The purpose of the study was to examine the factors which influence students' decision to take up the role of an art student in secondary schools in Nigeria and propose ways to advance the study of art in secondary education. Pedagogy tells that children in elementary schools are very interested in art education, but when they leave primary school and enter secondary school, this enthusiasm changes quickly and students no longer show interest in art education. Researches in art education also show that only a fraction of the teenage population which attend secondary schools choose art education in the WASC and the GCE examinations. A very few students carry over art interest into adult life. A play of factors is at work in deciding the change in behaviour. The study critically examined the factors and their influences on students' choice of art education. The research was in three phases: (1) a general survey on students' background experiences in art teaching, people's attitude towards art and the position of art in education; (2) a case study of art education in some selected secondary schools; and (3) another case study of art education in a particular institution, chosen on the basis of the strength of its art department. The research involved fifteen states, secondary schools, teachers, students, principals and administrators. The research procedures revolved around structured interviews, observations, questionnaires and documentary resources. The analyses of the data provided the following: (1) The decision to study art as a major subject was the result of a number of different forces which not only conflicted with each other, but reflected the tendency of divergence between the values of artists and those of the society as whole. Sometimes the decision to take art instead of science was based on a lack of sufficiently good marks in the areas relevant to science. The selection of the subject was by no means uniquely due to outstanding performance in art because art students who gave art as their best subject had none the less considered careers in other fields. Others both gave a subject other than art as their best and considered other careers. This provided the probability of other sorts of motivation towards and away from the role of an art student. Some students who opted for art hoped to reconcile its values with the socially dominant ones, which stressed such needs as earning capacity, job security, and occupational prestige. Others had enough encouragements in the social milieu, in the family and in the school. (2) There were traditional assumptions about the role of art in society and in education, which pushed the works of artists and the works of the art teachers down the list of social and educational priorities. (3) Some of the issues which confronted students were to do with long-established attitudes towards art and art education. Based on the findings of the study, it is recommended that: (1) Quality of education and life-long education cannot be achieved by only focussing on high standards of literacy and numeracy through a specialised curriculum; by choosing between science or art, vocational qualification or education for leisure. All need to be equally represented in a well balanced curriculum. Each stands to gain through being taught in conjunction with the others. Those talented in art can be successful in the sciences and vise versa. What children and adolescents need is a varied general education, which sees the acquisition of knowledge and practical skills as integral parts of development. Attitudes towards art and art teachers need to be improved. The deep-rooted attitude and the collary of this - that the subject is less significant - are issues which need to be campaigned against.

Traditionally, the vast majority of Canadian Amerindians have largely remained undereducated and such is the case in Betsiamites. This 2,500 people community is the largest of the nine Montagnais reserves which are located in Eastern Québec. There has been an improvement in the overall completion rates at the elementary and secondary levels between 1970 and 1985, following the transfer of all the responsibilities for reserve schools from the federal Government to the Amerindian communities. But progress had come to a halt by the end of the 1980s and most secondary school or university Amerindian students still drop out today. By focusing on the reserve of Betsiamites, this thesis attempts to provide explanations for this situation and to suggest ways to improve the effectiveness of Amerindian education. The thesis is divided into seven chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion. In the second chapter, the assumptions underlying this thesis, the data-gathering and analysis methods and the ethical problems linked to the situation of the current researcher as former teacher and current principal of the secondary school under investigation are discussed. In the third chapter, it is argued that the 1969-1972 political battle which allowed the Amerindians to govern their education systems has overshadowed some basic and essential issues regarding quality education and is partly responsible for the lack of improvement since the mid 1980s. In the fourth chapter, the historical process which led to the creation of the reserve of Betiamites and to the generalized dependency on welfare is presented. The fifth chapter analyses the daily life of the local secondary school, from its management to the motivation of students. The sixth chapter discusses the links between the local political, economic and social life and local schooling and suggests ways of alleviating widespread educational underachievement in rural reserves. This thesis argues that despite an adverse socio-economic environment, Canadian Amerindian schools could have become much more effective if it had not been for the excessive politicization of the issue of reserve schooling and for the unwillingness of Amerindian leaders and the federal Government to question the adoption, in 1972, of affirmative action as the ideological pillar of Amerindian teacher-training programmes.

This thesis is a study of resistance to the changes in Greek higher education that were implemented within the framework of the 1999 Bologna Agreement of the European Union in the period 2007-2008. The changes that occurred were of great significance for Greece’s education system as they introduced important changes in the structure and function of Greek higher education. This thesis argues that the organisational culture that had been created throughout the history of Greek higher education was a powerful factor that provoked resistance to the new policies. Methodologically, the thesis argues that discourse, change and institutional culture are closely tied together, and that this is of crucial importance in creating, modifying, and sustaining change within higher education institutions. The process of resistance is examined through the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2009; Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999), and within this framework by applying the empirical-analytical method of the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak and Meyer, 2009; Reisigl and Wodak, 2009). The framework and method for the study are also complemented by the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985). The narrative of the thesis includes a critical examination of the hegemonic struggles that occurred in the 2007-2008 period, the perceptions and ideologies of the key stakeholders (politicians, university faculty, and student groups), and the ways in which the discourses about Greek higher education have been influenced by social, political, and institutional factors. Finally, the implications of the findings for adding to the existing knowledge about management and change in higher education institutions are discussed.

Foreign language pedagogy has often been influenced by findings drawn from the area of first and/or second language acquisition with confusing results. The thesis explores the extent to which the inter-relation of variables in foreign language learning differs from that in natural acquisition processes and varies across a range of learning contexts, thereby encouraging different pedagogical approaches. Chapter one argues that some models underestimate the different variables involved and suggests that a socio-cultural approach is more effective in identiffing and explaining the shifting relation between context and cognition. Chapter two seeks to situate foreign language study within a more general process of jimctional differentiation' in the child's widening linguistic repertoire, arguing that not only does the relation of context and cognition change between L I and L2 but also within L2 itself. Chapter three examines the shifting relation between context and cognition with reference to the language programme of European Schools in general, and the one at Culham in particular. The latter provides a basis for answering two questions: (1) is there a correlation between success in an acquisition poor environment and the extent of the learner's analytic competence; (2) does motivation play an increasing role in affecting success in contexts where goals are long-term rather than immediate? Data collected from the school are analyzed in chapter four. Response to both questions would seem to he positive although the complexity of the learners' backgrounds produced greater variation in the role of affective factors than anticipated. Finally, chapter five argues that the relative success of foreign language study from an early stage in schemes such as the European schools or the immersion programmes depends upon a precise interplay of socio-cognitive variables which is unlikely to he replicated elsewhere.

This thesis focuses on how people think about the infinite. A review of both the historical and psychological/educational literature, reveals a complexity which sharpens the research questions and informs the methodology. Furthermore, the areas of mathematics where infinity occurs are those that have traditionally been presented to students mainly from an algebraic/symbolic perspective, which has tended to make it difficult to link formal and intuitive knowledge. The challenge is to create situations in which infinity can become more accessible. My theoretical approach follows the constructionist paradigm, adopting the position that the construction of meanings involves the use of representations; that representations are tools for understanding; and that the learning of a concept is facilitated when there are more opportunities of constructing and interacting with external representations of a concept, which are as diverse as possible. Based on this premise, I built a computational set of open tools — a microworld — which could simultaneously provide its users with insights into a range of infinity-related ideas, and offer the researcher a window into the users' thinking about the infinite. The microworld provided a means for students to construct and explore different types of representations — symbolic, graphical and numerical — of infinite processes via programming activities. The processes studied were infinite sequences and the construction of fractals. The corpus of data is based on case studies of 8 individuals, whose ages ranged from 14 to mid-thirties, interacting as pairs with the microworld. These case studies served as the basis for an analysis of the ways in which the tools of the microworld structured, and were structured by, the activities. The findings indicate that the environment and its tools shaped students' understandings of the infinite in rich ways, allowing them to discriminate subtle process-oriented features of infinite processes, and permitted the students to deal with the complexity of the infinite by assisting them in coordinating the different epistemological elements present. On a theoretical level, the thesis elaborates and refines the notion of situated abstraction and introduces the idea of "situated proof".

This thesis arose from a concern with assessment in Brazilian higher education music courses, especially in the assessment of ability in aural training classes. A review of literature indicates that musical ability is assessed mainly by an emphasis on the technical and analytical aspects of music. The thrust of this study is that individuals are aware of and value other aspects of music, besides its technicalities, and a comprehensive listening test ought to take this into consideration. The research has two interconnected strands. The first is a theoretical model of categories of musical response derived from aspects of the work of L. B. Meyer (1967) and Swanwick's layers of musical understanding (1988). The second is empirical work drawing on data from two groups of participants - seven contemporary Brazilian composers and forty undergraduate students on a music course and on other courses at a Brazilian university. The empirical work investigates: a) general attitudes of composers and students to music and their correspondence with the categories of the model; and, b) the responses of students to specific musical pieces and whether these fit the categories. The final aim is to explore the implications of the research findings for the assessment of musical listening with particular reference to Brazilian higher education. Analysis of the data revealed that there is a correspondence between Meyer's scheme and the general attitudes to music of composers and students. However, this scheme alone is inadequate to interpret the complexity of actual musical experience; Swanwick's layers provided more useful guidelines. Regarding the musical responses of students, six categories were found. The presence of these categories confirms the relative narrowness of conventional listening tests. The implications for Brazilian higher education include the possibility of developing objective and valid criteria to assess musical listening.

This thesis is a study of two extracurricular groups – a Dance Group and a Singing Group established for students at a university in the United Kingdom. The study centres on learning facilitated by student group social practices in relation to the production of identities, focusing particularly on gender and the role of the body. A review of the existing literature reveals distinct strands in this area. The first focuses academic success and future employment. A second strand critiques simplistic notions of academic skills and employability. The third analyses a diversity of student identities development within communities of practice in legitimate peripheral participation. This study extends this third strand by investigating the questions: How are student identities constructed in extracurricular dance and singing groups in a UK university? What role do the body and gender play in identity construction? Ethnographic techniques mainly participant observation and general conversations were utilised for collection of empirical data from student groups for one academic year (2007-2008) for ten sessions each term, as well as additional related events. The analysis draws on three bodies of theory: the theory of the body and of corporeal realism (Shilling, 2012), feminist theory and theories of masculinities and femininities (e.g. Connell, 2013); and the community of practice theory of learning (Wenger, 1998; Lave and Wenger, 1991). Analysis suggests that extracurricular groups were used to both achieve an externally-set objective and for engagement in complex social relations that constitute a significant aspect of student life. Furthermore, analysis explores specific ways in which masculine and feminine identities were produced. Gendered norms and relations were variably repeated, challenged or resisted through students’ embodied engagement in group activities. Thus, this contribution enhances existing knowledge through analysis that incorporates the importance of the human body in gendered identity production within extracurricular activities in higher education.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of Year 9 school pupils' responses to horror films, and, in particular, The Company of Wolves (Jordan, 1984). It employs social semiotic theory to analyse both film texts and audience engagements with such texts, exploring how such engagements involve transformations of subjectivity, particular kinds of competence in reading visual codes, and certain types of affective response to horror texts. It explores, briefly, histories of elements of the horror genre, especially the figures of the werewolf and the folktale heroine, in the period from the Enlightenment to the present day. The thesis develops a theory of textual pleasure in relation to horror films, drawing on Bakhtin's theory of carnival, Freud's theories of pleasure, and Bourdieu's theory of taste. It argues that fear and pleasure are related in this context; that such pleasures are socially situated; and that they relate to forms of textual identification. A theory of the sublime is also developed in the context of the social semiotics of film, exploring the history of the sublime from Kant and Burke to postmodernist theory. It is argued that sublime images operate through a dialectic of revelation and concealment, and that audiences replicate this mechanism in their viewing, and in the social sites in which they spectate. These structures are associated, furthermore, with socially-determined structures of aesthetic taste, and ways in which these in turn determine texts as popular or elite (or a hybrid of the two). Finally, the thesis addresses the pedagogies of English and Media Studies, arguing that classrooms need to become spectatorial spaces, open to new literacies of the visual, and equipped with the texts, technologies, and practices adequate to these new competences.

In this thesis I set out to develop a social symbolic approach to context and communication which goes beyond a code-systemic perspective on language, and one of economic exchange in language use. I begin by reviewing relations between linguistics and language teaching, and the dangers to the latter when it becomes preoccupied with linguistic theory and description. I consider the potential of applied linguistics to synthesise key ideas from various language related disciplines in descriptively adequate accounts of communication in social situations. In the remainder of chapter one I examine a number of 'centrifugal' approaches to the analysis of language use, arguing a tendency for them to underestimate the importance of social symbolism in communication. Taking a range of social symbolic structures and processes in educational contexts as the starting point for 'centripetal' investigations, in chapter two I describe salient aspects of social symbolism in contexts of communication. These include contrasting social, educational and economic forces in educational institutions, conceptions of role and role relations between students and teachers, and structural symbolic features such as dominance and dependency within rites of transition. In chapter three I explore further aspects of social symbolism revealed in communication, such as identity and risk-taking. I also discuss criteria for developing and appraising models of 'an ecology of context and communication'. Chapter four deals with the notion of negotiating meaning as a key process in social encounters, and the influence of social symbolic factors on meaning negotiation in dyadic communication. Having explored important dimensions of social symbolism in both context and communication, along with implications for the negotiation of meaning, I argue the value of raising awareness of social symbolism in educational processes in the final chapter of the thesis. I address ways of incorporating major aspects of social symbolism into language education and discuss a range of issues involved in so doing.

Performance in an assessment is not the reflection of just one’s knowledge and skills;motivation also plays a part. When the stakes of the assessment are low, it is logical to assume that students will have lower motivation to perform well in it. The Diagnostic English Language Tracking Assessment (DELTA) diagnoses and tracks students’ English language progress during their years of study at three universities in Hong Kong. Although the DELTA is a low stakes assessment, students get a report with their DELTA measure and detailed feedback on their performance. This study provides insights into test motivation as well as how useful students find a diagnostic report is to their language learning by ways of questionnaire survey and group interview, so as to explore students’ perceptions of test stakes and test value. The survey includes the Student Opinion Scale by Sundre and Moore (2002),which measures students’ motivation during the test; and a feedback usefulness scale specifically designed for this study to measure students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the diagnostic report. The results show that both scales are valid instruments to be used in this context and students are not motivated whilst sitting the test although they find the DELTA report quite useful. Data from the students’ interviews provide further information as to students’ motivation before and after the DELTA. In general they are not motivated before the test and their motivation to work on their English after the test largely depends on their perceived usefulness of the DELTA report. Lastly, as L2 motivation is a dynamic entity which will not remain constant over time, the study also demonstrates how Dörnyei and Ottó’s (1998) process model of L2 motivation can be adapted in explaining students’ test preparation and test taking process in low stakes diagnostic tests.