This report describes a year-long practitioner-research study documenting the challenges and successes of a first grade teacher’s attempt to increase her students’ sense of agency in the classroom. Through the insight gained from my classes in graduate school, I decided to alter my practices into a more child-centered approach. Throughout the 2011-2012 school year, I have documented the reactions to these changes in my students and myself. I have altered my practice in three main areas. These areas include: implementing a project-approach time period in the classroom schedule entitled, “Discovery Time;” taking a supporting role (as opposed to a directing role) in peer-to-peer conflicts that occur in the classroom; and providing students with more of a voice when learning new concepts which enables them to teach each other more than I teach them. Each of these three areas has required me to give up a substantial amount of control in the classroom and reallocate this control to my students in order to allow them more ownership and direction in their own learning and development. This, in turn, has given my students a greater sense of agency in our classroom. / text

Lone-parent families were in the news in 1993 as never before. The Child Support Agency, and the question of lone-parent families' entitlement to state support were the feature of many news reports. This study examines this media coverage and, using concepts from agenda-setting and issue definition literature, examines the roles that political actors have played in the construction of these media reports. A content analysis of a complete sample of 77ie Times and 7he Sunday Times comprises the primary analytical method, with a policy process framework organising the analysis. It has been found that government ministers played the greatest part in setting the media agendas for these and other issues. It seems that other actors can be successful in shaping coverage, however, if they make use of certain tactics, particularly if they provide 'ready-packaged' stories to journalists that combine a human interest element (involving 'real' people) with a political slant. By mobilising on a mass level absent fathers were able to provide such stories and were thus able to take control of press coverage of the Child Support Agency. The lone parents' groups Gingerbread and the National Council for One Parent Families, on the other hand, found mobilisation and particularisation more difficult due to the social and economic situation of their client group - nine out of ten lone parents are women, and around eight out of ten claim income support benefits - and for this reason were less successful in shaping either coverage of the Child Support Agency, or of lone-parent families and their right to state support.

This thesis aims to elucidate an apparent paradox about the role of emotion in moral agency. A number of lines of concern suggest emotion may have serious negative impact on moral agency. On the other hand, there are considerations that suggest emotion also plays a crucial role in motivating, informing and even constituting moral agency. Significantly, there is a strong connection between participant reactive attitudes and ascription of moral status as agent or subject. Nonemotional agents could not hold such attitudes. Also, removing participant reactive attitudes imposes a peculiar and incoherent form of solipsism about moral agency. Given this necessary role for emotion, can we give an account of emotion that will also meet the worries? I examine, as crucial examples, three recurrent lines of concern about emotion - that it threatens our capacities for objectivity, rationality, and autonomy - to tease out the descriptive assumptions about emotion, and the normative assumptions about moral agency, that these objections are based on. I then offer three lines of argument towards resolving these worries. The first addresses the worries directly, and the other two shift blame off emotion. First, then, I argue that the normative concerns can largely be met by a descriptive account that views emotion as cognitive. However, “judgementalist” cognitive accounts that assimilate emotion to belief may make emotion metaethically respectable at the cost of making it meta-ethically redundant. Also, such accounts are descriptively less than plausible. A better approach, I argue, is to allow that belief may play a significant role in emotion but to also allow at least a quasicognitive role to the distinctively affective element in emotion: feeling. I also argue for a hrther revision of cognitive accounts to emphasise that emotions reflect features of those who feel them. If we were different, our emotions would be different. So, secondly, I argue that a number of the features that power worries about emotions have their sources in what those who feel them are like, rather than in emotions as such. However, both human nature and emotion are capable of significant plasticity and diversity. We are also capable of a considerable - but not infinite - degree of self-determination both about what we are like and what our emotions are like. Finally, I argue that the normative assumptions that power the objections to emotion are themselves in need of revision - and in some tension with each other. This leads to a McGufin-theory of emotion in moral agency: Problems with emotion’s place in moral agency serve as indicators of unresolved tensions in our thinking about moral agency, rather than just indicators of problems with emotion as such. In view of this, I also argue for caution in any attempts to change emotion to fit particular ideals of moral agency.

No description available.

Zugl.: Münster (Westfalen), Univ., Diss., 2004

Zugl.: Leipzig, Handelshochsch., Diss., 2006.

Zugl.: Frankfurt am Main, University, Diss., 2007. / Kumulative Diss.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Marburg, 1968. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-113).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Tübingen.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Breslau, 1904. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [61]-63).