This study is designed to explore the applied behavioral research available to designers of educational landscapes and determine what aspects of that research can be extracted and applied to a physical landscape design. Its purpose is to create an awareness and understanding of the issues that designers should take into consideration to make an educational landscape design solution more developmentally appropriate for children. The literature review reveals that play forms the common link between learning and child development. The design considerations being presented in this study incorporate play. Being aware of and understanding the developmental and intellectual needs and abilities of children will give designers the foundation to make informed decisions and design choices in the creation of successful children's educational landscapes. The design considerations presented in this study are part of an exploratory investigation attempting to identify direct linkages between developmental/play activities and physical design elements. They offer a framework for creating landscape environments that meet the developmental needs of children. An existing educational landscape, the Jamestown Settlement near Williamsburg, Virginia will be evaluated in terms of these considerations. This educational landscape will be viewed from the perspective of a landscape architect aware of the developmental and play issues that surround child's learning as well as the potential for creating a site that offers a unique landscape experience. The outdoor learning environment is the site of the highest level of children's activity. It represents, at best, a potential site for investigation, exploration and practice of skills at various levels of complexity. At its worst, it is a static collection of objects offering little toward the developmental needs of the child. The landscape designer has the opportunity to provide a unique environment that supports the ways that children learn. The physical landscape has the potential to challenge children, offering choices in sight, smell, sound and touch. The landscape is ever-changing, providing broad learning opportunities where children can learn at their own pace, in their own unique style. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Mary C. Kingery-Page / School environments of today’s urban children are generally inflexible, restricting and uninspiring places for learning and exploration that are disconnected from their surrounding community and nature. Facilities and teaching methods do not keep pace with the evolving needs of the workforce and varying child learning styles (Stanbury 2009). Organized sports, limited free time and standardized testing steal the zest out of childhood discovery once felt by children who grew up with a connection to their surroundings, especially nature. Many adverse effects are seen as a result. “Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses,” (Louv 2008, 36). Children are left to face the world’s escalating environmental dilemmas with hindered social and cognitive skills, diseases related to association and disassociation from nature and an impaired relationship with their extended community. Programs like University Colorado Denver’s Learning Landscapes and California’s Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) and have individually worked to improve learning facilities, reconnect students with outdoor curriculum-based learning and establish a bond with their communities. But implemented designs reveal unmet potential, calling for advancement and further evolution of the school learning environment. MontClair Elementary in Oakland, California is a typical urban school with paved schoolyard, restricted boundary, weak link between curriculum and schoolyard, disconnect from the community and disassociation from nature. New CHPS verified facilities are being implemented on their existing campus to accommodate an increase in student population but the link between schoolyard and curriculum has only been minimally addressed in the proposed design. Integrating Learning Landscapes with the Collaborative for High Performance Schools to create a hybrid learning landscape framework will reconnect MontClair Elementary with the surrounding community and nature. Advancement of the CHPS program, through adaptation of their existing scorecard, will allow Hybrid Learning Landscape Framework to be quantitatively applied to MontClair Elementary.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Mary Catherine (Katie) Kingery-Page / This project explores the potential of gardens as specific physical places where humans cultivate vegetation. Humans are increasingly separated from natural systems, particularly vegetation, in their daily lives. Such a disconnect results in a failure to build emotional ties to and deep care for the natural world. To address this disconnect, landscape architects and planting designers need to understand how to design public gardens as ambiguous landscapes, landscapes that refer to natural ecosystems while also clearly revealing the human role in their design and care. Design choices involve environmental components and their articulation. Designers currently lack a vocabulary to identify the components of transformative experiences between people and plants. They also lack a visual understanding of how relationships between components can be articulated to establish ambiguity in specific sites. Synthesis of literature in experiential learning, dynamic vegetation, and planting design establishes a vocabulary of component cues to set up conditions for transformative experience in public gardens. Critical drawing of ambiguous landscapes by contemporary planting designers augments the researcher’s understanding of experiential cues. In order to explore the potential formal impact of designing for ambiguity throughout the design process, this project’s design application spans two sites: Chapman Botanical Garden in Apalachicola, Florida, and the Meadow on the Kansas State University campus, Manhattan, Kansas. Designing Chapman Botanical Garden offers the potential to be involved with the conceptual phases of site design: site planning, programming, and planting design. Designing at the Meadow offers the opportunity to be involved in the implementation phase of design: stakeholder involvement, selection and growing of plants, and design interpretation. Together, the two planting design explorations represent a complete design process for transformative experience.

Each organization has its specifics that affect the way knowledge is created and transferred. The existing literature in the field of knowledge creation, studies contemporary organizations and currently does not consider special cases such as high reliability organizations. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to complement the existing knowledge creation model by describing the knowledge creation process for high reliability organizations using the case study of the Lambohov Fire Station. A qualitative case study was conducted and carried out with the help of Lambohov Fire Station through non-participant observations and semi- structured interviews with one of the fire brigades. Our research has revealed that the learning processes in HROs differs from the existing theoretical framework. According to the literature, knowledge is created through conversion of tacit and explicit knowledge, while at the fire station the conversion involves tacit and implicit types of knowledge.

This study examines transformative learning in the context of an annual First Nations journey in traditional cedar dugout canoes tracing ancestral trading routes between Western Washington and British Columbia. Transformative learning is a shift or change in perspective of self, life, and the world. The goal was: to illuminate the role of Indigenous cultures in facilitating transformative learning for Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners; to contribute to the development of transformative learning theory; to provide research that contributes convergent solutions to global issues and the development of interdisciplinary methodology, integrating Western and Indigenous worldviews; and to construct an integrated transformative program for participants to ensure that the results benefit them. To achieve these goals, an Integrated Voice Approach (IVA) was applied, piecing together different techniques, tools, methods, representations and interpretations to construct a multi-faceted reality. The IVA is constructed through the use of five “voices” strengthened by building on each other: Indigenous Voice, Grounded Theory Voice, Auto-ethnographic Voice, Ethno-ecological Voice, and Integrative Voice, harmonizing the previous four voices. Demonstrated here are an integration of interviews, researcher field notes, participation, observations and photographs, revealing that transformative learning in this context is dependent on the cultural landscape, cultural memory and somatic and embodied knowing, enacted in a repeating cycle of paddling, circling, dancing, singing, storytelling and drumming. The components of this learning process are measured through mental, emotional, spiritual and physical indicators and draw on traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom. The study develops guiding principles to provide a foundation for future curriculum development for transformative learning. / Graduate

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