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Educative Encounters: An Analysis Of Dewey, Buber And Noddings To Understand The Role Of Encountering Self, Others And The World In Teaching And Learning In Higher Education, Carrie Maureen Nolan

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation provides a novel conception of educative encounter as a means of providing a pedagogical framework for directing experience in the classroom for the purpose of cultivating growth, and specifically cultivating care (N. Noddings, 2003a). By honing in on encounter as the relational aspect of experience, emphasizing the importance of the relational quality of the learning experience, and articulating a different approach to teaching in higher education, this conception helps educators attend to strengthening learning outcomes oriented towards the growth of students. This serves towards the illumination of learning through and for educative encounter by addressing both the meaning …

Artifact-Based Reflective Interviews For Identifying Pragmatic Epistemological Resources, Christopher Walden Shubert

Doctoral Dissertations

Physics Education Research studies the science of teaching and learning physics. The process of student learning is complex, and the factors that affect it are numerous. Describing students' understanding of physics knowledge and reasoning is the basis for much productive research; however, such research fails to account for certain types of student learning difficulties. In this dissertation, I explore one source of student difficulty: personal epistemology, students' ideas about knowledge and knowing.

Epistemology traditionally answers three questions: What is knowledge? How is knowledge created? And, how do we know what we know? An individual's responses to these questions can affect …

Teaching, Activism, And The Purposes Of Education: Toward An Integrated Vision Of Teachers' Work, Carina E. Self

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to consider the political dimensions of teachers' work through a conceptual comparison to the work of social activists. The author developed a four-part analysis of the work of activists through a reading of the social movement literature and compared that analysis to the work of teachers according to four contemporary approaches to teachers' work (neo-conservative, caring, contemporary liberal, and critical theory). The result was an integrated vision of teachers' work that brings together teachers' daily practices and their educational commitments around four dimensions of teachers work: social critique, identity formation/negotiation, affiliation, and institutional change. …

Indoctrination In Education: Offering An Alternative Conception, Barbara A. Peterson

Doctoral Dissertations

Peace Education courses, as well as others that teach marginalized values and beliefs (e.g., race relations, queer studies, and feminist studies) are particularly vulnerable to the charge of indoctrination. This allegation is political rather than scholarly and it is not clear what precisely teachers of such subjects are being accused of doing or trying to do. However, the charge is powerful enough to prevent such courses from being offered at public schools and universities and to remove them when they are already part of the curriculum. To provide teachers and schools the confidence to take on these marginalized and controversial …

Where The Inchoate Seeks Form: Autobiographical Curriculum Inquiry In Women's Rowing, Jennie Anne Marshall

Doctoral Dissertations

In 1976, four years after the Title IX act was passed by the Federal Government, a group of female rowers at Yale University attempted to reveal the university's discriminatory practices toward their team. On March 3, 1976, team captain, Chris Ernst, secured an appointment with the assistant athletic director Joni Barnett. Members of the Yale Women's Crew filed silently into the athletic director's office wearing sweats that said "Yale Women's Crew," then stripped to the waist, revealing the words "Title IX" written on their bare chests and backs. Chris Ernst read a 300-word statement (New York Times, 3/4/76) while a …

Critical Autonomy: Investigating Social Class And Education, Peter-John Giampietro

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation develops the concept of critical autonomy as a theoretical framework to guide responses to social class oppression in schooling. The project is grounded on Cheryl Misak and C. S. Peirce's arguments about inquiry and their implications for holding knowledge claims, especially claims to self-knowledge. As a result, critical autonomy presupposes the need for engagement in a community of inquiry. Unlike other theories of autonomy that may acknowledge that autonomy is nurtured socially but is realized in isolation, I argue that critical autonomy is enhanced through the constant process of inquiry with other inquirers. Thus it is always a …

More Than Simply "Hanging Out": The Nature Of Participant Observation And Research Relationships, Julie Frances Simpson

Doctoral Dissertations

Participant observation is a research activity used in qualitative inquiry, particularly ethnography, where the aim is to understand the meanings and experiences of social actors. Researchers employing this activity take part in people's lives as a way of learning about them and their culture, and to gain understanding of social life processes. Often these activities in the field are referred to as "hanging out": that is, interacting with participants in an uncontrived fashion as they go about their daily lives.

Participation observation is multifaceted: participant observation is conducted within the framework of scientists' own and others' life worlds; participant observers …

Can I Get A Witness? The Significance Of Finding A Witness For Liberatory Education, Martha J. Ritter

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a philosophical inquiry into what it means to be a 'witness' and to 'bear witness'; it is also an investigation into what place witness has in education. I undertake this broad conceptual work to formulate a conception of witness that supports liberatory education---education that aims at freedom from oppression.

The inquiry is rooted in work with writing groups in Bolivia, and the idea that young people may have come to the group to find witnesses. I critically appraise three contemporary proposals that employ the notions of 'witness' and to 'bearing witness' in liberatory education. My critique notes …

Relational Learning For A Sustainable Future: An Eco -Spiritual Model, Mary Elizabeth Westfall

Doctoral Dissertations

We are facing unprecedented environmental challenges as we enter the new millennium as human choices and practices have repeatedly led to environmental degradation. Increasingly there are individuals and groups seeking to address this environmental crisis and move toward more sustainable patterns of living. But in order to make alternative choices it will be essential to draw upon the wealth and variety of human capabilities.

For nearly 350 years Western culture has looked to reason and rationality to provide truth and direction. The affective side of being human, feelings, intuition, love, care, wonder, mystery and hope have largely been devalued. In …

Composing Compassion: Developing Care Communities Via Engagements In The Visual Arts, Cynthia Worthen Vascak

Doctoral Dissertations

Concerns for the development of caring communities in our schools are being increasingly expressed by parents, educators, researchers, and school administrators. Accompanying this expression of concern is the growing acknowledgement that such communities are essential to the well-being of schools and children. If we seek the actualized development of such communities we must also attend to questions of means. I ask, if care communities are considered as essential components of our schools, then how can we develop such communities? I examine the arts and particularly the visual arts and children's engaged art-making as sources for being able to offer educators …

Literacies Without Judgment: Composing A (Con)Text For Cultural Healing In Northeast Brazil, Francisco Silva Cavalcante Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

In this study the researcher describes and interprets the experiences with Projeto (Con)texto, a research group created in Northeast Brazil composed of eleven people with different levels of formal schooling, social classes and ages varying from 14 to 50 years old. The researcher explores the dynamics of the Brazilian relational universe and its impact on people's lives, the multiple forms of letramento (literacies) used by people in a certain cultural context to construe and convey meaning, and the process of strengthening of one's self to deal with cultural conflicts through cultural healing.

The researcher gathered descriptive data during one year …

Constructive Texts: Theory, Practice, And The "Self" In Composition, Deborah Lynne Hodgkins

Doctoral Dissertations

The influence of postmodern theory on studies in composition and rhetoric has led to important questions for the teaching of writing: In light of/after postmodernism, what role does/should theory play in classroom practice and how can it best inform pedagogy? In writing and in the world at large, how do we define and where do we locate agency?

I argue that the goal of composition courses should be to help students learn to use discourse to represent the interests of themselves and others and effect change in a postmodern world--to become active citizens by becoming better rhetoricians. In order to …

A Poetics Of Reconciliation: The Aesthetic Mediation Of Conflict, Cynthia Eames Cohen

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, a philosophical inquiry into the significance of the aesthetic domain for reconciliation, addresses the following question: What is the nature of reconciliation, and what is the nature of the aesthetic domain, that aesthetic forms and processes should be uniquely well-suited to the educational tasks and challenges inherent in the work of reconciliation? The question is answered through the methods of conceptual analysis, with examples from the author's practice of conflict resolution, oral history and cultural work.

The first section of the dissertation identifies 'reconciliation' as an ethical and educational concept. The educational tasks of reconciliation--through which former enemies …

Composition As A Mode Of Being: Politics, Ethics, And History In The Writing Classrooms Of Postmodernity, Lance Michael Svehla

Doctoral Dissertations

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. once commented that while he did not "deny the importance, on the level of theory, of the (postmodern) project," such a project did not help him when he was "trying to get a taxi on the corner of 125th and Lenox Avenue" (Loose Canons 37-38). The postmodern project lacked what Gates calls "practical performative force." The purpose of this dissertation is to establish postmodernity's practical performative force for the composition classroom. It addresses four central questions: What is postmodernity? What is its relationship to composition? Why should composition teachers and students care about this relationship? How …

Critical Thinking: A Voyage Of The Imagination, David Glenn Hodgdon

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I contend that there is a strong connection between critical thinking and the imagination, a connection which increases the dynamism and vitality of critical thinking. By acknowledging a role for the imagination, we are able to form a more coherent and complete critical thinking conception, which leads to the positing of a new theory of critical thinking. This new conception has pedagogical implications demanding that we alter or augment current approaches to critical thinking instruction.

Employing a conceptual analysis, I first focus on critical thinking conceptions found on a continuum from traditional conceptions, which focus on logic …

"There Is No School Like The Family School": Literacy, Motherteaching, And The Alcott Family, Lisa Margaret Stepanski

Doctoral Dissertations

By the mid nineteenth century, Americans were increasingly recognizing the need for public education and literacy for all citizens if the United States was to survive, if not thrive. In addition, new industries and technologies were developed that would slowly transform the agrarian New England landscape into a terrain of mill towns and manufacturing sites. The industrialization of New England altered family life, as well, and lead to the rise of the "motherteacher" ideology, a cultural paradigm that profoundly influenced discussions of childrearing and public education in the United States.

This dissertation examines the motherteaching of three famous nineteenth-century figures, …

Beyond The Postmodern Impasse Of Contemporary Composition: The Non-Foundational Alternative Of Deweyan Pragmatism, Donald Crosby Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

In their critique of the autonomous individual of foundationalism, postmodernists have rejected the epistemological assumption that a knower directly perceives reality in thought then expresses these perceptions through language. Yet as these theorists have asserted the influence of language upon an individual's thinking, they have been unable to explain an individual's agency--the ability to create, assert, examine, and maintain/or modify a belief. Once considered to be situated in prior discourses, the individual has been conceived as a postmodern subject dominated by language. Yet the subject's ability to influence as well as be influenced by discursive practices has not been explained …

Writing And Reading As Reflexive Inquiry: A Reflexive Inquiry, Donna Jeanne Qualley

Doctoral Dissertations

In this inquiry, I draw from theories in feminist epistemology, ethnography, and hermeneutics that consider the role of subjectivity in the construction and assessment of understanding in order to examine the process of reflexivity and explore its significance for learning.

I define reflexivity as a response triggered by an individual's dialectical encounter with an other (person, culture, text or other part of the self) whereby the individual begins to identify and critically examine his or her knowledge and assumptions. Using students' writing from my composition classes, I suggest how writing and reading, especially essayistic writing and reading, might be used …

Learning To Live: Values And Experience In The Life Of A Classroom, Mary Comstock

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the question, "How are the values of the people who comprise a classroom manifested there?" The results of this ethnographic study are reported in descriptive narrative and cover events which took place in a grade five classroom over a period of four and a half months.

The body of the narrative entails events in an experiential learning environment in which the teaching of content area curriculum was accompanied by numerous field trips and other hands-on activities. Moreover, lessons intended to raise the children's awareness of environment, community, ethics and values were also taught.

This study concludes that …