Digital Commons Network^™

Introducing Performance Into The Communication Curriculum For Engineers: Breaking The Mould, Constance Matilda Israel

Doctoral Dissertations

Education in South Africa has, thankfully, not escaped the winds of change. The introduction of Outcomes-based Education (OBE) has generated much debate. How have technikons responded to the educational transformation impelled by sociopolitical change? I refer here specifically to the Communication curricula for engineers at Mangosuthu Technikon.

This research explores the effects in my Communication classroom of introducing performance, through games and a dramatic text. My intention is to subvert the potential dangers of OBE, given its behaviourist and prescriptive thrust, and a possible reversion to the transmission model in its application at Mantec. I argue that gaps in the …

The Effects Of Providing Mathematical Problem -Posing Experiences For K--8 Pre-Service Teachers: Investigating Teachers' Beliefs And Characteristics Of Posed Problems, Todd August Grundmeier

Doctoral Dissertations

This study incorporated problem posing into a mathematics content course for preservice elementary and middle school teachers by extending George Polya's (1957) problem solving heuristic to include problem re-formulation and by having participants pose problems from sets of given information. The course provided pre-service teachers with a new mathematical perspective and this research examined participants' problem posing, beliefs about mathematics, and beliefs about the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Study participants were enrolled in a mathematics content course for pre-service teachers at the University of New Hampshire. There were twenty students in the course and nineteen agreed to be participants …

Connections Between New Hampshire Superintendents' Leadership Orientations And Their Perceptions Of Selected Issues Associated With Politics In Education, Althea E. Sheaff

Doctoral Dissertations

Many Americans, including educational professionals, eschew politics in classrooms, administrative offices, or any interaction with the educational system. The apolitical myth has it roots in the struggle for public schooling by common school crusaders like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard and continuing in the twentieth century with adoption of Frederick Taylor's scientific management principles. Despite commonly held notions of the separateness and distance between politics and education, this study concludes that politics in education is inevitable.

The purpose of the study is to uncover connections between superintendents' leadership orientations and their political behaviors and beliefs using a multiple perspectives approach. …

Knowledge, Inquiry, Action: Teacher Collaboration At Prospect Center's Summer Institute, Karen Hendrickson Woolf

Doctoral Dissertations

This two-year study describes the work of approximately thirty educators, kindergarten/post-secondary, who attend the Summer Institute on Descriptive Inquiry and November Conference under the auspices of The Prospect Archive and Center for Education and Research in North Bennington, Vermont. The purpose of this study is to portray the experience of collaborative inquiry using Prospect Center's descriptive processes.

Teacher network groups generally center around specific content areas such as language arts or science. In contrast, Prospect Center is an independent national network of educators committed to guided observation and disciplined description as a grounding for teaching practice and inquiry. Generated by …

Committed To Encounter: Sources Of Teacher Engagement With Students In A Cross -Cultural Study Of Two Sister Schools In Japan And The United States, Rosemary Anne Zurawel

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to examine the sources of teachers' motivations to engage with students. I have chosen care theory upon which to build the conceptual framework for this phenomenological study, and I consider both natural and ethical care as seen by Nel Noddings. I have also drawn upon the work of Jane Roland Martin and The Schoolhome (1992), and that of Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot in Respect (2000). Finally, I examine the Japanese notion of amae, or interdependence, and note its parallels to the ethics of care.

Through the use of in-depth interviews, I interviewed 15 American teachers and …

Reading The Personal: Toward A Theory And Practice Of Self -Narrative In Student Writing, Megan Fulwiler

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines students' personal essays as rhetorical projects of self-representation. The debate over the role of personal writing in composition studies has created a binary opposition between a modernist transcendent notion of self and a postmodern discursive subject. As a result, the complex issues of self and representation in student work is often dismissed in favor of what is traditionally called "academic discourse." The concept of "narrative identity" provides a way to identify the strategies that student writers use to establish ethos, assert agency, and negotiate codes of belonging within multiple social communities. Chapter 1, "Situating Personal Writing," considers …