Thesis advisor: Sandra R. Mott / The purpose of this research was to address the gap in the literature regarding the lack of first hand accounts of the factors that influence adolescent sexual decision making. Using a narrative approach, I asked a cohort of late adolescent participants to tell their stories about the events surrounding their decision to become sexually active, and how this initial decision affected subsequent decision making. The specific research questions that guided the study were: 1) What are late adolescents' perspectives of the factors that influenced their decision to become and remain sexually active? and 2) What is the effect of sexual decision making regarding coital debut on subsequent sexual activity? To accomplish my research aims I used narrative inquiry to elicit rich information, in the adolescents' own words, about what they perceive to be the most salient factors that contributed to their decisions to engage in sexual activity. I recruited a purposive sample of 11 late adolescents between the ages of 18 and 22 years from a series of family planning and sexually transmitted infection (STI) clinics in the Northeastern United States. As their stories unfolded, four main components emerged. These components included the internal and external environmental context, expected social norms, implied sexual consent, and self-reflection and evaluation. The results of this study provide evidence that adolescent sexual decision making is a complex process with multiple layers of influence. Through the stories of my participants, I have constructed a more comprehensive conceptualization of adolescent sexual decision making and related sexual behaviors. This will guide the development of possible interventions to improve health care for this population. These interventions include expanding nursing knowledge to inform the development of theories, practice innovations, research, sexual health education, and policies for addressing adolescents' needs across the continuum of the adolescents' development from childhood to adulthood. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Connell School of Nursing. / Discipline: Nursing.

Thesis advisor: Maria E. Brisk / While traditional multicultural education has advanced school personnel's cultural awareness and the implementation of multicultural curricula, it can also perpetuate stereotypes of certain cultural groups by overstating the role of culture. The widely held stereotypes of Chinese immigrants as super-achievers and a "model minority" may dangerously hide the problems that many Chinese immigrant families face upon immigrating. In this dissertation, I share findings generated from the narrative inquiry of sixteen Chinese immigrant parents. The study was to uncover multiple realities related to the parenting experiences constructed by Chinese immigrant parents in their given social, cultural, and personal circumstances. Guiding this inquiry is the bioecological model, which provides an overarching framework to address all the factors that possibly influence immigrants' parenting. With a focus on critical events, data collected from multiple open-ended interviews and documents were presented in two ways: case-focused narrative analysis and cross-case thematic analysis. The findings show that Chinese immigrants are a diverse group, with each individual's parental beliefs and practices influenced by multiple personal and contextual factors. All the factors interacted through complex processes occurring at various levels within the parents' ecological environments between the two cultures. In addition, several issues related to Chinese immigrant families were exposed from the parents' narratives that have not been well researched so far, including: subgroup differences, the influence of marital discord as a result of immigration on child development, the role of religion change on parenting, and grandparents as major childcare giver. At a theoretical level, notions of the continuum of common cultural values, and the continuum of enculturation and acculturation provide a fluid and dynamic theoretical lens to better understanding immigrants' in-between cultural values. I suggest that school personnel and social workers work towards eliminating pre-assumptions about any cultural group, attending to each child's unique identity without over-emphasizing the role of culture. Furthermore, schools need to take efforts to build effective and reciprocal relationships with immigrant families to better address the immigrant students' individual needs. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

This study is an exploration of five children’s relationship with the existential as it is played out in their everydayness at the nursery. Previous research in the field has looked at teachers’ perceptions of pre-school children’s existential questions, showing, thus, a place for a study on children’s existential encounters. My focus lies with the subjective meanings and the emotional qualities of these encounters, specifically how they are embodied in children’s play in the form of a word but also an object, an image, a movement or silence as well as in their ordinary doing and their very being at the nursery. I am also interested in how the existential reveals itself in children’s everyday relationships with others as well as how it is precisely through my relationship with them that I, as someone who looks for it, can get closer to it. For that I use psychoanalytic observation as a methodology that stays with the child’s interior worlds as they unfold in her play and in the relationship with the observer. My methodology is informed by relational psychoanalytic thinking and feminist writings that allow me to locate meaning in the liminal spaces between the self and the other, the interior and the exterior. In the analysis, I use writing as inquiry as a means to explore an integrative approach by moving between psychoanalytic theories and existential-phenomenological ideas to think the existential with. I explore children’s existential encounters with the questions of nothingness, strangeness, ontological insecurity, death and selfhood as they emerged in the context of our relationship in the course of the observations. I also discuss how time, space and relationship - as inherent in the existential but also implicated in the method of psychanalytic observation - manifested in children’s existential encounters. Finally, I look at the idea of the interpersonal unconscious as a creative source of meaning and discuss how the existential emerged embodied in symbolic articulations in the form of character, imagery, sounds and scents.

This research study explores the ways in which articulations of belonging are expressed by a small number of second year education undergraduates in a post-1992 university in the UK. Issues of student engagement and belonging in Higher Education (HE) have been the subject of research within recent years as a way to enhance rates of student retention and success, as the Widening Participation agenda has realised a changing demographic within the traditional student body. This study focuses on the First Generation Student (FGS), as reflective of the non-traditional student, who is subject to a negative framing within the educational literary discourse. The research adopts a metaphorical lens to locate the FGS as migrant within the HE landscape and to consider HE institutional efforts to foster a sense of belonging, as a strategic tool for success, as a colonising process. Working within an ecological framing of the topic, the study focuses on the differing contexts within which the research participants operate and considers the impact these have upon student engagement with the university. As a way to foreground respectful working with research participants, a person-centred approach has been employed, using a narrative inquiry methodological framework. Voices of the participants, as narrators, are privileged within this study in order to afford them the opportunity to add to the ongoing conversation on belonging. Creative strategies, based upon photo- and metaphor-elicitation, have been employed to facilitate discussion of the abstract and intangible concept of belonging and to provide a participatory nature to this research study. Findings signal a strong resolve by these narrators to overcome obstacles in their path to success within what is often an unfamiliar terrain within HE. The potentiality of the individual is privileged, showing strengths that are brought to the world of study which are often unrecognised by university practices. The affective dimension of belonging is emphasised within the research and metaphors of belonging, articulated by the narrators, offer alternative conceptual structurings which privilege aspects to do with security and adventure. Such insights afford opportunities to view belonging from differing perspectives, to re-figure ways in which students see themselves within HE processes, and to alert staff and personnel to new ways in which they might view the non-traditional student. Aspects of valuing the diversity of students and of a person-centred approach to working are viewed as key to creating the possibilities for belonging.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-04T21:02:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 17 / Milton Valente / A presente dissertação enfrentará alguns conceitos fundamentais da obra foucaultiana, tais como o poder, a soberania, a disciplina, a instituição de seqüestro, a vigilância, para aprofundar a análise naquilo que se refere ao tema da arte de governar. Nesse ponto, será a obra de Nietzsche, no recorte que lida com a temática do pecado, chamada a oferecer uma breve contribuição. Das novas formas de poder pastoral, em Foucault, até alcançar o tema do racismo de Estado, serão abordadas as doutrinas da razão de estado e da polícia, a história da verdade no âmbito das práticas judiciárias, o panoptismo e a origem da pena de prisão. Como ponto final, o tema do racismo associado à figura do inimigo – dará suporte a aproximações entre a filosofia foucaultiana e problemas contemporâneos como a violência, a suspensão de direitos de determinados grupos sociais, o recrudescimento das penas e das estruturas e instituições de vigilância e controle social / The presente paper will face some main concepts inserted in the philosophical work of Michel Foucault, such as power, sovereignty, discipline, surveillance, in the way to improve the analysis to what referes to the governing art. At this point, a specific scene of Nietzschean´s philosophy, in wich the theme of the sin takes place, will be added as a brief contribution. Between the new forms of the priest´s power, in Foucault, and the theme of State racism, other subjects will be approached, like the doctrine of State reason, the doctrine of police, the history of truth in the judicial practices, the panopticon, and the origens of the prison penalty. The final issue will face the theme of racism, wich will give support, in association to the notion of enemy, to the dialogue between the mentioned concepts of the foucaultian philosophy and some contemporary issues, connected to subjects such as violence, suspension of rights (from determinated social groups), reinforcement of penaltys, structures and institu

There is a paucity of scientific evidence into the lived experience of people who have a history of injecting drug use and are living with leg ulceration. Portraying the true voice of injecting drug users (IDUs) through narrative means is a novelty in contemporary literature. The representation of the life and the person behind the leg ulcer, having experienced addiction, is original from a purist narrative perspective. This study, led from the perspective of a nurse-researcher leading in the field of wound management, offers a unique opportunity to gain a rare glimpse into the daily life of IDUs, as reported in their own words. The aim of this study was to explore the experience of injecting drug users living with leg ulceration using qualitative methodology. A naturalistic paradigm framed the design by allowing participants to control the data in an unrestricted an open manner without direct intrusion form the researcher. Qualitative methodology was central to collecting data on life experience and feelings. The ethics process detailed a rigorous application to explore the professional, ethical virtues from the perspective of an insider-outsider working with sensitive data in a marginalised population. Diaries were kept and recorded by participants over four weeks in their routine daily life; this was followed by semi-structured interviews. The diaries allowed a unique insight into the past, present and future of IDUs and how their ulcer affected their lives. The diaries also facilitated a means of reflection on themselves and their wounded body. The interviews offered an opportunity to explore in detail the diary entries and other stories participants wished to share. The study recruited twelve participants from leg ulcer clinics set in London; three women and nine men older than 18 years of age (median age of 52 years; range 35 - 62 years). Ten completed the data collection process; two of the participants, aged 61 and 62 years, were married. Gatekeepers working with IDUs with leg ulceration were central to the process of engagement and recruitment. Participants welcomed the design as an opportunity to voice and share their journey of living with an open wound. The findings revealed the detailed suffering participants endured living with their ulcer: pain, shame and stigma were clearly voiced in their narratives. The majority of participants had experienced some form of stigma during their life and this was exacerbated as they were drug users. The self-blame and punishment triggered by this felt stigma was a detriment to the health of participants. Those in contact with specialist wound care services saw a significant improvement in wound healing and this had a positive impact on their wellbeing and their overall outlook on life. Participants also voiced enacted-stigma experienced from encounters in health practice. These negative experiences exacerbated the self-stigma. Findings also portrayed the multiple characteristics and talents of participants including humour, art and resilience. This research contributes to science and practice by understanding the lives of IDUs living with leg ulceration. It provides a platform from which to engage both generalists and specialists who care for these patients and has the potential to influence medical and social policy-making and clinical practice in this field. By means of narrative inquiry, this study may challenge the conventional social stereotypes, the taboos and the stigma still experienced by this patient group in health care.

Resilience is the process by which protective factors enable a child to achieve desirable outcomes despite the presence of adversity in their lives. It develops through the child's interaction with their ecosystem; their family, school and wider community. A resilient child has internal resources, external supports and the interpersonal skills required facilitate this interdependency. Narrative theory suggests that when a child's prevalent narratives focus on protective factors rather than risk factors this will form a resilient self-identity. This thesis combines resilience literature and narrative theory by exploring the process of developing children's resilience through enhancing and creating protective focussed stories through narrative therapy. The narrative methodology Narrative Oriented Inquiry (NOI), (Hiles and Cermak, 2008) is used to gather and then explore the stories told by three children, their parents and their teachers. The children who had been identified by their teachers as needing to become more resilient were engaged in a short series of narrative therapy sessions with the aim of changing the nature of the stories they held about themselves from stories based on risk factors to those based on protective factors. The process was further supported through inviting the child's parent and teacher into the therapeutic sessions. This thesis makes a unique contribution by exploring how children's resilience can be promoted through use of narrative therapy in professional practice. The implications for educational psychology practice and resilience research are discussed. A number of limitations to the research design and so the conclusions made are discussed, these primarily focus on the unknown impact of the narrative therapy on the children's behaviour beyond the sessions and the complex nature of the dual researcher/practitioner role. The thesis explores the efficacy of NOI for research of this type. The processes NOI offers allow 'the told', 'the teller' and 'the telling' to inform a deep understanding of the stories shared. Interpreting the stories through the six interpretative lenses offered by NOI enabled the researcher to compare the stories told by each participant and to compare the stories told by different participants before and after the narrative therapy. The thesis offers suggestions for further development of the advice around its use and discusses the contribution NOI could make to educational psychology practice.

Submitted by Matheus Almeida Bauer Zytkuewisz (matheus.bauer@unesp.br) on 2019-01-29T13:12:00Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação_Matheus_Almeida_Bauer_Zytkuewisz.pdf: 5568207 bytes, checksum: c6747256bad7b516b287fd10aa92c0ed (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Ana Carolina Gonçalves Bet null (abet@iq.unesp.br) on 2019-01-31T12:11:11Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 zytkuewisz_mab_me_araiq_int.pdf: 5431251 bytes, checksum: 6c4f196e54624f6719164e31587bd433 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2019-01-31T12:11:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 zytkuewisz_mab_me_araiq_int.pdf: 5431251 bytes, checksum: 6c4f196e54624f6719164e31587bd433 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-12-17 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / O presente trabalho de mestrado teve como temática geral a experimentação no ensino de Química, especificamente o emprego da perspectiva investigativa de ensino no nível superior. A pesquisa visou verificar como a inserção de um erro proposital em uma atividade experimental possivelmente suscitaria no amadurecimento e formação do Espírito Científico dos alunos do curso da licenciatura. A metodologia de pesquisa teve abordagem qualitativa do tipo Estudo de Caso, e as fontes de informação foram compostas de sujeitos e documentos. Os sujeitos foram os alunos do curso de licenciatura cursando no ano de 2017 na disciplina de Laboratório de Ensino de Química Geral, e os documentos textuais foram um roteiro alterado, um formulário de proposição de hipóteses adido de um roteiro provisório, e um relatório final, no qual os alunos também propuseram um roteiro retificado para a realização da atividade experimental. Ainda, foi realizado um grupo focal com os participantes da atividade, e os alunos também responderam a um questionário, o qual providenciou suporte para a conseguinte entrevista individual. O tratamento e análise das informações coletadas se deu pela Análise de Conteúdo, para a qual foram utilizadas categorias a priori para o questionário e entrevista reflexiva, e categorias a posteriori para o grupo focal e documentos textuais. Como conclusão do estudo, concebe-se que a intervenção aqui proposta, a qual é dotada de um elemento inédito, por si só, em ação pontual, não foi capaz de suscitar a níveis significativos características do espírito científico nos sujeitos. Porém, a mesma se revelou como excelente pedra angular para o início da construção do espírito científico e de noções mais adequadas de ciência nos sujeitos. / The work herein presented had as general theme practical work regarding chemical education, and had its scope on the employment of inquiry-based activities at the undergraduate level. This research intended to unveil how the interposition of a purposeful error on a experimental activity could promote the formation and maturation of the scientific spirit on undergraduate students. The research methodology had used a qualitative approach, on the manners of a case study, and the information sources regarded subjects and documents. The subjects were the students undergoing the “Laboratório de Ensino de Química Geral” course, and the textual documents were a modified script, a hypothesis form coupled with a provisional script and a final report, in whose the students should add a rectified script that would allow them to perform the activity without issues. In addition, the students composed a focus group with the groups that participated in our intervention, as well as an individual questionnaire regarding aspects of nature of science. The latter provided support for the accomplishment of individual interviews with the students. The data gathering and treatment of collected data was done in the ways of the content analysis, for whose we employed a priori analytical categories for the questionnaire and individual interview, and established a posteriori categories for the focus group and textual documents. As a conclusion, we conceived that the intervention proposed on this work, which features a brand-new tool for inquiry, by itself was unable to achieve significant aspects of the scientific spirit on the subjects. However, the intervention unraveled excellent potentialities as cornerstone for the scientific spirit and more informed notions of science on the subjects. / 001

This thesis is an autoethnographic exploration and articulation of aspects of my lived experience of the longterm impact of professional abuse. It is a context-dependent single case study written from a researcher-participant-counsellor perspective. In my review of the literature I demonstrate the challenges of researching and documenting the direct experiences of women who have been sexually exploited by male professionals. These challenges stem from our natural human tendency to deny traumatic experience, and from the prevailing culture of many social institutions which continues to have the effect of silencing women's voices and discrediting women's experience. The methodological approach I have taken in this thesis is evocative autoethnography. I have chosen this approach in order to document and analyse my present embodied experiences of remembering past abuse, continuing feelings of loss, and unfulfilled longing for resolution and release. I explore the relationship between my past and present selves in context, and consider the therapeutic possibilities of combining memory work, lifewriting, poetry, and imagination to create texts of remembering and re-remembering, to reclaim both what is and what might have been.

This study focuses on the potential contribution of new information communication technologies in higher education, in particular the use of microblogging, in transforming teaching practices to enhance critical thinking skills. Recognising the dearth of critical thinking skills in higher education and its importance in the cultivation of an engaged citizenry which is necessary for the creation of a vibrant and thriving democracy, the study seeks to investigate teaching practices in the higher education sector, utilizing the Community of Inquiry model to examine the possible iterative dialogues between lecturer and students in a first year class , in the form of microblogging posts , for evidence of potential critical engagement. In its finding , the study, whilst not being able to demonstrate significant evidence of higher order thinking, ascribed to the use of the of the microblogging activity , does however support the notion that the microblogging platform offers the potential for critical engagement but emphasizes that this potential , is to a very large degree, dependent on the adoption of appropriate and sound pedagogical strategies .