published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

This thesis is a comprehensive account and analysis of the contribution of architect and author A. J. Penty to British social criticism and aesthetic theory. The central argument is that Penty has been neglected in scholarship as the result of an historical misclassification. In the existing literature he is presented as a marginal figure in the history of English guild socialism, a movement his first book did much to inspire. He was, in fact, in conflict with fundamental aspects of the guild socialist movement as it developed. Considered in totality, Penty's views were those of a reactionary conservative, and his significance in early twentieth-century political thought can best be understood by locating him within the essentially Victorian tradition of medievalism, which sought to use the social and economic arrangements of the Middle Ages as a perspective from which to criticise industrial society. The thesis therefore investigates the complex nature of Penty's intellectual debts to earlier thinkers, such as Ruskin, Carlyle, Morris, Carpenter, and Matthew Arnold. A subsidiary contention is that the continuing relevance of medievalism in Edwardian and later intellectual life has been underestimated. Some of its central themes can be discerned in the several political currents with which Penty was in varying degrees associated, such as guild socialism, distributism, Christian social action, agrarian revivalism and fascism. Support for this view has been found by examining Penty's personal and intellectual links with likeminded contemporaries, including Belloc, Chesterton, de Maeztu, Saunders Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Berdyaev and A. K. Coomaraswamy.The thesis aims to highlight the continuities between Penty and his nineteenth-century antecedents and also to identify his original contributions to the development of medievalist thinking, particularly in the sphere of international relations theory. 3 2

This is a multiple-case study about 16 university students’ (hereafter called participants) learning experience of “six-step reframing” in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and an exploration about whether the practice of such reframing (hereafter called the Practice) could be used to enhance the participants’ Type I thinking styles. Each participant was treated as a case on his/her own. The researcher met each voluntary participant individually on three occasions. First, each participant was given a pre-test of thinking styles, a NLP workshop, the first NLP “six-step reframing” practice, a first post-test of thinking styles and a first follow-up interview. One week later, the participant was given a second NLP “six-step reframing” practice, a second post test of thinking styles and a second follow-up interview. One month later, the participant was given a delayed final post test of thinking styles and in-depth interview for review of their experience and validation of the observations and measurements made in the entire process. All measurement results and practice and interview transcripts were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively according to the nature of the data. Results indicated that all participants felt positively towards the experience of the Practice. Through the Practice, they were able to identify their own limiting beliefs in learning and discover some new learning methods to overcome the problems. Furthermore, a desirable increase in Type I thinking styles was observed for most of the participants after the Practice. 8 of the participants showed marked increase (with effect size≥0.8) and 3 showed slight increase (with effect size <0.8). For the remaining 5 participants, 2 of them showed marked decrease (with effect size≥0.8) and 3 showed slight decrease (with effect size <0.8). Case-by-case analysis indicated the marked increase in Type I thinking styles could reasonably be explained by certain characteristics of the methods that the participants discovered in solving their problems, as well as characteristics of the processes they experienced in the Practice, such as the internal dialogue among different sensing “parts” within their awareness and the stimulation of multiple perspective perceptions in generating new insights to overcome their limiting beliefs, which share a lot of commonality with the characteristics of Type I thinking styles. In the 2 cases of marked decrease in Type I thinking style, interfering factors like fear and illness were identified. Based on the results, the researcher argues that in order that the problem solving experience can lead to desirable changes in the participants’ preferred ways of thinking, affective aspects of the experience is also highly important. Salient features in the Practice such as “generation of positive affection”, “provision of serene environment”, “autonomy to choose freely”, “reflection upon past life experiences” and “ownership of the self-identified problems” might have contributed to explain why the Practice was effective to most participants in this research in enhancing their Type I thinking style but similar success had not been observed so far in other intervention studies using problem solving tasks. The thesis also discussed the limitations of the study and implications for further education and psychological research. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

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The practice of understanding by making marks is common to the disciplines of anthropology, fine art and architecture.  This thesis holds that the written word is not the only means by which theory can be produced.  Indeed, it is appropriate to the theorising of fields such as architecture and art that it should use the tools of the discipline at hand.  In this thesis I demonstrate that this is so, by way of a series of drawing projects and experiments in notation.  Sometimes a drawing might illustrate or elaborate an argument established in the text, or vice-versa.  Three key inscriptive practices are identified: notation, drawing and diagrams. The prevalence of inscriptive practices in modern Western societies allows them to become deeply ingrained as ways of thinking.  This brings me to the second component in the title of the thesis, namely the idea of the ‘thinking tool.’ By that I mean the manner in which a set of codes for drawing becomes a way of organising and understanding phenomena.  For example, an architect’s section drawing becomes a tool by which volume can be explored, whilst the plan drawing is a tool for understanding spatial relations on a more organisational level. Key to this is an understanding of Bergson’s notion of duration and Deleuze’s work on locating the diagram within the paintings of Francis Bacon. The inscriptive practice is not primarily a form of representation or mimesis, but rather a way of articulating the world, not an expression of a pre-existing thought, but a thought process in itself.  As such, the actual practice of making the mark is of utmost importance anthropologically, as it is the way in which the mark is made that organises our thoughts rather than the completed artefact.

Anxiety increase drive level and will at first lead to an increased level of performance and then, as drive level continues to rise, to a decrease in performance. There seems to be an optimal level condition for best performance. On either side of this point, performance is relatively impaired. However, nothing has been done to explore directly its relationship to critical thinking ability. The purpose of this study was to investigate that relationship.