Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex and lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder that is widely variable in presentation and intensity of defining features. ASD affects 1 in 94 Canadians and is increasing in prevalence. The variety of professionals who work with children with ASD have an accumulation of experiences that can be instructive and inspiring for other practitioners. This study explored how their wealth of experiences might be encapsulated as short vignettes or stories that could be analyzed and used as resources for educating current and future professionals. Six stories were collected from diverse professionals, and themes were summarized in order to demonstrate the types of lessons that can be learned from a clinician’s story of a significant moment or event in working with a child with ASD. The stories highlighted challenges and breakthroughs in communication and managing the child’s challenging behaviours, as well as skills and techniques that professionals have found effective in practice. The study shows that clinicians’ stories hold valuable information that can be shared with professionals in an interesting and memorable manner. Future research could expand on this study to build larger collections of stories with additional viewpoints and specific professional insights and experiences with a variety of children in their practice. / Graduate / 0518 / 0727 / 0758

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine how and if an organization is using the phenomenon Corporate Storytelling as a toll for communication to spread internal culture to new employees. Method: This paper is based on a qualitative approach where semi structured interviews together with computer-aided interviews are used for data collection. We applied theories from scholars and scientific research to form a theoretical framework, which we analysed together with the empirical data that been gathered. Conclusion: Through our analysis we have come to the conclusion that Corporate Storytelling is a complex concept that is not used with awareness of the organization leader when the internal communication concept is designed. According to one of the results from the essay we have been able to identify the need a formal use of Corporate Storytelling as a communication tool and that the need is increased with the amount of employees in an organisation and according how long the organization has been existing. The stories need to be true and reliable to create the right message and for the employees to be able to establish in the reality of the organization. Another conclusion that is made out of this paper is that during the recruitment process the use of Corporate Storytelling can contribute to a faster and more effective process to be implemented in the organization culture. The benefit of a shared culture increased the value of well-being and leads to a longer employment and reduces the risk to recruit the wrong person.

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This dissertation is a critical ethnography about the power that storytelling offers in creating sustainable community literacy programs. The research for this dissertation was conducted at a ten year-old grassroots community literacy organization, VOICES: Community Stories Past and Present, Inc., which is based in Tucson, Arizona. Interviews for this project were conducted over a period of two years and includes feedback from thirty-three board members, staff members, volunteers, and youth participants at the organization. The dissertation begins with the assertion that gaps in understanding between theory and practice lead to damaging assumptions about difference and inequality, especially in the realm of community-based programming. I argue that an expanded understanding of storytelling as reciprocal and transformative can bridge these misunderstandings.In order to bridge the divide between theory and practice, this project offers the concept of reciprocity, fleshed out by the work of Ellen Cushman and Pierre Bourdieu, to encourage both participants in community literacy programs, as well as administrators, to be more transparent about their goals by sharing individual experience. This concept of reciprocity is the foundation on which storytelling as an agent of transformation rests. The process of storytelling that this project proposes establishes advocacy journalism and witnessing as a precedent. In the stories about interviewing and storytelling that the narrators from VOICES share, reciprocity is performative in that it can be manipulated to fit the needs of specific rhetorical situations. But this performance is dependent on the audience. I suggest that contrary to many discussions in composition and rhetoric, the tension between "addressed" and "invoked" audiences is an accurate one, and can be used to generate conversation about the assumptions and expectations of low-income youth and community literacy participants. An addressed audience is necessary in order for stories to be transformative; which is ultimately the way that they create large-scale social change. The conclusion of this project argues that administrators and literacy workers must foster an ethic of sustainability, which can be achieved through storytelling in order to both honor difference and challenge inequality in ways that are meaningful to the participants in these programs.

In Jamaica, sexual acts between men are still punishable by law. Numerous incidents of violence against gay men and lesbians have prompted human rights groups to distinguish it as one of the most homophobic places on earth. There are many cases of gay Jamaican men seeking resettlement and refuge in Canada. While any transition to a new country and culture can be challenging for immigrants, there is limited research that speaks to the experiences of the gay Jamaican men. This paper is based on stories gathered from four gay Jamaican men who came to Canada as refugees and highlights issues of acculturation related to connection with Canadian culture, letting go of the home culture, challenges in support systems and the inability to feel comfortable, confident and settled in the new Canadian environment. The project resulted in a compilation of visual stories and audio clips that were placed on a website (http://queeryingjamaica.tumblr.com/). Using the tools available through social media, the stories provide a source of representation.

Languages currently used by planners to conceptualize, document, and present projects lack expansive imagination and polyphonic literacy. Planning demands new languages to address social and environmental challenges within our increasingly cross-cultural urban environments. Although storytelling theory in planning has expanded contemporary understanding of what constitutes method and practice within the discipline of planning, there has been little work to date explicating what poetry offers to planning education and practice. This thesis examines several opportunities and challenges in adopting poetry into contemporary practice in Vancouver, British Columbia using a multi-method approach. Methods include: a literature review on planning projects collaborating with artists; an ethnomethodological analysis of interviews with four Vancouver poets; a constructionist analysis of a planning text and a re/formation experiment with poetry; and finally, autoethnographic 'poetry as inquiry'. Learnings suggest that a critical approach to poetry offers an alternative language to connect to both 'self as planner' and to the multitude of overlapping voices of 'publics' in process, document, and presentation.

Storytelling is a powerful means of communication that has been employed by humankind from the early stages of development. As technology has advanced, the medium through which people tell stories has evolved from verbal, to writing, performing on stage, and more recently television, movies, and video games. A promising medium for the telling of stories in an in-person, one-on-one or one-to-many setting is a digital table—a large, horizontal multi-touch surface—that can provide quick access to visuals and narrative elements at the touch of one’s hands and fingers. In this work, I present the results of an exploratory study on storytellers’ interaction behaviours while working with digital tables, and its physical counterparts of sand and water. My results highlight some of the differences in these media that can both help and hinder a storyteller’s narrative process. I use these findings to present design implications for the design of applications for storytelling on digital multi-touch surfaces.

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Why do seventy percent of Canadian Aboriginal students drop out of school? Although the literature focuses on reform to schools, school systems, and to the formal relationships that govern Aboriginal education, there is, as yet, a lack of empirically-based evidence from the perspectives of the people who have dropped out. The research was conducted in an adult education centre located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and combines semi-structured interviews with an innovative Bead Workshop field-tested in other areas of identity conflict. The study asked 22 Aboriginal people how they make sense of their education experiences, inquired about why they dropped out of school, and invited them to share their hopes for the future. The trans-disciplinary nature of peace and conflict studies offers a new analysis when data were applied to Lederach’s (2003) conflict transformation framework. The findings showed that the participants quit school in the midst of very difficult and strikingly similar life circumstances, and they did not attribute dropping out to inadequacies in education or schooling, or to the effects of colonialism. The study expands the peace and conflict literature into the Canadian Aboriginal context while establishing a new research design and methodology. The study respects Indigenous research principles and combines them with conflict transformation principles to provide empirical evidence about why Aboriginal students drop out of school, and then extends the theoretical literature with a framework for exploring the role of deeper beliefs like love, courage, and hope in personal conflict transformation. Future research can be undertaken with larger groups of Aboriginal people to better understand their experiences in education and in other important areas of life, and to inform and advise Aboriginal policy and practice.

Recollecting Place is the product of an experiential approach to Landscape Architecture. It is at once the re-telling of a place that is expected to be quite foreign to the reader as well as an examination of the method by which landscape architects assume truth of a place. As professionals, we develop a method by which we examine a site, re-tell its truth and then alter it somehow. Recollecting Place is the story of how the teller’s connections with the place in questions offer a version of the truth that can inform the design in a way that is different, and arguably more appropriate than if the site had been investigated by more traditional methods.