This autoethnographic study presents a narrative of my lifelong yearning to pursue the practice of magic while concurrently managing the frustrations of being a public elementary school teacher. This study also presents sets of facilitating factors that enabled me to surmount personal, professional, and sociocultural challenges to rekindle my direction and purpose in life. The research questions guiding this study include the following: 1) What are the multiple levels of influence that have contributed to my desire to be a magician and leave the teaching profession? ; and 2) In the interrelation of the above context, how do I reignite my artistic passion and purpose? Using the Bronfenbrenner model of human ecology, this study explores multiple levels of influence spanning those from a sociocultural perspective to those of an inter- and intrapersonal nature.

Curriculum is a means by which the medium of thought finds expression. It is a palette for the mind. Curriculum is a device by which thoughts are given form that can be shared. In the hands of a curriculum artist, symphonies of thought are conceived, composed, and performed. Like a palette in the hands of a master, curriculum in the hands of a teacher can transform minds. This dissertation seeks to examine, through reflective inquiry, the efficacy of an integrative, concept‐driven curriculum framework for novice elementary teachers, and, thereby, posit a generalized model of reflective curriculum inquiry to generate a deeper understanding for the researcher and her readers. The emergent model is not a curriculum, but when viewed as a framework, this model can become a means to facilitate design and to further support the development and evaluation of curricula. This dissertation is a story of how a teacher was made, not born. It is a story of how students learned conceptually and performed purposefully. It is also a story of roles and relationships found between students, teachers, parents, administrators, and curriculum. Throughout this dissertation, actor‐network theory (ANT) was used to help describe these relationships between the various roles that I assumed in relation to others, resources, and educational settings. Finally, this dissertation reveals a significant and direct relationship between standards‐derived concept vocabulary, subject matter integration, and literacy development that emphasized the need for a configurable curriculum framework to serve as a model for curriculum inquiry. / text

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

No description available.

Abstract: My inquiry, involving participant-observation and self-study, explores the stories of four older women through verbal and visual narratives. Showing how two specific types of visual narratives—sandpictures and collages—stimulate experiential story-telling and promote understanding about life experiences, I also illustrate how engagement with images extends learning and meaning-making. Effective in carrying life stories and integrating experience, the visual narratives also reveal archetypal imagery that is sustained and sustaining. Considering how visual narratives may be understood independently, I describe multiple strategies that worked for me for entering deeply into the images. I also elaborate on the relationship of visual narratives to accompanying verbal narratives, describing how tacit knowing may evolve. Through this process, I offer a framework for a curricular approach to visual narratives that involves feeling and seeing aesthetically and associatively and that provides a space for learners to express their individual stories and make meaning of significant life events. Salient narrative themes include confrontation with life-death issues, the experience of “creating a new life,” an avid early interest in books and learning, and a vital connection to the natural world. New professions after mid-life, creative expression, and volunteerism provide fulfillment and challenge as life changes promote attempts to marry relationships with self and others to work and service. My therapy practice room was the setting for five sessions, including an introduction, three experiential sandplay sessions, and a conclusion. Data derive from transcripts from free-flowing conversations, written narratives, photographs of sandpictures, and field notes written throughout the various phases of my doctoral process. This study of older women, with its emphasis on lifelong learning, visual narratives, and development of tacit knowing, will contribute to the field of narrative inquiry already strongly grounded in verbal narrative and teacher education/development. It may also promote in-depth investigations of male learners at a life stage of making meaning of, and integrating, their life experiences. New inquirers may note what I did and how it worked for me, and find their unique ways of extending the study of visual narratives while venturing into the broad field of diverse narrative forms.

Seimo laikinosios tyrimo komisijos - vienas iš Seimo vidinių darinių. Jos skirstomos į laikinąsias tyrimo komisijas valstybinės svarbos klausimams spręsti ir į kitas laikinąsias tyrimo komisijas. Pirmosios grupės komisijos veiklos rezultatai naudojami Seimo įgyvendinant pagrindines funkcijas - leidžiant įstatymus, vykdant parlamentinę kontrolę, steigiant institucijas ir skiriant pareigūnus bei tvirtinant valstybės biudžetą ir stebint jo vykdymą. antrosios grupės komisijos skirtos pateikti išvadas, ar yra pagrindas panaikinti Seimo nario teisinę neliečiamybę ir ar yra pagrindas pradėti apkaltos procesą. / Provisional Investigation Commission of the Parlament - one of the family of internal structures. They are divided into commissions of inquiry of national importance and the issues of interim study committees. The first group of the operating results for the main use of family functions - passing laws, the parliamentary control, creation of institutions and officials on the state budget and approving and monitoring its implementation. The second group of the Commission for an opinion, or a withdrawal of a member of the Parlament of immunity and whether there are grounds for an impeachment process.

This research is a nomadic inquiry into the ethics and aesthetics of three makers’ social and material practices. Deleuze’s concept of the nomad operated in multiple ways throughout the process, which was embedded in performative engagements that produced narratives of becoming. Over four months, I built relationships with three people as I learned about the ethico-aesthetic significance of their daily practices. The process started by interviewing participants in their homes and expanded over time to formal and informal engagements in school, community, and agricultural settings. I used Guattari’s ecosophical approach to consider how subjectivity was produced through spatial assemblages by spending time with participants, discussing material structures and objects, listening to personal histories, and collaboratively developing ideas. Participants included a builder who repurposed a missile base into a private residence and community gathering space, an elementary art teacher who practiced urban homesteading, and a young artist who developed an educational farm. The research considers the affective force of normalized social values, the production of desire by designer capitalism, and the mutation of life from neoliberal policies. Our experiences illuminate the community-building potential of direct encounters and direct exchanges. The project generates ideas for becoming an inquirer in the everyday and reveals possibilities for producing pedagogical experiences through collective and dissensual action. Ultimately, the project produces hope for performative and anti-disciplinary approaches to education, rupturing false divisions that fragment the force of thought, to produce, instead, aesthetic experiences that privilege processes and are based in direct and collective engagements with life.

Master of Science / Department of Communications and Agricultural Education / Jason D. Ellis / The general public is more generationally and geographically removed from agricultural production today than ever before, yet as influential as ever with regards to its ability to impact the operating conditions of the animal agriculture industry. To date, the agriculture industry has focused research and extension on how to educate and persuade the public in order to gain support for its practices and policies. Little work has investigated how the language choices of those communicating about agriculture may be functioning to position themselves and other participants with regards to authority and credibility, and how this affects their communication and the industry as a whole. This study sought to develop an understanding as to how three key groups in the animal agriculture conversation (experts, professional communicators, and agricultural advocates) use discourse and language to position themselves and other participants, their explanations of opposition to animal agriculture, and their ideas about how to best present and justify their arguments to the wider public. In addition to this, the study also sought to understand what power structures and dynamics exist within the conversation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data for a critical discourse analysis. The discursive practices of the participants functioned to ultimately undermine and delegitimize the role of the public and individuals and groups opposed to animal agriculture, as well as position the industry and its constituents as the only authoritative and credible voices in the animal agriculture conversation. This is likely to be prohibitive to achieving the goals of agricultural communication activities. Those communicating on behalf of the animal agriculture industry should become more aware of how their beliefs, values, and ideologies impact the discourse from which they are operating, as well as how their communication is functioning. This research was undertaken from a critical inquiry perspective, shedding light on some of the power structures inherent between the animal agriculture industry and the general public. Others undertaking agricultural sociology and related research should consider doing so integrating a similar theoretical perspective to continually challenge the assumptions and conditions under which the industry operates.

An authoritarian and bureaucratic ethos adopted by South African Schools prior to 1994 continues to be adopted in many schools. It may be assumed that with the advent of the new South African democratic government in 1994 there would be more freedom given to schools to adopt different leadership styles that were relevant to their school context. Given the top-down culture and authoritarian leadership structures of schools that were designed and developed during the apartheid era, secondary school principals and school management teams have struggled to adopt a more democratic approach to running a school since 1994. In the previous dispensation, school decision making was mostly not a collective effort, and involved a minimum of consultation and sharing of ideas, with staff not being seen as having the role or potential to positively influence significant school decisions. The national Department of Education (2003) refers to this as “… the entrenched bureaucratic and hierarchical management practices inherited from apartheid traditions.” However, greater choice and autonomy of thought are part and parcel of the democratic paradigm. A comprehensive literature review on the Community of Enquiry (CoE) methodology, a resource developed by Matthew Lipman, revealed a more open and inclusive approach to thinking together and embraces the principals of choice and autonomy. It is proposed that this methodology could be used to help school management teams (SMTs) become more collaborative and democratic in their approach to decision-making. Particular attention will be paid to the democratic values that underpin a CoE, in particular the values of equality, justice and freedom will be discussed with specific reference to the South African context. Bureaucratic, autocratic and democratic leadership styles may be adopted by the SMTs in various schools and each leadership style could influence the decision making process as well as the culture within a school. The CoE methodology could work in conjunction with a democratic leadership style to allow SMTs to be more collaborative and inclusive in the decision making process.

This thesis documents the everyday experiences of adults with disabilities living in a rural area of South Africa. Given South Africa’s tumultuous history, characterised by human rights violations incurred through cultural, political and racial disputes, and the country’s current state of socio-economic and political turmoil, violence has come to represent a core feature in the lives of many South Africans. This, together with the impact of unemployment, food insecurity and unequal power distribution, has significantly affected the ways in which many people make sense of their life experiences. Despite the fact that exposure to unequal power dynamics, violence, marginalisation and exclusion are documented to dominate the life experiences of people with disabilities, little is understood about the ways in which these aspects manifest in the interpretation and reconstruction of experiences. Previous research into the field of disability studies has depended primarily on quantitative measures, or on the reports of family members and caregivers as proxies, perpetuating the cycle of voicelessness and marginalization amongst adults with disabilities. Those studies which have adopted qualitative measures in order to explore the psychosocial experiences of disability have focussed largely on the limitations imposed by physical access, and have relied predominantly on the medical and social models of disability, or on the World Health Organisation’s International Classification on Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO ICF, 2001). These models consider the psychosocial experience of disability to be universal, and do not adequately take into account the impact of cultural and contextual variables. This has negatively impacted on the establishment of a research repository upon which evidence-based practice has been developed. This thesis aimed to explore and document the lived experiences of 30 adults with a variety of disabilities, living in 12 rural villages in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. A combination of narrative inquiry and participant observation was employed in order to examine the relationship between personal and social interpretations of experience. Data analysis was conducted using a combination of Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) Three Dimensional Narrative Inquiry Space, Harré’s Positioning Theory (1990, 1993, & 2009), and Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Results revealed that narratives were plurivocal in nature, giving rise to a complex relationship between personal and social interpretations of experience. The findings highlighted the impact of cultural norms, values and roles on making sense of experiences associated with disability. Four new types of narrative emerged, none of which conformed to the current interpretations of lived experience as reported in the literature. All of the narratives were pervaded by the embodied experience of violence, including evidence of structural, physical, psychological and sexual violence, as well as violence by means of deprivation. This gave rise to a sense of moral decay and highlighted the ways in which abuse of power has become woven into lived experience. In this way insight was gained into the complex interplay between impairment, exclusion, high mortality rates, violence, and poverty in rural areas. Narrative inquiry proved to be a particularly useful tool for providing insight into disability as a socio-cultural construct, drawing attention to a variety of clinical, policy and theoretical implications. These gave rise to a number of broader philosophical questions pertaining to the role of memory, vulnerability and responsibility, and the ways in which all citizens have the potential to be complicit in denying the reality of lived experience amongst vulnerable members of society. These findings demand attention to the ways in which governments, communities and individuals conceive of what it means to be human, and consequently how the ethics of care is embraced within society.