This thesis focuses on young students’ experiences and meaning-making processes in school practices within environmental and sustainability education. Earlier research has shown this to be an area of complexity; besides a transdisciplinary perspective requiring relational thinking, it also involves conflicting interests as well as emotions and values. With a certain interest in emotions being part of learning as a meaning-making process, this thesis aims to investigate the character of experiencing, and the function of aesthetic experience in environmental and sustainability education. Through a mixed-methods approach a comprehensive questionnaire was used in the first study, and a more in-depth case study investigated the most important findings from the questionnaire even further in the second one by using multiple data. 209 students, age 10-12, from six different schools in Sweden answered the questionnaire. One class in grade six participated in the case study during four months, where both in- and out-of-door activities were studied. Both qualitative content analyses, and quantitative statistics were used to analyze the material from the two studies. Furthermore, John Dewey’s theoretical perspectives and neo-Aristotelian philosophers, mainly Martha Nussbaum, guided the interpretations of the empirical results. The main findings show that young students’ experiences in environmental and sustainability education are characterized by relational understandings both within and among ecologic, economic and social aspects, but also that perceived school activities of a value-laden and more cognitive kind correlated. The results further show that aesthetic experiences function as links in the transactional and continuous processes of meaning making. Furthermore, of importance for students’ meaning making and formation of values in environmental and sustainability were also prior experiences, encounters with outdoor environments and artifacts (both natural and digital), social interactions and felt independence. A holistic picture of understanding, emotions and values hence appear as an intertwined unity in students’ written responses, action and talk. A conclusion suggests that contributing to students’ possibilities of making meaning in environmental and sustainability issues requires openness to personal emotions and values as a starting point. Activities allowing for social interaction, independence, and relevant contextual encounters should also be considered in the pedagogical practice of environmental and sustainability education.

Fondatrice et résultante du corps textuel, origine et horizon du poème, la Voix, dans l’œuvre d’André du Bouchet, dépend de cet espace exigu qui se situe simultanément en dehors du sens et du non-sens. Dépassant la dichotomie écriture/oralité propre à la métaphysique traditionnelle occidentale, le poète l’apparente à une sorte de balancement entre l'exprimé et l'imprimé, entre un « vouloir-dire » et un « faire-silence ». La Voix est ce « signe » du bruit ou du mutisme, clair de toute signification préétablie et irréductible, dans le temps où il est perçu à l’ordre de la langue, qu’il habite cependant. Le sens des mots ne se constitue que dans la disposition élocutoire qui les porte à la parole et qui englobe l’ensemble de la corporéité et de la spatialité. Retentissante dans un espace qui est ouvert sur le dehors, la Voix est la manifestation d’un « espace-temps-lieu-monde » singulier par l'écoute qui, seule, peut entendre dans les mots l'émergence d'un existant. Véritable ouverture potentielle et permissive à un toujours vouloir-dire, la Voix perd son statut d’épiphénomène (simple expression sonore d’une pensée primitive) pour acquérir celui d’événement. Elle est cette parole pour ne rien dire, dont force est de prendre acte sans conclure. / The Voice in the works of André du Bouchet, is at the foundation and the result of the text corpus, the origin and horizon of the poem. It is dependent on the exiguous space lying simultaneously beyond meaning and lack of meaning. Transcending the writing/oral expression dichotomy characterizing Western traditional metaphysics, the poet identifies it as swaying somehow from the expressed to the imprinted, from a “meaning to say” to a “keeping under silence”. The Voice is the “sign” of noise or silence. It is void of all pre-established and irreducible meaning at the very moment it comes to be perceived in the language order, yet it inhabits it. The meaning of words only constitutes itself in the delivery phase that brings them into speech and encompasses physicality and spatiality as a whole. Resounding in a space looking outward, the Voice is the expression of a peculiar “space-time-place-world” when it is listened to. It is only this listening that makes it possible to hear the emergence of existing elements in words. As a true potential and permissive opening to a permanent “meaning to say”, the Voice loses its status of epiphenomenon (a simple sound expression of primitive thought) to gain that of event. It is this speech that says nothing that we are forced to acknowledge without reaching a conclusion.

This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the impact that constructions of meaning and personal identity have upon the processes of professional decision-making, in the delivery of community safety services. The research draws upon the previous work undertaken in the fields of psychology, sociology, social anthropology, criminology and community safety. The research was composed of five separate studies. Study one was a Delphi exercise to determine consensus of meaning for different community terms in common usage for policy makers, practitioners and academics. The research was able to define consensual meanings for ten of the thirteen terms presented, including crime prevention, crime reduction and community safety. Consensus was not achieved for the terms community engagement, respect and quality of life and suggestions are made which may account for this result. Study two utilised repertory grids to investigate the ways that community safety professionals might construe the decisions that they have to make as part of their duties. Studies three and four utilised bespoke ISA/lpseus instruments, whose structures were informed by the results from Study Two. These instruments were used to further explore the construals and worldviews of a variety of community safety professionals through six process postulates. It was found that whilst an individual's initial job role or gender did not have significant impact upon their professional decision-making, the training that they had received in community safety and the time that they had spent working in the field did have a significant impact upon their professional decision-making. It was also found that the groups of community safety professionals differed in their attitudes towards those members of society who are the target of community safety activity. Study five involved the generation and piloting of a survey instrument whose various sections were designed to validate the findings generated from the previous studies, as well as providing further data on the decision-making processes of those working within community safety. The final chapter presents the Warren Person Process Priority (WaPPP) layered model of decision-making that was derived from the data collected to inform the current thesis. The outer Person layer is defined by the four-way typology derived from the Procedural / Free-form and Cautious / Adventurous bi-polar constructs of identity types that were identified from the ISA/lpseus studies. The middle layer of the model describes a number of different decision-making processes that professionals may follow when making a judgement or coming to a conclusion. The order of the processes was given by the results of the survey pilot. The central portion of the model presents a number of factors that may impact upon professional decision-making, determined from the ethnographic work that informed the ISA/lpseus studies. The order of these factors was determined from the preparatory data collection instrument that was used with the ISA/lpseus studies and confirmed by the results of the survey pilot. Suggestions are made for further research that may expand upon the results presented in this thesis. These include a larger version of the Delphi, with an international panel of experts; correlation of the ISA/lpseus instruments with other validated instruments for the measurement of personality, identity and decision-making and an expansion of the survey pilot.

Årligen kommer ett stort antal barn och ungdomar utan medföljande förälder eller annan legal vårdnadshavare till Sverige för att söka asyl, så kallade ensamkommande flyktingbarn och ungdomar. De ensamkommande barnen har rätt till skydd, skolgång, sjukvård och en meningsfull vardag där de kan knyta sociala kontakter. De här barnen behöver få trygghet och normalitet i sin tillvaro för att kunna utvecklas, känna sig säkra och få en chans till ett bra liv. Ansvaret för ungdomarnas boende och omvårdnad ligger på kommunnivå och kräver att det finns kompetent och kunnig personal som möter dessa ungdomar. Syftet med studien var att undersöka hur personalen arbetar på ett boende för ensamkommande flyktingungdomar för att utveckla mening, identitet och trygghet över kulturella gränser. Metoden som användes var fyra intervjuer med narrativ teori som inspiration för att få fram personalens berättelser istället för enbart svar på ställda frågor och få en djupare förståelse för personalens påverkan på verksamheten och de ensamkommande flyktingungdomarna. Resultatet visade att personalen arbetar utifrån samtal för att skapa en ömsesidig trygghet och tillit inom boendet och genom det sker en samhällsintroduktion och integration för de ensamkommande flyktingungdomarna med en samtidig respekt och förståelse för deras egen kultur. Utifrån detta arbete skapas en värdegrund hos ungdomarna i svensk demokrati och en utveckling av deras identitet. Analysen av berättelserna visar att de fem ord som är målsättningsord för organisationen, samhörighet, egenvärde, samhällsintroduktion, ansvar och möjligheter kan sammanfattas till den demokratiska värdegrunden som arbetet sker utifrån. / Every year a great number of children and youth come to Sweden without any parent or legal guardian, seeking asylum, they are called unaccompanied refugee youth. These unaccompanied minors are entitled to protection, school, healthcare and a meaningful everyday life, where they can make social contacts. These minors need stability and normality in their life to be able to develop, feel secure and have a chance to a good life. The municipality has the responsibility for the minors living conditions and care and this demands competent and knowledgeable personnel to work with these minors. The purpose of the study was to examine how personnel in housing for unaccompanied refugee youth work with meaning, identity and security across cultural borders. The method was four interviews with narrative theory as inspiration to get stories more than just answers to questions and a deeper knowledge for the personnel’s influence on the organization and the unaccompanied refugee youth. The result showed that the personnel worked from conversation to create a mutual security and trust within the housing and through that a community introduction and integration takes place with a simultaneous respect and understanding for the youths own culture. From this basic values are created for Swedish democracy and development of the youth’s identity is created. The analysis of the stories shows that the five words that is the aim for the organization, solidarity, self-worth, community introduction, responsibility and possibilities can be concluded as the democratic basic values that the personnel work is conducted from.

The recent invention of Google Glass has prompted me to contemplate how future technologies will affect the way we interact with one another. In this paper, I argue that Google Glass technology is the first sort of technology that will facilitate us to violate our genuine interactions with one another in a face-to-face setting. Once we diminish these types of interactions, we fail to respect one another on a fundamental level and as a result, we fail to genuinely pursue one of the most important classes of meaningful projects in our lives: developing and maintaining relationships.

Adequate assessment of the needs of HIV-positive individuals in the South African context is essential, as it may provide insight concerning limitations in healthcare. This study focuses on the subjective experience of nine HIV-positive individuals, in order (a) to investigate their needs; (b) to gain knowledge and understanding of the strengths available to them; (c) to investigate their coping strategies; and (d) to generate a set of guidelines for the development of a secondary prevention programme to improve their psychological well-being and immune functioning. This article employs a qualitative research method, utilising hermeneutic thematic analysis to gain a greater understanding of the subjective psychological functioning of HIV-positive individuals in the South African multicultural context. To a great extent, this research focuses on the salutogenic/fortigenic perspective, where the focus is on strengths, capacities and emotional/psychological well-being. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine asymptomatic HIV-positive individuals. The needs identified during this study involved the psychological, economical, informational and social categories. The strengths available to HIV-positive individuals in order to make sense or construct meaning in their lives, consisted of four themes, namely internal, social, self-regulative and spiritual strengths. The study further indicates that the psychological strengths utilised by HIV-positive individuals are closely related to the concept of meaningfulness, the mechanisms of coping and psychological resilience. A broad range of coping strategies was identified that participants employed in the management of the disease and in dealing with the negative emotions associated with an HIV-positive diagnosis. These strategies could be conceptually grouped into five categories based on the functions these strategies served, namely self-management coping strategies, cognitive coping strategies, social support coping strategies, religious coping strategies, and avoidance coping strategies. The implications of this study are that the various identified concepts related to needs, strengths and coping strategies, may contribute to the development of a secondary prevention programme, in order to improve HIV-positive individuals' psychological well-being and immune functioning. The concept of "Sense of Coherence" which consists of three elements, namely Comprehensibility, Manageability and Meaningfulness, could be successfully incorporated into an intervention programme in order to achieve a positive redefinition of participants' subjective feeling that life is meaningful, as well as to improve their comprehensibility and manageability of their illness. / Thesis (M.Sc.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

The overall aim of this study is to explore the subjective experiences of psychotherapeutic interventions and the sense-making process in a group of persons paralysed as a consequence of violence-related gunshot injury. An available and purposive sample of ten participants was selected from public and private hospitals in and around Johannesburg, and from the Association for the Physically Disabled in South Africa. Three females and seven males, between the ages of 26 and 43 years, took part in the research. The participants had all suffered penetrative damage to the spinal cord in the thoracic region as a result of violence related gunshot injury, and are therefore classified as having paraplegia The participants' gunshot injuries had been sustained in incidents ranging from attempted hijacking and armed robbery, to being caught in crime-related crossfire. In-depth interviews were conducted with the participants. A narrative approach was used to examine participants' unique stories, utilising a systematic form of narrative analysis. The thesis consists of three articles, namely 1) The subjective experience of psychotherapeutic interventions in the rehabilitation of persons paralysed as a result of violence-related gunshot injuries; 2) Making sense of paraplegia caused by violence-related gunshot injury; and 3) Therapeutic guidelines for the management of persons paralysed as a result of violence-related gunshot injuries. The findings of article 1 reveal that paraplegic persons had both positive and negative experiences during their hospital rehabilitation. Ultimately, however, positive experiences compensated for negative experiences. This suggests that in the absence of psychotherapeutic interventions, psychosocial adjustment may possibly not be facilitated. The second article indicates that although several barriers prevented participants from making sense of their trauma, meaningful relationships, spiritual growth and a greater appreciation of the value of life were still possible. in the final article guidelines were put forward that include meeting the holistic and adjustment needs of paraplegic persons. Future research is suggested and limitations acknowledged. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006.

The present paper focuses on the problem of reflexivization in Lithuanian and English. The study is based on a corpus of 6718 instances of reflexive constructions in the novel “Sodybų Tuštėjimo Metas” by Jonas Avyžius and their equivalents in the English variant of the text translated by Olga Shartse. The aim of the paper is to describe the semantic patterns that can be expressed by reflexive constructions in Lithuanian and English, and to determine the basic similarities and differences in the employment of reflexivization in the two languages. The analysis is carried out by means of the descriptive method. The results show that both in Lithuanian and English the greatest number of reflexive constructions are used in their primary function, i.e. to mark the coreference of two semantic roles. In both the languages reflexives can be used to mark other meanings than that of semantic reflexivity, but Lithuanian reflexive constructions are in a position to express more meanings. The analysis of the data shows that, in contrast to Lithuanian, in English there is a strong preference for the use of unmarked reflexive constructions rather than for the marked ones in all the semantic patterns. The differences in the use of reflexive constructions in the two languages can be accounted for by the peculiarities of the morphological structure of the languages. In English the reflexive marker is a pronoun with a relatively independent syntactical status, which can be omitted if the context... [to full text]

The process of communication involves two types of meaning: explicit and implicit. An attempt is made to draw a distinction between two carriers of implicit meaning- presupposition and implicature. It is argued that presupposition is what the speaker assumes before making an utterance, and implicature is what the addressee infers from a linguistic structure used in an appropriate linguistic context. Implicature is of two types: non-contextual (or non-situational) and contextual (or situational). Although both types of implicature are determined by the context, they are generated using different types of context. Non-contextual implicature arises in contexts which are familiar to the addressee, while contextual implicature arises in contexts (situations) which are new to the addressee. Pragmatic competence is the ability to discover implicit meaning. Thus, of great importance is the description of the mechanism that carries implicit meaning. There are two such mechanisms: 1) linguistic structures used in appropriate linguistic contexts and 2) linguistic structures used in appropriate situations. The first mechanism is responsible for the generation of non-contextual implicature while the second mechanism is responsible for the generation of contextual implicature. Both types of implicature contribute to the economy of language. However, of the two types of implicature, the more important in the respect is contextual implicature- it makes possible to use one and the same... [to full text]

Tyrimo tikslas – nustatyti sergančių onkologine liga asmenų, vyrų ir moterų, ligos suvokimo sąsajas su gyvenimo prasme ir ligos įveikos strategijomis. Tyrimui atlikti naudota: Ligos suvokimo klausimynas (Weinman, Petrie, Moss-Morris, Horne, 1996; Weinman, Petrie, 1997) (angl. The Revised-Illness Perception Questionnaire, IPQ–R), siekiant nustatyti vėžiu sergančių asmenų ligos suvokimą; Gyvenimo prasmės skalė (Jim et al., 2006) (angl. Meaning in Life Scale, MiLS), skirta tiriamųjų gyvenimo prasmės įvertinimui; COPE streso įveikimo strategijų klausimynas Carver, Scheier, Weintraub, 1989) (angl. Coping Orientation of Problem Experience Inventory, COPE), siekiant nustatyti tiriamųjų pasirinktas ligos įveikos strategijas. Gauti duomenys apdoroti naudojant statistinį SPSS 16,0 versijos programinį paketą. Statistiškai patikimais rezultatais laikytini atvejai, kai p < 0,05, P = 95 proc. Tyrime dalyvavo 142 (22–74 metų) onkologinėmis ligomis sergantys vyrai ir moterys. Tyrimo rezultatai parodė, kad onkologine liga sergančių asmenų, vyrų ir moterų, stipresnis ligos suvokimas siejasi su dažniau naudojama adaptyvia, į problemas nukreipta ligos įveika; onkologine liga sergančių asmenų, vyrų ir moterų, stipresnis ligos suvokimas siejasi su aukštesne gyvenimo prasme; onkologine liga sergantiems asmenims, vyrams ir moterims, pasižymintiems stipresniu ligos suvokimu ir adaptyvia, į emocijas nukreipta ligos įveika, būdinga žemesnė gyvenimo prasmė. / The aim of the research is to identify oncology patients’, men and women, relation of illness perception to the meaning in life, the coping strategies of illness. References for research: The Revised-Illness Perception Questionnaire, IPQ–R (Weinman, Petrie, Moss-Morris, Horne, 1996; Weinman, Petrie, 1997) in order to identify oncology patients’ illness perception; Meaning in Life Scale, MiLS (Jim et al., 2006) for evaluation of research participants’ meaning in life; Coping Orientation of Problem Experience Inventory, COPE (Carver, Scheier, Weintraub, 1989) in order to identify the coping strategies of illness chosen by research participants. The received data was processed while using a statistical SPSS software package. Statistically reliable cases werw considered when p < 0,05, P = 95%. 142 people (22-74years old), men and women with oncologic illnesses participated in the research. The research results have revealed that a stronger illness perception of men and women with oncologic illness is associated with a more frequently used adaptive, problem-focused coping of illness; a stronger illness perception of men and women with oncologic illness is associated with a higher meaning in life; a lower meaning in life is typical for those oncology patients, men and women, who have a stronger illness perception and adaptive, emotion - focused illness coping.