The need for preparing our youth to live in an interdependent world on this finite planet has become urgent since the beginning of the nuclear age at the end of World War II. There is a need to extend the loyalty of the citizen tor the nation-state to human needs seen from a global view. The involvement of the United States in the international community already is extensive because of its predominant power. This involvement is not reflected in our education, either from the amount of time devoted to social studies in our schools or in the emphasis on international relations in that curriculum. To achieve the global view which our changing society demands it is suggested that some unifying concepts be chosen which cross the various social science disciplines namely, the concepts of change (both violent and non-violent), conflict, authority or power, order, freedom and responsibility. These concepts enable the teacher, using a problem-solving approach, to raise questions which make values explicit, and provide flexibility in subject matter and range of student ability. In a global context, the following specific goals would be encouraged: overcome ethnocentrism, recognize the diversity of faces that the U.S. presents to the world, seek a transnational view based on human rights, emphasize the problem rather than the institution, and seek foreign points of view in source materials. During the 1960s there have been 80me innovations in both subject matter and method in teaching social studies, ranging from entire school systems to single schools and classes, and there are a number of new curricula materials coming out of projects funded by both government and private sources. This thesis has l.dent1tied a number of these with the idea that the teacher who is interested in presenting a global orientation now has a growing number of tools to choose from. He need not wait to construct a new curriculum but can supplement and reorient his approach in his own classroom. However, this implies that the teacher baa a global view already. Opportunities for foreign studies are becoming widespread and, hopefully, more and more teachers will feel they are an essential part of their preparation. Unfortunately, there is very little course preparation for the global view at the college level, where the largest proportion of teachers will develop.-or not develop--an international awareness. The community at the state or local level can often be of considerable help in encouraging this kind of experience for its teachers. It is probable that the more activist role of today’s student has been a factor in the trend toward using the inquiry, or discovery, method in the classroom. Certainly, this method has the advantage, for a global view, of using concepts which' can present controversial subject matter in an open-ended way. It uses the techniques of a scientific approach and enables the social studies to introduce more social science findings of current global concern. Discussion of values becomes an essential element. Such discussion begins with the student's experience, and by exposing him to a clash of personal beliefs there is evidence that motivation is increased and a possible shift in attitudes occurs. The teacher who aims to teach from a global viewpoint will need help, both in keeping abreast of the current curricula and in having available the most recent findings of social science and educational research which could affect the attitudes of his students. In particular, the area of conflict studies has potential for resolving international problems. The teacher, thus, has a key role in preparing future citizens to meet the changes of a global society.

Note:

No description available.

From the moment a snowflake touches down on the surface of a glacier, it begins a process of transformation. Fresh snow, made up of single-grained snowflakes is compacted into glacial ice by the weight of subsequent snowfall and by sintering, grain boundary sliding and diffusion. At first, snow grains accommodate the stress through mechanical failure and by changing their shapes and positions. Fragile, dendritic structures on the edges of snowflakes break off, and grains round into lower free energy configurations. Rounded grains slip into air pockets. As time passes, increasing overburden of a load to bear, and it is, for a single snowflake. But it is precisely this stress that creates a glacier. Stress, in this case, is a catalyst for transformation. But don't worry. I am not going to make an overly forced metaphor for what happens during a doctorate program.} Pressure causes the grains to merge, large grains absorbing small ones. As ice grains squeeze and grow into all the available pore space, grains trap air bubbles and cut them off from the atmosphere, preserving records of climate conditions. Eventually, these processes densify the snow so thoroughly that it metamorphoses into glacial ice, and from a crumbly collection of snowflakes emerges a cohesive crystalline matrix. This process, firn densification, is the subject of my first chapter. From measurements of englacial strain rates by repeat phase-sensitive radar deployments, we show it is possible to extract densification rates that match modeled predictions. The formation of ice is just the beginning of the story of a glacier. As and after ice forms, gravity pulls on the body of the glacier; ice flows under its own weight, becoming a viscous river that meanders from high elevations toward the sea level. Along the way, various other forces act on the ice (e.g., friction at the ice-bed causes ice to shear, narrowing valley walls create compressive stresses, etc.). This history can be written into the ice in the orientation and configuration of its molecular structure. Ice is made of a regular crystal matrix of water molecules. Covalently bonded oxygen and hydrogen molecules assemble into sheets of hexagons, held to each other by hydrogen bonds. The relative orientation of these hexagonal sheets is called the "ice fabric”, and its importance lies in the fact that ice’s asymmetric molecular structure gives rise to asymmetric properties. For example, ice is softer—more deformable—when stress is applied parallel to the hexagonal planes, like playing cards sliding over one another. Over hundreds or thousands of years, this asymmetric response to stress causes the hexagonal planes to rotate so that they lie perpendicular to the direction of compressive stress. This, in turn, changes which relative direction a glacier is the “softest”. In short, the history of the glacier is written into its fabric. Ice remembers the stress it has undergone, and that memory changes its resistance to (or accommodation of) stress in the present and future. In chapter two, I use an autonomous phase-sensitive radar to measure the ice fabric along a central transect of Thwaites Glacier. Thwaites drains ice from West Antarctica and is one of the fastest changing glaciers on the continent. Locked up in Thwaites is at least half a meter of sea level rise, as well as much of the buttressing that holds back WAIS. Measurements of the fabric of Thwaites tell us about the history of stress undergone by the glacier, as well as any change in relative direction of the "softest" ice. As a glaciologist, I have dedicated my life to studying how glaciers form, flow, and disappear. As an artist and writer, I am interested in material memory, with a particular orientation toward ice itself and in the way the language and mathematics used to describe ice mimic processes that happen in body, mind, and society. My fourth chapter is centered on the creative research and art produced during my dissertation, particularly focused on a visual autoethnography of my body I created during my first field season in Antarctica in 2022-2023. In it, I try to grapple with whether/how, even as positivist science demands I remove as much of myself as possible from my scientific research, my body/myself show up in small ways in my data. I consider how ice's response to stress—to soften or harden, to flow or crack—is in many ways, a mirror for how we as humans respond to stress. Other work in Chapter 4 was created in direct response to the beauty of glaciated landscapes and the grief I struggle to manage in response to their rapid change. Biome I is a short zine that uses faux-color satellite imagery overlain with text and meshes of glaciers from Grand Teton National Park (GRTE). In 2021, I spent six months as a Scientists-in-Parks fellow through AmeriCorps, joining the park's physical science team in Wyoming to expand their glacier monitoring program. From this work emerged Chapter 3 a history of glacial change in the park over the last 70 years from in situ and remotely sensed observations. This work, while quite different from my previous scientific output, allowed me to learn and explore other glaciological techniques as well as template methodologies and provide information that is immediately useful for education and action in GRTE and other rapidly deglaciating landscapes. Much of the way I have come to understand glacial geophysics is by considering the ways they connect more broadly to our lived experiences. In the Tetons, this involved understanding how deglaciation affects the park's ecological systems and the evolving safety for visitors given the changing ice conditions. In pursuit of both expanding my own understanding and hoping to share with others the joy and beauty of the study of ice, I have developed numerous education efforts to make the study of glaciers, climate, and the earth physical, tangible, less abstract, emotional, joyful, and intuitive. Chapter 5 concludes the thesis by taking a step back to look at education and teaching, the thread that has carried through my doctorate, from prior to starting graduate school and, I hope, that will continue long after. I discuss the influences of teacher-philosophers like Shannon Mattern, Lynda Barry, and bell hooks, who have all, in their own way, striven to reshape the (idea of the) classroom into forms that better serve the learner. This work has taken place on the seat of a bicycle riding across the country, on an icefield in Juneau, Alaska, and in my own backyard, in classrooms across New York City. To conclude, I hope this thesis is not only a scientific effort, but one that draws the curtain back on the broader work we do as glaciologists. We are also artists and educators, caretakers, archivists, and public figures. Our work can be physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding, and it is as often full of grief as it is of awe.

The purpose of this study is to determine the nature of a curriculum for use in the eighth-grade social science classes of the Plainview Junior High School, Plainview, Texas.

As future holders of power, nurturing a critical consciousness among economically privileged populations is urgently needed as it could encourage them to actively challenge class oppression around them. Egyptian international school students typically belong to this population as they serve as vehicles that push for the interests of global capital in the Global South. Given that they tend to be isolated from the lived realities of most Egyptians, it is important to understand how to craft pedagogies that expose the privileged to the lived and structural realities that maintain class oppression. Given the limited research on this topic, this qualitative study explores means of employing Critical Pedagogical ethos and practices through a collaboratively designed curriculum that attempts to nurture their awareness, accountability, and efficacy. Utilizing interviews, photo elicitation tasks, ethnographic observations and teacher reflections, this study investigates the processes, pushback, and transformations of nine economically privileged high school students in two international schools in Cairo, as their teachers implement a curriculum on the intersection between social class and education in Egypt. Findings suggest that students went through transformations in their awareness of the other, their structural awareness, and imaginaries of action. However, their sense of accountability and recognition of the intertwine between their own positionalities and economic inequality, served as an obstacle against cultivating an analysis of systemic class oppression, causing a state of dissonance. Moreover, teachers’ findings demonstrate a tension between strong content knowledge and real-life interaction due to administrative constraints, and push for rethinking the potential of a critical curriculum by teachers who don’t identify as critical. The findings suggest using the international school as a microcosm of oppressive class dynamics, to help interrogate the self in relation to the other and the structural (both locally and globally), as well as a space to imagine and implementaction. It also has implications on how critical subject matter can be developed to help teachers address class inequality.

Amid concerns of increased populist right-wing movements in Europe and the US, this dissertation research uncovers a core contradiction at the heart of modern nation-states: the ethnic underpinnings of the “civic nation.” In recent years, nativist and ultra-nationalist movements opposing immigration have gained popularity in Western democracies. These movements draw on “hard” boundaries such as race or religion to exclude “others” from the “nation.” However, sociological research on the nation has consistently found that most people in Western countries publicly oppose these ideas and embrace civic conceptions of the nation. At the same time, research on immigrants' experiences in these same countries suggests that “civic” conceptions of the nation may be much more exclusionary than what survey research has shown. To reconcile this tension in the nationalism and immigration integration literature, I label the mismatch between people’s stated preferences and their actual behaviors as “colorblind ethnocentrism.” By analyzing the extent to which nations are imagined to be racially restrictive by their inhabitants, my research offers a new understanding of national identity that has consequences for the integration of non-white groups into Western societies. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, I analyze the way that the category of “nation” is socially constructed, and in what ways this social construction overlaps with the socially constructed category of “race,” particularly in countries where “race” does not exist as a state-sanctioned classificatory system (unlike the US). Finally, I use these theoretical insights to reframe a classic debate in political economy and show that natives' normative understandings about national belonging moderate the way that non-White populations are perceived as an outside group and a threat to economic redistribution. This dissertation combines novel methodology from political science with advanced statistical analysis as well as qualitative content analysis research to investigate (1) the role of ancestry, and race in defining the imagined community, (2) the ways that race and nation are empirically related, and (3) to what extent different ideas of the “nation” mediate the relationship between increased racial diversity and decreased support for redistribution. Building on previous work, in chapter 1, I consider the “nation” as a cognitive category used to create social distinctions between those who “belong” in the nation-state and those who do not. Using a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in representative samples across France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, I challenge the long-standing assumption in the literature that the dominant conception of the “nation” in the West is based on inclusive and civic symbolic boundaries. I show that the most important characteristic across all country contexts for natives when making decisions about who is and is not a member of the nation is their ancestry: whether a given profile's parents and grandparents were all born in the country or not. I also find that people who answer in surveys that ancestry is important to be truly national in fact are espousing a racial and religious preference for White and Christian nationals. Then, I show how this colorblind ethnocentrism affects symbolic integration of non-white profiles with immigrant backgrounds. Finally, I find that racial preferences in who belongs in the nation are the most pronounced in continental Europe, where “race” is not an institutionalized categorization system (i.e. countrieswhere racial statistics and “race” is taboo). This provides some evidence in favor of my theory that countries that do not have an available discourse around race tend to use “nation” as a proxy for it. I further investigate the origins of this discrepancy in the next chapter. In chapter 2, I leverage a drastic change in curriculum in the mid-1990s in Spain that led to the sudden and (almost) complete removal of racial vocabulary from social-science textbooks to explore what happens to the construct of race once racial language has been removed. Through my analysis of 82 textbooks from 1975 to 2017, I find that a racial classification system was replaced by one based on cultural categories. Yet, far from moving away from essentialist beliefs about human nature, culture continues to reproduce the social hierarchies previously associated with phenotype. Because the books present culture as a scientifically valid classification system, the use of culture legitimizes and entrenches those same beliefs in racial differences, while creating a new double meaning for cultural categories (often “national cultures” or “nation”), i.e. its purported meaning and a short-hand for “race”. In chapter 3, I follow up on a question that emerged from my textbookstudy: to what degree do Europeans believe (or not) in biological racial differences? I find that people in Europe hold racist beliefs at similar rates to the United States. I also show that an under-studied source of variation across countries is the differences within a country between the proportion of people who believe in one racial belief but not another. In my final chapter, I investigate the consequences of this racialized “imagined community” for support for welfare in contexts of increased immigration. In this chapter, I shift the focus of attention from “immigrants” to “natives.” I argue that the well-documented reduction of native support for redistribution in the presence of immigrants is moderated by how strongly the natives imagine the “nation” as racially white. Using survey and census data from 30 European countries and 270 regions, I show that the negative association between the share of immigration and support for welfare is driven by those who imagine the nation in racial terms. Moreover, I show that ethnic nationalists’ support for welfare policies is only sensitive to non-European foreign-born immigration, not European foreign-born immigration. This suggests that racism, more than xenophobia, is the mechanism behind the withdrawal of solidarity. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of implications and directions for future research.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the problem solving proficiency of Physical Science learners in Highveld Ridge East circuits in Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. The objectives of this study were to determine the relationship between proficiency in conceptual and algorithmic problem solving, to compare the percentage of algorithmic and conceptual problems that were correctly and incorrectly answered, problems not attempted at all and finally to categorize Physical Science learners according to their stoichiometry problem solving proficiencies. The target population for this study was Grade 12 Physical Science learners in Highveld Ridge East and West circuit in Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. To achieve the aim of this study and its subsequent objectives random sampling was used to select the three schools and the sample after a stoichiometry achievement test was administered by Physical Science teachers, who were teaching the participants at their respective schools. The researcher scored the tests using a memorandum. The results of this study indicated that learners’ proficiency in both algorithmic and conceptual problem solving was low, there was a weak positive correlation between algorithmic and conceptual problem solving proficiency, the percentage of solutions that were correctly solved was the lowest compared to the percentage of incorrect solutions and problems not attempted. The other result of this study was that there were no grade 12 Physical Science learners with high algorithmic and high conceptual abilities, a few learners had high algorithmic and low conceptual abilities and the majority of the learners had low algorithmic and low conceptual problem solving abilities. This implies that Physical Science teachers in these circuits should focus on developing both algorithmic and conceptual problem solving strategies when teaching stoichiometry. / Science and Technology Education / M. Sc. (Mathematics, Science and Technology Education)

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / Background: Formative feedback is an important process in facilitating student learning as it helps students identify learning gaps early enough and devise means of covering those gaps. Most health professional educators spend most of the time designing summative assessment tools and pay little emphasis to giving qualitative feedback to students throughout the learning process. This problem has been identified at Makerere University College of Health Sciences (MaKCHS) and forms the basis of this study. Objectives: To investigate prior understanding of students and lecturers about formative feedback. The study also aimed at exploring experiences of students and lecturers regarding implementation of feedback in a resource-constrained context. Methods: This was an action research study using a participatory approach. Results: Initially, lecturers had some prior knowledge of feedback, however, students had misconceptions of what feedback could mean. After introducing a written feedback form, all participants expressed satisfaction with the feedback process. Key themes that emerged included: enhancing motivation, enhancing learning, promoting reflection and clarifying understanding. Conclusion: Students` motivation to learn can be greatly enhanced through formative qualitative feedback. A simple structured form is one way of providing qualitative formative feedback to students in resource-limited settings. Key words: formative feedback, structured form, action research.

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In some contemporary discourses, a new dimension of knowledge is increasingly being recognised. Sustainable development is no longer the exclusive domain of western science and technology. There is a growing interest in the role that indigenous people and their communities can play in sustainable development. The integration of indigenous knowledge (IK) into formal school curricula, especially environmental education (EE), is seen as a key approach to making education relevant to rural students. This will also promote the intellectual diversity required to manage the scope, complexity and uncertainty of local and global environmental issues. This study is guided by constructivist approaches and postcolonial perspectives that recognise the differences between IK and western sciences but at the same time concerned with ways in which the two can work together. In particular, this study uses a qualitative case study of selected schools in the Northern part of Namibia to investigate how IK can be used to support EE in rural schools. The National (Namibian) Curriculum for Basic Education and the Life Science curriculum documents have been analysed, focusing specifically on how IK is coupled with EE at school level. The review of the curriculum documents revealed that IK is not only ignored and underutilised in schools, but also systematically undermined as a potential source of knowledge for development. The curriculum continues to reinforce western values at the expense of IK. To gain more insight into existing EE practices in schools and the role that local knowledge can play in school syllabi, six teachers, two advisory teachers and two traditional leaders were carefully selected and interviewed. The basis for this was to possibly challenge and address the needs that learners and their environment have. The participants in this study embraced the inclusion of IK in EE. However, the processes of combining IK with science may be constrained by challenges related to: teachers‟ attitudes, the design of the curriculum, and the way learner-centered education is conceptualised and practiced in schools. The study suggests that, to incorporate IK into EE effectively may require a shift away from the current strong subject-based, content-focused and examination driven EE curriculum. A cross-cultural Science Technology and Society (STS) curricula that includes a broad range of disciplines and provides a context within which all knowledge systems can be equitably compared and contribute to our understanding of the environment is proposed as an alternative curricula framework.