America's school-age population is experiencing a demographic shift. In 1972, students of color represented 22% of the school-age population; in 2005, minority students accounted for 33% of public school enrollment (Statistics, 2007 Villegas, 2002). This study sought to explore how these changing demographics affected University Town Community Schools, the district's interventions, and teachers' perceptions to those interventions. This study also explored teachers' feelings of efficacy when teaching minority students. Using a qualitative study among third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade elementary school teachers, a random sample of 9 teachers from schools comprising a minority population of at least 40% were interviewed. Data analysis involved the use of themes that emerged from the interview data, observations, and quotations from participants. The findings indicated that the district acted on a school-by-school basis, with no specific actions to target any one racial group. Meanwhile, teachers were inconsistent when discussing race, behavior, and learning. Teachers felt comfortable assigning behaviors based on race and culture, but were hesitant to assign learning strengths and weaknesses based on race or culture.

The purpose of this was study was to explore the use of two teaching practices (cognitively responsive subject matter and culturally responsive teaching) at Hispanic-Serving Institutions in the United States. The conceptual frameworks for this study were the Multi-Contextual Model of Diverse Learning Environments (MMDLE) (Hurtado et al., 2015), Blackwell and Lawrence’s (1995) framework on faculty work, and Neumann’s (2014) framework on cognitively responsive teaching practices and culturally responsive teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1994). Data for this study were culled from responses of full-time faculty to the University of California-Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute’s 2013 faculty survey, a national, multi-institutional survey of faculty. Using ANOVAs and hierarchical linear models (HLM), the study estimated the effect of individual- and organizational-level variables on subject matter and culturally responsive teaching. The results of HLM models showed that women faculty, faculty who have won an award for their teaching, and those who believe all students can excel have higher culturally responsive teaching scores. In contrast, faculty who believe it is up to individual students to succeed, and those who teach a hard discipline as characterized by Biglan’s (1973) typology of disciplines, have lower culturally responsive teaching scores. Of the organizational-level predictors used in HLM models, the selectivity of an institution was negatively associated with culturally responsive teaching, as was the percentage of Latinx students enrolled. For subject matter teaching, women faculty, tenure-track faculty, faculty who believe all students can excel, and those who spend additional time weekly preparing to teach have higher subject matter teaching scores. Faculty who teach a hard discipline, as characterized by Biglan’s (1973) typology of disciplines, and those who believe it is up to individual students to succeed have lower subject matter teaching scores. Of the organizational-level predictors, the percent of Latinx students enrolled in an institution had a negative association with subject matter teaching practices.

This thesis is concerned with the recent trends within church gatherings where it is reported that there are growing numbers of 15-35 year olds missing from many evangelical churches. This is the generation commonly labelled as postmodern, and is even associated with the most up to date reaction of post-post modernism. The startling facts around this missing generation are explored in this thesis. This investigation looks at the present status of church services (Chapter 2) where the research identifies this problem of attendance of the younger generation at church gatherings, as well as the danger of the irrelevance of the church in its postmodern context. From here the study moves to suggest the basis of authority (Chapter 3), which is the biblical model for church gatherings. Once this foundation is established we move to detect the specific gaps between the current status (Chapter 4) and the biblical model. This leaves the application (Chapter 5) of what the church needs to do to get back to the original scriptural shape, and to be relevant to the postmodern era in which it finds itself. Due to the nature of the topic, the thesis discusses the characteristics of emerging generations, and what it means to be relevant to postmodern society in the way that a church gathering worships, preaches and styles itself. Other elements of liturgy are examined, such as the Lord’s Supper. In this manner, this thesis moves the reader to a point where they are able to see that the church at large needs to make some drastic changes to the way that it designs its gatherings. The author is careful to show that being relevant to culture is an endless quest, and that church leaders are wise to understand that this pursuit must be secondary to the main issue of seeking Jesus Christ and sticking to the power of the unchanging gospel. This must come before trendy worship music, flashy lights, big loud sound systems and professionally designed web pages. All these are simply smoke and no flames if the church is simply passionate about the superficial surface stylistic features of its gatherings. Therefore, in moving towards relevant church services for the postmodern era, the author takes the reader on a journey where he encourages the church to take some bold steps into adapting and “redesigning the packaging” of Christian ministry in church gatherings. Church meetings cannot just be about being social, creative and communal. They must be defined by the biblical framework that calls for a spiritual gathering of believers that come to worship together as God ordained, to participate in a reverent, powerful, experiential, participative, creative, multi-sensory meeting where they meet with God. / Dissertation (MA(Theol))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Practical Theology / unrestricted

This dissertation qualitatively explores 55 Thai 4th grade students, a teacher, and 7 community members from a low-income public school in Bangkok, Thailand in order to develop a design framework for creating school-based maker experiences that are culturally relevant to lower income Thai students. Co-teaching and co designing a two-year design-based research project named, “Little Builders,” I worked with a local science teacher to engage the students in a constructionist learning experience that involved designing and building social innovations to solve problems in their community. I propose the Culturally Relevant Constructionist Design framework as a way to (1) create constructionist learning experiences that align with students’ values and goals, and (2) engage important people in the students’ lives, such as teachers and community members, in the process of making. Designing the learning experience for Thai students from 2017-2019, I draw from the life and work of the late King Bhumibol of Thailand. For 70 years, King Bhumibol was a unifying figure in Thailand and widely admired as “The Developer King” (Nicholas & Dominic, 2011) as he dedicated his life to creating inventions for the good of the country. Students “followed in the King’s footsteps” by making inventions to better their community in the midst of a nation-wide mourning period after the King’s death in 2016. This dissertation builds upon the literature from constructionism, sociocultural views of learning and identity development, community-centered making, and culturally relevant pedagogy. Little Builders provided opportunities for students, teachers, and community members to build projects and relationships. They learned about making while also learning more about each other and about how to support one another. During the Little Builders project, teachers and community members explicitly expressed new appreciation and awareness of students’ skills and strengths, gradually moving away from deficit narratives. Similarly, the students saw themselves as someone who could create and invent while helping others.

Magister Scientiae (Nutrition Management) - MSc(NM) / Introduction: The significant link between mental health and nutrition throughout one’s life cannot be overstated. Yet this strong association is often neglected in the public healthcare sector in South Africa, particularly in the case of people who are being treated for various types of mental illness. It is therefore important to prioritise nutrition care through efficient and effective hospital food services in public psychiatric facilities. Although hospital settings are often perceived to provide efficient clinical care, the food provided to patients by hospital food service units is often criticised for being bland, repetitive and/or unhealthy. At times, too, inadequate food budget allocations by provincial health departments or poor supply chain management practices result in patients receiving inadequate quantities of food at mealtimes, which might lead to their becoming malnourished during their hospital stays. For psychiatric patients in particular, malnutrition can have serious short and longer-term consequences.

Today, as computer systems are ubiquitous in our everyday life, there is no need to argue that their correctness is of capital importance. In order to prove (in a mathematical sense) that a given system satisfies a given property, formal methods have been introduced. They include concepts such as model checking and synthesis. Roughly speaking, when considering synthesis, we aim at building a model of the system which is correct by construction. In order to do so, models are mainly borrowed from game theory. During the last decades, there has been a shift from two-player qualitative zero-sum games (used to model antagonistic interactions between a system and its environment) to multiplayer quantitative games (used to model complex systems composed of several agents whose objectives are not necessarily antagonistic). In the latter setting, the solution concepts of interest include numerous equilibria, such as Nash equilibrium (NE) and subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE). While the existence of equilibria is widely studied, it is also well known that several equilibria may coexist in the same game. Nevertheless, some equilibria are more relevant than others. For example, if we consider a game in which each player aims at satisfying a given qualitative objective, it is possible to have both an equilibrium in which no player satisfies his objective and another one in which each player satisfies it. In this case one prefers the latter equilibrium which is more relevant.In this thesis, we focus on multiplayer turn-based games played on graphs either with qualitative or quantitative objectives. Our contributions are twofold: (i) we provide equilibria characterizations and (ii) we use these characterizations to solve decision problems related to the existence of relevant equilibria; and characterize their complexities. Firstly, we provide a characterization of a weaker notion of SPE (weak SPE) in multiplayer games with omega-regular objectives based on the payoff profiles which are realizable by a weak SPE. We then adopt another point of view by characterizing the outcomes of equilibria instead of their payoff profiles. In particular we focus on weak SPE outcome characterization. As for some kinds of games (e.g. multiplayer quantitative Reachability games), weak SPEs and SPEs are equivalent, this characterization is useful in order to study SPEs in these games.Secondly, we use those different equilibrium characterizations to provide the exact complexity classes of different decision problems related to the existence of relevant equilibria. We mainly focus on the constrained existence problem: if each player aims at maximizing his gain, this problem asks whether there exists an equilibrium such that each resulting player’s gain is greater than a threshold (one per player). We also consider variants of relevant equilibria based on the social welfare and the Pareto optimality of the players’ payoff. In this way, we prove the exact complexity classes for (i) the weak SPE constrained existence problem in multiplayer games with classical qualitative objectives such as Büchi, co-Büchi and Safety and (ii) the NE and SPE constrained existence problems (and variants) for qualitative and quantitative reachability games. In the latter case, the upper bounds on the required memory for such relevant equilibria are studied and proved to be finite. Studying memory requirements of strategies is important since with the synthesis process those strategies have to be implemented.Finally, we consider multiplayer, non zero-sum, turn-based timed games with qualitative Reachability objectives together with the concept of SPE. We prove that the SPE constrained existence problem is EXPTIME-complete for qualitative Reachability timed games. In order to obtain an EXPTIME algorithm, we proceed in different steps. In the first step, we prove that the game variant of the classical region graph is a good abstraction for the SPE constrained existence problem. In fact, we identify conditions on bisimulations under which the study of SPE in a given game can be reduced to the study of its quotient. / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The challenges of sustainability and its complexities born out of overexploitation of resources, leading to climate change issues, food wastage, and scarcity, economic and health-related dilemmas, has yet to find their solution in top-down models, taking the form of hierarchical control (rulers), as such, researchers have considered other alternatives to how communities can tackle these issues, and one of such approach is the bottom-up model. Recent research and literature on collective action have focused on sequencing events like regime changes, riots, revolutions, protests, and the founding of social movement organizations. This study ethnographically investigated the relevant factors for collective action and factors influencing individual cooperation in the local community initiative, Food Rescue Gotland, through a four-week participant observation with eight in-depth interviews. The relevant factors identified in this context were a sense of community, passion for sustainability, good atmosphere for work, committed volunteers and trust, availability of resources and goodwill ambassadors, ease of participation, small size, effective communication, and good structure. Significant factors influencing individual cooperation include knowledge about sustainability, a sense of belonging, and a shared sense of community. This study contributes to the broader literature on successful collective action for sustainability in the context of local community initiatives. It contributes further to the replicability of this kind of local community initiative in other communities and awareness of its impact on Gotland Island, Sweden.

The purpose of this study was to examine technology integration and the application of Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT). This inquiry evolved as a result of trying to understand the unique intersectionality of student identity, which is inclusive of youth culture, and whether teachers understood this dynamic and hence leveraged it in the classrooms and school communities they taught. Given that youth culture is a “mash-up of cultures and the membership transcends ethnic and racial lines,” there was evident value in exploring how youth cultural competence is unpacked and applied by educators to both deliver content and build relationships (Keuss, 2012), Understanding that a major youth cultural referent is technology, the study observed how teacher’s Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge manifested itself in the classroom and the types of technology students shared they were exposed to, in addition to their perceptions of teacher competence of technology and/or youth culture. This exploration was further framed by using a Culturally Relevant Teaching framework to analyze teacher-student interactions, based on the principles, behaviors and mindsets outlined by Ladson-Billings in her construction of defining the characteristics of a CRT educator (2009). This was a qualitative study that included 10 teachers and 20 student participants that were members of a technology-rich middle school in an urban environment. Teachers participated in classroom observations, interviews, and CRT reflective tasks. Students participated in grade-level focus groups that leveraged interactive and reflective tasks. As a result of the data analysis, implications from the study presents school leaders with practical insights on how technology integration can be woven into the fabric of the school to strengthen teacher development, support content delivery and enhance the quality of student learning experiences. Additionally, there is evidence of a need for commitment by schools to train teachers in Culturally Relevant Teaching practices in order to attend to the whole child, operate with a more student-centered approach, and adequately prepare scholars for the digital world. / Educational Administration

[pt] O objetivo desta dissertação é construir um tableaux linear intuicionista a partir de um cálculo de sequentes relevante clássico. Os passos principais dessa construção são: i) tradução das regras do cálculo dos sequentes relevante clássico para regras de tableaux (capítulo 3), usando a estratégia apresentada por D Agostino et al. em Tableau Methods for Substructural Logic. ii) construção de um tableaux linear clássico através da linearização do tableaux clássico relevante (capítulo 4). iii) apresentar um tableau intuicionista ao estilo Fitting, em que são adicionados rótulos T s e F s às fórmulas (capítulo 5). / [en] The main goal of this master tesis is intuitionistic linear tableaux from a relevant sequent calculus. The central steps are: i) Apply D Agostino et al. strategy to translate classical relevant sequent calculus rules to tableaux rules for classical relevant logic (Chapter 3). ii) Use Meyer et al. strategy to linearize the classical relevant tableaux (Chapter 4). iii) Build a new intuicionistic linear tableaux with Fitting labels.

Machine learning has achieved remarkable performance in many domains, now it promising to solve manufacturing problems — a new ongoing trend of using machine learning in industrial applications. Dealing with the material order demand in manufacturing as time-series sequences, making unsupervised time-series clustering possible to apply. This study aims to evaluate different time-series clustering approaches, algorithms, and distance measures in material flow data. Three different approaches are evaluated; statistical clustering approaches; raw based and shape-based approaches and at last feature-based approach. The objectives are to categorize the materials in the supermarket (intermediate storage area to store materials before assembling the products) into three different flows according to their time-series properties. The experimental shows that feature-based approach is performed best for the data. A features filter is applied to keep the relevant features, that catch the unique characteristics from the data the predicted output. As a conclusion data type, structure, the goal of the clustering task and the application domains are reasons that have to consider when choosing the suitable clustering approach.