<p> Place-based environmental education provides myriad physical, cognitive, social, and emotional benefits. In this study, 13 environmental educators illuminated how policy, partnerships and place shaped environmental education in pre-K&ndash;12 schools in Washington, DC. I recruited participants from the local government, nongovernmental organizations, and three public and public charter schools. Place studies and Bronfenbrenner&rsquo;s ecological systems theory influenced the design of this instrumental case study. Data sources included interviews, analyses of policy documents, and observations of participants and teaching settings. Analytic memos and coding using NVivo supported data analysis. Data representation included using narratives to center participants&rsquo; voices. </p><p> Participants described iteratively expanding place-based environmental education for DC students by (a) influencing and enacting policies that promote interdisciplinary engagement with the environment, (b) expanding partnerships between non-formal and formal educators, (c) enriching students&rsquo; sense of place, and (d) promoting students&rsquo; mental and physical wellbeing alongside their academic achievement. </p><p> In DC, interconnected local, regional, and national policies, standards, and initiatives served as catalysts for new funding, opportunities, and partnerships. Among the most relevant were the local DC Healthy Schools Act of 2010, the regional Chesapeake Bay Agreement of 2014, and the national Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS); collectively, these documents addressed wellness, environmental protection, and science education &ndash; all areas relevant to environmental education. </p><p> Multi-institutional partnerships addressed policy goals and enabled teachers to access a) professional development, b) curriculum materials, and c) place-based experiences for students in gardens and on waterways. Through a DC government-funded project, non-formal educators and mentor teachers created an environmental literacy framework that aligned existing environmental education activities with NGSS. Non-formal educators collaboratively led waterway-based fieldtrips that addressed regional efforts to protect the Chesapeake Bay. </p><p> Structured environmental education activities on waterways and in gardens engaged students, inspired educators, and provided links across disciplines, locations, and past experiences. Non-formal educators provided direct instruction, encouraged student inquiry, and fostered relationships with place. By contrast, few educators utilize the school building for environmental education. My findings suggest that expanding place-based environmental education requires engaging diverse stakeholders, including school custodians and others who have not traditionally been consulted as experts.</p><p>

<p> The current mixed method study explored the job satisfaction perceptions and retention plans of 241 secondary science teachers from seven North Texas school districts. For the current study, an email questionnaire was sent to seven districts across 83 secondary campuses, which included 51 middle schools and 32 high schools. The current study intended to find reasons why secondary science teachers continue to teach or decide to leave the profession. The participants&rsquo; perceptions and intentions to continue teaching were gathered through an online survey which gathered data across seven job satisfaction domains. Demographic and retention responses provided additional data on each participant. Through a quantitative analysis of Likert type survey responses and qualitative analysis of open-ended retention responses, the current study explored secondary science teachers&rsquo; perceptions and intentions to stay teaching. The quantitative analysis of survey data found significant differences in almost all of the job satisfaction domains for all teachers. There were also significant differences across some demographic groups as well. Through a qualitative analysis, motivation to teach was the leading predictor for retention. On the other hand, school culture and compensation were the top reasons for teachers planning to leave the classroom. </p><p>

This dissertation is an evaluation of an intervention designed to (a) increase the number of minority students who pursue graduate degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines, and (b) to develop a cadre of qualified individuals from minority backgrounds who, upon finishing their training, are ready to take positions as faculty members and mentors. The Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) is a program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support a pathway from undergraduate to graduate school and to a career in the professoriate. AGEP is part of an effort by the U.S. Government to keep the nations' competitive edge; redress historical gender and racial inequalities still prevalent at the higher levels of science and academia; and to use those who have reached the top of their professions as effective role models for the thousands of talented youth who are excluded from STEM fields due to real or perceived social, economic, or cultural barriers. As of September 2012, there were 178 colleges and universities grouped in 37 alliances nationwide and serving approximately 22,000 minority doctoral students. Specifically, this evaluation focuses on one alliance situated in the North Region of the United States, and presents the approaches, rationale, and findings of evaluation activities conducted during 2011 through 2012. The overarching goals of this evaluation were to assist program managers and staff in their efforts to improve the quality and effectiveness of the program, and to provide them with information related to the program's contribution to increasing the recruitment and retention of students from underrepresented minorities (URMs) in STEM graduate programs, their transition into the professoriate, and the strength of the program's theory of change. To achieve these goals the evaluation design included a) the reconstruction of the program's theory, b) a systematic review and meta-analysis of existing research; and c) analysis of primary data collected from a sample of current AGEP students, alumni, faculty, staff, and program officers. Primary data were collected through focus groups, interviews, and electronic surveys for current and former participants. The evaluation found evidence that the North Region program has been largely successful in contributing to the number of URM receiving STEM graduate degrees at both the master's and doctoral levels in North Carolina since its inception in 1999. Those who have received their graduate degrees are employed in academic and non-academic settings as practitioners, researchers, and as university faculty. Probably the most significant weakness was the absence of a systematic or coherent evaluation design of the program that could be found throughout the history of the program.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 318-352). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Awareness of profound ecological, economical and social crises interacting globally at various scales has brought up the notion of the necessity of a fundamental change, which has driven studies on sustainable change in diverse fields of knowledge. Resilience scholars have approached the issue through a systemic lens that integrates social and ecological phenomena, but scientists from the social “wing” have pointed out the need of adopting a structure agency approach. This study present an analysis of the contribution of researchers to the process of deliberate social-ecological transformation through the analytical lens provided by Archer’s Morphogenetic Approach, which was operationalized by means of the Social-Ecological Action Situation tool, whose purpose is tracking processes of emergence. This study revisited a well-established case of social-ecological transformation, the benthic fisheries governance change in Chile between 1980 and 1997. I found that researcher’s basic transformatory strategic agency was finding the way to personal and vested interests, otherwise engaging in activities such as dissemination of knowledge and advising policy processes carries costs. Researchers main contributions were producing knowledge relevant to different cultural systems as it enabled further structural change, disseminating and endorsing ideas and conducting policy pilots. The Morhogenetic Approach depicted the process of transformation as a sequence of short-life emergent outcomes driven by agency that resulted into a long-life emergent outcome that modified a structural re-arrangement. The combined theoretical-methodological approach is a promising frame to study social-ecological transformations as it managed to explain emergence of phenomena such as policy innovation, interaction between ideational and structural change, relation of interest and power, and it grasped interaction between simultaneous processes.

Since the economic reform in 1978, China’s health system moved from a commune-based system to a market-driven system. This drastic change resulted in various market failures, including cost inflation, perverse incentives for providers and supplier-induced demand for unnecessary care, increasing inequality in access across regions based on economic status, and other problems. Though China attempted to correct its policy mistakes and reform its inadequate and unjust health care system in order to provide basic universal health coverage for all over the past decade, not everyone has equal access to the same quality of affordable health care, especially the non-resident workers, the poor urban residents, and the rural population. This research uses the framework of the five intellectual tasks to assess the history of China’s health policies, the political economy factors that have driven and shaped the reform of China’s health system, the likely projections of policy options, and potential alternatives for policymakers.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)'s emphasis of reading, language arts, and mathematics (RLA&M) and its de-emphasis of science has been a source of great concern among educators. Through an objectivist and constructionist framework, this study explored the unforeseen effects of the NCLB on public science education among Title I (TI) and non-Title I (NTI) students. The research questions focused on the effects of NCLB on Criterion Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) scores in the high-stakes subjects of reading, language arts, mathematics and the low stakes subject of science among TI and NTI 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students in a north Georgia County during the 2010/2011 school year. This study also compared instructional time TI and NTI teachers dedicated to science. A causal-comparative quantitative methodology was used to analyze Georgia's public domain CRCT scores. Three independent-samples t tests showed that TI schools exhibited significantly lower Science CRCT scores than did NTI students at all grade levels (p < 0.0001). The data also showed CRCT scores in high-stakes subjects between TI and NTI students converging but science CRCT scores between TI and NTI students diverging. The self-report survey indicated no significant differences between TI and NTI teachers' instructional science time (t (107) = 1.49, p = 0.137). A teacher development project was designed to focus on improving teacher science content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge through a formal introduction to the nature of science. With increasing global science competition, science is more relevant than ever, and communities need students with strong science foundations. Further study is recommended to analyze the factors associated with this science gap between TI and NTI students.

En ce début de XXIème siècle, toutes les sociétés multilingues et multiculturelles, soit pratiquement tous les pays du monde, sont concernées par la politique linguistique scolaire. La gestion des langues de scolarisation, en particulier, est devenue l’affaire de tous les États soucieux (ou contraints) d’assurer le vivre-ensemble et de contribuer au développement humain, social, économique tout en ménageant des identités culturelles labiles et plurielles. Le XXème siècle a été celui de l’organisation des sociétés en unités étatiques sur fond d’utopie démocratique. Il a été celui d’une métamorphose du paysage politique avec l’apparition des organismes supranationaux et le réveil de la société civile. Dans un contexte global qui semble vouloir en finir avec la malédiction de Babel, nous tentons de problématiser la dimension concrète de la fabrique des politiques linguistiques scolaires. Nous soutenons dans ce travail qu’une politique linguistique scolaire est le résultat de l’interaction complexe entre une multitude d’acteurs au poids variable. En nous intéressant au cas mexicain et plus spécifiquement à celui de l’État du Jalisco, nous nous proposons d’interroger la fabrique de la politique d’éducation bilingue interculturelle mexicaine comme un espace de négociations au carrefour des recommandations globales, des choix étatiques et des revendications des populations indigènes.Cette thèse est une réflexion théorique et pragmatique sur la fabrique des politiques linguistiques scolaires. Elle est entièrement tournée vers l’objectif de prendre en considération la complexité inhérente à la conception des politiques linguistiques scolaires dans un monde glocalisé. / At this start of the XXIst century, all multilingual and multicultural societies, that is to say almost all countries in the world, are concerned with school language policies. In particular, schooling language management is a shared concern by all states involved in (or obliged to) ensure the living together and to contribute to the human, social and economic development while maintaining cultural identities both labile and plural. During the XXth century societies organised themselves into state units with a democratic utopia in the background. It was a century where the political scene got transformed with the appearance of supranational organizations and the reawakening of the civil society.In a global context that seems “to want” to finish with the Babel’s curse, we try to analyse the practical dimensions of schooling language policies’ construction.In this work we support that school language policies are the results of a complex interaction between numerous actors with variable power of action.With our focus on the Mexican case and more specifically on the case of the State of Jalisco, we try to analyse the construction of the intercultural and bilingual education policy - considering it as a space for negotiations at the crossroad between global recommendations, State choices and the expectations of the native populations.This thesis is a theoretical and pragmatic reflection on the “making” of schooling language policies. It is completely turned to the objective to take into consideration the inherent complexity in the conception of the school language policies in a glocalized world. / En esos principios del siglo XXI, cualquier sociedad multilingüe y multicultural, es decir casi todos los países del mundo, se debe de enfocar en una política lingüística escolar. El manejo de los idiomas de escolarización, en especial, se convirtió en un asunto central para todos los Estados preocupados (o forzados) por asegurar la convivencia y contribuir al desarrollo humano, social y económico, respetando a la vez identidades culturales cambiantes y plurales. El siglo XX vio las sociedades organizarse en entidades estatales en medio de una utopía democrática. Asimismo, vio el profundo cambio del paisaje político con la aparición de organismos supranacionales y el despertar de la sociedad civil. Dentro de un contexto global que parece querer ponerle fin a la maldición de Babel, tratamos aquí de plantear la creación / fabricación de las políticas lingüísticas escolares. En contra de cierta tradición en la investigación sobre política y planificación lingüística que se esmera en analizar una política a través de un análisis estático, sostenemos en el presente trabajo la idea que una política lingüística escolar es el resultado de una compleja interacción entre una multitud de actores de importancia variable. Enfocándonos en el caso mexicano, y en especial en el Estado de Jalisco, nos proponemos cuestionar la creación de la política lingüística escolar en México - política de educación bilingüe intercultural - como un espacio de negociaciones entre las recomendaciones globales, las elecciones de los estados, y las reivindicaciones de los pueblos indigenas. La presente tesis es una reflexión teórica y a la vez pragmática sobre la creación de las políticas lingüísticas escolares. Tiene como objetivo fundamental tomar en consideración la complejidad inherente a la concepción de esas políticas en un mundo glocalizado.