Set against a changing backdrop of reforms in higher education and English language teaching (ELT), the thesis explores the notion of professionalism for university English teachers in Vietnam: What is defined as professionalism in this particular period of time? How is professionalism constructed in this context? The research approaches professionalism as a critical concept: A list of aspired traits and features are always value-laden and concern the question of power. From this premise, the thesis discusses a “kaleidoscope” relationship between different actors in the making of professionalism. Using Freidson’s (2001) ideas on the contingencies of professionalism, the study views the notion as a process rather than a product. Professionalism has its own logic that needs to be respected, but this logic is also incidental to other logics for its establishment and development. The study uses embedded case study to address its research questions. Defining the case as professionalism for university ELT teachers in contemporary Vietnam higher education, the thesis studies the notion as articulated at national, institutional, and individual levels. The primary data sources include five national policies, institutional policies and management practices at a university and its foreign languages department, and interviews with six academic managers and eleven ELT lecturers. The data were analysed using thematic analysis approach within constructivist, interpretive traditions. The results show that professionalism for ELT lecturers in Vietnam can largely be characterised as a professionalism of entrepreneurship, measurability and functionality. ELT is largely considered as a tool for international integration. Each type of professionalism project involves several actors (the state, expert groups, the institution, and ELT academics) with their own logic, but they interrelate in responding to the imperatives of the knowledge-based economy and globalisation. How the meaning of professionalism is established and argued for by the different actors in this study reveals that it is not easy to conceptualise the notion in a binary system of “from above” professionalism versus “from within” professionalism; and “organisational” professionalism versus “occupational” professionalism. The complexities of the logics of professionalism – with an ”s”, affect whether a professionalisation project can be perceived as being positive or negative – Is it professionalisation or is it deprofessionalisation? The relativity of “from above” and “from within” reflects the contingencies of professionalism, and also suggests authority power is plural, shifting, and fluid, rather than single, normative, and static. Meanwhile, it means human’s individual power is not of an ultimate freedom but dependent on external conditions. With these considerations, the study proposes interpreting professionalism as a ”social contract”. This helps not only recognise a mutual relationship between the state, the institution, and academics, but also illuminate how each party enables, maintains, and contributes to this relationship.

<div>In the United States, there has been an increased emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and especially engineering, in pre-college settings. There are several potential benefits of this, including: increasing the quantity and diversity of students who pursue STEM careers, improving all students’ technological literacy, and improving student learning in the STEM disciplines. While current standards support the integration of the four STEM disciplines in pre-college classrooms, research still needs to be done to determine which models of STEM integration are effective and how and why they impact student learning. The context of this study is a model of STEM integration called engineering design-based STEM integration. The purpose of this study was to do an in-depth exploration of students’ use of science conceptions during an engineering design-based STEM integration unit, with additional focus on how engineering design, redesign, teamwork, and communication influence students’ use of science conceptions. For this study, the unit was designed to address middle school-level physical science concepts related to heat transfer, including temperature, thermal energy, and processes of heat transfer (i.e., conduction, convection, and radiation).</div><div><br></div><div>An embedded case study design was used to explore students’ science conceptions while they participated in an engineering design STEM integration unit. The case was one student team from a seventh-grade science class, and the students within the team were the embedded sub-units. Data were collected on each day of the unit’s implementation; these data included video of the student team and entire classroom, audio of the student team, observations and field notes, and student artifacts, including their engineering notebooks. Data were analyzed primarily using methods from qualitative content analysis. Themes emerged for the whole team, with emphasis on specific students when appropriate.</div><div><br></div><div>The results show that there were a few key features of engineering (i.e., engineering design, redesign, teamwork, and communication) that influenced students’ use of heat transfer conceptions. During much of the problem scoping stage, which included the science lessons focused on heat transfer, students mostly used scientific conceptions about conduction, convection, and radiation. However, when they needed to think about those three processes of heat transfer together, as well as apply them to the context of the engineering design challenge, the students began to use a larger mix of scientific conceptions and alternative conceptions. Several alternative conceptions emerged when they combined ideas and vocabulary from conduction and radiation to create one set of rules about thermal properties of materials (i.e., did not distinguish between conduction and radiation). Even when they used scientific conceptions, the students sometimes applied the conceptions unscientifically when designing, which led them to create a prototype that performed poorly. However, the student team then learned from the failures of their first design and redesigned, during which they appropriately used mostly scientific conceptions. In other words, the opportunity to learn from failure and redesign was critical to this team’s use of correct conceptions about heat transfer. Two other features of engineering that emerged were teamwork and communication through notebooks. Students on the team learned from each other, but they learned both scientific and alternative conceptions from each other and from their peers on other teams. Engineering notebooks proved to be somewhat helpful to students, since they referred to them a few times when designing, but more importantly they were helpful in revealing students’ conceptions, especially for one student on the team who rarely spoke.</div><div><br></div><div>The findings of this study contribute to future development and implementation of other engineering design-based STEM integration curricula because they show how various features of engineering influenced this student team’s use of science conceptions. In particular, the results demonstrate the importance of giving students the opportunity to learn from failure and redesign, since this process can help students use more scientific conceptions and potentially repair their alternative conceptions. Additionally, it is important for curriculum developers and teachers to think carefully about the transition from problem scoping to solution generation and how to include effective scaffolds for students to help them combine their conceptions from science lessons and apply them correctly when designing. These results also have implications related to heat transfer conceptions, as the student team in this study demonstrated some scientific and alternative conceptions that were already in the literature. Additionally, they used alternative conceptions when they confused concepts from conduction and radiation, which are not in literature about pre-college heat transfer conceptions. These findings suggest that more research should be done to explore the interaction of engineering design and students’ science conceptions, especially heat transfer conceptions.</div>

Cette recherche, menée en immersion sur le terrain, vise à rendre plus intelligible le mode projet dans le système de décision des organisations bureaucratiques. Ce sujet, manquant d’évidences tant conceptuelles qu’empiriques, a été analysé longitudinalement et en temps réel par le biais d’une étude de cas enchâssés, composée de cinq projets internes d’une même collectivité territoriale. Pour appréhender davantage la complexité de ce sujet, un cadre conceptuel a été spécifiquement développé sur la base d’une approche multidimensionnelle. Puis, différents dispositifs méthodologiques, oscillant de l’observation flottante jusqu’à la recherche-action, ont été mobilisés pour détecter ce qui relève du singulier ou de la répétition dans les pratiques. Au final, les résultats de cette thèse, largement révélés par l’exercice d’une réflexivité, suggèrent que l’analyse du mode projet dans le système de décision d’une organisation bureaucratique ne peut être menée sans l’usage du concept d’instanciation. Plus encore, au sein des bureaucraties publiques, les projets internes connaissent une instanciation incomplète, néfaste à leur efficience. / This research, performed on the field-based approach, aims to give a more intelligible view of the project mode in the decision-making system within bureaucratic organizations. As this subject lacked of both conceptual and empiric evidences, it was analyzed on a real-time and longitudinal basis by means of embedded case study, composed of five internal projects performed in a territorial community. To advance deeper with the complexity of the subject, a conceptual frame was specifically done on the basis of a multidimensional approach. Then, several methological tools, from floating observation to action-research, were mobilized in order to identify if the practices tackled are either originated in a singular or repetitive approach. Finally, this thesis results, highly revealed through the exercise of reflexivity, show us that the analysis of the mode project in decision-making system within a bureaucratic organization can’t be lead without using the concept of instantiation. Moreover, within the public bureaucracies, the internal projects suffer from an unachieved instantiation, undermining their efficiency.

This study aims to explore how the Danish grassroots movement #hvorerderenvoksen is shaped through the usage of Facebook as their primary communication tool. Using the embedded case study method, this thesis describes in detail how and why the movement arose and explains the role of Facebook’s features, primarily groups and sites, for the movements external communication. As such, it will become clear that using Facebook is not merely a means to an end. Being an activist on Facebook means using and being used, it entails the acceleration of mobilisation, but also disciplining activist action in accordance with Facebook’s terms and conditions. This thesis will draw upon modern communication theories such as mediatization and network media logic and analyse #hvorerderenvoksen as a digital social phenomenon. As will become clear, digitalisation and even more so datafication processes play a role when critically examining contemporary activism. To sum up, this thesis aims to show how an activist movement is mediatized and strongly emphasizes the role of digitalization and media hybridity in this process. It suggests that future research will focus more on the influence datafication, and especially the collection of human data and its untransparent processing, has on mediatized activism.

Transport Policy in the United Kingdom from the 1950s to the early 1990s has been focused on increasing car use at the expense of investment in public transport services and infrastructure. This has culminated in a poorly integrated public transport network that has seen continued decline in use outside of London. The Competition Act (1998) has exacerbated this, as public operators risked prosecution if they were seen to collaborate. A policy shift in 1998 introduced the concept of Local Transport Plans, Organisational Travel Plans and Quality Partnerships as local policy tools for developing and implementing travel solutions using the planning process. Travel Plans today are viewed by the UK Government as a local delivery tool for transport policy, inspired by the successes in Europe and the United States in changing individual travel behaviour, where the Smart Growth Agenda has emerged as a mass transit based planning response to urban sprawl. In the UK, success in delivering significant modal shift away from private car use has seen limited success, hence the rationale for this research. Using this wider policy context, this research uses the University of Hertfordshire as a case study with the objective to research the development and implementation processes of a Travel Plan. The research conducts a review of travel behaviour within the case study, providing recommendations for implementing alternative interventions to car-based travel. Making use of national policy tools, using insights from both Smarter Travel / Smarter Choice agenda, the research includes the development process of a complex city wide Quality Partnership – a delivery mechanism for travel behaviour change incorporating multiple stakeholders. This thesis uses an embedded and reflective critical realist approach to researching Travel Plans from the perspective of a Travel Plan Coordinator. Through applying a multi-method dimension to empirical data collection, the use of structured quantitative commuter surveys, semi structured qualitative interviews and supporting secondary data sources are all utilised. Using such an approach provides the research with the flexibility for reporting complex social and empirical data, including the researcher’s embedded reflective insights throughout the process. An evaluative matrix ‘lens’ has been developed for reporting back the multitude of factors, including identifying Critical Success Factors and Key Performance Indicators that underpin the success or failure of such travel planning approaches. The research culminates in the development of a Travel Plan for the University of Hertfordshire and a voluntary Quality Partnership for the City and District of St Albans. A conclusion is drawn based on the unique perspective of an embedded reflective researcher as an active practitioner in the field of travel planning. In order to be successful a Travel Plan should feed into the wider quality partnership structures for mutual benefit where multiple stakeholders are able to influence the development of interventions at the local level, which could lead to significant travel behaviour changes. It is argued that this will ultimately help Travel Plans and quality partnerships achieve their key performance objectives and help meet government policy agenda.

No description available.

This thesis challenges core assumptions associated with the peer production of culture using the web-based collaborative film production platform Wreckamovie to understand how peer production works in practice. Active cultural participation is a growing political priority for many governments and cultural bodies, but these priorities are often implemented without a basis in empirical evidence, making it necessary for rigorous scholarship to tackle emerging networked cultural production. Existing work portrays peer production efforts as unrealistically distinct from proprietary, market-based production, incorrectly suggesting that peer production allows distributed, non-monetarily motivated, collaboration between self-selected individuals in hierarchy-free communities. In overcoming these assumptions, this thesis contributes to the development of a consolidated theoretical framework encompassing the complicated and multifaceted nature of networked cultural production. This theoretical framing extends Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and reconciles it with Becker’s Art Worlds framework, and further embeds and draws on Benkler’s notion of commons-based peer production. Concretely, this research tackles the emergence of new collaborative production models enabled by networked technologies, and theorizes the tensions and challenges characterizing such production forms. Secondly, this thesis redefines cultural participation and considers the divisions of labour in online filmmaking materializing from the interactions between professional and non-professional filmmakers. Finally, this study considers the social economies surrounding networked cultural production, including crowdfunding, and characterizes associated conversions of capital, such as the conversion of symbolic capital into financial capital. Methodologically, this thesis employs an embedded case study strategy. It examines four feature film productions facilitated by the online platform Wreckamovie, as well as the online community within which these productions are embedded. The four production cases have completed all production stages, and have resulted in completed cultural goods during the course of data collection. This study’s findings were derived from two and half years of participant observations, interviews with 29 Wreckamovie community and production members, and the examination of archived production-related discourses (2006-2013). Ultimately, this study makes concrete proposals towards a theory of networked cultural production with clear policy implications.

“Why do immigrants and refugees need community health workers/lay health workers (CHWs) if Canada already has a universal health care system?” Abundant evidence demonstrates that despite the universality of our health care system marginalized populations, including immigrants and refugees, experience barriers to accessing the health system. Evidence on the role of CHWs facilitating access is both lacking and urgently needed. This dissertation contributes to this evidence by providing a thick description and thorough analytical exploration of a CHW model, in Edmonton, Canada. Specifically, I examine the activities of the Multicultural Health Brokers Co-operative (MCHB Co-op) and its Multicultural Health Brokers from 1992 to 2011 as well as the relationship they have with Alberta Health Services (AHS) Edmonton Zone Public Health. The research for this study is based on an instrumental and embedded qualitative case study design. The case is the MCHB Co-op, an independently-run multicultural health worker co-operative, which contracts with health and social services providers in Edmonton to offer linguistically- and culturally-appropriate services to marginalized immigrant and refugee women and their families. The two embedded mini-cases are two programs of the MCHB Co-op: Perinatal Outreach and Health for Two, which are the raison d’être for a sustained partnership between the MCHB Co-op and AHS. The phenomenon under study is the Multicultural Health Brokers’ practice. I triangulate multiple methods (research strategies and data sources), including 46 days of participant and direct observation, 44 in-depth interviews (with Multicultural Health Brokers, mentors, women using the programs, health professionals and outsiders who knew of the work of the MCHB Co-op and Multicultural Health Brokers), and document review and analysis of policy documents, yearly reports, training manuals, educational materials as well as quantitative analysis of the Health Brokers’ 3,442 client caseload database. In addition, data include my field notes of both descriptive and analytical reflections taken throughout the onsite research. I also triangulate various theoretical frameworks to explore how historically specific social structures, economic relationships, and ideological assumptions serve to create and reinforce the conditions that give rise to the need for CHWs, and the factors that aid or hinder their ability to facilitate marginalized populations’ access to health and social services. Findings reveal that Multicultural Health Brokers facilitate access to health and social services as well as foster community capacity building in order to address settlement, adaptation, and integration of immigrant and refugee women and their families into Canadian society. Findings also demonstrate that the Multicultural Health Broker model is an example of collaboration between community-based organizations and local systems in targeting health equity for marginalized populations; in particular, in perinatal health and violence against women. A major problem these workers face is they provide important services as part of Canada’s health human resources workforce, but their contributions are often not recognized as such. The triangulation of methods and theory provides empirical and theoretical understanding of the Multicultural Health Brokers’ contribution to immigrant and refugee women and their families’ feminist urban citizenship.

“Why do immigrants and refugees need community health workers/lay health workers (CHWs) if Canada already has a universal health care system?” Abundant evidence demonstrates that despite the universality of our health care system marginalized populations, including immigrants and refugees, experience barriers to accessing the health system. Evidence on the role of CHWs facilitating access is both lacking and urgently needed. This dissertation contributes to this evidence by providing a thick description and thorough analytical exploration of a CHW model, in Edmonton, Canada. Specifically, I examine the activities of the Multicultural Health Brokers Co-operative (MCHB Co-op) and its Multicultural Health Brokers from 1992 to 2011 as well as the relationship they have with Alberta Health Services (AHS) Edmonton Zone Public Health. The research for this study is based on an instrumental and embedded qualitative case study design. The case is the MCHB Co-op, an independently-run multicultural health worker co-operative, which contracts with health and social services providers in Edmonton to offer linguistically- and culturally-appropriate services to marginalized immigrant and refugee women and their families. The two embedded mini-cases are two programs of the MCHB Co-op: Perinatal Outreach and Health for Two, which are the raison d’être for a sustained partnership between the MCHB Co-op and AHS. The phenomenon under study is the Multicultural Health Brokers’ practice. I triangulate multiple methods (research strategies and data sources), including 46 days of participant and direct observation, 44 in-depth interviews (with Multicultural Health Brokers, mentors, women using the programs, health professionals and outsiders who knew of the work of the MCHB Co-op and Multicultural Health Brokers), and document review and analysis of policy documents, yearly reports, training manuals, educational materials as well as quantitative analysis of the Health Brokers’ 3,442 client caseload database. In addition, data include my field notes of both descriptive and analytical reflections taken throughout the onsite research. I also triangulate various theoretical frameworks to explore how historically specific social structures, economic relationships, and ideological assumptions serve to create and reinforce the conditions that give rise to the need for CHWs, and the factors that aid or hinder their ability to facilitate marginalized populations’ access to health and social services. Findings reveal that Multicultural Health Brokers facilitate access to health and social services as well as foster community capacity building in order to address settlement, adaptation, and integration of immigrant and refugee women and their families into Canadian society. Findings also demonstrate that the Multicultural Health Broker model is an example of collaboration between community-based organizations and local systems in targeting health equity for marginalized populations; in particular, in perinatal health and violence against women. A major problem these workers face is they provide important services as part of Canada’s health human resources workforce, but their contributions are often not recognized as such. The triangulation of methods and theory provides empirical and theoretical understanding of the Multicultural Health Brokers’ contribution to immigrant and refugee women and their families’ feminist urban citizenship.

“Why do immigrants and refugees need community health workers/lay health workers (CHWs) if Canada already has a universal health care system?” Abundant evidence demonstrates that despite the universality of our health care system marginalized populations, including immigrants and refugees, experience barriers to accessing the health system. Evidence on the role of CHWs facilitating access is both lacking and urgently needed. This dissertation contributes to this evidence by providing a thick description and thorough analytical exploration of a CHW model, in Edmonton, Canada. Specifically, I examine the activities of the Multicultural Health Brokers Co-operative (MCHB Co-op) and its Multicultural Health Brokers from 1992 to 2011 as well as the relationship they have with Alberta Health Services (AHS) Edmonton Zone Public Health. The research for this study is based on an instrumental and embedded qualitative case study design. The case is the MCHB Co-op, an independently-run multicultural health worker co-operative, which contracts with health and social services providers in Edmonton to offer linguistically- and culturally-appropriate services to marginalized immigrant and refugee women and their families. The two embedded mini-cases are two programs of the MCHB Co-op: Perinatal Outreach and Health for Two, which are the raison d’être for a sustained partnership between the MCHB Co-op and AHS. The phenomenon under study is the Multicultural Health Brokers’ practice. I triangulate multiple methods (research strategies and data sources), including 46 days of participant and direct observation, 44 in-depth interviews (with Multicultural Health Brokers, mentors, women using the programs, health professionals and outsiders who knew of the work of the MCHB Co-op and Multicultural Health Brokers), and document review and analysis of policy documents, yearly reports, training manuals, educational materials as well as quantitative analysis of the Health Brokers’ 3,442 client caseload database. In addition, data include my field notes of both descriptive and analytical reflections taken throughout the onsite research. I also triangulate various theoretical frameworks to explore how historically specific social structures, economic relationships, and ideological assumptions serve to create and reinforce the conditions that give rise to the need for CHWs, and the factors that aid or hinder their ability to facilitate marginalized populations’ access to health and social services. Findings reveal that Multicultural Health Brokers facilitate access to health and social services as well as foster community capacity building in order to address settlement, adaptation, and integration of immigrant and refugee women and their families into Canadian society. Findings also demonstrate that the Multicultural Health Broker model is an example of collaboration between community-based organizations and local systems in targeting health equity for marginalized populations; in particular, in perinatal health and violence against women. A major problem these workers face is they provide important services as part of Canada’s health human resources workforce, but their contributions are often not recognized as such. The triangulation of methods and theory provides empirical and theoretical understanding of the Multicultural Health Brokers’ contribution to immigrant and refugee women and their families’ feminist urban citizenship.