Although retention has become a critical priority for most institutions, this interest has not yielded significantly increased retention rates over the past 30 years. Understanding how each individual institution could increase retention rates will help to avoid the critics of higher education who have grown wary over the increasing costs. In order to justify the increases in tuition, higher education must show that students can persist, graduate, and succeed in the 'real world'.This exploratory study seeks to provide insight into persistence by focusing on understanding the common themes of students who persisted. In 2001, Woodard, Mallory, & DeLuca published a research article providing a comprehensive structure that incorporates an extensive body of student retention research along with the authors' own research. The framework provides institutions with a model to explore the areas that affect student retention. The authors describe four major components to retention: the student sphere, institutional sphere, academic affairs sphere, and student services sphere. Within each of these spheres is a number of characteristics that research indicates effects retention. The Retention Self-Study Framework (2001) draws heavily from the research of Vincent Tinto (1975, 1987, 1993), John Bean (1980, 1983), Alexander Astin (1984), and Ernest Pascarella (1980).This study investigates the extent to gender, race, high school class rank, socio-economic status, institutional choice, financial aid package, and parents' education relate to the experiences within the Retention Self-Study Framework (Woodard, Mallory, & DeLuca, 2001).Utilizing the Retention Self-Study Framework, the author created a survey that asked students about each of the various characteristics within the four spheres described in the framework. The research was conducted at a large Research-Extensive university in southwest United States of undeclared majors. Utilizing both mixed methods, the research provides a fresh look at issues of retention and those experiences that are related to persistence and suggests implications for practice and future research.

A high school art teacher investigates the relationship of his religious beliefs with his notions of what it means to be creative. This Mormon teacher examines his religious and experiential life through self-study, by drawing from autoethnographic and hermeneutic phenomenological strategies. He believes that everyone, including himself and his students, has a creative potential. He also analyzes how his Mormon religion affects his view of creativity and how creativity has affected his behavior as a Mormon. The conclusions he reaches uncover the need for balance between his creative self and his Mormon self and outlines several ways to merge these two aspects of his life.

This self-study examines the role that children’s out-of school lives play in the “schooled literacy practices” of the Morning Meeting, a daily meeting in the teacher-researcher’s classroom. Morning Meeting in this Grade 2/3 classroom became a contestable “third space” where several professional tensions intersected for the teacher-researcher. The study explores questions of what “counts as literacy,” what role “popular culture” plays in school, and whose voices are privileged or marginalized in schooled literacy discussions. Data was collected over a 3-week period in the form of immediate and more distanced teacher reflections. A Bourdieusian theoretical framework, critical sociocultural literacy theory, third space theory, and artifactual critical literacy, offered the teacher-researcher lenses through which to analyze the meanings found in the everyday stories and artifacts young children share in the schooled literacy practice of Morning Meeting. The findings of this study inform and create new thinking about the entanglements of children’s out-of-school everyday culture with schooled literacy practices.

No description available.

The challenges of teaching include classroom management issues, lack of time, stress, and the constraints of core standards. In response to these challenges, I determined to change my attitude about being a teacher, become more reflective about my teaching practice and curriculum, and try to connect my artistic self to my teaching self. This thesis is an autoethnographic research of my own teaching practice designed to counter the challenges I was facing as a teacher. I wanted to become less reactive and more reflective about the challenges and rewards of being an artist teacher. This thesis is a reflection on my journey to find my own path toward professional growth and satisfaction through a careful study of my experiences teaching in a junior high school art room. In the end, this self-study has helped me become more flexible, understanding, and forgiving of myself as an artist and a teacher. I learned to allow myself to be flexible enough to let the research lead me in unforeseen directions and not fall into the trap of best practices. My attempt to apply some of my own artistic practices, such as in the use of materials, artists, and time constraints, to student projects was successful. I began by attempting to turn my teaching into my art practice; what I ended up doing was becoming a more reflective teacher.

Teacher education programs have long grappled with the disconnects between campus and classroom in the preparation of teacher candidates. Both are important sites of learning for teacher candidates, and yet the design of conventional teacher education programs leaves little room for teacher candidates to explore theory and practice simultaneously in ways that recognize the multifaceted nature of learning how to teach. In addition, teacher educators are faced with the complex demands of being responsive to the needs of teacher candidates while at the same time challenging assumptions and beliefs in order to ensure new teachers are responsive to the diverse needs of their students. Teacher educators, too, need to make their own dilemmas and tensions of practice observable both to teacher candidates and to one another as they consider and interrogate their beliefs and assumptions about teaching. This study explores Link2Practice, a partnership between the University of Victoria and SD 62 (Sooke) which was organized to provide a campus and classroom experience for Elementary Post-Degree Program students from the beginning of their program. A group of participants involved as teacher educators in Link2Practice engaged in a self-study with the purpose of examining how sharing leadership in teacher education provided the participants the opportunity to engage in conversations about the partnership, and how our professional learning, understandings of teacher education, and understandings of ourselves as teacher educators were informed through the research. / Graduate

No description available.

No description available.

Syftet med föreliggande studie är att undersöka timing som aspekt av och transkription i relation till musik i tempo rubato. I studien undersöks en fyra veckor lång instuderingsperiod där ett stycke musik i tempo rubato lärdes in med utgångspunkt i en ljudande förlaga. Studien utgår från ett fenomenologiskt livsvärldsperspektiv och resultatet grundar sig på loggboksanteckningar samt ljud- och videoinspelningar från övningsperioden. Resultatet presenteras utifrån temana instudering och inlärning och utförande, och visar att olika instuderingsmetoder använts med olika syften, att inlärningen starkt påverkas av tidigare erfarenheter samt att musikens avsaknad av stadig puls medförde svårigheter som inte uppkommer i instudering av musik där tempot och pulsen är mer konsekvent. I resultatet framkommer även att transkriptionen haft stor inverkan på instuderingen genom det förhållande som finns mellan transkriptionen och upplevelsen av musiken. Slutligen diskuteras timing och transkription utifrån litteratur och tidigare forskning i ämnet, med tonvikt på livsvärldsperspektivet. / The purpose of the present study is to examine timing as an aspect of and transcription in relation to music in tempo rubato. The study examines a four week learning period wherein a piece of music in tempo rubato was practiced with the original recording being used as the starting point. The study is based on the phenomenological life world theory and its results are based on logbook entries as well as audio and video recordings made during the practice period. The results are presented from the themes studying and learning and performance and show that different practice methods were used for different purposes, that the learning process was strongly affected by earlier experiences and that the absence of a steady pulse in the music brought about difficulties that don’t occur in the study of music where the tempo and pulse is more consistent. The results also show that the transcription had a great impact on the learning process through the relation between the transcription and the experience of the music. Lastly, timing and transcription is discussed through literature presented in the background chapter, with an emphasis on the life world theory.

My dissertation is a selection of essays that reflect upon human potential, particularly but not exclusively, within educational environments. I offer theory and practices that suggest that under the right conditions educators and students will move towards the far reaches of their own creative capacities. I offer my own experience and practice as an exemplar of possibilities. I make proposals about educators and education of educators that represent a paradigm shift from centralizing curriculum and content to focusing on care, nurturance, subjective and inter-subjective understanding, and development of educators. The reader is invited to see educators as central, and is encouraged towards the possibility that educators must be supported, encouraged, and cared for in order to support emergence of their vitality, first for themselves and subsequently for students. I outline an approach that puts human beings in educational environments first in practical and specific ways. Integration of personal experience and curriculum material is explicated. The importance of personal inner work for educators is highlighted. Inner Work is characterized as a personal and spiritual process. The claim that educators need to have group facilitation skills is made and evidence offered. Philosophical and theoretical background from education, eastern and western philosophy, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, process-oriented methods, and counselling psychology are drawn upon. The approach is holistic and systemic. The human is viewed as important but not separate from other living beings or the environment. The values of presence, care, and deep democracy underlie the ideas. The importance of relationality and I-Thou connection are explicated. The writing and research draws on a variety of qualitative approaches, including, living inquiry, autobiography, and self-study, as well as conceptual, narrative, poetic, auto-ethnographic, heuristic, and analytic methods. The material, personal, and ephemeral are investigated as integrated parts of the Dao-Field of education and life.