There have been numerous calls for the radical transformation of public education in the United States. Reform initiatives are fuelled by the need to prepare students to meet the challenges of the networked knowledge society. This thesis examines the shaping of school culture within two public non-charter high schools, in different regions of the United States and with different socioeconomic characteristics, that are implementing the "New Technology" (or "New Tech") model of education: Pacific Coast High, a well-established New Tech school, and Midwest High, a school that recently transitioned to the model and is still in the process of culture change. This rapidly expanding school reform network includes 168 schools in the United States and 7 international sites in Australia. The New Tech Network, the organisation that provides training and support for these schools, explicitly emphasises the goal of changing the culture of education. They describe themselves as a network of schools that promotes a culture of trust, respect, and responsibility and uses project-based learning and "smart use" of technology to redefine teaching and learning. I employed an ethnographic multisite case study design to gain an understanding of the everyday experiences and practices of teachers, students and school leaders as they work through the process of implementing and maintaining the New Tech model. Fieldwork included six and a half months of participant observation of secondary classrooms, school meetings, professional development sessions, and New Tech training conferences as well as semi-structured interviews with teachers, students, and administrators. My analysis provides an understanding of the influence of local context, including historical background (local and national) and economic and political structures. The research findings indicate that a deliberate focus on 'culture-building', with particular values like trust, respect and responsibility, underpin and shape relationships, behaviours and educational practices, including the extensive use of ICTs. A multi-faceted approach to socialisation and enculturation, which includes extensive peer-to-peer support, is involved in inculcating values and shaping behaviours and practices. The New Tech model shifts the focus of education from a primarily individualist competitive endeavour (reflecting the broad cultural orientations of modern society in the United States) to a more collectivist approach, with students working in collaborative groups supported by the use of ICTs. Schools operate as learning communities with collaborative partnerships with the wider community. Pacific Coast High is an exemplar for the model in its fully implemented form, while Midwest High's transition to the model has been fraught with tensions as they navigate numerous context-specific challenges. I argue that real reform requires an intentional effort to change the culture of education and that pedagogy and culture have to necessitate the use of ICTs to more fully integrate them into the education process. I characterise the culture I observed in New Tech schools, particularly at Pacific Coast, as an 'ICT-facilitating school culture' with (1) a collaborative project-based focus and encouragement of students to communicate and find information themselves which pushes them to use ICTs, (2) a system of cultural values that, when internalised, operates as a means of social control, keeping students on task as they work independently and collaboratively, using ICTs, including social networking sites, and (3) an ideal classroom layout and technology infrastructure that facilitates the use of ICTs. I characterise the New Tech Network of schools as a revitalization movement, addressing the needs of a changing society by changing the culture of education.

L’Afrique n’échappe pas aux débats sur les industries culturelles, déjà en vogue, au niveau mondial. Bien développées dans les pays du Nord, les industries culturelles connaissent cependant un développement très faible en Afrique. Dans le continent, si quelques pays ont des modèles réussis de développement de ce secteur, à l’instar du Nigéria ou de l’Afrique du Sud, les industries culturelles des pays francophones d’Afrique subsahrienne demeurent encore dans un état précaire. Cela semble probablement dû à une prise de conscience tardive de leurs enjeux, à des considérations socio-politiques, ou encore à une mauvaise compréhension des rôles des acteurs. D’où notre intérêt à étudier le rôle des pouvoirs publics dans le processus de développement des industries culturelles au Burkina Faso, à travers le sujet suivant : Les industries culturelles dans les pays francophones d’Afrique subsaharienne : cas du Burkina Faso. Pour mener à bien notre réflexion sur le sujet, la méthodologie a consisté aussi bien à un débroussaillage théorique et à des enquêtes de terrain, permettant de confirmer les hypothèses émises. Au Burkina Faso, les industries culturelles connaissent, par leur organisation, une certaine dynamique, malgré quelques insuffisances dans le développement des filières culturelles. Cette dynamique, favorable à la mise en place d’initiatives et d’évènements culturels d’envergure, fait sans doute considérer le pays comme un « carrefour culturel » en Afrique. Les industries culturelles génèrent des enjeux sociaux, politiques et économiques considérables pour le pays. Cependant, ces enjeux sont l’objet de conflits entre surtout les industriels de la culture et l’Etat. Aussi, est-il indispensable que les pouvoirs publics et les industriels de la culture travaillent en synergie, avec des rôles bien définis, pour prendre au sérieux les défis, pour un secteur plus viable, dynamique et durable. / THESIS SUMMARYAfrica is no exception to the debates on the cultural industries, already in vogue, at the global level. Although well developed in the North, cultural industries are less developed in Africa. In the continent, while some countries have successful models of development in this sector, like Nigeria or South Africa, the cultural industries in francophone countries of sub-Saharan Africa are still in a precarious level. This seems likely due to a late awareness of their issues, socio-political considerations, or a misunderstanding of the roles of the actors. Hence our interest in studying the role of public authorities in the process of cultural industries development in Burkina Faso, through the following subject: Cultural industries in francophone countries of sub-Saharan Africa: case of Burkina Faso. To carry out our reflection on the subject, the methodology consisted as well of a theoretical brusaillage and field investigations, allowing to confirm the hypotheses emitted.In Burkina Faso, the cultural industries are dynamic, by their organization, despite some shortcomings in the development of cultural sectors. This dynamic, favorable to the implementation of major initiatives and cultural events, makes the country as a "cultural crossroads" in Africa. Cultural industries generate considerable social, political and economic impacts for the country. However, these profits are the subject of conflicts between mainly industrial culture sector and the public sector. It is therefore essential that public authorities and cultural private sector work in synergy, with well-defined roles, to take the challenges seriously, for a more viable, dynamic and sustainable sector.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) began to audit Australian universities. At the same time, universities were increasingly using online technologies for teaching and learning. Little is known about how these two significant changes in teaching and learning might be acting and interacting at a time of increasing focus by universities on the educational marketplace. This thesis investigates the AUQA audits carried out in 2002 of three Australian universities which had different locations in the Australian higher education marketplace and had different approaches to the use of online technologies. I use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyse a range of artefacts produced between 2002 and 2005 by and about the universities. I analyse the first three editions of the AUQA manual, the universities' web sites before and after their audit, the submissions of those universities to AUQA, and the audit reports by AUQA on them. I explore the role that representations of the "online university" discourse play in constructions of a "quality university" discourse within these texts. I discovered a number of shifts in emphasis in the texts over time. Notions of the "online university", while prevalent in the texts produced early in the time frame of the study, were absent from later texts. Also, texts produced early in the study represented the three universities as very different institutions. However texts examined towards the end of the study represented the universities to be more similar in nature. Given the diverse nature of the institutions' market locations, I found that quality assurance processes work to reduce the representation of institutional diversity. There was evidence that the "online university" discourse came to be used more as a marketing tool and less as a marker of quality education over the time period of the study. I argue that AUQA's audits do not support institutions? various market positionings as described by Marginson and Considine (2000), but rather provide the imprimatur of "brand Australia" by producing representations of each institution that are safe and amenable to the audit process. The "online university" discourse speaks of new and borderless teaching strategies, while the "quality university" discourse speaks of containment and control of university activities. The bounding and limiting effect of the "quality university" discourse over the outward reaching "online university" discourse resulted in the three universities representing themselves in increasingly isomorphic ways. My analysis shows that over the time frame of the study, the surveillance of a national quality audit body, through self-audit by universities and the subsequent publication of reviews of universities by that body, produced more cautious representations of the universities and ironically, less direct influence by the audit body over universities? actions in the marketplace. The study suggests that the degree of influence which the ?online university? discourse and the "quality university" discourse have on the representations of universities is dependent largely on the degree to which they can impel universities within the market. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2007

The Master's thesis follows professional work of Jaroslav Pospisil. Briefly presented the Pospisil's family from Jan Hostivít Pospisil, who founded the family business, to Jaroslav's successor Jaroslav Pospisil junior. Considerable attention will be paid to the composition of the editorial program. It will not be missed out nor Pospíšil's social functions, eg. Association of booksellers and and publishers. Keywords: Publishing houses, book printing, bookstore, publishers and publishing, booksellers, book culture, publishers' catalogs, books, culture and society, fading

Esta investigación tiene como propósito desentrañar la sociedad española que sedescribe en la novela Tierra de campos del autor español David Trueba, con elobjetivo de cartografiarla y encontrar en ella rasgos comunes y propios de unasociedad posmoderna.Para ello se recurrirá a los postulados de la teoría de la posmodernidad deFredrik Jameson y se centrará especialmente en los conceptos de espacio y tiempo.De la novela se extraerán los rasgos distintivos de los personajes, de los lugares ydel contexto en el que esta acontece para poder configurar un paisaje amplio de lasociedad a la que pertenecen y de esta forma acercarse al objetivo del estudio.Como resultado de la investigación se ha podido definir la sociedadespañola descrita en la novela como de carácter posmoderno, pero con unaspeculiaridades propias derivadas de la herencia de las antiguas estructuras deltardofranquismo. / The following research is intended to ascertain and furthermore describe in depththe way in which David Trueba’s fictional novel Tierra de campos reflects thecontemporary Spanish society. And by so doing, an analysis of whether Spanishsociety can genuinely be considered postmodern, will be presented.The analysis will be supported by a focus on the space-temporal scope asit is asserted in Fredrik Jameson’s theory on post-modernism. Taking the novel byTrueba as a main source, reference characters, places, setting as well as context, willplay an important role in the mapping out of all shared features of the society thatthe novel describes in order to approach the purpose of the study.As a result of this research, we have been able to properly define the societydepicted in the novel as one clearly pertaining to the post-modern timeline,nonetheless bearing some of the inherent traces derived from the rusty structurescharacteristic of the last period of Franco’s dictatorship.

<p>This investigation into the status of English in Iran and cultural presentations in Iranian English has two areas of emphasis. The first is a sociolinguistic profile of English in Iran in which the status, functions, uses and users of this language are described within in the country’s social and political contexts. In this part, contributing factors to the growth of English in three political periods, including the Qajar dynasty (1796 -1925), the Pahlavi era (1925-1979) and post-Revolutionary time (1979 – present), are elaborated upon to establish the historical and political bases for the second area of focus.</p> <p>The second focus is the cultural content in the locally developed English textbooks used from 1939 to the present time (2020). Accordingly, the content of four generations (across five textbook series) of Iranian high school English textbooks are analyzed based on an evaluation scheme which the author has developed. This research finds answers to the questions on the status of culture in the Iranian English textbooks; distribution of Iranian and non-Iranian cultures; dominance of cultural elements (products, practices and perspectives) in each English textbooks series; and the political and ideological influence of each era on the content of English textbooks.</p> <p>This investigation finds that the English textbooks which were developed before the Islamic Revolution (first and second generations) were highly cultural compared to the post-Revolution materials (third and fourth generations). Also, non-Iranian cultural components (particularly the American and British cultures) were more represented in the English textbooks of the Pahlavi period, whereas Western cultures were all eliminated in the post-Revolution textbooks, replaced by the Islamic/Revolutionary cultures. Additionally, cultural perspectives outnumbered cultural products and practices in the first and second generations of English textbooks (Pahlavi era) whereas cultural products dominated the post-Revolutionary English materials. This study finds that political and ideological hegemony of each era have directly influenced the textual and illustrative content of locally developed English textbooks in Iran.<a> </a></p>

<p>   </p> <p>Motivated by the lack of research that has explored the rhetorical structure of research articles in the humanities, this dissertation analyzes professional philosophical discourse using move-analysis as an approach. A corpus of 60 research articles was compiled from some of the leading philosophy journals. The articles were selected from three sub-disciplinary areas: (a) metaphysics and epistemology, (b) the history of philosophy, and (c) ethics. To analyze the articles, a move analysis codebook was developed, which identified the rhetorical functions (i.e., moves and steps) that different text segments played. The codebook was then applied to the entire research article structure of the 60 research articles. Linguistic features of certain functional units were also identified via corpus analysis techniques. The results of the study show that rhetorical structure of philosophical writing is distinctive compared to other fields and disciplines. On one hand, at the macro level, philosophical writing uses a problem-solution structure rather than the IMRD (intro-methods-results-discussion) structure, common in the social and natural sciences. At the move and step level, philosophical writing heavily relies on evaluation to critically analyze solutions to philosophical problems. Finally, the dissertation found systemic rhetorical functions that permeated the entire research article. Most notably, philosophers heavily qualify and outline their arguments throughout the text. </p> <p>  </p>