Includes bibliographical references (leaves 313-325) Specific concern is the poetic, as well as literal, significance given to the environment, and in particular to land, as a measure of belonging in Australia. Environment is explored in the context of ecologies, offered here as an alternative configuration of the nation, and in which the subject, through human and non-human environmental relations, can be culturally and spatially positioned. Argues that both environment and ecology are narrowly defined in dominant discourses that pursue an ideal, certain and authentic belonging for non-indigenous Australians.

This thesis is concerned with the development of tertiary students' experiences of learning as they progress through three years of undergraduate study in two different psychology programs. Previous research that is relevant to this topic has tended to focus either more narrowly on the development of epistemic beliefs or more broadly on the variation of learners' experiences of learning. Research on epistemic beliefs has tended to focus on the structural aspects (stages) of development and to ignore the content of thinking. In contrast, research on experiences of learning has concentrated upon the content of students' experiences, yet it can be criticised for the way in which it decontextualises students' experiences and for its limited attention to change and development. Moreover, despite evidence suggesting that learning comprises a complex of phenomena such as understanding, memorising and knowing, this line of research has tended to treat learning as a single phenomenon. In the thesis I draw on Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, Gurwitsch's view of awareness, and much of the conceptual framework of the phenomenographic perspective to argue a case for a theoretical framework and consequential practices that are more plural and inclusive of learner's experiences of learning. The new approach refocuses the relationship between researcher, knower and known in terms of the knowing relation-one that involves a dynamic iterative interweaving of first and second order perspectives. Using this new approach, students' experiences are analysed to provide rich description and ontological explanation of both change and development over time. The approach allows the unity of the partlwholelpart relation of an individual's experience to be recognised. So the method is able to take account of the contextual relevancy of the individual whilst also focusing on the experiences of the group. The results show that rather than comprising a single phenomenon, learning is itself part of a multi-dimensional (depth, spatial and temporal dimensions), multi-phenomenal field. The phenomena of learning, understanding, memorising and knowledge are described in detail, and their individual internal relations are elaborated along with the internal relations between the phenomena. Four main groups of experiences of learning are described within this framework: reproductive experiences; relational experiences; constructive experiences; and transformative experiences. Each of these categories comprises several sub- categories. This fine-grained focus on individual students' data, and the use of the phenomenographic whadhow framework, allows the development of experiences to be traced and interpreted as a gradual morphing over time. The pattern of development suggests that each part of the learners' journey plays an important role in the growth of skill and competence in learning. Thus, it may be important that curricula account for variation not by focussing upon transformative experiences of learning, as is often the case, but by facilitating shifts through all of the experiences that learners may pass through.

This thesis concerns ways of knowing in the Anglican eucharistic tradition. It also explores the ramifications of these ways of knowing for theological education in the Anglican tradition of Christianity. The thesis uses Anglican eucharistic theology as a source of case study, and attempts, using a methodology of phenomenology to examine critically the particular interests and philosophical assumptions underlying eucharistic theology in the Anglican tradition from the time of the Reformation to the present day. Phenomenology is chosen as the methodology since it allows access to the diverse experience of the Anglican eucharistic tradition, suspending judgment until a later time when essences are extracted from the case studies. This has the potential to avoid exclusive commitments to particular technical and hermeneutic interests within Anglicanism while at the same time recognising the multiformity of the Anglican eucharistic tradition and fostering a critical approach to the examination of the experience of the Anglican eucharistic tradition and Anglican theological education. In examining ways of knowing in the Anglican tradition, the thesis acknowledges the usefulness for eucharistic theology and theological education of philosophical enquiry. The three ways of knowing (technical, hermeneutic and critical) proposed by the philosopher, Jurgen Habermas (1971 and 1973) are used to assist in understanding the knowledge of the Anglican eucharistic tradition presented in the case studies. The further insights of Habermas (1984 and 1989) are used in recommending a dialogue approach, based on the intersubjectivity of communicative action, for theological education concerned with the teaching of eucharistic theology in the Anglican tradition. Philosophical reflection is also employed in an examination of the underlying philosophical assumptions of the case studies of eucharistic theology in the Anglican tradition. A model of the Anglican eucharistic tradition based on the philosophical concepts of realism and nominalism, to both the moderate and immoderate degrees is developed and proposed as a way of promoting a critical interest in the Anglican eucharistic tradition beyond the merely technical or hermeneutic interests commonly found in various church parties of the Anglican Communion. The work of the Australian philosopher David Armstrong (1989, 1995, 1997 and 2004) is foundational to the development of a model for the Anglican eucharistic tradition and the examination of its experience in the case studies. The principal findings of the study suggest that the prevailing essence of the Anglican eucharistic tradition is a multiformity of eucharistic doctrine, such that eucharistic theology is most often expressed using the philosophical assumptions of realism and nominalism to the moderate degree and according to varying technical and hermeneutic interests. The thesis also seeks to draw out the educational implications of these differing ways of knowing for theological education in the Anglican tradition and specifically for the teaching of eucharistic theology. The principal recommendation of the thesis for theological education is the application of a dialogue approach in the teaching of eucharistic theology in Anglican theological education, where dialogue involves the development of an ideal communicative community in which participants seek shared meaning on the basis of the intersubjectivity of communicative action. / PhD Doctorate

This thesis details the maintenance of Polish identities through acts of memory: the (re)production, transmission and reception of Polish cultural practices. The (re)productions and transmissions of Polish identity formations, and the acts of remembrance, are multifarious by nature, and I have examined them in two distinctly different settings ?? in public spheres in Poland, and in the private realms of Australian Polish diaspora. In this thesis, these research settings have been conceptualised as the conduits through which Polish identities are maintained. Polish identity is theorised using a constructivist approach; Polish identities are therefore positioned historically and geographically. Their performances are fluid: they move through time and across spaces. The active maintenance of Polish identity developed as a result of foreign occupations. The partitioning of Poland by the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian and Russian Empires lasted 123 years. From 1795 to 1918 the Polish nation was expunged. Following a brief period of independence between World War I (WWI) and World War II (WWII), Poland was again occupied by Nazi and Soviet regimes during WWII (1939-1945). The Soviet occupation continued after WWII with the Soviet-supported Polish government that lasted until 1989. Under occupation ?? particularly during WWII ?? Poland suffered events that have been indelibly imprinted within Polish cultural memory. The macabre nature of this era included the incursion of hegemonic regimes on political and everyday social life, as well as the atrocities for which it is well known. An important outcome of these occupations has been the division of discourses of Polishness, and their remembrances, into distinctly public and private spheres. These periods of foreign occupation brought various attempts to suppress and eliminate Polishness: the cultures and identifications of Polish people. Suppression particularly occurred in public spheres through the prohibition of the Polish language, and by investing the public memory landscape with ideologies that represented the new regimes. By repressing public commemorations of Polish cultural narratives, a new history was written at the expense of the Polish experience. There have been two primary responses to these repressions of Polishness. These responses initially developed during the partitioned period to ensure that Polish language and cultural practices were maintained. First, a narrative and tradition of resistance emerged in reaction to the Russian, Prussian and Austrian partitions. It was enacted through military participation in insurrections and through the production of patriotic Romantic Era cultural artefacts, both of which strengthened linkages to the Polish Catholic faith. Second, Polish cultural practices and language were safeguarded in the private spheres of home. It was in private settings, in Poland and within the diaspora in Australia, that memories and experiences of occupation were passed on and through generations. In Poland, such narratives were often maintained in resistance to those imposed by foreign occupiers and because of the inability to commemorate events of Poland??s macabre past in public. In Australia, identity maintenance has occurred to resist the dissolution of Polishness in a diasporic and multicultural environment. This thesis demonstrates the utility of studying cultural memories as a means of understanding how identity maintenance can occur in the face of adversities, such as the multiple foreign occupations that occurred in Poland, and in diaspora. Moreover, it exemplifies the diverse paths of identity maintenance in different contexts. This thesis shows that despite the distinctive character of both Polish public and private spheres, Polish identities have been informed, shaped and maintained through culturally-enacted memory (re)production. This process is exhibited in the present ?? in Poland and through the diaspora ?? and it occurred despite the repressive aims of various foreign occupiers.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 313-325) / [6], 325 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Specific concern is the poetic, as well as literal, significance given to the environment, and in particular to land, as a measure of belonging in Australia. Environment is explored in the context of ecologies, offered here as an alternative configuration of the nation, and in which the subject, through human and non-human environmental relations, can be culturally and spatially positioned. Argues that both environment and ecology are narrowly defined in dominant discourses that pursue an ideal, certain and authentic belonging for non-indigenous Australians. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2003

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [56]-68).

This Cultural Studies dissertation comes from extended research on three East Tennessee school districts as they attempted to integrate after the Supreme Court mandated an end to segregation in the United States. The study focuses on the experiences of former students of Austin High School, the segregated black school on the eastern edge of Knoxville, Tennessee. From looking at their schooling experiences in the context of the area's failed attempts to integrate, I address the myriad ways these participants and white citizens took up the term community to advance or block integration efforts. Community, I argue from this research, is a socially constructed discourse situated in a specific context of power that can simultaneously empower and oppress targeted groups in its creation. This study that centers on the stories of alumni of Austin High shows the negotiation of local power as defined through the efforts to maintain geographically separate spaces for each race in their schools and neighborhoods. In my research, I developed a methodology called historical ethnography to address these questions. By employing a historical ethnographic approach, I attempted to show that the history of education must take into account that schooling is not an experience lived and remembered, but one that is continually relived in every act of remembering. Therefore, it is not a standard historical account of a segregated school. It is an interdisciplinary exploration of how power can be recreated in schools through claims to community and how my participants engaged that power still in recounting their own school experiences.

The dissertation consists of eight studies in combination with a longer work, which links the eight studies together. The aim is two-fold: to develop a scientific approach within philosophical hermeneutics for the study of the culture-specific dimension of teaching in China, and to analyse the culture-specific dimension of teaching in China on the terms of this approach. An explicit ontological foundation makes up the base of the hermeneutic approach, and epistemology, methodology and so on are adapted in accordance with this. Implications of this hermeneutical approach for educational research is further outlined, and the hermeneutical approach is more clearly positioned in relation to so-called qualitative research. With this hermeneutical approach, cross-cultural educational research can be conducted without either universalism or exoticism, since it offers a possibility to understand phenomena in other cultures without claiming to share them. Based on this hermeneutical approach, an interpretational framework named traditional thinking is constructed as a theoretical synthesis of Chinese philosophy, that is Confucianism, Taoism, Chinese Buddhism, Moism and Legalism. With traditional thinking, the analysis of the culture-specific dimension of teaching in China generates an understanding consisting of a number of themes. The themes are: concrete activity, sociality, collectivism, relationalism, balance, order, patriotism, aesthetics, perfection, good examples, the nobility of teaching, family, hierarchy, equal competition, responsibility, talent, examination, body, improvement, critiques, effort, self-study. In this understanding, moral has a central position and refl ects on all themes. This is a social and relational morality that embraces knowledge and aesthetics, which is achieved and realised in concrete bodily activity. Morality serves a system in order, i.e. it helps keep its balance. It facilitates the functioning of the collective and gives patriotism a moral character. Perfection is the optimal moral standard, which characterises all good examples, and the striving for improvement depends on critique and effort. Since perfection is always attainable, teaching and self-study make up the human way to harmony. In this, family is a precondition for moral cultivation, just as equal competition is a precondition for a balanced hierarchy and for correct responsibility. Talent is decisive, which in turn requires examination.

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The primary aim of this thesis is the consideration of neuroscientific studies regarding the localization of high-level cognitive (i.e., nonsensory and nonmotor) processes into the brain. To accomplish this aim, I briefly summarized history of the localizations which lead to the cortical localization of high-level cognitive processes. Then, I present a case study, memory consolidation to compare molecular neuroscience (MN) and cognitive neuroscience (CN) as to how they differ in their localizations. After I put forward the difference between MN and CN, I make use of Uttal&rsquo / s arguments to consider the localizations of MN and CN. His arguments resemble the underdetermination problem and pessimistic meta-induction (PMI) highly debated topic in scientific realism debate. In this respect, I examine UD and PMI with its relevance to MN and CN.