Typescript, etc.

The aim of this conceptual investigation is to reclaim the ethics of teaching through a critical examination of some recent accounts of good practice in teaching and by advancing an alternative account. Many recent accounts of good practice focus on concepts such as professionalism, competence and reflective practice. In some of these accounts, the ethical dimension of teaching is central and explicit; in others, it is only implicit; in yet others, it is distorted or even ignored. This inattention to ethics in theoretical accounts is paralleled in practice by teachers' failure to understand teaching as a moral enterprise, as is exemplified by responses of teachers to some of the teaching problems that they encounter. This research gives an alternative account of teaching as a practice through using Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of a practice. Key term in MacIntyre's conception are internal and external goods, standards of excellence and virtue. It is shown that the acquisition of the goods internal rather than the goods external to teaching is necessary but not sufficient for a flourishing practice of teaching. The conception of teaching as a practice is also used in this investigation to reflect on the roles of teachers as specified by the new Norms and Standards Teacher Education in South Africa. If well understood, the roles of teachers are not made up of mere lists of tasks and competences. The notion of teachers' roles opens the way for reclaiming an ethics of teaching.

This thesis explores the life stories of four Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants in Tallahassee by collecting detailed narratives. There are three aspects that this thesis focused on: 1) motivations for emigration from their home countries to the United States and changes in their socioeconomic status afterwards; 2) cultural, political, and religious shifts of identity after immigration; and 3) the religious conversion of three of them and the roles that the Chinese Church plays in their daily lives. Narrative analysis of an ethnographic method used with this study. The findings of this project suggest that there were various factors motivating my participants to immigrate to the U.S. and all of them have experienced upward mobility. However, they have also encountered structural social inequalities that cannot be solved by individual actors. In terms of the shifts in their identities, the narratives collected from the participants show that there is a complex relation between their cultural identities and citizenship. Further, Christianity and the Chinese Church also play important roles in three of the participants’ lives, which offer them a different perspective discussing their identities. Overall, this thesis has filled a gap in the academic literature; no scholars have previously explored this immigrant group in Tallahassee. additionally, I provided information for future anthropological studies that relate to diasporic immigrants’ lives in the U.S. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 17, 2018. / Chinese Americans, Narratives, Oral History, Taiwanese Americans / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristin L. Dowell, Professor Directing Thesis; Sabra G. Thorner, Committee Member; Vincent Joos, Committee Member.

Thesis (M.Div.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Bibliography: leaves 130-136.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University

xvii, 307 leaves : ill. ; 26 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.1969) from the Dept. of Electrical Engineering, University of Adelaide

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Clark university, 1917. / "Reprinted from the Pedagogical seminary, December, 1917, vol. xxiv." Bibliography: p. 555-558. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

This research study probes students’ understandings of various aspects of probability in a 3-week Probability unit in a Grade 7 classroom. Informing this study are the perspectives of constructivism and sociocultural theory which underpin the contemporary reform in mathematics education as codified in the NCTM standards and orient much of the teaching and learning of mathematics in today’s classrooms. Elements of culturally responsive pedagogy were also adopted within the research design. The study was carried out in an urban school where I collaborated with the teacher and students as co-teacher and researcher. As the population of this school was predominantly Aboriginal, the lessons included discussion of the tradition and significance of Aboriginal games of chance and an activity based on one of these games. Data sources included the responses in the pre- and post-tests, fleidnotes of the lessons, and audiotapes of student interviews. The key findings of the study are that the students had some understanding of formal probability theory with strongly-held persistent alternative thinking, some of which did not fit the informal conceptions of probability noted in the literature such as the outcome approach and the gambler’s fallacy. This has led to the proposal of a Personal Probability model in which the determination of a probability or a probability decision is a weighting of components such as experience, intuition and judgment, some normative thinicing, and personal choice, beliefs and attitudes. Though the alternative understandings were explored in interviews and resolved to some degree, the study finds that the probability understandings of students in this study are still fragile and inconsistent. Students demonstrated marked interest in tasks that combined mathematics, culture and community. This study presents evidence that the current prescribed learning outcomes in the elementary grades are too ambitious and best left to the higher grades. The difficulties in the teaching and learning of the subject induced by the nuances and challenges of the subject as well as the dearth of time that is needed for an adequate treatment further direct that instructional resources at this level be focused on deepening and strengthening the basic ideas.

In this dissertation, I drew on analytical frames found in genre theory to examine digital storytelling as a cultural practice with historically developed genre features, practices, and structures. A central concern was to examine how genre mediated ongoing discursive work. I conducted interviews with designers and facilitators from four socially influential programs of digital storytelling to understand the cultural practice as simultaneously durable and dynamic. Attending to a corpus of facilitator-nominated digital stories, I developed genre-informed discourse analytical methods to explore how locally manifested genre features embodied ideological orientations, institutional pressures, and individual intentions. Analysis of ethnographic data allowed me to describe the four programs as dialectically connected to each other through a shared meaning potential they drew from and added to. In the mean time, each program developed temporarily stabilized genre practices in response to contingent social, cultural, institutional, and personal needs and intentions. Digital stories manifested genre features that indexed collective ideological and experiential knowledge. I suggest that we treat temporality as one dimension of genre features.

This study explores the reasoning that emerged among eight high school juniors and seniors as they participated in a classroom teaching experiment addressing stochastic conceptions of sampling and statistical inference. Toward this end, instructional activities engaged students in embedding sampling and inference within the foundational notion of distributions of sample statisticspatterns of dispersion that one conceives as emerging in a collection of a sample statistics values that accumulate from re-sampling under essentially identical conditions. The study details students engagement and emergent understandings in the context of instructional activities designed to support them. Analyses highlight these components: the design of instructional activities, classroom conversations and interactions that emerged from students engagement in activities, students ideas and understandings that emerged in the process, and the design teams interpretations of students understandings. Moreover, analyses highlight the synergistic interplay between these components that drove the unfolding of the teaching experiment over the course of 17 lessons in cycles of design, engagement, and interpretation. These cycles gave rise to four interrelated phases of instructional engagements: Phase 1: Orientation to statistical prediction and distributional reasoning; Phase 2: Move to conceptualize probabilistic situations and quantify unusualness; Phase 3: Move to conceptualize variability and distribution; Phase 4: Move to quantify variability and extend distribution. Analyses reveal that students experienced significant difficulties in conceiving the distribution of sample statistics and point to possible reasons for them. Their difficulties centered on composing and coordinating objects into a hierarchical structure with actions in imagined re-sampling scenarios that involve: a population of items, selecting items from it to accumulate a sample, recording the value of a statistic of interest, repeating this process to accumulate a collection of values, structuring such collections and conceiving patterns within and across them in ways that support making statistical inferences.