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The purpose of the study was to test the assumption that educational programs had a positive effect upon the institutional behaviors of incarcerated male felons. The sample was the total population of 1,667 offenders located at Indiana Reformatory during 1988. The data were fairly conclusive and supportive of the assumption, at least when offenders participated in a meaningful manner.Findings were based upon the data gathered through inspection of each offender's official institutional records. One-way and two-way analyses of variance and the Scheffe Procedure were used to analyze data. Standard statistical analysis was used to generate the general findings. The .05 level of significance was selected as the critical probability level for the acceptance or nonacceptance of the eight null hypotheses. Seven of the eight null hypotheses were rejected. / Department of Educational Leadership

This small-scale, qualitative, instructional study examined creative writing, publishing and empowerment of Inuit adult learners in Baker Lake, Nunavut. I studied whether instruction in culturally relevant topics in English and Inuit songs in Inuktitut motivated the learners to write. In addition, I examined whether having their creative writing published led to empowerment for the learners. This was a participatory action research project, and a Project Advisory Committee of community members helped in planning and carrying out the study. I examined concepts of orality and literacy and discussed how Inuit have historically practiced many types of literacy—such as reading snowdrifts and Inuksuit to navigate. The project took place in Baker Lake, an Inuit community that has experienced the colonization of the South. Thus, throughout the project, I examined my positionality in terms of culture, colonialism, disability and its affect on my research. I taught a creative writing workshop at the Nunavut Arctic College, along with the local Elders, who taught songs from the Baker Lake area. In the process of curriculum planning, the Elders asserted their right to teach the songs in Inuktitut, which is the way that they originally composed or learned them. In this context I explore the work of Fanon (1963) concerning the role of storytellers in the decolonization of cultures. After the workshop, in February 2006, The Sound of Songs: Stories by Baker Lake Writers (Utatnaq, 2006), an anthology of the adult learners’ writings, was published. This small book was then launched at the Community Centre in Baker Lake, where community members listened to learners’ readings. In the course of the project, the Project Advisory Committee and I examined the meaning of the term “empowerment” in the context of Inuit culture. Each of the nine learners who took part in the workshop published at least one piece in the book. The majority of the nine learners who took part in the study reported some degree of empowerment, in the area of confidence about their own writing, in gaining the respect of community members, especially the Elders, and also in learning to be a “real Inuk” from the Elders who taught songs from the Baker Lake area. Most of the learners had not heard these songs before and thus this was an opportunity for Elders and younger people in their twenties and thirties to better understand each other. Indeed, the community itself may have been empowered in the process of doing participatory action research for this project and in seeing its young people take an interest in their heritage.

This case study of two combined grade 7 and 8 classrooms investigated the qualities of student engagement during a modified Four Blocks (Cunningham, Hall & Defee, 1998) literacy blocks intervention. The teachers’ experiences with implementing and engaging their students in literacy blocks were also examined. Qualities of student engagement were described across four domains: affective, behavioural, cognitive and social. Participant interviews, professional development meetings and classroom observations were analyzed to describe instructional context and teacher experiences during the implementation of literacy blocks. Teacher involvement and opportunities for choice seemed to positively impact student engagement. Findings suggest that student engagement may be increased through the effective use of collaborative learning strategies and the explicit teaching of strategies and skills leading to the gradual release of responsibility. Data provided insight into the teacher experiences of implementing literacy blocks and suggests that further research into teacher professional development to support implementation is needed.

There is a conceptual world surrounding literacy in schools. and we are conditioned to a particular language about literacy. This study seeks to interrogate the term `'literacy" at the level of the classroom: to ask what is meant when it is invoked and what it means to the teachers who teach it. The central question of this inquiry is: How do teachers conceptualize literacy, and how are those conceptualizations socially and historically situated.' I worked with one staff of teachers to explore their articulations of literacy, through a lunch hour discussion group and one-on-one interviews. Methodologically I looked to Caputo's radical hermeneutics as a way to understand the interpretations teachers were making of literacy both in the context of their lives and within a broader socio-historical context. Caputo's radicalization of hermeneutics allows the introduction of post-modern flux into the interpretive process. Through the data. I found a wide-ranging diversity in teachers' conceptualizations of literacy, and was surprised by the extent to which their conceptualizations were embedded in their own childhood experiences. rather than their social context. the curriculum, their teacher education, or professional development. Most teachers considered literacy to be mainly about reading and writing, with a strong emphasis on the reading aspect. With a few exceptions, there was little interest or awareness in what might be termed new literacies", or a commitment or even interest in alternative texts or digital media. These findings have important implications for the field of language and literacy, for teacher education, for the professional development of teachers, and for the future of schooling.

Scientific knowledge is constructed and communicated through a range of forms in addition to verbal language. Maps, graphs, charts, diagrams, formulae, models, and drawings are just some of the ways in which science concepts can be represented. Representational competence—an aspect of visual literacy that focuses on the ability to interpret, transform, and produce visual representations—is a key component of science literacy and an essential part of science reading and writing. To date, however, most research has examined learning from representations rather than learning with representations. This dissertation consisted of three distinct projects that were related by a common focus on learning from visual representations as an important aspect of scientific literacy. The first project was the development of an exploratory framework that is proposed for use in investigations of students constructing and interpreting multimedia texts. The exploratory framework, which integrates cognition, metacognition, semiotics, and systemic functional linguistics, could eventually result in a model that might be used to guide classroom practice, leading to improved visual literacy, better comprehension of science concepts, and enhanced science literacy because it emphasizes distinct aspects of learning with representations that can be addressed though explicit instruction. The second project was a metasynthesis of the research that was previously conducted as part of the Explicit Literacy Instruction Embedded in Middle School Science project (Pacific CRYSTAL, http://www.educ.uvic.ca/pacificcrystal). Five overarching themes emerged from this case-to-case synthesis: the engaging and effective nature of multimedia genres, opportunities for differentiated instruction using multimodal strategies, opportunities for assessment, an emphasis on visual representations, and the robustness of some multimodal literacy strategies across content areas. The third project was a mixed-methods verification study that was conducted to refine and validate the theoretical framework. This study examined middle school students’ representational competence and focused on students’ creation of visual representations such as labelled diagrams, a form of representation commonly found in science information texts and textbooks. An analysis of the 31 Grade 6 participants’ representations and semistructured interviews revealed five themes, each of which supports one or more dimensions of the exploratory framework: participants’ use of color, participants’ choice of representation (form and function), participants’ method of planning for representing, participants’ knowledge of conventions, and participants’ selection of information to represent. Together, the results of these three projects highlight the need for further research on learning with rather than learning from representations. / Graduate

This study investigates the importance of demographic variables and the influence of teachers on the reading literacy performance of Canadian 15-year-olds in a multi-level analysis of the national population as well as its highest and lowest quartiles. A large-scale representative dataset was chosen for these purposes. Multi-level modeling was completed using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (v. 6.08) quantifying the variance present at the student- and school-levels as well as identifying statistically significant correlates for each of the three models examined. Results were consistent with prior research while the use of a quartile-split accessed subpopulations based on achievement that are otherwise not closely examined by national averages. Students’ gender and schools’ SES appear to be the most influential individual factors of those examined, while the positive influence of teachers is a conclusion to be gleaned from this research. / Graduate / 0535 / 0533 / theshawnwthomas@gmail.com

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No description available.