This dissertation presents an intervention-based study that aimed to enable teachers to improve teaching and learning in one school in Ramallah, Palestine. The non-positional approach to teacher leadership was adopted as a means to mobilise all teachers in the drive towards bottom-up, participatory school change processes that increase teacher self-efficacy and collaboration, build professional capacity and social capital, and promote sustainability. The Teachers Leading the Way programme provided a contextually tailored strategy, and set of instruments and tools that through reflective exercises and dialogic activities aimed to support teachers to innovate practice, and impact organisational structures and professional culture. This is significant in the Palestine setting for facilitating the building of locally based and sourced knowledge to inform an authentic Palestinian vision and agenda for policy-making and education reconstruction, with implications for countries of the Middle East and North Africa region. In the process, a grassroots change movement is intended to shift historical and continued reliance on foreign intervention and international assistance, and lay the foundation for democratisation and social transformation. The intervention was investigated using a critical action-based, participatory methodology that emphasised context and researcher reflexivity in one school and amongst a cohort of 12 participants. Data were collected using a range of research-designed and programme-based methods and instruments, analysed deductively and inductively, and narrated critically to maintain coherence, and convey experiential and temporal dimensions. The study outcomes indicate that teachers in Palestine are capable of leading school improvement, and impacting school structures and professional culture for system-wide change, when the proper support is provided. Non-positional teacher leadership is the vehicle and can be developed through Teachers Leading the Way. At the individual level, this is enabled through a transformation in teachers’ perspective towards a self-empowered, agential mindset that leads to action on ways to improve practice. The transition process underscores the role of effective facilitation as an enabling condition for developing non-positional teacher leadership in Palestine and similar settings.

The diploma thesis "Rural section of the Bohemia newspapers in 1856 - 1876" analyses the thematic content and news frequency from the countryside and places that the German written newspapers Bohemia published during the introduced period. In the beginning the thesis describes the historical, cultural and political connection in the Czech countries, it focuses mainly on Czech-German relationship and national problems that grew after the year 1848. It introduces the media area of this period as well. The main titles and newspapers distributed in Prague and German places have been mentioned there. Bohemia played the main role in integration of German population especially till 50s. Consecutively, it grows the number of other titles and periodical, so Bohemia loses its strong position. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the rural section should prove weakening of the rural news and the changes of its structure and content. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)