published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

As technology continues to change the way society communicates, teachers need to prepare their students for digital literacy and competencies in their adulthood. Specific training is necessary for educators in the appropriate and effective methods for incorporating technologies such as smart phones and hand-held devices. Teachers, who work in international boarding schools, are more effective in their use of technology when they understand the classroom cultural differences and are able to clarify any misconceptions. To determine what experienced teachers find missing in their instruction and what should be included in a teachers' instructional guide, a guide was developed based upon the existing literature; the guide was tested and revised under three conditions. In the first phase, a panel of subject-matter experts reviewed the guide draft to identify the instructional goals and validate the survey instrument. In the second phase, a teacher's workshop was conducted and provided in-depth discussions on how they use technology in the classroom. Teachers shared examples of how culture affected students' use and misuse of technology. In the final phase, observations were conducted as teachers used the lessons and resources in their instruction. The final revision, presented in this document, includes closing comments made by participating teachers. The goal was to develop a digital citizenship guide for teachers in international boarding schools that reflected best practices from the literature and the input from experts and teachers. The results identified the specific skills and competencies that are required to teach students how to communicate in the digital world and become good digital citizens. The culturally diverse student population at the investigation site made it possible to generalize instructional sets that will be of value to teachers everywhere. The guide, developed through the dissertation initiative, provides educators with the knowledge, tools, and examples necessary to teach students how these technologies can be used in a multicultural learning environment. It can be used to address the fundamentals of digital citizenship and provide insight into the role culture plays in the use of technology in education.

This ethnography takes place at four of northern India’s most renowned, all-girls’ private boarding schools, established in reference to the British Public Schooling model mainly during the tail ends of colonialism by Indian queens and British memsahibs on the sub-continent. It is a story told from the points of view of founders, administrators, and teachers, but primarily from that of students, based on fieldwork conducted from July 2013 through June 2014. Schools heralded as historic venues of purported upper-caste girls’ emancipation, this study interrogates the legacies of this colonial-nationalist moment by examining how these institutions and their female students engage in newer processes and discourses of class formation and gendered empowerment through schooling. For one, it considers the dichotomous (re)constructions of gendered and classed personhoods enacted through exclusionary modernities, particularly in terms of who gains access to these schools, both physically and through symbolic forms of belonging. It then examines the reclamation of these constructs within (inter)national development discourses of girls’ empowerment and the role of neoliberal privatization in reconstituting elite schooling experiences with gender as its globalizing force. Here, seemingly paradoxical relationships between such concepts as discipline and freedom, duties and rights, collective responsibility and individual competition are explored, arguing that the pressures of academic success, tensions over the future, and role of high stakes examinations and privatized tutoring are contributing to student experiences of performative or fatiguing kinds of empowerment. Through such frames, extreme binary constructions of empowerment are complicated, demonstrating how female Public School students exist more within middling spaces of “betweenness,” of practiced mediation. Empowerment in this sense is not an achievable status, nor unidirectional process, but a set of learned tools or skills deployed in recurring moments of contradiction or in difficult deliberations, whereby students variously buy in, (re)create, opt-out of, or reject proposed models of “successful” or “legitimate,” female personhood. Overall, this ethnography problematizes assumed relationships between empowerment and privilege, questions the alignments between school and the (upper-)middle class home, and suggests that as the reproductive capabilities of elite schooling are challenged in the face of newer venues of capital, these all-girls’ Public Schools and their students are finding unique ways to remain or become the elite of consideration.

The aims of this study were to define an Australian boarding school, provide a summary of international and Australian boarding school literature, and complete a small-scale qualitative investigation of students' views in a co-educational boarding school. At first glance, it appeared that contemporary Australian boarding schools were a reproduction of the influential public boys' schools of Great Britain. Although there have been a number of histories of Australian independent schools, the boarding element has often been portrayed as Dickensian and remains an overlooked area of educational research. In particular, the literature available about Australian residential schooling over the past 20 years has been limited to a handful of significant studies by Cree and Trimingham Jack. In this study 45 Australian and overseas students were asked to write memoirs of 4-5,000 words about their boarding experience emphasising their thoughts, feelings and aspirations. The limitation was that all respondents were full-time boarders for at least one year when the questionnaire-survey was completed. The memoir-based humanistic approach of the Polish- American sociologist Florian Znaniecki, as developed for the analysis of personal and group social systems in the culturally diverse context of Australia by J. J. Smolicz, was employed to interpret the memoir data. The memoir method has been well documented in Australia, as a means of collecting and analysing concrete and cultural facts, mainly in relation to the study of minority ethnic groups and their cultural actions. The humanistic approach emphasized that the researcher must accept cultural phenomena from the viewpoint of its participants and not from that of an outside observer. In the present study, this approach permitted the researcher to understand the experiences and attitudes of individual students towards an Australian co-educational boarding education through their own eyes. The memoirs analysed were generated from 26 concrete questions, which revealed place-of-birth, ethnic identity, and languages spoken at home. This provided the researcher with verifiable information about the everyday lives of the respondents. The second half of the memoirs required response to 23 questions - these yielded cultural data. These questions required students to reflect on their situation, attitudes and experiences of boarding as a system of education. This information could only have been provided by the participants themselves and gave the researcher direct access to the memoir writers' individual and group consciousness. The study discovered that a number of the students were in the process of re-evaluating and re-interpreting the advantages and disadvantages of boarding school as a social system transmitted to them by parents, friends, family, and teachers. The respondent's personal statements revealed that the relationships among students and among students and staff in the boarding House tended to be primary in nature, in that they were personal, informal, and involved the entire human personality. From these data, it appeared that the success of a boarding school was determined by the personal atmosphere, support, and comfort of the boarding House. Consideration of the empirical data found that 43 of the 45 respondents' memoirs believed that their overall experiences at the research boarding school were positive. Negative observations stressed the pressures of homesickness, tedium of school life and a lack of freedom thereby supporting Goffman's view of a "total institution". The majority of students' memoirs were ambivalent towards religion at the research school. Nevertheless, 11 stressed its significant implication in their day-to-day lives. The memoirs suggested that an education at the research boarding school was a crucible that forged students through a variety of experiences, positive and negative, individual and collective, for life. Overall, the memoirs support the observation that boarding school acts as a social system for the acceptance of new cultural values, such as the cultural diversity respondents' experienced in their lives at boarding school. The study revealed an attitudinal shift in the group that welcomed the cultural pluralism of the school and recognised the cultural monism of the home. These memoirs revealed that boarding school was a significant factor in fostering independence and embracing cultural diversity as experienced in the crucible of the boarding school. These findings challenged the popular maxim that an Australian residential education was an anachronistic, inflexible, colonial-British model and suggested that it has the potential to act as a system of education that prepares its students for the challenges of life. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Education, 2004.

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of economically disadvantaged, Black students attending predominantly White, elite private boarding schools. Data were collected utilizing semi-structured interviews with 9 participants, with each interview lasting approximately 90 minutes. The recursive method of data collection and analysis was informed by six steps outlined by Creswell (1998), as well as Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) methods (Hill, Thompson, & Williams, 1997). Findings revealed 9 themes associated with participants' experiences: classroom experiences, value of Black peer networks, caught between two worlds, racial perceptions, desire to connect with people of all races, socioeconomic challenges, living away from home challenges, impact of peers on level of success, and significance of relationships with Black faculty. Practice and research implications for Black students attending private school, as well as for private school faculty and administrators, are discussed.

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

In these latter years a lot of countries try to call people’s attention to education of the disabled. Special attention is paid to education of students with noticeable disability. Pupils with strongly noticeable disability are integrated into special classes of general education as well as educated in education centers, special boarding schools, specialized foster homes or children and youth boarding schools. An educator plays a very important part in the system of education. The attitude of a headmaster towards their functions is very important still very often opinion of a headmaster and an educator is quite different. It shows the existing problem between educators and headmasters. Nowadays we lack ways of solving this problem. It’s difficult to understand why educators and headmasters try to get round and not to solve this problem. One of the most important functions of every educator is taking care of individual’s education and maturity. Other functions are very important as well. They are: helping and taking care of pupils health and safety, looking for participants and pedagogical briefing. The main problem of the research study consists of one component – it is educators’ and headmasters’ attitude towards functions performed by educators. I tried to review activities done by educators teaching students with strongly noticeable disability and specificity of their activities and functions. I also tried to understand the priorities given... [to full text]

This study challenges a popular Canadian national myth that characterizes Settlers as "benevolent" peacemakers - not perpetrators of violence in our relations with Indigenous peoples. I trace this foundational myth from its historical roots in 19th century treatymaking to a contemporary discourse of reconciliation that purports to be transformative, but simply perpetuates colonial relations. I argue that Settler violence against Indigenous peoples is woven into the fabric of Canada's national history in an unbroken thread from past to present that we must "unsettle" and "restory." making substantive space for Indigenous history: counternarratives of diplomacy, law and peacemaking practices, on transformative pathways to decolonizing Canada. This requires a better understanding of what role myth, ritual and history play in perpetuating or transforming Indigenous-Settler conflict. I propose a pedagogical strategy for "unsettling the Settler within" to explore the unsettling, potentially decolonizing and transformative power of testimony in public acts of restitution, apology. truth-telling and remembrance; and restorying- the making of space for Indigenous history. diplomacy. law, and peacemaking practices enacted in story, ceremony and ritual. I suggest that Settlers must confront our real identity as perpetrators - a deeply unsettling task. Dislodging the false premise of the benevolent peacemaker myth requires a paradigm shift that moves Settlers from a culture of denial that is the hallmark of perpetrators of violence towards an ethics of recognition that guides our attempts to become authentic peacemakers and Indigenous allies. The study mirrors this process. linking theory to my own critical. reflective practice. I critique reconciliation discourse in a case study of Canada's approach to settling Indian residential school claims. I describe my personal experience in an apology feast held for Gitxsan residential school survivors as an example of unsettling the Settler within and restorying that, despite its specificity, has broader applicability for designing truth-telling and reconciliation processes.

The English Public Boarding School is considered from a sociological perspective, and more particularly in the context of research in the field of complex organizations, as a residential organization. Concepts are used which have been developed in studies of other residential organizations such as military units, hospitals and prisons. The account is of an exploratory, descriptive case study of 'the research school', using a variant on the method of participant observation as the principal technique of data collection supplemented with data collected during visits to certain other public schools and an examination of published and unpublished documents by staff and past pupils. The size of these schools and their residential nature, which involves them in the custody of their pupils, give rise to certain specific organizational problems to which similar solutions have been devised by most of the schools. Certain aspects of the social process in the education provided by the schools are indicated in the examination of their admission procedures, processes of socialization on entry and the concomitants of organizational membership, of the agents and means of social control, together with a discussion both of the boys' perception of relative gratifications and deprivations with respect to various reference groups both within and without the school system and of the boys' different modes of adaptation to life in the socio-cultural context of the school. These schools belong to that category of complex organization which in addition to working through and with people work on them. The role of the school in socializing the boy and regulating his behaviour while a member of the school is emphasized, as education in the public boarding school is as much the attempt to socialize its pupils as to enable them to pass formal examinations or otherwise achieve academic ends, and it is with this former aspect of the schools that this account is primarily concerned. The schools' combined custodial and educational commitments make the maintenance of social order within them of fundamental significance. By anticipatory socialization in the home and at 'preparatory' school, and by their recruitment selection and admission procedures, by a formal system of control exercised partly through the prefect system, by the privilege system and certain ritualistic activities and ritualistic symbolization, the staff combine a high degree of organizational control with high scope and pervasiveness. During term a boy is engaged almost exclusively in activities involving other members of his school and organizational status embraces his life to an extent which is approached by few other types of organization in English society. Aspects of life at these schools are described which involve the pupils experiencing, rather than a sense of relative gratification, one of relative deprivation. The extent to which a particular boy experiences this is discussed in terms of disparities between his presenting culture on entry and the way of life associated with organizational membership, and in terms of his expectations and of the mode of adaptation and constellations of reference groups he has adopted at the time. The boys' responses to life in the socio-cultural context of the public boarding school are presented within the framework of a revised form of Merton's Typology of Individual Adaptation, and discussed in relation to the availability of the various modes of adaptation and to some of the determinants of their adoption by particular boys at certain stages of their school careers.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2000. / Adviser: Elizabeth Ammons. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 269-282). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;