No description available.

Today’s video game players sit in front of their screens immersing themselves within the fictional environment of the video game. They connect their physical self to the game-controller and their cerebral self to the game-world. The video game medium becomes a cybernetic and psychological appendage, a prosthesis that allows game players to share their consciousness across actual and virtual realities. Such an appendage has the ability to expand the personal spatial environment of the game players as they navigate the spaces of an increasingly complex, digitally constructed extension of the imagination. The thesis begins with an autobiographical summary of personal experiences in the suburbs and the resultant escape from suburbia that video games provide. The thesis then presents a series of experiential diaries generated from gameplay. This is followed by a conceptual analysis that uses six meditations to discuss the spaces and experiences presented in the diaries. The purpose of the conceptual analysis is to investigate how the narrative and spatial experiences of single player role playing video games expand our perceptions of architecture and space beyond the real-world. The spaces of these games represent a new way of thinking about, experiencing and creating architecture.

C. S. Lewis’s novel, Till We Have Faces, has been misunderstood by both scholars and readers alike. This paper seeks to read the text through the lens of Lewis’s own literary criticism. It begins by presenting Lewis’s fundamental dilemma of the mind, the rift between the rational and the imaginative faculties. Lewis posits myth as a “partial solution” to this problem. This paper traces Lewis’s ideas from his early position on myth as “beautiful lies” to the more nuanced, later position where myth is connected with terms like “truth,” “reality,” “fact” and “history.” Using the text of “On Stories,” and the chapter “On Myth” from Lewis’s book An Experiment in Criticism, this paper argues that Lewis, because of the basic elusiveness of mythic experience, steps into the use of story or narrative as a provisional solution for the dilemma of the mind. This is then applied to Till We Have Faces, arguing that the story is not a myth or an allegory, but a realistic novel with a hidden mythic reality, a Lewisian narrative that fulfills his requirements of Story. A close reading of Till We Have Faces connects the text with Lewis’s realism of content and realism of presentation. This reading then places the text within the problem of rationality set against imaginative reception. Till We Have Faces is a test case for Lewis’s extensive ideas about Divine Myth, its hiddenness behind and within narrative, and its power to heal a divided mind. The narrative of Till We Have Faces, for the main character Orual, as well as for the receptive reader, comes to embody the transformative power of extra-literary myth within the containment of word-dense, tensed story.

The purpose of the research study was to inquire into the experiences of youth who leave school before graduating with a high school diploma. Through the narrative inquiries into the life and school stories of the participants, several threads are identified, providing opportunity for further reflection on current school policies and practices. The research study shows that the life and the school stories of youth are not separate but are interrelated in ways that add to the complexity of the issues facing youth in contemporary school settings. / Special Education

This study investigated the effect of a two week intensive narrative intervention program on the narrative abilities of four inner-city children, using an interrupted time-series with removed treatment design. The intervention program focused on teaching five specific story grammar units. The variables of interest in this study were: improvement in story macrostructure, microstructure and language quantity, as well as improvement of scores on standardized narrative tools. All participants showed an improvement in at least one of the narrative skills examined in this study; one of four participants showed an improvement in all of the narrative skills examined in the study. The results of this study indicate that intensive narrative intervention is a viable treatment approach and should be further investigated. / Speech-Language Pathology

Maps and atlases are traditionally convenient documents for representing the surface of the earth. They provide an impression of spatial relationships and facilitate an appreciation of geographical and environmental characteristics. They are essential tools for creating an awareness of the world beyond the limits of our experience. Maps can also inform readers on the flow of cultural or economic influences, because they show localities in relation to their neighbours. Furthermore, they capture the reader's imagination by provoking the desire for adventure and exploration. Occasionally maps are also censored because they are an efficient means of indicating strategic features. This project concerns the historical and contemporary examples of communicating information visually by analysing a selection of conventional literary and visual sources, which informs the research. It includes graphic forms that present abundant data, for example, atlases and texts on the architectural history of Central Asia, Tibet, China and Japan. The studio works will examine illustration, draughtsmanship, rendering, and textual/visual imagery. The outcome will be an illustrated atlas of traditional architecture in the earthquake zones of Central Asia (Xinjiang), Tibet, China, Japan and related areas. The graphic format is used as a narrative for the communication of environmental, cultural and architectural data of the region. The atlas is also intended to present the subject in a holistic form in relation to environmental influences on the structures and materiality of buildings, and the broader field of history.

This project explores the notion of a world experienced and mediated through the image. The focus is on issues related to representation of that world to self through image-based narrative. Central to the creation of these worlds is imagery published in various public access media such as television, the internet, print publishing. Although filtered and interpreted personally, because of their ubiquity and familiarity, these images collectively constitute representation of our culture. Our construction of the world (the way we represent it to ourselves) is contingent on our encounter with such images.Sited within the milieu of a media-fixated age, the project aims to deal with our desire to make sense of the litter of images that people our visual horizon. The project seeks to employ these images as objects of direct experience and to consider the subjective frameworks and cultural narratives through which they are filtered.The work will play on the desire to make relational sense of images, often by invoking narrative. Painting will be used as a means to provoke encounter between imagery, with the performative act of painting, itself a narrative, both being and representing a process of mediation

Humans make sense of experience through narrative and stories. ?Narratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, our experience, and ultimately ourselves? (Kerby, 1991, p. 3). Story enlarges our capacity to understand our actions and our values and lets us talk about them (Novak, 1978, p. 63). Story is a ?mode of thinking and feeling? that facilitates people?s ability to ?create a version of the world in which, psychologically, they can envisage a place for themselves?a personal world? (Bruner, 1996, p. 39). It is also vital to the realization of that world. This study is a storyteller-teacher-researcher?s personal quest to find a good teacher. The stories are my looking. I am telling a story of looking for a good teacher that implicitly demonstrates how narratives facilitate a deeper understanding of good teaching. I pursue the quest simultaneously in three realms that blend with, enrich, and enlarge each other: recovering from illness, journeying around the world, and reflecting on teaching practice. The stories in this work are showing the capacity of narrative imagining in human experience. Through the stories re-presented here, I made discoveries that are very important to being a good teacher. Yet those discoveries cast a shadow across something else that is necessary to being a good teacher and kept it hidden from my view. It was not until I had almost completed the storying process of telling, reflecting, and discovering that the shadow receded and that which is so integral to being a good teacher was revealed.

Thesis (doctoral)--Lärarhögskolan i Stockholm, 2006. / "Doctoral dissertation 2006"--Half title verso. Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-269).

Thesis (MA(Psychology))-University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.