ABSTRACT The purpose of this portraiture study is to describe four African-American principals' experiences, in the context of their principal's role, with the interventions they championed in meeting the needs of their struggling students. This research attempts to answer questions concerning: What role did the four principals play in the targeted school reform? What interventions did each principal introduce and what evidence of effects do they identify for each one? How did each principal's values and beliefs affect what they chose to do? Framed within Social Justice Theory (SJT), the study provides insight into how these respondents increased student achievement and social behavior through the interventions that they championed. Data collection included school observations, interviews of principal participants, and the collection of principal generated artifacts such as awards, memos, and newspaper articles. Portraiture was the method used in this study. Several themes emerged from the narratives of the two men and two women. First, all four leaders were able to bring students, parents, and school staff members together. Second, there is a clear focus on how dedicated these men and women were to their work. The results and impact of their leadership, however, appear contextually unique, serendipitous, and distinctive.

I do not intend to talk about architecture as just shapes or forms but as an ongoing construction of the social, political and physical spaces we inhabit. I will concentrate on the different elements that constitute the process of making-the-world, together with the text, interventions on site, understanding the design as one of those elements, not as the final output of my work. This project is a reaction to the impact that the recent and on-going changes in society have in public space, or in other words: a reaction to changes in public life such as individualization being opposite to the commonality and ability to share in relationship with the effects those changes have had on public space, such as an overwhelming and growing privatization of those spaces and an increasing threat to their very existence. First, I explore existing public spaces and their construction through analysis and involvement in the city. I continue my explorations being in the spaces and interacting with different actors and react on the discovered aspects (potentialities, failures) by virtue of interventions. This leads to the discovery of features such as playfulness, openness, common ownership, voluntariness, equality, freedom and other as conditions that emerge from the different experiences and situations in which I have intervened. Combinations of them give opportunities for other forms of togetherness to be thought and discussed, but also for them to appear in space. Finally, those features become also an input for speculative proposals that allowed me to test my reflections: an imaginary projection onto the current situation of intuitions, ideas and ideals, which are integral for what I call Urban Commons. The Urban Commons I propose are connected to public life and social behaviour in public spaces and reflect on the possibilities of new ways of commonality. I will consider one intervention, its process and current state closer as I relate it to the making of the Urban Common. This imaginary projection also allows to criticise existing construction of public spaces and society in common.

The everyday survival of the other at the border between ‘East’ and ‘West’ is the object of this study. The country in-between, Estonia, is a ‘melting pot’ of Russian, Western and Nordic influence, what makes this zone an active, diverse, nevertheless invisible in the global awareness. The process of transition and rapid neoliberalization, which is characteristic for the post-socialist country such as Estonia, brings together number of side-effects, lots of redundant people, who could not adapt to the new regime, who speculate and trade. The investigation of ‘Russian’ semi-official spaces of trade in Estonian capital, Tallinn, reveals the values and defects of the open-air markets.  The thesis highlights the need to politicize the processes around the disappearing and/or transforming the open-air markets in the city. In spite of the fact, that the informal trading is often connected with poverty, illegality, low hygiene, distrust and crime, this work explores the alternative ways of trading, the power of immediacy and aesthetics in confrontation to the global capital. The architecture as the transversal practice cuts across the patterns of trading based on irresponsible consumerism and desire, and experiments with the original concept of the market with the dialogue in front. The speculative interventions are the sites of the common life, production and renewal.

This study examined the role of the replacement behavior when designing function-based interventions. Three students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) ages 12, 5, and 6, who displayed chronic off-task behavior participated in the three-phase study. In Phase 1, a descriptive functional behavioral assessment (FBA) was conducted for each student, and then each student's ability to perform the replacement behavior was assessed using a two-step approach. In Phase 2, two function-based interventions were designed for each student using the Decision Model (Umbreit, Ferro, Liaupsin, & Lane 2007). The first intervention consisted of methods to adjust antecedent and consequent contingencies of reinforcement alone, whereas the second intervention included methods to teach the replacement behavior. In Phase 3, the function-based interventions were implemented during typically occurring classroom activities for five weeks. For students who did not already perform the replacement behavior independently, the interventions that included strategies to teach the replacement behaviors produced more favorable results than the interventions that did not. High levels of treatment integrity and social validity were obtained.

Interventions which ameliorate the late effects of cancer treatment, and promote adjustment for children coping with cancer are needed (Kazak, 2005). The Beads of Courage® (BOC) Program (Baruch, 2002), is an arts-in-health program developed to strengthen resilience and alleviate suffering in children receiving treatment for cancer. Through the BOC Program, children receive different colored beads that serve as visible symbols of the many procedures they experience during cancer treatment. Despite the wide use of the BOC Program by more than 70 children's hospitals, the BOC Program has never been formally evaluated.The purpose of this study was to evaluate the BOC Program using qualitative descriptive methods. The specific aims of the program evaluation were to: 1) Describe the BOC Program process; 2) Describe how the BOC Program is implemented; and 3) Describe the potential outcomes of the BOC Program.Data collection methods with four BOC Program stakeholders included: Semi-structured interviews with children (N=6); focus groups with clinicians (N=10) and parents (N=5); and open-ended surveys with clinicians (N=9), parents (N=8) and bead artists (N=6). Findings indicate that the BOC Program is operating according to design (process and implementation), and the overall satisfaction and perceived worth of the BOC Program is high. Emerging categories from the content analysis describe the BOC Program as a form of narrative medicine that provides a reflective tool, a symbol of accomplishment, and joy and encouragement for children receiving treatment for cancer. Preliminary data support the BOC Program theory, with resilience-based protective factors (positive coping, derived meaning, social support) supported, and risk factors (uncertainty in illness, defensive coping) decreased in children who received the BOC Program. Future studies should include quantitative measures of factors of resilience to determine change over time in children receiving the BOC Program during cancer treatment. Findings from this study support theory development to further strengthen the body of knowledge on psychosocial adjustment issues for children coping with cancer. The findings also provide evidence to support the role that arts-in-health programs have in alleviating the experience of suffering in children coping with cancer.

Students with ASD may experience challenges in school; however, literature suggests that they should still have access to public education with appropriate services and supports (Burge, Ouellette-Kuntz, Hutchinson & Box, 2008; Levy & Perry, 2008; Mesibov & Shea, 1996; Odom, 2000; Porter, 2008). The purpose of the current study was to examine the views and perceptions of those involved in the transition of students with ASD from IBI to school in Northern Ontario. Using a mixed-methods approach, members of multiple transition teams were asked to complete The Transition Beliefs Inventory (Levy & Perry, 2008) and the Transition Practices Questionnaire (Levy & Perry, 2008) to assess their transition beliefs and experiences. The results of this study suggest that the transition is occurring as outlined by the North region Autism Intervention Program (AIP) and the Connections for Students model and could be used to inform continuous improvement of service and practices.

ADHD is one of the most common childhood psychiatric disorders, with symptoms that are frequently displayed in the school environment. Past studies have measured teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours towards ADHD, but very few studies have aimed to change teachers’ knowledge, attitudes and behaviour through the implementation of an intervention. The goal of the present study was to determine if a web-based medium is an effective tool for supporting knowledge, attitude, and behaviour change in teachers of elementary school children with ADHD. Teachers (n = 20) from Nova Scotia were recruited through word of mouth. Of these participants, 19 completed a 7-week intervention that consisted of presentations, web-links and discussion board activities related to different aspects of ADHD. Knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour were measured pre- and post-intervention. Teachers’ knowledge improved from pre- to post-intervention (p = 0.03). In terms of attitudes, although there was no change on the overall measure of attitude, there was a significant change on the Lack of Control (p = 0.001) and Perceived Competence (p = 0.000) subscales. A measure of teacher behaviour toward ADHD did not significantly change. Participants agreed that the content was presented in a way that was usable and easy to understand, the links and discussion board functions were useful, and they learned something new from each of the sessions. The study demonstrated that a web-based medium is a useful tool for knowledge creation and translation and has potential as a means of providing professional development to teachers about ADHD.

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Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

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