This research examines the failure of AB 101 (Alejo) a bill that would have created a statewide ethnic studies curriculum in California. Through a qualitative analysis consisting primarily of interviews, the analysis challenges the validity of the main oppositional arguments against the bill. Then argues that misunderstandings regarding the implications of ethnic studies curriculum, leading to an unwillingness to fund such programs, has served as the main barrier in enacting a statewide curriculum. Lastly, the work identifies the social and political conditions needed to overcome such barriers. In conclusion, the research suggests that, through time, as local ethnic studies programs become more prominent, and research on the impact of ethnic studies becomes more robust, California will be in a place to be one of the first states to pass a statewide ethnic studies curriculum.

Despite firm knowledge of the instructional actions taken by skillful teachers, the evidence of persistently low levels of literacy achievement among urban secondary students underscores the complexity of achieving meaningful change in routine teaching practices. This study was motivated by the need to improve teaching practices and improve literacy achievement among Black and Latino youth. In this mixed-methods study, I researched the extent to which the understandings about effective instruction guided the instruction of two highly-regarded secondary English language arts classroom teachers. The data for this study included initial teacher interviews, videos of classroom observations, teacher and researcher reflections of practice, and teacher retrospective interviews. The analyses included identifying, analyzing, and classifying: (1) the occurrence of explicit instruction of reading strategies, development of requisite background knowledge, culturally responsive pedagogy, and disciplinary literacy in English language arts secondary classrooms, (2) the types of decisions teachers make related to these factors when enacting a standards-based curriculum, and (3) how these decisions affect student achievement. The analyses led to two major findings: (1) both teachers modified the new standards-based language arts curriculum, but in varied ways and for substantially different reasons; and (2) the students whose instruction included the use of research-based strategies to access and build requisite background knowledge along with disciplinary literacy strategies made significant gains in reading achievement. The overall results of this study confirm and expand the existing literature in several ways: (1) by calling attention to how curricular modifications related to the development of requisite background knowledge and instruction in disciplinary literacy strategies serve to facilitate students’ access to complex texts; (2) by identifying some of the reasons for and obstacles to curricular modification for particular teachers in particular contexts; and (3) by providing preliminary evidence of positive reading outcomes for Black and Latino students who read complex texts in classrooms in which teachers emphasize disciplinary literacy practices, development of requisite background knowledge, and explicit instruction in comprehension strategies.

Global competence--a necessary attribute in an increasingly interconnected world--describes having the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to act creatively and collaboratively on important global issues. In urban settings comprised of racial, ethnic, and/or linguistic-minority students, especially, a logical but seemingly underutilized facilitator of global competence would be instruction that draws from students’ funds of knowledge--the home-based practices central to a household’s functioning and well-being. In response to a need for deepened insight into how these concepts may interact in practice, the goal of this qualitative study was to better understand the experience of urban teachers as global competence educators, specifically, the extent to which they consider and utilize their students’ funds of knowledge in developing global competence. In this study, 30 Boston area teachers were interviewed using a semi-structured protocol to draw out their understandings of students’ funds of knowledge and their awareness of how these funds of knowledge might be used to further the development of global competence. Data produced in this study were analyzed through a multi-phase thematic coding process. A conceptual framework built upon existing definitions of global competence and funds of knowledge was developed to inform the design and methodology of this study, and was used as a guide for viewing and understanding the produced data. The two major findings of this study were that: (1) teachers, while seemingly able and willing to talk about global competence and funds of knowledge in relation to their students, did not seem to synthesize (or speak about their synthesis of) these concepts in practice, and, (2) in teacher interviews, potential global competence-supporting funds of knowledge were most often recognized in immigrant and/or economically privileged White students. The potential global competence-supporting funds of knowledge possessed by non-immigrant, minority, and presumably, low-income students were not routinely recognized or accessed.

SOUZA, Luis Fernando dos Santos. Desarmando o puzzle cético: uma defesa da epistemologia contrastivista. 2016. 160f. – Tese (Doutorado) – Universidade Federal do Ceará, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Filosofia, Fortaleza (CE), 2016. / Submitted by Gustavo Daher (gdaherufc@hotmail.com) on 2017-07-10T17:10:24Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2016_tese_lfssouza.pdf: 1448839 bytes, checksum: f3b0a151ca978022517d4e18ba7a8f98 (MD5) / Rejected by Gustavo Daher (gdaherufc@hotmail.com), reason: fd on 2017-07-11T11:07:39Z (GMT) / Submitted by Gustavo Daher (gdaherufc@hotmail.com) on 2017-07-11T11:09:44Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2016_tese_lfssouza.pdf: 1041996 bytes, checksum: 436db74ca13b099559c9d9da4f8fb510 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Márcia Araújo (marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2017-07-25T12:32:06Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2016_tese_lfssouza.pdf: 1041996 bytes, checksum: 436db74ca13b099559c9d9da4f8fb510 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-25T12:32:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2016_tese_lfssouza.pdf: 1041996 bytes, checksum: 436db74ca13b099559c9d9da4f8fb510 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016 / Esta tese tem por objetivo enfrentar um tipo clássico de argumento cético a partir da teoria contrastivista do conhecimento. O problema que abordaremos surge quando aceitamos o princípio de lógica epistêmica chamado princípio de fechamento. O princípio afirma que o conhecimento é fechado sob implicação e parece regular o modo como expandimos nosso conhecimento ordinário. Basicamente o fechamento afirma que para todo sujeito epistêmico S, proposição alvo p e contrária lógica q, se S sabe que p e S sabe que p implica logicamente q, então S sabe que q. O problema surge quando a contrária lógica é uma hipótese cética, uma hipótese que não podemos conhecer. Operando um modus tollens no princípio de fechamento o cético conclui logicamente que não podemos conhecer qualquer coisa. Para contextualizar a solução contrastivista do problema cético que faz uso do fechamento apresentaremos o tratamento de duas teorias que nos servirão de preliminares. A primeira é a Teoria das Alternativas Relevantes de Fred Dretske e a segunda é o Contextualismo de David Lewis. Dretske reconheceu que aceitar o fechamento significa se render ao ceticismo, por esta razão tentou resolver o problema rejeitando a validade do fechamento. A rejeição do fechamento por Dretske, entretanto, foi considerada ad hoc e, por isso, incapaz de resolver o problema. A solução contextualista de David Lewis, entretanto, aceita a validade do princípio do fechamento e busca resolver o problema acusando o cético de equivocar-se quanto à semântica do termo conhecer. Para Lewis o “conhecimento” é um termo indexical e, como tal, sofre variações (semânticas e epistêmicas) contextuais. Compreender adequadamente a indexicalidade do conhecimento, para o contextualista, mostrará que o paradoxo é apenas aparente. Mostraremos as vantagens da teoria de Lewis, mas mostraremos também que ela é insatisfatória para resolver o problema do ceticismo. Defenderemos, por fim, que a teoria que melhor acomoda o conhecimento ordinário frente aos argumentos céticos é o Contrastivismo de Jonathan Schaffer. A teoria contrastivista buscará esquivar-se do problema apelando para um revisionismo epistêmico. Para Schaffer, a relação de conhecimento é essencialmente ternária e quando olharmos para o puzzle cético pelo viés contrastivista perceberemos que o problema é mitigado, ou seja, é enfraquecido de um modo mais intuitivo do que as teorias de Dretske e Lewis. A teoria contrastivista defenderá, de maneira inovadora, que o conhecimento ordinário é compatível com a dúvida cética.

Tile research focuses on the role played by the school in preraring learners for self-employment. It seeks to establish the extent to which entrepreneurial knowledge, skills and attitudes are being promoted ai school thus equipping learners for ihe world of business once they leave school. The study is undertaken ag~i the background of very high mte of unemployment currently facing South Africa. A nmnber of factors, such as high population growth, globalisation and a variety of other socio-political circlUllStance have resulted in the shrinkage of job opportunities in the formal sector of the economy. The unemployment problem mostly affects the rural schoolleavers, among other groups, in the community. Small bu.'$ine.<Js development is generally seen as the most promising solution to the unemployment problem. Preparing learners for entrepreneurship is therefore the most serious challenge facing schools today. The school is required to deliver the kind of education that will make it possible for learners to start and develop their own businesses once they leave school. Hence the quest for education that is relevant to the needs and aspirations of society. A qualitative study undertaken with rural schoolleavers who own small businesses reveals that the school has not yet taken delibemte steps to tester entrepreneurship among learners thus preparing them for self-employment when they leave school. Again it bas been demonstrated that schools have great potential to inculcate entrepreneurial knowledge, attitudes and skills once they can start working in close co-operation with the community. A shift from traditional approaches to teaching and learning to the progressive (entrepreneurial) approaches can contribute greatly in producing learners who are ready fbr life as independent, creative and influencial business leaders of the future. / Educational Studies / D.Ed. (Comparative Education)

abstract: Crises or large-scale emergencies such as earthquakes and hurricanes cause massive damage to lives and property. Crisis response is an essential task to mitigate the impact of a crisis. An effective response to a crisis necessitates information gathering and analysis. Traditionally, this process has been restricted to the information collected by first responders on the ground in the affected region or by official agencies such as local governments involved in the response. However, the ubiquity of mobile devices has empowered people to publish information during a crisis through social media, such as the damage reports from a hurricane. Social media has thus emerged as an important channel of information which can be leveraged to improve crisis response. Twitter is a popular medium which has been employed in recent crises. However, it presents new challenges: the data is noisy and uncurated, and it has high volume and high velocity. In this work, I study four key problems in the use of social media for crisis response: effective monitoring and analysis of high volume crisis tweets, detecting crisis events automatically in streaming data, identifying users who can be followed to effectively monitor crisis, and finally understanding user behavior during crisis to detect tweets inside crisis regions. To address these problems I propose two systems which assist disaster responders or analysts to collaboratively collect tweets related to crisis and analyze it using visual analytics to identify interesting regions, topics, and users involved in disaster response. I present a novel approach to detecting crisis events automatically in noisy, high volume Twitter streams. I also investigate and introduce novel methods to tackle information overload through the identification of information leaders in information diffusion who can be followed for efficient crisis monitoring and identification of messages originating from crisis regions using user behavior analysis. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2015

Em 1999, o mercado de medicamentos genéricos foi criado no Brasil. Com isso, iniciou-se uma nova fase do mercado farmacêutico brasileiro. Através de dados cedidos pela ANVISA sobre o mercado varejista brasileiro, objetivou-se testar em até que ponto a política de medicamentos genéricos tem logrado êxito. Foram utilizados dados em painel para analisar o impacto da entrada dos medicamentos genéricos sobre a estrutura do mercado, assim como o impacto nos preços e na quantidade vendida entre 2003 e 2007. Os resultados foram favoráveis à diminuição da concentração dos mercados relevantes da amostragem e também ao aumento da quantidade comercializada. Em relação aos preços, o modelo se mostrou pouco significativo, provavelmente pela política de medicamentos genéricos ser um instrumento indireto de controle de preços. De qualquer forma, os resultados encontrados parecem sugerir o bom andamento da política de medicamentos genéricos, o que é um alívio em se tratando de um mercado tão essencial para o bem-estar da população. / In 1999, the generic medicines market was created in Brazil. Thus, a new phase of the Brazilian pharmaceutical market began. Through data provided by ANVISA on the Brazilian retail market, aimed to test in how far the generic drug policy has been successful, we used panel data to analyze the impact of the entry of generic drugs on the market structure, as well as the impact on prices and quantities sold between 2003 and 2007. The results were favorable to the policy as they show decrease of the concentration level in the relevant markets of the sample and also increase of the quantity sold. Regarding prices, the model was negligible, probably due to generic drug policy being an instrument of indirect price control. Anyway, the results seem to suggest the progress of the generic drug policy, which is a relief when it comes to a market as essential for the welfare of the population.

Cette étude a pour objectif d’examiner la structure des relatives en arabe classique, en arabe standard moderne et en arabe égyptien. Nous avons tenté de montrer les caractéristiques des relatives dans chacune de ces variantes d’arabe et de les comparer à celles du français.La première partie expose l’analyse des relatives chez les grammairiens français, ainsi que notre point de vue sur celle-ci. La deuxième partie présente une étude de la structure de la phrase en arabe classique et en arabe moderne. Nous y exposons également l’analyse menée par les grammairiens arabes des unités que nous apparentons à des relatifs. Dans la troisième et la quatrième partie, nous analysons ce que nous avons appelé les relatives marquées et les relatives non marquées en arabe moderne et en arabe égyptien. Enfin, nous décrivons les ressemblances et les différences, qui sont ressorties de ces comparaisons, entre le système des relatives dans les trois variantes d’arabe étudiées et celui du français. / This study aims to examine the structure of relative pronouns between Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic. We try to show the characteristics of relative pronouns for each of these three Arabic language variants and compare them with those of the French language.The first section presents an analysis of the relative pronouns by French grammarians, as well as our perspective on it. The second section presents a study of sentence structure in Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. In this section, we also present an overview of the analysis conducted by Arab grammarians of the units that we consider as relative pronouns. In the third and the fourth section, we analyze what we have called the marked relatives and unmarked relatives in Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic. Finally, we describe the similarities and differences that emerge from these comparisons between the system of relative pronouns for each of these three Arabic language variants and the French language.

Sammandrag I denna undersökning analyserar vi elevuppsatser från de nationella proven år 2003. Vi studerar samband mellan föräldrarnas utbildningsnivå och kulturella kapital och elevernas förmåga att uttrycka röd tråd och relevant innehåll. Detta gör vi genom att studera styckeindelning och genom att analysera innehållsmässiga teman. Eftersom uppsatserna är bedömda dels av elevens lärare och dels av en extern bedömare, så undersöker vi om betygssättningen dem emellan eventuellt skiljer sig åt. Vi analyserar 12 uppsatser indelade i två kategorier: Elevkategori 1, vars föräldrar har eftergymnasial utbildning och elevkategori 2, vars föräldrar endast har förgymnasial utbildning. Resultatet visar att elever oavsett kategori har problem med styckeindelning och att det inte finns någon skillnad mellan grupperna i förmåga till att skapa en tydlig röd tråd. De innehållsmässiga teman som analyserades visade att elever från båda kategorierna är övervägande positivt inställda till sina lärare och till skolan och att hur eleven uppfattar relationer och stämning i klassen beror på hur eleven upplever situationen i skolan. Det som skiljer de båda kategorierna åt är deras motivation och attityd. Eleverna i kategori 1 är mer studieinriktade, medan eleverna i kategori 2 mer upplever skolan som en social arena. Betygssättningen skiljer sig åt i sju av uppsatserna. Fem av texterna har fått ett lägre betyg, och två har fått ett högre av de externa bedömarna.

Educational and public narratives on the achievement outcomes of Black boys in mathematics are too often negative. Contrary to these negative narratives, however, research affirms positive outcomes for students, including Black boys, when engaged in caring teacher–student relationships (see, e.g., Bartell, 2011; Roberts, 2009; Steele, 1992). Considering the growing importance of mathematics both nationally and globally, an investigation into the benefits of such caring relationship is important. But literature specific to caring teacher−student relationships, African American male students, and mathematics teaching and learning is all but nonexistent. For this reason, I sought to uncover the definition that African American male students had of teacher care, and how, if at all, an African American male teacher might influence their perceptions of teacher care. Additionally, I was intrigued with and wished to uncover any influence an African American male teacher might have on African American male students’ attitudes toward mathematics. The purpose of this qualitative study, therefore, was to explore the influence a “successful” African American male teacher had on three African American male students’ perceptions of teacher care and their attitudes toward mathematics. This critical ethnography was guided by an intersection of an eclectic array of theoretical traditions (Stinson, 2009), including care theory (e.g., Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1992), critical race theory (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1998), and culturally relevant pedagogy (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1992). This eclectic array aligned with both the philosophical foundations of the project and the methodological procedures employed. The project used ethnographic methods—specifically, participant observations and semi-structured interviews—during data collection. Data analysis identified six overarching themes that the participants used to describe teacher care: (a) motivation, (b) culture, (c) confidence, (d) discipline, (e) concern for futures, and (f) environment. The findings of this study suggest that teachers should reconsider the ways they care for African American male students, specifically, in the mathematics classroom, and that a caring teacher–student relationship has a positive influence on African American male students’ attitudes toward mathematics as well as their descriptions and perceptions of teacher care.