In the railway industry (like other industries), safety awareness campaigns are conducted as intervention programmes for providing educational programmes to change the attitudes and behaviours of the general public that interact with the railway environment. Such educational intervention programmes are ideally achieved by following pedagogical principles that ensure programme quality. However, it seems that even with the use of safety awareness campaigns, the desired safety behaviour among the general public in the railway environment is not yet established. The purpose of this research study was to understand how the Railway Safety Regulator (RSR) – as the custodian of railway safety in South Africa – plans, designs and implements its safety awareness campaigns as an educative process to combat railway-related occurrences involving the general public. As an exploratory study, the researcher applied the industry standard logic model framework (LMF) to guide the process of the investigation and utilised an interpretivist lens to understand the context of the phenomenon investigated. Following a qualitative programme evaluation research approach, a safety awareness campaign was studied as a single case study to understand how the RSR plans and develops their safety awareness campaigns. Six purposively selected RSR employees participated in the study, providing qualitative data through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The findings of the study conclude that the Regulator’s current practice of conducting awareness campaigns does not reflect an educative process, hence helping to explain why the envisaged change in public behaviour is not attained. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Humanities Education / MEd / Unrestricted

According to a recent report from the National Center for Educational Statistics, approximately 20% of the United States' high-school aged population is at risk of dropping out of high school, an outcome that strongly limits participation in economic and educational opportunities. The importance of earning a high school diploma has increased many local districts' efforts to close graduation gaps across the student population. Accordingly, this study evaluated a recuperative environmental leadership and service (EL&S) program in a northwestern local district to ascertain its effectiveness in providing at-risk students the personal and academic support required for high school graduation. Following the logic model program theory, this study examined the program's effectiveness in redirecting off-track students by comparing on time (4 year) and extended-time (> 4 years) graduation rates of at-risk students who did participate (n = 96) and did not participate (n = 76) in the EL&S. Through an ANCOVA, the 4 year and extended graduation rates, 68.3% and 89.1%, respectively, were analyzed and found to be higher than the on-time and extended-time graduation rates for the local district, 65.8% and 68.5%. Results indicated that the EL&S does statistically increase the participants' likelihood of graduating from high school. These findings illustrate the utility of EL&S interventions for at-risk students who have experienced multiple indicators of educational failure. Replication or adaptation of this EL&S program could provide social change benefits to educational stakeholders seeking to close the graduation gap; to families seeking educative and personal support for at-risk students; and to struggling students desiring to contribute to the economic, educative, and social growth of their community.