Recent scholarship on the impact of neoliberalism in education centers on the creation of policies, curricula, and programming, positioning education as a system that produces marketable, entrepreneurially-minded, global workers (DeLissovoy, 2015; Peters, 2017). What is less known are the ways in which economic principles and mechanisms work in school systems, and how these changes affect teachers and social studies disciplines. Through a critical discourse analysis of policy and other official education documents, interviews, and focus groups with experienced administrators and social studies teachers in the province of Nova Scotia, Canada, I argue that changes in education policy between 1994-2016 have altered the purpose of public education, entangling schooling with economic and accountability goals of the province. The purpose of this qualitative study is threefold: first, using Foucault’s (2008), and later Stephen Ball’s (2013a) theorization, I investigate the extent to which neoliberal governmentality shaped education policy changes in Nova Scotia between 1994-2016. Second, I examine how these changes implicate educators in practice, including the ways teachers perceive changes to their jobs over the last decade. Lastly, I explore the state of high school social studies in Nova Scotia as a site to test the micro-effects of neoliberalism and governmentality in changing policies and practices in education. I conclude that neoliberal governmentality has emerged in distinct patterns in Nova Scotia, which articulate with specific policy technologies and practices in education. Such patterns include the strategic use of economic and educational crises to forward neoliberal policy reform, the expansion of governmental mechanisms to track student and teacher performance, and the dis-articulation of social studies disciplines from the education system.

A presente dissertação tem como tema o processo de regularização fundiária de territórios de comunidades remanescentes de quilombos. Tem-se como foco de análise a produção de Relatórios Técnicos de Identificação e Delimitação (RTID) que visam o reconhecimento e a delimitação da Comunidade de Morro Alto, localizada no Litoral Norte do Rio Grande do Sul. Busca-se aqui, a partir da abordagem teórica proposta pelos “estudos sociais da ciência”, compreender as redes sócio-técnica necessárias para produzirem territórios de comunidades quilombolas enquanto verdades passíveis de serem reconhecidos pelo estado brasileiro. Entre os anos de 2005 e 2006 foram reunidos materiais fruto de entrevistas, acompanhamento de reuniões, observações do trabalho de técnicos e cientistas, fotografias, jornais e pesquisa documental. A partir desse conjunto de materiais produziu-se uma narrativa de orientação etnográfica que possibilitasse uma interpretação dos materiais. As conclusões que o estudo possibilitou chegar apontaram para uma fragilidade da rede que sustenta o território de Morro Alto, no que diz respeito às dimensões da mobilização do mundo e das alianças políticas, fatores esses com potencial explicativo da atual instabilidade do território de Morro Alto. / The present dissertation has as subject the process of agrarian regularization of territories of remaining communities of quilombos. The production of Reports is had as focus of analysis Technician of Identification and Delimitation (R.T.I.D) that they aim at the recognition and the delimitation of the Community of Morro Alto, located in the Coast North of the Rio Grande Do Sul. One searchs here, from the theoretical boarding proposal for the “social studies of science”, to understand the nets social-technique necessary to produce territories of communities quilombolas while truths possible to be recognized for the Brazilian state. It enters the material years of 2005 and 2006 had been congregated fruit of interviews, accompaniment of meetings, comments of the technician work and scientists, photographs, periodicals and documentary research. From this set of materials a narrative of etnographic orientation was produced that made possible an interpretation of the materials. The conclusions that the study it made possible to arrive had pointed with respect to a fragility of the net that supports the territory of Morro Alto, in what it says respect to the dimensions of the mobilization of the world and the alliances politics, factors these with clarifying potential of the current instability of the territory of Morro Alto.

The larger research project seeks to examine the role of technology and factors that influence its overall use and efficacy in supporting a community of teachers engaged in professional development. This thesis examines factors that appear to influence teacher participation in the online community of practice engaging in an overarching research project conducted by Dr. Balcaen and a team from UBC O Faculty of Education and funded by the Southern Alberta Professional Development Consortium (SAPDC). The two groups are acting in partnership for supporting and sustaining communities of practice in social studies in southern Alberta. SAPDC is allowing teachers release time to engage in the project while TC² is providing professional development for the participant teachers to become proficient at embedding TC² critical thinking tools into their classroom practices. Various technologies are used during this study as part of the design of providing professional development for the participants including supporting an online community presence. The guiding question for this thesis is: In a blended approach of face-to-face and online supported professional development for embedding critical thinking into the new social studies curriculum, what significant factors appear to influence teacher participation in the online community of practice during the first year of the project? Overall results during the first year of this project show that various technologies used during the project are valuable and effective in nurturing this community of practice by enabling and promoting collaboration, communication, and the completion and delivery of products to be used in teaching the new curriculum. I also examine negative factors that appear to prevent some teachers’ technology use and online participation and collaboration during this project. Findings show that there are several significant factors that influence participation in the online community and while some participants are reluctant to engage or enter the online environment, others have emerged as leaders and play a significant role in building and sustaining the community of practice. These results provide critical information about implementing and integrating an online component and using technology to sustain communities of practice engaged in this form of teacher professional development. / Education, Faculty of (Okanagan) / Graduate

The most recent phase of curriculum reform in the era of accountability is the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) which have essentially reshaped the landscape of public education. Its objective of preparing K-12 students for college and career upon high school graduation have prioritized English language arts, mathematics, and science over social studies, which is not part of widespread high-stakes testing for elementary students. This qualitative case study investigated eleven intermediate elementary teachers’ perceptions of alignment between CCSS and the elementary social studies curriculum. Data gathering analysis included two semi-structured interviews and an archival analysis of the mandated curriculum. The data revealed that perceptions of alignment vary among teachers and were influenced by the perceived effects of inadequate instructional time and resources, lack of content knowledge, and insufficient district levels of professional support. Teachers perceived some similarities between the methods of thinking skills, such as historical thinking and higher-order thinking, and the English/Language Arts standards of the Common Core and their district social studies curriculum. Despite perceived inadequate instructional time and resources, teachers believed that elementary social studies must be an instructional priority and found ways to include social studies through interdisciplinary approaches. Recommendations include district-level professional development focused on an integration between CCSS and social studies modeled in classroom practices. These approaches may improve use of instructional time and resources and reduce the marginalization of elementary social studies.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore what 4th-grade teachers could learn about African American students’ knowledge of social studies content through children’s drawings and to understand what they communicated through visual texts. This study was grounded in social semiotics and critical race theory (CRT). Social semiotics allowed for close readings of children’s drawings and interpretation of teachers’ interests in using art as an assessment tool. CRT challenges applying the experiences of White people as the standard by which others are measured. CRT was used to analyze structural barriers, such as high-stakes standardized testing, as primary in determining what students knew. Research questions were as follows: (a) When teachers are instructed in how to read images structurally and semantically, what do they learn about their low achieving African American students’ understanding of a social studies text through their drawings? (b) How do teachers understand and talk about images through the lens of sign systems? (c) How do low-achieving African American students demonstrate social studies content knowledge in a written assessment compared to how they demonstrate content knowledge in a visual representation of a social studies text? The setting was in an urban elementary school and the study involved 4 teachers and 7 students from their collective classes. Analysis of data included constant comparative analysis and visual discourse analysis (VDA), including student drawings and teacher/student interviews. Three findings emerged from teacher data analysis. Teachers varied in their beliefs about art as a communicative system; teachers intentionally studied their children’s visual texts differently after professional development; teachers intentionally integrated visual arts as a part of assessment in social studies. Two key findings emerged from student data analysis: Students visually represented key concepts in social studies in their visual texts and they found art to be a “fun” way to demonstrate social studies learning. The significance of this study offers insight into other communicative systems-art and specifically drawings—as a viable way to assess students’ knowledge and skills in content areas.

Målen har fått en allt viktigare position i skolan, elevernas resultat likaså. I den här studien belyses och undersöks lärares tolkning och realisering av kursplanemål i grundskolan. Läroplanen föreskriver att samtliga elever i grundskolan skall nå förutbestämda kunskapsmål. Det gap som återfinns mellan läroplanens formulerade innehåll och elevers lärande har tidigare kallats för the teaching gap eller undervisningens Grand Canyon. En sådan metafor åskådliggör den problematik som existerar i undervisningssituation mellan styrning och elevers lärande. Studien ramas in av de läroplansförändringar som har skett sedan början av 90-talet. I och med införandet av den tidigare läroplanen för grundskolan, Lpo94, förändrades kursplanens struktur i grunden. Lärarna skulle medverka i en deltagande målstyrning där de formellt gavs stort utrymme att tolka läro- och kursplaner. Att undervisa med hjälp av både strävans- och uppnåendemål visade sig dock vara problematiskt på flera sätt. En ny läroplan för grundskolan, Lgr 11, arbetades fram och trädde i kraft 2011. Lärarna blev nu tvungna att tyda en ny kursplan med centralt innehåll och kunskapskrav där elevernas utvecklande av ämnesspecifika förmågor framstod som centralt. Lärarna i studien ger exempel på hur de tolkar och realiserar kursplanemål samt iscensätter dem i undervisning inom ramen för en mål- och resultatstyrd skola. Lärarnas uppdrag har beskrivits som mer kvalificerat i och med den senaste läroplansreformen och den här studien antyder samma sak. Lärarna skall undervisa så att eleverna utvecklar ämnesspecifika förmågor men vad innebär det i ett undervisningssammanhang? Samtidigt har kraven ökat på lärare när det gäller resultatmedvetenhet och kunskapsbedömning. I studien undersöks därför också vad det kan innebära för lärare att iscensätta och realisera kursplanens innehåll via en learning study. Lärarna undersöker då vad som krävs för att elever utvecklar ett specifikt kunnande i samhällskunskap. Att lärarna gavs möjlighet att få iscensätta undervisning på det här sättet verkar ha haft betydelse för deras förståelse av såväl det ämnesdidaktiska innehållet som elevernas förståelse. / This thesis investigates teachers’ life-world during an era of restructuring of the educational system in Sweden. In recent years two different kinds of curriculums have been implemented in compulsory school, Lpo94 [1994 Curriculum for the Compulsory School System] and Lgr 11 [Curriculum for Primary Schools, Kindergarten, and Before/After School Care], which replaced the 1994 plan. Both are framed in the system of management by objectives. This affects teachers practice in different ways. One is that teachers need to interpret and implement curricular goals in the classroom in a way that makes them evaluable. This reflects an instrumental view of knowledge that is often found in a goal- and results-driven business. The aim of this study is to explore teachers’ meaning-making as they formulate and discuss the subject content in teaching with regard to learning objectives and student learning. This thesis consists of two studies. Results show that teachers first need to understand the subject matter and its relation to students’ understanding and only then consider the objectives to be met. This is what is expressed by the teachers in this thesis when they create meaning as they formulate objectives with regard to the object of learning. In this way the view of the goals as directive and rational in teaching is overturned because the goals are incorporated into teaching and are used in different ways by different teachers.

As education focuses increasingly on standards based assessment, social studies must be examined for its integration of Black History in the United States History curriculum. Using a Critical Race Theory lens, this directed content analysis attempts to examine the Florida Standards for United States History to determine if and how Black History is integrated into United States History courses. The study also makes use of Banks’ (1994) “levels of integration” to explore the degree to which this is accomplished. In addition, lesson plans created and/or endorsed by the state of Florida are analyzed for their inclusion of Black History. Data and analysis from this study demonstrate that while Black History is integrated to varying degrees across the K-12 United States History Florida Standards, the “levels of integration” (Banks, 1994) and topics covered do not offer a complete historical narrative. Similarly, while the lesson plans approved by the state of Florida often reflect a higher “level of integration” (Banks, 1994) and historical understanding, the limited topics of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement prevent students from seeing the development of Black History across the continuum of United States History. Further, the findings suggest that standards should be developed that directly address the role race and racism play in the development of the United States. These findings can be useful to both administrators and teachers looking to develop standards which help form an accurate historical understanding of the development of the United States. The study recommends that United States History courses and state standards in United States History focus on the role racism has played in developing the United States, include the voices of people of color, and focus on social justice in the United States History curriculum

As with other forms of green crime, timber trafficking is frequently overlooked by traditional criminology. This research is an exploratory investigation into the problem of timber trafficking in Vietnam, which aims to obtain a detailed understanding of the typology of, victimisation from, and key factors driving this crime. To achieve this aim, 41 semi-structured interviews with seven different cohorts (environmental police, investigative police, forest protection officers, commune authorities, forest-based inhabitants, timber traders, and green NGO staff) were conducted. Over one hundred pages of official documents (criminal case records, operational reports, and conference papers), and more than two hundred relevant newspapers were collected and analysed to enhance and triangulate the primary data. This research reveals a multifaceted typology of timber trafficking in Vietnam, comprising five different components: harvesting, transporting, trading, supporting, and processing. Each of these components is further constituted by distinctive, parallel forms of illicit operation. There are, for example, three parallel forms of illegal timber harvesting, termed small-scale, medium-scale and large-scale (SSITH, MSITH and LSITH). While having certain overlaps, in general SSITH, MSITH and LSITH are fundamentally distinctive not only in terms of the volumes of illicit timber they produce and the methods of illegally felling trees they employ, as typically identified in the previous studies, but more importantly in terms of the harvesters‘ attributes, their motivations, and the sophistication and security implications of the criminal operations. It is thus argued that the typology of illegal timber harvesting in this research challenges the typical classification in the existing literature, and offers an alternative way of understanding more comprehensively the dynamic of illegal logging. Regarding the victimisation from timber trafficking, due to the employment of a broad conceptual framework of human security, it is revealed that timber trafficking has substantial harmful impacts on all seven elements of human security: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political. These impacts are closely interconnected, but vary between different groups of victims. These findings culminate in the proposal that there are three main typical characteristics of green victimisation: suffering hierarchy, victim-offender overlap, and multidimensionality. Additionally, the employment of a human security paradigm in this research leads to another proposal that it is highly achievable and productive to integrate perspectives from the field of security studies into the discipline of green criminology, for the purpose of systematically examining green victimisation. Finally, this research offers five solutions to control timber trafficking in the context of Vietnam, by refining the current policy framework of forest governance and improving the efficiency of law enforcement.

This study looks for the usage of ideology and the definition of freedom according to these in the video game Papers Please. To analyze this game a method has been constructed which uses the parts: playthrough, picture analysis and a text analysis. As the main tool for the analysis a theory based model will be used. This model breaks down the chosen ideologies: liberalism, socialism and fascism into the factors of agent, obstacle and goal to explain their definition of freedom. The study shows that the game Papers Please uses these ideologies in the gameplay, but in different ways. The definition of the ideologies that was based on the model used for the analyses was not fully used correctly in the game, and the ideologies in the game had a different definition of these. It also became very clear that the game had very much control over the player’s choice over which ideology to stick to, since the game could frequently punish the player for making the wrong choice. Lastly the game uses some of the chosen ideologies very more hiddenly in the game and it was later discovered that it was very dominated by fascist undertones even though the government in the game was describe as a communist state. Liberalism was used as a tool for showing the player how to combat these undertones of fascism. In the end the definition of freedom is up to the player to choose since it is defined by their actions in the game.

The purpose of the present investigation is to make a study of the growth and trends of the social studies curriculum in the schools of Texas from pioneer days up to the present time, 1948.