abstract: Professional development is best when embedded in one's practice and linked directly to the classroom. Opportunities for teachers to identify specific areas of concern in their classroom and problem solve solutions via action research promotes a culture of inquiry. This culture of inquiry is enhanced when teams of teachers collaborate and share their action research experiences. In this study, action research training was provided to teachers to create a trained cohort of action research teachers within the school. Members of this cohort voluntarily joined with other teachers interested in classroom action research and participated in a professional learning community (PLC). The members of this PLC initiated classroom action research projects and met collaboratively as a PLC. The study examined what collaborative practitioner inquiry contributed to teacher professional development and how my leadership contributed to teacher professional development. Data were collected through the administration of a survey, interviews, transcriptions of PLC meetings, and my research journal. Findings indicate that participants benefited from the provided professional development and my leadership as a result of the intervention. Teachers applied the professional literature and used data to inform their instruction. Teacher collaboration was enhanced and teachers examined instructional practices. Lastly, my leadership enhanced teacher application of action research. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ed.D. Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2011

Submitted by Noeme Timbo (noeme.timbo@metodista.br) on 2018-02-16T17:03:48Z No. of bitstreams: 1 GUSTAVOCOTOMACCI.pdf: 787247 bytes, checksum: f0d8ec0ae8d99aba1f1bc43a5a4d8670 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-02-16T17:03:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 GUSTAVOCOTOMACCI.pdf: 787247 bytes, checksum: f0d8ec0ae8d99aba1f1bc43a5a4d8670 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-09-06 / The present study, nurtured by teacher formation, aims at sparking initial discussion on the law teaching in undergraduate courses in which law is not the focus. Most of such courses do not offer law teaching in their programs. In the light of such a frame, the challenge of teaching law-oriented issues stands out. The research intends to consider perceptions which emerge from students’ narratives on a twofold basis: (i) through informal conversations and (ii) through questions based on an interdisciplinary task. The students involved in the research belong to a confessional university in São Bernardo do Campo. The law teaching focus on Geertz (2005), Martinez (2008), Oliveira (2004) and, as far as the theoretical foundations is concerned, on Beherens and Oliari (2007), Demo (2001) and Moraes (2012). The Paradigm of Complexity (MORIN, 2014, 2015, 2015a) and the so-called narrative inquiry (CLANDININ; CONNELY, 2015) cast light on the theme under investigation. / O presente estudo, vinculado à linha de pesquisa “Formação de Educadores” do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da Universidade Metodista de São Paulo, tem como objetivo promover uma reflexão acerca do ensino jurídico ministrado em cursos não jurídicos. Nas matrizes curriculares de uma gama de cursos universitários se tem presente, nem que por um semestre, alguma disciplina que transita no universo jurídico. Diante deste panorama, surge a necessidade de levar a esses alunos, que não fazem parte do curso de Direito, uma linguagem técnica. Para a sua composição, o trabalho busca investigar quais percepções emergem a partir de narrativas de alunos sob dois aspectos, (i) em conversas informais e (ii) por meio de perguntas baseadas em uma atividade desenvolvida de forma interdisciplinar. Os discentes envolvidos estudam em uma Universidade no município de São Bernardo do Campo. O escopo jurídico se sustenta em Geertz (2006), Martinez (2008), Oliveira (2004), e na linha teórica nos fundamentos em Beherehs e Oliari (2007), Demo (2001), Moraes (2012) que completa o trajeto da educação no Brasil. Como sustentáculo metodológico, os fragmentos de narrativa encontram seu alicerce no estudo do paradigma da complexidade com Morin (2014, 2015, 2015a), juntamente com os fragmentos de narrativa à luz de Clandinin e Connelly (2015), que perfazem a chave para abertura de novas compreensões sobre o tema proposto

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction Programs / F. Todd Goodson / English language learners (ELLs) are expected to meet the same academic standards as those of their fluent English-speaking peers while simultaneously acquiring a second language. When content area instruction is embedded with literacy-based tasks, ELLs' achievement is both the acquisition of content area knowledge and English language skills can be anticipated. Science is a content area that can provide a deep context for ELLs to develop academic language because students must use their literacy skills to gather information about scientific concepts. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of an instructional intervention integrating literacy-based practices in science on third grade ELLs' science achievement and English language development. The mixed methods study was conducted at an elementary school in the Midwest, United States. There were 12 participants, eight identified as ELL and four fluent English speakers. Four of eight identified as ELL received the intervention while the remaining four ELL and fluent English speakers were instructed by the classroom teacher. The intervention was based on the systematic and repeated practice of language strategies and explicit vocabulary instruction. Authentic communication was used during scientific inquiry, discussions, and the reading of expository science text. Both quantitative and qualitative data was collected from pre and posttest data from five FOSS I-Check assessments, researcher's observations and field notes, participants' artifacts such as science journal entries and reflections, classroom teacher interview, and recorded session videos. The data was coded and analyzed identifying major themes which are noted in the findings. The results concluded the four participants who received the intervention outperformed their ELL peers not receiving the intervention but were still slightly behind their English-speaking peers. Overall, the participants receiving the intervention showed gains in their productive language as reflected in their utilization of domain-specific vocabulary in their speaking and writing. The conclusions drawn from this study included ELLs can benefit from receiving an integrated literacy/science intervention in both their acquisition of scientific knowledge and language development.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Adult Learning and Leadership / Kakali Bhattacharya / Royce Ann Collins / The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how two Black women, born 1946 to 1964, discuss their sexuality in relation to their understanding of spirituality and informal learning. Using the Black Feminine Narrative Inquiry framework informed by womanism, Black feminism, and narrative structures used by Black women novelists, this qualitative study analyzed the vulnerable, empowered, and spirit-driven narratives (VES Narratives) collected from the participants to explore their experiences with spirituality, sexuality, and informal learning. The data collection methods included wisdom whisper talks to elicit spirituality and sexuality timelines and glean information from the participants’ treasure chests.

Calls for history teachers to adopt inquiry methods continue to go unabated in educational research and curricular initiatives. In recent years, there has been increased recognition of the important role teacher reflection plays in managing the uncertainty that accompanies such pedagogy in history classrooms. Accordingly, this dissertation was situated within theories of reflection and reflective teaching, which acknowledge teaching to be endemically problematic and teachers as autonomous in their curricular- instructional decisions and thereby resistive to certainty-driven models of history teaching. This dissertation sought to investigate the reflections of inquiry-oriented history teachers by examining how and upon what they reflect throughout a unit of study. Using an interpretive multiple-case design with video-stimulated recall methodology, reflective interviews were conducted with participants in four different schools within the same urban public school district. A cross-case analysis of the data led to several key findings. First, the process of reflection for teachers in practice revealed itself to be more affective and messy than conventional rational models of reflection found in the literature. Second, the results showed that history teachers’ reflections were prioritized in accordance with their values and sense of purpose. Third, the inclusiveness of teachers’ classroom environments and curricular-instructional decisions were a focal point of their reflections. Fourth, the teachers’ reflections were influenced by their understandings of their school cultures, with three of the four teachers finding their school norms and policies as oppositional to the promotion of inquiry methods with their students. Finally, the findings showed that reflection aided teachers’ examination of assumptions embedded within their professional routines and pedagogical decisions, particulary with regard to the selection and use of the essential questions that framed their units. This dissertation highlights the need for more and better reflective opportunites for pre- and in-service history teachers and for better research that might yield further insights into the nature of inquiry-based history teaching.

Rationale and Aims: Research into the lived experience of parenting children with muscular dystrophy has typically addressed key transitions along the disease trajectory, such as diagnosis or end-of-life care. Families reportedly face continuous challenges as their child's health deteriorates. No research has considered accounts of parenting across the lifespan that look at adaptation following their child's death. This research was conducted in the context of a wish-fulfilment charity that offer experiences for children to be supported in activities that are usually deemed inaccessible. In this context, the study asked how do parents who have lost a child to muscular dystrophy story their experiences of parenting. Methods: This research used a qualitative approach that explored the accounts of eight parents interviewed in couples, all of who had experienced the death of their child to muscular dystrophy. The study used a semi-structured interview, lasting from 100-150 minutes each. Interviews were video-recorded, transcribed, and analysed using narrative analysis to explore what and how the parents narrated their experiences. Consideration was given to the social and cultural contexts that shaped these. Analysis: Multiple readings of the transcripts allowed me to develop individual summaries and then construct an analysis across all of the accounts. Three main stories of change, survival and creating change emerged through my analysis. These three stories represented six sub-stories in total: waking up to different futures; being so close, you don't see the deterioration; humour through the struggle; storytelling together; creating a legacy; and living the dream. Findings: Couples narrated the loss of parental dreams, leading to the need for identity (re)formation. Humour and storytelling together were often used to regulate emotions during the storying telling, and a means of surviving their loss. Parents shared narratives of building legacies and the memories created through 'living the dream', which alluded to an impact that surpassed death itself. Implications: These findings suggest the need for greater consideration of sense-making, changing identities, and benefit-finding in clinical consultations, at key transitions during the parenting journey and particularly following the death of a child to muscular dystrophy. Accounts suggest that wish-fulfilment events can sustain hope for parents, a proposition that will need further investigation in the future.

With the increasing pace of technological changes in the modern society, there has been a growing interest from educators, business leaders, and policymakers in teaching important higher-order skills which were identified as necessary for thriving in the present-day globalized economy. In this regard, one of the most widely discussed higher order skills is critical thinking, whose importance in shaping problem solving, decision making, and logical thinking has been recognized. Within the domain of distance and online education, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model provides a pedagogical framework for understanding the critical dimensions of student learning and factors which impact the development of student critical thinking. The CoI model follows the social-constructivist perspective on learning in which learning is seen as happening in both individual minds of learners and through the discourse within the group of learners. Central to the CoI model is the construct of cognitive presence, which captures the student cognitive engagement and the development of critical thinking and deep thinking skills. However, the assessment of cognitive presence is challenging task, particularly given its latent nature and the inherent physical and time separation between students and instructors in distance education settings. One way to address this problem is to make use of the vast amounts of learning data being collected by learning systems. This thesis presents novel methods for understanding and assessing the levels of cognitive presence based on learning analytics techniques and the data collected by learning environments. We first outline a comprehensive model for cognitive presence assessment which builds on the well-established evidence-cantered design (ECD) assessment framework. The proposed assessment model provides a foundation of the thesis, showing how the developed analytical models and their components fit together and how they can be adjusted for new learning contexts. The thesis shows two distinct and complementary analytical methods for assessing students’ cognitive presence and its development. The first method is based on the automated classification of student discussion messages and captures learning as it is observed in the student dialogue. The second analytics method relies on the analysis of log data of students’ use of the learning platform and captures the individual dimension of the learning process. The developed analytics also extend current theoretical understanding of the cognitive presence construct through data-informed operationalization of cognitive presence with different quantitative measures extracted from the student use of online discussions. We also examine methodological challenges of assessing cognitive presence and other forms of cognitive engagement through the analysis of trace data. Finally, with the intent of enabling for the wider adoption of the CoI model for new online learning modalities, the last two chapters examine the use of developed analytics within the context of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Given the substantial differences between traditional online and MOOC contexts, we first evaluate the suitability of the CoI model for MOOC settings and then assess students’ cognitive presence using the data collected by the MOOC platform. We conclude the thesis with the discussion of practical application and impact of the present work and the directions for the future research.

This thesis presents a recollection of the relation of “being” and thinking through an articulation of the gesture of etho-poetic thinking. Part I marks out a path towards such a thinking through an encounter with Martin Heidegger’s “sketch” of the self as Dasein, where his description of being-there is read as an originary language of inquiry – one which attempts to respond to the issue of being, to the questionability and groundlessness of existence stemming from simply being-in-the-world. Part I follows out a description of this language of inquiry as a pre-conceptual, pre-cognitive, attuned, bodily understanding, through chapters which unfold this sketch of Dasein. This language of inquiry is construed as a two-fold action of being begun, being sketched, and beginning, sketching-out. The final chapter of part I connects Heidegger’s articulation of “Care” to the ancient practice of “care of the self” and the transformative, etho-poetic potentiality of thinking. As the thesis proffers, it is this pre-conceptual language of inquiry which must be repeated in a resolute thinking, as Heidegger articulates it in Being and Time, seeking not to objectivise the world, to represent it, but to resonate with it. In this sense, the “purpose” of thinking is not so much the obtainment of knowledge as it is an attempt to come back into “Care” for the questionability of one’s existence. As the thesis gestures to in the conclusion, part of the attempt of the thesis is, thus, an implicit critique of the contemporary situation and discourse on thinking with its emphasis on outcomes and outputs. The thesis itself follows the two-fold structure of the language of inquiry. Whilst part I depicts Heidegger’s sketch of this originary language of inquiry, part II sketches-out this language, seeking to articulate how an etho-poetic language of inquiry can occur in writing by bringing the sketch of part one into conversation with other etho-poetic thinkers; Walter Benjamin, Henri Meschonnic, Jan Zwicky, Giorgio Agamben, Lisa Robertson. In this way, through the textual composition of the writing, the thesis presents itself as the primary example of such a language of inquiry, making it not an investigation which objectifies an etho-poetic thinking, but makes an attempt at its own performance of it.

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[pt] Este trabalho analisa o uso da tecnologia de representação visual Power Point por aspirantes de Marinha da Escola Naval do Rio de Janeiro, ao produzir e conduzir apresentações durante as aulas de inglês como língua estrangeira, com o duplo objetivo de investigar como os princípios semióticos operam nos slides e como a experiência contribui para a vivência em sala de aula. Para tanto, o estudo leva em consideração os slides produzidos e a percepção dos aspirantes envolvidos. Três áreas de pesquisa fornecem embasamento teórico para este estudo: multimodalidade, comunidade de prática e qualidade de vida em sala de aula. Estudos sobre os elementos visuais na comunicação (ROSE, 2001; KRESS E VAN LEEUWEN, 1996, 2001; ROYCE, 2002), aliados ao estudo das funções da linguagem propostas pela Linguística Sistêmico-Funcional (HALLIDAY, 1985, 1994) dão subsídio para a análise dos slides. Estudos sobre tipos de comunidade que partilham objetivos, hábitos e atitudes (LAVE E WENGER, 1991; ECKERT E MC CONNELL-GINNET, 1992), associados ao estudo de gêneros híbridos que refletem ideologias e valores e desempenham uma funcionalidade retórica e social (ANSON, DANNELS E ST CLAIR, 2005) direcionam a interpretação das opiniões dos aspirantes. Estudos sobre a complexidade da sala de aula e das relações que aí se estabelecem (ALLWRIGHT, 1991, 2005, 2006; GIEVE E MILLER, 2006) dão suporte para as conclusões quanto ao possível efeito das apresentações nessas relações. Esta pesquisa caracteriza-se como qualitativa, pois a coleta de dados compreende uma série de práticas e atividades interpretativas relacionadas à análise de (1 ) slides em Power Point, (2) textos escritos pelos aspirantes durante discussões em grupo, (3) seus relatos individuais e (4) notas de campo da pesquisadora. Com base nos resultados do estudo, este trabalho (1) propõe um modelo de análise que dá contados diversos elementos existentes nos slides digitais – a Esfera Multimodal; e (2) sugere que a experiência de produzir e conduzir apresentações com o recurso digital possibilita a expressão de idéias e favorece a integração com o grupo. O maior conhecimento sobre a competência genérica multimodal propiciada pelo uso de Power Point em um ambiente educacional pode contribuir para estimular a autonomia dos aprendizes e influenciar positivamente sua participação no processo de ensino-aprendizagem. / [en] This work analyses the use of Power Point as a technology of visual representation by the midshipmen of the Naval Academy of Rio de Janeiro while producing and conducting presentations during the classes of English as a Foreign Language, with the double aim of investigating how semiotic principles operate on the slides and how the experience contributes to life in the classroom. To that effect, the study takes into account the slides produced as well as the perceptions of the midshipmen involved. Three areas of research provide theoretical support for this study: multimodality, community of practice and quality of classroom life. Studies about the visual elements in communication (ROSE, 2001; KRESS AND VAN LEEUWEN, 1996, 2001; ROYCE, 2002), together with the studies of language functions proposed by Systemic-Functional Linguistics (HALLIDAY, 1985, 1994), enable the analysis of the slides. Studies about types of communities whose objectives, habits and attitudes are shared (LAVE AND WENGER, 1991; ECKERT AND MC CONNELL-GINNET, 1992), associated with studies of hybrid genres which reflect ideology and values and accomplish rhetorical and social functionality (ANSON, DANNELS AND ST CLAIR, 2005) direct the interpretation of the midshipmen’s perceptions. Studies about the complexity of classroom life and the relationships which are established in it (ALLWRIGHT, 1991, 2005, 2006; GIEVE AND MILLER, 2006) back up conclusions as to the possible repercussion of the presentations on those relationships. This research is characterized as qualitative, as data collection involves a series of interpretive practices and activities regarding the analysis of (1) Power Point slides, (2) texts produced by the midshipmen while engaged in group discussions, (3) their individual statements and (4) the field notes taken by the researcher. On the basis of the results of the study, this work (1) proposes a model of analysis which encompasses the variety of elements existing in digital slides - the Multimodal Sphere, and (2) suggests that the experience of producing and conducting presentations with the aid of the digital resource makes it possible to express ideas and easier to integrate with the group. A deeper understanding of the multimodal generic competence afforded by the use of Power Point in an educational setting can contribute to encouraging learners’ autonomy and enhancing their participation in the teaching-learning process.