Including values for non-market natural and cultural resources in decision processes present challenges to resource managers. This dissertation uses a place-based resource-driven approach to assess the values associated with non-market resources in a national park. Existing valuation methods produce reliable measures for market resources, but are criticized for their inability to express values beyond uni-dimensional monetary values. Expressed values of park visitors for the natural and cultural resources within a national park are analyzed in order to quantitatively depict multiple dimensions of value for each resource relative to all others. Resulting abstract value-spaces are used to depict stakeholder group values and illustrate shared and unique values that can aid in decision processes. Value spaces are also used to examine the effects of resource losses on expressed values. These are observed through potential impact scenarios and can inform long-range planning and adaptation efforts. This research finds that a two-dimensional value space, representing aesthetic and functional qualities of resources can be formed to depict the values for included resources relative to one another. A core set of resources commonly valued by all major stakeholder groups is easily identifiable. Direct comparisons of value spaces for groups provides clear distinctions between group values for specific resources. Finally, subjecting value spaces to resource loss scenarios, indicates consistent changes in values while patterns of resource values remain stable, which can be used in participation and in conflict resolution efforts. These findings provide previously unobservable insight regarding the similarities and differences of group values and value stability as resource managers seek public input, resolve conflicts and craft long-range resource plans. This methodology establishes a basic framework for assessing relative resource values, non-monetarily, and along multiple dimensions. Value spaces can be used to proactively inform planning and decision processes from initial problem identification, establishment of alternative solutions and through assessments of implementation.

This study explores the experiences of teachers undertaking place-based education in or near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, including their perceptions of the best ways of implementing place-based education. In all, seven teachers undertaking place-based education in their teaching practices were interviewed to share their experiences. Qualitative interviews with the aid of an interview guide were used to collect data. In collecting the data, five individual interviews and one group interview involving two teachers were conducted. Content analysis was used in analyzing the data. Three overarching research questions guided this research. These had to do with the experiences of teachers undertaking place-based education, challenges of teachers undertaking place-based education in their teaching practice, and knowledge and skills needed to implement place-based education. The interviews with the participants were transcribed and coded resulting in ten themes emerging. The themes that emerged helped to answer the three overarching research questions. The findings suggests that although challenges exist in implementing place-based education, educators can overcome these challenges if they are motivated, adaptable and willing to work with all stakeholders in a place-based program. Finally, new teachers who want to implement place-based education in their teaching practices must understand the local community, understand different teaching and learning methods, and gain knowledge and understanding in safety issues.

This dissertation examines how to evaluate a place-based poverty reduction program across different sites and scales. Unpacking urban planning’s dominant, normative construction of poverty, neighbourhoods, youth, and evaluation, this thesis presents an alternative view of evaluation, which recognizes the complexity and diversity of qualitative narratives describing the impacts of targeted human service programs on the places and peoples they serve. To answer this question, I crafted a theoretical framework linking the concept of the right to the city as presented by Lefebvre (1996), to Uri Bronfenbrenner’s (1977, 1979), 1995) understanding of the micro, macro, and meso systems in which children and youth operate. I then conducted a small-scale, qualitative case study of Pathways to Education Canada as it replicated and expanded, to examine and explore different ways of evaluating the success of a place-based poverty human service program. Using a participatory methodology, I listened to different stakeholders’ voices, particularly those of youth and staff, to examine and explore tensions in the construction of success.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2007. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Oct. 21, 2008). An Interdisciplinary Master of Arts thesis in English, Education, and Environment and Natural Resources. Includes bibliographical references (p. 150-154).

This study uses Foucauldian governmentality as a framework to examine the interplay of neoliberal and place-based discourses, as well as the political rationalities aimed at governing citizens. It identifies neoliberalism as an ideological project and different parties play a role in the facilitation and circulation of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality. The possibility for accommodation of the two mismatched theoretical position, poststructuralism and Marxism, is also discussed. This study not only focuses on the apparatus of technologies of domination, but also responds to a recent call to recognize the creative possibilities and freedom of an individual. A geneology of poverty and welfare discourse is examined in this study through a complementary combination of qualitative coding analysis and quantitative content analysis of 20 years of Hong Kong newspaper articles. Seventy in-deep interviews with poor people, social workers, and volunteers, and participant observation were conducted in three NGOs for one year. Five central governing practices among poverty news articles supporting neoliberal rationality and mentalities and four oppositional claims are also found. Three major shifts in discursive strategies were identified as coinciding with the major socio-political changes in Hong Kong. The result shows that the mobilization of moral panic prompted a shift in the discourse regarding poverty from a story-like form of social citizenship to rational language of economic citizenship. In this, news media use their institutional power to determine the legitimate way to discuss poverty. Faced with journalism preference of scientism, rationality, and extraordinary stories, social actors and government officials use survey, official statistics, rational language and demonstrations to attract media attention. Journalists condition the audience to act as good citizens by repeating the self-reliance project. The individuals are either conditioned to behave themselves or to monitor the behavior of others in economic terms. This study further examines how the society in terms of power and knowledge constitutes subjectivity. It first illustrates how gazes might transform social relations in our everyday lives. Individuals might submit to power as technology of domination under constant surveillance. At the same time, poor people accomplish goals and actualize themselves as technology of self

Small businesses are significant contributors to a nation’s job creation and employment. These enterprises face many challenges that often lead to failure within 5 years. Some small business owners fail because they lack the necessary strategies for maintaining a sustainable business operation. The purpose of this qualitative descriptive phenomenological study was to analyze how to overcome the high failure rate of small businesses in Accra, Ghana. The conceptual framework for this study was institutional and planned behavior theories. The research questions sought participant’s experiences with small business survival that may have led to sustainable businesses. Data were collected from 20 participants using semistructured telephone interviews in Accra, Ghana. Participants were small business owners in the consumer products industry. Eligibility required full-time self-employed persons aged 26-65 years who must have been in business beyond 5 years. Thematic analysis was used to analyze data. After data analysis, member checking was used to establish the trustworthiness of the outcomes. The main result of the study was that small businesses that had identified viable business opportunities in sustaining the needs and challenges of potential customers reported gains in sales and customer retention. The findings were significant for improving sustainable small business efforts, improving self-employment, reducing poverty through inclusive business models, and creating positive social change. Small business owners and policymakers might benefit from this research by reducing redundancies in their operations. This effort should promote an environment that enhances wealth creation and the quality of life of small business owners in Accra, Ghana.

Globally oriented content and perspectives are urgently needed in United States secondary classrooms as the world continues to become more interconnected. U.S. secondary students are typically exposed to global topics in world history courses. There is limited research on the intersection of global education and world history, particularly within empirical studies concerning teachers’ positionalities and practice. This qualitative study explores this gap by asking: How do self-identified globally oriented world history teachers’ positionalities influence their curricular and pedagogical decisions? The sub-questions are: What identities, experiences, and surrounding social structures shape teachers’ understanding of themselves as global educators? Where/when/how do world history teachers position themselves within the knowledge, material, and teaching about the world? This study, utilizing interviews, elicitation tasks (concept mapping, identity card sort, global image ranking), and observations of teaching, investigated eight globally oriented New York City public school world history teachers. Findings suggest reconceptualizing teacher positionalities to include worldviews and place-based experiences abroad in addition to identities, subjectivities, and contexts. These intertwining aspects of world history teachers’ positionalities influenced their practice to teach with a global orientation in a world history classroom. Four worldviews were significant in how these teachers framed the world for themselves and their students: interconnectedness, justice-orientations, cosmopolitanism, and critical perspectives. Place-based experiences abroad were significant aspects to their positionalities in that they gained content knowledge of the place while confronting their social positions and privileges. These engagements contributed to the ways in which they approached their knowledge construction of the world in their approaches to curriculum and teaching. I suggest these aspects of teacher positionalities be integrated into future research in global education and social studies teacher education programs.

This study explores a place based pedagogy of Philadelphia jazz history for K-12 students. While many intersections exist between place based programming and jazz public history both nationally and locally, the Philadelphia jazz public history community does not focus on educational programming. Though centered in Philadelphia, this study includes educational materials and field research for both formal and informal educators to increase critical, interdisciplinary African American musical history content in the classroom. The lesson plans found within exemplify a cross section of social studies educational literature, the history of African American narratives in Philadelphia schools, and place based jazz history in the city. / History

Writing gives children a chance to practice self-expression and creativity (Dobson, 2015b; Millard, 2005) as they learn needed literacy skills (Calkins, 2003). When children write, they appropriate semiotic materials from popular culture, literature, and the world around them (Dyson, 1997, 2003, 2013). Although the National Commission on Writing (2003) recommended that writing instruction be "placed squarely in the center of the elementary curriculum," attention to writing continues to lag behind other subjects (Coker et al., 2016; Cutler and Graham, 2008; Korth et al., 2016; Simmerman et al., 2012). Vygotsky's sociocultural (1978) and creativity (1971) theories, together with Freire's critical pedagogy theory (1970), form the basis of the theoretical framework used for this research. Various literature on the importance of writing (e.g., Dyson, 1993, 2008), creativity (e.g., Csikszsentmihalyi, 1996), and place (e.g., Gruenewald, 2003) were also influential in its framing. This study sought to illuminate the possibilities that emerge when rural students in the intermediate elementary grades engage in narrative fiction writing. Qualitative content analysis (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005) was used to analyze 237 stories written as the culminating project of the semester-length Fiction unit of Promoting PLACE (Azano et al., 2017a), a place-based language arts curriculum for fourth graders attending rural schools. The researcher first typed the stories, making low-level inferences to correct spelling and grammar mistakes so comparisons could be made across stories about macrostructure elements (Koustofas, 2018), or the overall structure, organization, and cohesion of the piece. The data were described and catalogued according to codes that emerged from a deep dive into the stories. Thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was used to inductively identify thematic understandings across the stories. Specifically, the researcher searched for expressions of identity, connections to place, and mastery of age-appropriate language arts standards. Findings revealed that students can exert agency and express their identities through creative writing and that many students demonstrated mastery of needed language arts skills through the narrative fiction writing task. The study illuminated the value of sharing place-based literature as "mentor texts" for rural students, the importance of providing choice in writing assignments, and the need to foster the writing talent of rural students as a matter of social justice. / Doctor of Philosophy / Writing gives children a chance to practice self-expression and creativity (Dobson, 2015b; Millard, 2005) as they learn needed literacy skills (Calkins, 2003), yet attention to writing lags behind other subjects (Coker et al., 2016; Cutler and Graham, 2008; Korth et al., 2016; Simmerman et al., 2012). Using Vygotsky's sociocultural (1978) and creativity (1971) theories, together with Freire's critical pedagogy theory (1970), as the theoretical framework, this study sought to illuminate the possibilities that emerge when rural students in the intermediate elementary grades engage in narrative fiction writing. Qualitative content analysis (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005) was used to analyze 237 stories written as the culminating project of the semester-length Fiction unit of Promoting PLACE (Azano et al., 2017a), a place-based language arts curriculum for fourth graders attending rural schools. Thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was used to inductively identify thematic understandings across the stories, and findings revealed that students exerted agency and expressed their identities through creative writing while demonstrating mastery of needed language arts skills. The study illuminated the value of sharing place-based literature as "mentor texts" for rural students, the importance of providing choice in writing assignments, and the need to foster the writing talent of rural students as a matter of social justice.

These combined manuscripts explore the intersections of rural education, community influences, and diverse identities by challenging rural monoliths and deficits while working to address opportunity gaps for rural youth and educators. Theories throughout this work include critical pedagogies of place (Bass and Azano, 2024; Greenwood, 2003), critical theories disrupting power (Freire, 1970), a pedagogy of love (Darder, 2017), and poetic explorations for a sense of belonging and a celebration of place (bell hooks, 2008; 2012) allowing for my own poetic voice to "cry out" (hooks, 2012, p. 12). The critical engagement with place norms and influences on identity development is further rooted in Queer studies, binding these manuscripts as a "tool of incessant unsettling" (Luciano and Chen, 2015, p. 192) by challenging the role of cis-heteronormativity (Berlant and Warner, 1995) in rural contexts. These combined manuscripts situate knowledge production and identity development in educational spaces in conversation with rural education, local and federal policies, issues of access, histories of erasure, and local and societal cis-heterosexual norms. Literature informing these manuscripts focused on rural schools and the unique challenges embedded in those communities, such as rural poverty (Lewis and Boswell, 2020; Tieken, 2022), geographical inequities (Lichter et al., 2012; Showalter et al., 2023), fewer resources for Queer youth (Kosciw et al., 2022; Movement Advancement Project, 2019; Ramos et al., 2014), and limited enrichment opportunities (Azano et al., 2020; Callahan and Azano, 2019; Rasheed, 2019), with a focus on how these challenges influence rural identities and widen opportunity gaps for rural learners. As a manuscript style dissertation, each manuscript centralizes parts of these theories and literatures. Manuscript 1 is a grounding theoretical piece that explores how Queer rural narratives are tangled in a spectrum of visibility. Manuscript 2 is a literature review that navigates how rural education and Queer identities have been discussed in research and reports. Manuscript 3 is a policy brief that presents a framework to critique federal and local anti-Queer policies and their influence on rural Queer youth and educators. Manuscript 4 is an empirical study exploring how rural youth explore their own sense of place and identity while attending a residential summer camp aimed to address an opportunity gap for rural gifted learners. While each manuscript stands alone, combined, they present themes about (a) the internalizations and externalizations of rural identity, (b) the value of diverse rural representation, and (c) the influence of policy and place norms in rural schools. These manuscripts suggest the need to uplift vulnerable and historically marginalized narratives in rural schools in order to challenge rural monolithic narratives, the possibilities of alternative learning spaces to address opportunity gaps for Queer and gifted youth, and the hope for more safe spaces that celebrate diverse rural identities and experiences to increase authentic learning opportunities to celebrate place and self together. / Doctor of Philosophy / This manuscript style dissertation explores rural education, community influences, and diverse, under-served rural populations. Each manuscript engages with issues of deficit narratives, addressing assumptions, and monolithic perspectives of rurality that widen opportunity gaps that allow for all rural youth to access authentic learning. The theoretical framings in the embedded manuscripts center a critical pedagogy of place (Greenwood, 2003), Queer studies (e.g., Berlant and Warner, 1995; Luciano and Chen, 2015,), critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), and concepts of belonging (hooks, 2008, 2012). The four manuscripts address this central research topic by: (a) engaging with the role of visibility in rural spaces from Queer narratives; (b) exploring how research has discussed the intersections of rural education and Queerness in K-12 schools; (c) addressing anti-Queer policy implementation in rural schools; and (d) analyzing how rural, gifted learners explored their sense of place and identity at a summer enrichment experience designed to address an opportunity gap for rural, gifted learners. Overarching themes illuminate the importance in uplifting and celebrating diverse, rural experiences, especially Queer, to (re)root a sense of place value and authentic identity in a rural educational experience, which works to address educational opportunity gaps that uniquely influence rural youth while also challenging monolithic rural narratives.