Sabbaticals have long been linked to higher education institutions and their employees. Sabbaticals have been granted for the development and respite of employees teaching classes and conducting research. However, sabbaticals are not just limited to faculty at colleges or just linked to education. A number of businesses have also turned to sabbaticals to help recruit, retain, and develop employees and administrators. This study examines the practice of administrative sabbaticals to provide empirical research regarding sabbatical policies and benefits for administrative staff (professional, exempt staff). This study provides empirical research to understand how sabbaticals benefit institutions and their employees and how sabbatical policies are structured, conceptualized, and communicated. Content analysis and qualitative inquiry were used to examine sabbatical granting institutions and the individuals who use sabbaticals. This multi-institutional case study sampled a variety of institutional types in the United States. Data were obtained from 20 sabbatical policies (representing a total of 166 institutional locations) and nine semi-structured case study interviews with both the sabbicants and the administrators of the programs. The data for this study were analyzed through Amabile's organizational creativity theoretical framework. An extensive literature review on sabbaticals both inside and outside of academia provided the foundation for the study. Furthermore, document analysis of sabbatical proposals and final reports provided important background information. This study answered the following questions: How are staff sabbaticals structured and used at colleges and universities? How do administrators and sabbaticants in colleges and universities conceptualize and communicate individual and organizational benefits of staff sabbaticals? How do these individual and organizational benefits compare to the sabbatical policy?

This research explores the relationships between visual and written narratives, as well as the quality of engagement in art and writing processes. The study focuses on the work of second grade students in the art education classroom at a small rural elementary school. Data collection included: direct observation of the students, teacher notes, rubrics, student surveys, and student projects. The aim was to collect information on the ways in which students prefer to create and share their narratives. Results show that by providing students with choices in their learning, they are more engaged in the narrative process. It also demonstrates that by providing a variety of narrative methods, particularly the inclusion of image making, students will produce stories that are richer, more elaborate, and engaging.

Discourses of adolescence/ts that reduce teenagers to impulsive, hormonal, incomplete adults are pervasive, and affect the way that adolescence/ts is regarded in institutional spaces like schools. However, scholars in Critical Youth Studies (CYS) reject these determinations in favor of a vision of adolescence as a social construct; a construct that has changed throughout time and does not accurately reflect the lived experiences of diverse youth. This study considers the way in which these discourses are mobilized and circulating in one English Language Arts (ELA) classroom and, specifically, through the study of literature. Grounded in empirical scholarship that approaches classroom literature pedagogy and response through a sociocultural lens, and in theoretical scholarship in Critical Youth Studies (CYS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the purpose of this qualitative inquiry is to observe student response to young adult literature (YAL) in one ELA classroom in order to locate discourses of adolescence that are mobilized and circulating as students comprehend, analyze and interpret texts.

A critical aspect of the non-native students' academic adjustment in English-speaking countries is their English language ability, including their reading fluency and comprehension. Even when these students are considered proficient readers of English at an advanced level, they display different reading processes when dealing with the complex input of a second language (L2) text, as compared with their native English reading classmates. Despite the importance of comprehending highly sophisticated academic reading in international education, there is a lack of research in the field as to how advanced L2 readers cope with the texts with which the highly educated native speakers engage. This study, therefore, examined meaning construction processes of highly proficient L2 readers during reading the texts that vary in degree of cohesion. To describe readers' approaches to text cohesion and also recognize readers' perceptions of their own process, the study used a close observation of reading processes of nine highly proficient graduate students at a U.S. university with the use of qualitative research methods. The students participated in two interviews - pre-reading interview and post-reading cognitive interview - and two think-aloud verbal protocol sessions. Participants read one high-cohesive and one low-cohesive text during the think-aloud sessions, and then shared the meaning they constructed from the texts and also their thinking about the texts. The data from the instruments were analyzed qualitatively using a grounded theory approach. The results of the study reveal that the readers' meaning representation processes emerging as the result of reader and text interaction display differences at the local and global levels of processing of the high- and low-cohesive text. The processing differences between the readers are most apparent in texts with low text cohesion. The low cohesive text allowed the readers, especially, the creators of meaning, to conduct more elaborative processing compared to their performance with the high-cohesive one, in which all readers attempted to create a catalogue of facts trusting the explicitly provided text cohesion features. These results have implications for theories of text processing as well as the design of materials and instruction used for advanced L2 readers and lower level L2 readers.

Deficits dominate our culture's narratives of homelessness, associating poverty with lower literacy and skewing social policies about access and equity in schools, jobs, healthcare, and community (Bomer, 2008; Miller, 2011; Miller, 2014; Moore, 2013). Scant, if any, literature exists about literacy and identity in homeless adults, in ways that they might enroll in college and/or seek long-term careers. Yet if one of our roles as educators is to advocate for justice and disrupt social apathy, then we ought to consider more studies identifying literacy strengths (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Bomer, 2008; Janks, 2010; Miller, 2011, 2014; Moore, 2013) of marginalized groups. In particular, studies examining literacy spaces where homeless adults come together to partake in the writing culture of their town can inform, if not disrupt, what literacies we privilege, and whose. What can we learn about writing and writers, reading and readers when we broaden the boundaries of access to the community? When we appropriate Bakhtin's notion of dialogic tools inside a co-constructed learning space? This dissertation is based on my four-year and ongoing ethnographic observation of, and participation in, the literate lives of 75 men and women in the Community Stories Writing Workshop (CSWW) at a homeless shelter house (SH), a writing group I founded in fall 2010 and for which I am the facilitator. I focus on ways in which members negotiate, through composition, the layers of deficits ascribed to them as youths in school and as adults in transience (Gee, 2012, 2013; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Holland & Lachicotte, 2007) within the physical and mental, social and personal spaces of the CSWW. Implicitly this overarching pursuit assumes that the CSWW is indeed a kind of third space co-constructed by its members, and as such, throughout my dissertation, and particularly in the "pre-profile," I illustrate the various cultural practices and literacies or knowledge funds (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2013; Moje, et al., 2004) that members exchange with one another (and potentially integrate) inside the CSWW. In the first, second, and third profiles, I look at how members position themselves inside this space, as well as how my dual roles as facilitator and researcher affect the practices of the group. I consider, too, the various group dynamics inside the CSWW and ways in which they function as audience for the writers. Questions I ask in this study include: How might the act and process of telling, writing, revising, and sharing nonfiction narratives inside the CSWW afford adults in homeless circumstances the physical and mental, the social and personal spaces to exercise what they know and to construct who they are as literate beings? What identities and literacies do members perform in their stories (e.g., drafts of narratives) and off the page, or outside of their stories relative to audience? How does audience--inside the CSWW and CSWW-sponsored spaces--support and disrupt these self-discoveries and/or enactments for CSWW members--as writers, readers, and literate beings? As my ongoing quest, I wonder how these identities might correlate with those of the narrator's in drafts and the transformative implications of writing.

Students with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) struggle with writing. Writing is an important skill for everyday life; therefore, it is essential that students with ID receive effective writing instruction. Explicit writing instruction adhering to the Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) has shown to be an effective writing strategy for postsecondary students with ID. However, the impact of simple sentence writing instruction has not been studied for this population. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of part I of the Proficiency in Sentence Writing Strategy (Sheldon & Schumaker, 1999). Results indicate that students were able to learn and apply the vocabulary concepts needed to use the strategy (ES = 0.808), but that the simple sentence writing intervention had no effect on students overall writing quality.

Although researchers in composition studies have examined the instructional conditions that help students revise successfully, there is little published scholarship about how college students use feedback from a peer tutor in the revising process. Thus, I designed a qualitative, collective case study to investigate how students revised after writing center conferences. I used the conceptual framework of activity theory to analyze the entire system of student revision. I used the concept of situation definition to examine how students' understanding of writing conferences and rhetorical concepts, such as revision, changed (or did not change) during the writing conference. I analyzed the revisions with a taxonomy from a study by Faigley and Witte (1981). The findings of this study were centered on two different groups of students who had writing center conferences: those who had specific goals for their writing conferences and those who did not. Students who did not have specific goals for their conferences ceded authority to the writing consultant (the title that this writing center used instead of "peer tutor") who they believed could identify and correct sentence-level errors. When these students revised, they almost always integrated direct feedback about how to correct errors in grammar and mechanics because they believed that their instructors valued writing that was free of errors. But these students only integrated indirect feedback about microstructure revisions if they believed that the revisions were important to other aspects of the activity system such as their instructors. Students rarely made macrostructure revisions, but writing consultants rarely discussed this kind of revision. The writing consultants and the students without specific goals for their conferences had different situation definitions of the purpose of a writing conference and how to meaningfully revise their writing. The writing consultants did not try to promote situation re-definition by moving the discussion away from the text toward a conversation about the strategies that the student used to produce the draft. The conducted the conference at the level of the student in order to fulfill the student's agenda. This contradicted the main philosophy of the writing center, which was that a conference should be a productive conversation about the ideas in a piece of writing. The second group of students, who had specific goals for their conferences, consisted of writing consultants who also had writing conferences with other writing consultants. Writing consultants shared the same situation definition of the purpose of a writing conference and this led to them having productive conversations that framed the act of revision in a more complex way than "revising for the instructor." However, their conferences were focused on how to revise the text, so the consultants also did not try to promote situation re-definition to help their peers develop new writing strategies. The faculty in this research study had differing conceptions of the purpose of the writing center, but their situation definition was closer to that of the students who believed that the writing center was for helping students edit their texts. Instructors used the writing center as a resource to help their students revise their writing, but those who believed the writing center was only for basic writing assignments did not use the writing center or relied on writing consultants with specialized knowledge to help them. An important implication of this research is that peer tutors should be trained to elicit the students' situation definitions of what a writing conference is for and what it means to meaningfully revise. In this way, peer tutors can structure an activity that focuses on helping students to develop situation definitions that are more appropriate for successfully revising their academic writing and for completing future writing projects. Writing centers can also work to help instructors develop more appropriate situation definitions of what a writing conference can do for their students.

This study examined low and high level teachers' questioning patterns and classroom implementations within an argument-based inquiry approach known as the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach, which addresses issues on negotiation, argumentation, learning, and teaching. The level of the teachers was determined by the students' writing scores. This study was conducted in Turkey with seven teacher for preliminary study. Because scoring writing samples examines the students' negotiation level with the different sources and students learn scientific process, as negotiation, which they may transfer into their writing, in classroom, two teachers were selected to represent low and high level teachers. Data collection involved classroom observation through video recordings. The comparative qualitative method was employed throughout the data analysis process with including quantitative results. The research questions that guided the present study were: (1) How are low and high level teachers, determined according to their students' writing scores, questioning patterns different from each other during classroom discourse? (2) Is there a relationship between students' writings and teachers' questioning styles in the classroom? Analysis of Qualitative data showed that teachers' classroom implementations reveal big differences based on argumentation patterns. The high level teacher, whose students had high scores in writing samples, asked more questions and the cognitive levels of questions were higher than the low level teacher. Questions promote an argumentative environment and improve critical thinking skills by discussing different ideas and claims. Asking more questions of teacher influences students to initiate (ask questions) more and to learn the scientific process with science concepts. Implicitly, this learning may improve students' comparison in their writing. Moreover, high level teacher had a more structured and organized classroom than low level teacher.

Programwide implementation uses implementation science to provide the supports needed so all practitioners can use DEC recommended practices to improve child outcome. Participants will learn the process of programwide implementation, tools, and strategies they can use and how programwide implementation occurs within classroom and home visiting programs.

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