Student-teachers at the University of Pretoria are in desperate need of mentoring during their teaching practicum period. This is an essential need as they only get the opportunity to start their teaching practicum when they are in their final year of study. This study forms a part of a larger study that comes from a research project called the Peer Enhanced Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL). The aim of this project is to develop a mentoring intervention programme which will be used to develop student teachers into teachers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify, explore and understand what the mentoring needs of final year student-teachers in the year 2016 and 2017 at the University of Pretoria were during their first teaching practicum. This study aims to do such, because the participants of this study had a late exposure to teaching practice, and as such when they started their teaching practicum, they experienced feelings of being uncertain, scared, and anxious. The research methodology that this study will utilize is the qualitative research approach using single case study design. Inductive thematic analysis will then be used to analyse the data gathered for this study. The student-teachers in this study were 2016 and 2017 fourth year B. Ed students (n=433) that were studying at the University of Pretoria (Groenkloof campus), in the year 2016 (170), and 2017 (263). The theoretical framework that guided this study is Hudson’s five-factor model of mentoring. The findings of the study revealed that student-teachers at the University of Pretoria need to be mentored, specifically by their mentor lecturers as they embark on their teaching practicum. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Educational Psychology / MEd / Unrestricted

The gap between increased diversity of students and the level of multicultural competence of preservice teachers at a local university was investigated in this qualitative case study. The purpose of this study was to describe preservice teachers' experiences with multicultural competence in teaching diverse students. The study's conceptual framework was based on Dewey's theory of experience, Knowles's theory of adult learning, Kolb's theory of experiential learning, and Gay's culturally responsive teaching. Two models incorporating cultural competence by Mason, Benjamin, and Lewis and Pedersen were used to frame professional practice and develop understanding, acceptance, and skills in working with diverse students. Inquiry into how preservice teachers characterized their multicultural competence in relation to their experiences teaching diverse students formed the guiding research question. Data collection included semistructured, individual interviews with 10 preservice teachers selected by purposeful sampling. Lesson plans, class profiles from participants, and handwritten notes of participants' nonverbal expressions during interviews were also analyzed. Inductive data analysis results indicated that preservice teachers perceived a need for additional multicultural competence including increased awareness, knowledge, and skills in working with diverse students. A 3-day professional development workshop training project was developed to address cultural awareness, knowledge, and skills among preservice teachers in grades K-12. Preservice teachers' experiences revealed the need to build and strengthen multicultural competence in order to bring about social change by improving educational outcomes for minority culture students.

Psychology researchers have been gathering information regarding the positive effects of forgiveness, demonstrating that they contribute to better overall physical and emotional wellbeing. Individuals who have suffered a transgression can remain in a place of destructive anger and resentment for years. Long-term, these negative states can have deleterious effects emotionally, physically, and socially. Understanding how to help those who are suffering move past their victimization can have a positive impact. It is therefore important to conduct research to better understand forgiveness through the lived experience of individuals who have experienced some form of victimization. Using evolutionary psychology as the theoretical framework, the motivations for revenge and forgiveness become clearer. The goal of this multiple case study was to examine an individual's process of forgiveness and how it was achieved following the experience of a significant transgression. Nine participants agreed to participate in an in-depth semi-structured interview; this purposeful sample of individuals who had suffered either criminal victimization or interpersonal betrayal, and who had gone through the forgiveness process were selected for this study. The data analysis plan followed Braun and Clarke's six-step thematic analysis guide to classify, analyze, and report the themes that emerged from the data collected. The findings highlighted the processes whereby forgiveness is achieved, A total of six themes were identified: forgiveness perspectives, resentments and anger, safety, motivations, mediators, and resilience/personal growth. The most notable mediators in the process of forgiveness among participants were compassion/empathy and receiving an acknowledgement or explanation/sincere apology from the offender. In conclusion, this research attempts to bring about positive social change by supporting practitioners in helping the populations they serve, as well as further other important research on forgiveness.

Developing a computer program is not an easy task. Studies reported that a large number of computer science students decided to change their major due to the extreme challenge in learning programming. Fortunately, studies also reported that learning various self-regulation strategies may help students to continue studying computer science. This study is interested in assessing students’ self-regulation, in specific their task understanding and its revision during programming endeavors. Task understanding is specifically selected because it affects the entire programming endeavor. In this qualitative case study, two female and two male senior computer science students were voluntarily recruited as research participants. They were asked to think aloud while answering five programming problems. Before solving the problem, they had to explain their understanding of the task and after that answer some questions related to their problem-solving process. The participants’ problem-solving process were video and audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. This study found that the participants’ were capable of tailoring their problem-solving approach to the task types, including when understanding the tasks. Given enough time, the participants can understand the problem correctly. When the task is complicated, the participants will gradually update their understanding during the problem-solving endeavor. Some situations may have prevented the participants from understanding the task correctly, including overconfidence, being overwhelmed, utilizing an inappropriate presentation technique, or drawing knowledge from irrelevant experience. Last, the participants tended to be inexperienced in managing unfavorable outcomes.

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Students with intellectual disabilities have at times been overlooked and denied effective reading instruction. Teachers tasked with instructing such students are often limited in the training, resources, and support necessary to effectively instruct these students in reading. These problems are further compounded by the fact that students with intellectual disabilities have historically been misperceived, often by the very educators tasked with instructing them, as either being unable to learn to read or that the prospect of teaching them to read is simply too daunting and complicated to be of sufficient worth (Aldridge, 2014; Kluth & Chandler-Olcott, 2008). Such misperception may lead to insufficient and/or misguided instruction of these students limiting their potential learning and growth (Kliewer, Biklen, & Kasa-Hendrickson, 2006). This qualitative case study explored the perceptions and lived experiences of eight special education teachers from five different school districts, who both worked with students with intellectual disabilities and mentored preservice teachers who worked with students with intellectual disabilities in the area of reading. This study focused on the perceptions of these special education teacher/ mentors before, during and after receiving training in the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI) program, based on five areas of reading: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, Fluency, and Vocabulary. Data suggested a universal lack of support and training in reading for these special education teacher/mentors. Changes of perceptions and teaching practices of the special education teacher/mentors relative to explicit reading instruction for students with intellectual abilities are explored. Implications for practice are included.

<p>This dissertation is premised on using an asset-based framework to investigate how engineering educators provide culturally relevant engineering education to Nigerian students at the undergraduate level. Its research questions are as follows: <i>How do engineering educators provide culturally relevant teaching to Nigerian students? What can we learn about culturally relevant teaching in engineering education from a comparative study of institutions and educators in the Nigerian context? What are the affordances, challenges, and recommendations</i><i>?</i> This dissertation leverages the socio-psychological teacher conceptions of “knowledge,” “social relations,” and the “self” and “others” described by Gloria Ladson Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) framework. Schools located in all six of Nigeria’s geopolitical zones and participants fluent in her three major spoken languages are represented in the study. The analyzed data for this study include surveys, in-person and virtual classroom observations, teacher reflection journals, classroom artifacts, school policy documents, and semi-structured interviews with 37 engineering faculty members, 2 provosts, 5 engineering college deans, and 2 students. The findings reveal a strong penchant for <b>analogies and proverbs as analogical bridges</b> that engineering instructors in this context used when traditional experiments, classroom demonstrations, or available educational resources failed. Nuances of culturally-relevant teacher conceptions include: <u>using proverbs to build cognitive reasoning in Nigerian engineering classrooms; visual and auditory cues as a type of formative feedback; analogies as a pedagogical form; advocating for active and authentic learning through tutorials; leveraging the communal nature of the culture in the classroom; colonial antecedents responsible for certain school policies; manifestations of Ladson-Billings’ conceptions in this context; and peculiarities of the three CRP criteria in this context.</u> The dissertation concludes with implications of the study for culturally relevant engineering education and useful recommendations for instructors looking for culturally relevant ways of supporting students of Nigerian origins in their engineering classrooms.</p>

Orwell is painfully aware of almost all the difficulties under which the present day writer labors. These range from the squalid reality of poverty (espeoially true in his own case) to a serious uncertainty over the nature and purpose of literature. However, four problems seem to stick in his mind and he returns to them continually- They are (1) the difficulty of maintaining one's intellectual and artistiointegrity in a world whioh increasingly threatens personal freedom; (2) the neoessity of finding a balance between the claims of art and those of propaganda in literary works; (3) the steady deterioration of the English language under political and social pressures; and finally (4) the hardships which the writer is oompelled to suffer if he tries to support himself solely by his writing.

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