Good communication and maintaining effective relationships within a school community are essential for achieving high academic standards. The aim of effective communication between teachers and learners is to elicit and ensure behaviour that will enhance the learning process. It is therefore important that teachers relate to learners in a sensitive manner when they communicate their knowledge (Bingham and Sidorkin 2004, 5). Sotto (2007, 96) further contends that teachers‟ communication styles reveal their core attitude towards learning and that the success of their teaching will be partially determined by how effectively they communicate. Many schools are experiencing disciplinary problems, low teacher and learner expectations, a breakdown of the social order, and a high incidence of academic failure. Bingham and Sidorkin (2004, 5) explain the above-mentioned problems as symptoms of a breakdown in communication between educators and learners. Once relationships in a school have been jeopardised, it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve high academic standards. It is therefore essential that educators create meaningful interactions in an environment in which all individuals can develop to their full potential. The National Education Policy Act No. 27 of 1996 (Education Labour Relations Council 2003, A- 4) advocates the enhancement of quality education and innovation through systematic research and development. The principles contained therein are directed towards enabling the education system to contribute to the full development of each learner, respecting each learner‟s right to freedom of thought, opinion and expression within a culture of respect for teaching and learning. The establishment and strengthening of relationships in a school will contribute to improved academic achievement.

A pre-test post-test group design was used to determine whether student nurses who received a relationship-building intervention would rate their relationship with the instructor higher than those who received a placebo/ whether student nurses who received the intervention would have less state anxiety than those who received a placebo/ and whether there was a relationship between ratings of state anxiety and student-instructor relationships. The intervention was designed to occur over a three-day period. Data were collected from a homogenous sample of 30 control nursing students and 31 experimental nursing students. Effectiveness of the intervention was determined by measuring student anxiety levels using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger/ Gorsuch/ & Lushene/ 1970) and by measuring the student-instructor relationship using the Relationship Questionnaire (adapted from Truax & Carkhuff/ 1967). Additional data were collected from a Stressful Event Questionnaire/ a demographic data form/ and a debriefing session with participating instructors. Analysis of data indicated a treatment main effect was statistically significant. Members of the experimental group rated the perceived relationship with the instructor higher than members of the control group. There was no significant difference between groups in their ratings of anxiety. There was a trend/ however/ for those in the experimental group to have lower state anxiety than those in the control group. Correlations between the student-instructor relationship scores and the anxiety scores were low but were in the anticipated negative direction. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Nursing, School of / Graduate

M.Ed. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

This dissertation is an ethnography about the men and women who take up the practice and performance of a Hindustani (North Indian) drum called tabla, as a way of life. Learning tabla means that percussionists must find a guru, a learned master of the tradition who will guide them in their life long study of this instrument. The relationships formed between gurus and disciples are distinctively different in kind from teacher-student relations in Western knowledge systems. The guru-disciple tradition is a very specific, culturally dependent mode of learning originating from the Indian Brahmanical tradition of religious study. Discipleship is a form of apprenticeship which offers no easy translation, philosophically, culturally or spiritually. My ethnography and analysis of tabla as a way of life is presented from my own situated perspective as a tabla disciple of two tabla masters, Ustad Alia Rakha Khan, his son Ustad Zakir Hussain and as a visiting tabla enthusiast with another teacher of tabla, Ritesh Das. I offer a multi-local ethnography which centres on tabla communities based in Bombay, India, Toronto, Ontario, Vancouver, British Columbia, Seattle, Washington and the Bay Area of California. As tabla travels around the globe, outside of India, the learning and teaching of this tradition changes somewhat in its new environments. However, learning to play tabla whether in Indian or diaspora cultures necessitates adopting Indian ways of knowing, learning and being. For those musicians of non-Indian ethnicity who become dedicated to this art form learning tabla also means learning to embody Indian cultural ways of doing and knowing. I posit that learning the cultural, as in learning tabla, begins in the body and the embodied mind. Knowing through and with the body requires re-conceptualizing anthropological concepts of culture, memory and tradition. Grounding an analytic concept of the body in the emerging critical Anthropology of the Body and the Anthropology of the Senses allows for an examination of the social as something more than cognitive and language based. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

In the past decade, educational researchers have engaged in research on teacher emotion regulation. However, there has never been an in-depth look at teacher emotion regulation studied from the first person perspective of the teacher. This study seeks to offer just such a perspective. The self-study explored how, across time, I as the teacher participant, teaching in a mid-socioeconomic suburb of Utah, responded emotionally in terms of classroom interactions. Over a 4-month period, I made daily "in the moment" recordings of emotional classrooms situations and at the end of each week, the collection of recordings was reviewed and coded, creating analytic memos that identified patterns of responses. A critical friend then interrogated my analysis to provide me with critique, analysis, and response concerning the patterns and progression she and I identified. This process reveals a pattern of emotional experience (that of a triggering episode eliciting an emotional response, followed by negative or positive reaction) and the subsequent less or more effective coping strategies. As the study progressed, the coping strategies I utilized as emotion regulation in my classroom shifted from less to more effective as I made judgments about whether my responses effectively supported me in terms of emotion regulation, and my goals for the classroom. Reflection shifted my understanding of the underlying reasons for my emotional responses, which enabled me to create new patterns of analysis and response that led me to better regulate my emotion within my classroom. Findings reveal that reflection, coupled with interaction with a critical friend, contributes significantly to my development of emotion regulation as a teacher. Although this study provides an examination into my particular emotion regulation, both teachers and teacher educators can profit from the findings. This study demonstrates the need for a different kind of professional development for supporting teacher emotion regulation, one that incorporates cycles of "in the moment" recording of experience, reflection on experiences, and interaction with a critical friend allowing space to adjust and retry. The findings suggest practical approaches to support teachers in developing more effective emotion regulation.

There is a need for professional development for teachers that equips them for working with diverse students and creating supportive school climates. This pilot study (N=55) with K-12 teachers sought to identify predictors of a high school climate rating. The teachers were 78.2% (N=43) female, 81.8% U.S. born (N=45), 45.5% White (N=25), 30.9% Black (N=17), 14.5% Latinx (N=8), and 7.3% Asian (N=3). The teachers had moderately high knowledge and closest to moderately high self-efficacy for performing key behaviors deemed essential for working effectively with diverse students. Teachers reported experiencing (pre-pandemic) a school climate closest to moderately supporting, engaging, valuing, fairly disciplining, affirming, reflecting empathy for, and serving as a safe space for students from varied cultural backgrounds. Findings showed that about half the teachers or more had any experience of microaggressions that seemed related to their personal demographics or appearance while in school settings—pre-pandemic. Further, about three-quarters of teachers or more had any experience of witnessing microaggressions happening to students in school settings, pre-pandemic.

Communication theory involving the role concept has shown that role expectations and differing evaluations of role behavior can lead to communication breakdowns between persons. Literature pertaining to relations between professors and international students indicates the presence of unfulfilled expectations between them as to how they perform their respective roles. It was therefore hypothesized that some difficulties international students face in the academic world may be due to factors such as differing role expectations. As the literature provided no methodologically based cross-cultural research in this area, the researcher undertook to discover if professors and students evaluate the roles of student and professor differently cross-culturally. The researcher was also interested to learn of other factors that might affect role behavior evaluation such as status, sex, country of origin, and time in country. The purpose of the research was to: 1) definitively explore the current status of cross-cultural research on the roles of professor and student; 2) develop and administer a questionnaire that would allow a cross-cultural exploration of the role behaviors associated with the roles of student and professor; and 3) analyze the results. Role behaviors associated with student and professor roles were obtained from a multi-cultural sample and from them a prototype questionnaire was composed of 118 selected role behavior items. This was given to a sample of thirty-four subjects at two week intervals. Forty-five items evaluated at a significance level of .65 or above were termed reliable and included in a final questionnaire that was completed by a cross-cultural sample of 501 professors and students at a large urban university. The results indicated that culture-and status both affect how a role behavior is evaluated, but that culture is the more significant factor. "ben the evaluations of international students and American students were compared, using the t-Test for comparison of independent sample means, they differed significantly in the evaluation of seventeen items. International students and American professors differed in their evaluation of twenty-three of the forty-five items, whereas when American students' evaluations of the items were compared to those of American professors' there were only five items evaluated differently. These results can be interpreted to mean that American students and American professors perceive these roles more similarly than do international students and American professors. Using an "etic-ernic" classificatory schema there were nineteen "etic" and twenty-six "ernie" role behaviors. Of the "ernie" role behaviors, culture was determined to be the significant variable for the differing evaluations of sixteen items, status for five items, and both status and culture for one item. For four items is was not possible to determine the primary factor responsible. Further analysis of the data indicated that sex, status as an undergraduate, graduate, or professor, and cultural background or country of origin are other variables that can be isolated out as affecting how a role behavior is evaluated. The significance of the results and suggestions for improving communication between professors and students is addressed and directions for further research suggested.

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