Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Education Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2014

Agency

Discipline
Institution
Publication
Publication Type
File Type

Articles 1 - 15 of 15

Full-Text Articles in Education

"You Can't Be Creative Anymore": Students Reflect On The Lingering Effects Of The Five-Paragraph Essay, Jennifer P. Gray Nov 2014

"You Can't Be Creative Anymore": Students Reflect On The Lingering Effects Of The Five-Paragraph Essay, Jennifer P. Gray

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

The five-paragraph essay continues to make headlines in composition and pedagogy journals and on teacher listservs. This long-cherished genre has been touted for teaching the basics to writers in college, and teachers often claim that it is the best foundation for solid essay writing. In contrast, there are numerous five-paragraph essay critics who claim that the essay is a “school-created thing” that has no real-world value and persists due to an enshrinement in textbooks as preparation for objective standardized testing. Regardless of the debate, one thing remains: there is little research on the essay from the students’ perspective. This essay …


Confronting Persistent Challenges Through Research-Based Programming For Experienced School Leaders, Jane Clark Lindle, Kenyae L. Reese, Matthew Della Sala, Hans W. Klar, Robert C. Knoeppel Oct 2014

Confronting Persistent Challenges Through Research-Based Programming For Experienced School Leaders, Jane Clark Lindle, Kenyae L. Reese, Matthew Della Sala, Hans W. Klar, Robert C. Knoeppel

Jane Clark Lindle

This paper’s thesis of human agency derived from the South Carolina Successful School Principalship Project’s (SCSSPP) findings. In these schools, principals had leveraged a variety of schoolwide initiatives to enact the vision that all students would be successful despite their rurality and poverty. These findings were the underlying design for two regional cross-district pilot programs. Known as Leadership 2.0 and Leadership 3.0, the development of agency was constructed through cognitive coaching and based on principals of adult learning. Initial evaluation of participants' first year reactions show consistently high perceptions of all aspects of the principals used for their professional learning.


Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent Aug 2014

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …


Becoming An Altruistic Learner, Aaron W. Snyder Jul 2014

Becoming An Altruistic Learner, Aaron W. Snyder

Theses and Dissertations

This master’s thesis is a qualitative research project that explored the transformation of multiple individuals who initially learned for self-interested purposes, but later had a shift in their desire to learn so as to benefit others. The author collected rich narratives that described this phenomenon and provided insight into the following question: what is the experience of a learner who transitions from learning out of self-interest to learning out of altruistic purposes? The author found the following five major themes across six participants as they transitioned to more altruistic learning: humility, self-efficacy, resources, success and agency. These themes give insight …


South African Principalship, Agency & Intersectionality Theory, Michèle Schmidt, Raj Mestry Jun 2014

South African Principalship, Agency & Intersectionality Theory, Michèle Schmidt, Raj Mestry

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

Gender bias towards South African female principals remains a problem and compelling issue for research. The Constitution policy addresses gender equality, yet women still do not experience equal rights in practice. This study uses a theory of intersectionality to examine two Black South African women’s leadership experiences in their roles as principals in two South African schools. The goal of the paper is to examine how these women negotiate obstacles in their work that may constrain their agency as leaders in South African schools. The project involves semi-structured interviews and the results provide a significant contribution to the small body …


Toward A Co-Vivial Community: Hopes Found In The Friendship Among People With Intellectual Disability Labels, Maho Suzuki Jun 2014

Toward A Co-Vivial Community: Hopes Found In The Friendship Among People With Intellectual Disability Labels, Maho Suzuki

Dissertations - ALL

This is a qualitative study of friendships among people with intellectual disability labels in two countries - the United States and Japan. As a field to study friendships among adults with intellectual disability label, I gained access to two sheltered workshops ("The Farm" in the U.S. and "The Kapu Kapu" in Japan) and conducted participant observation, through which I wished to identify broader, multiple, and more humane ways to define competence and human value that could validate people labeled intellectually disabled whose humanity and citizenship are often doubted by dominant standards in industrialized societies. In addition to resisting social standards …


(Re)Claiming Spaces Through Story: An Examination Of The Liberatory Potential Of Autobiographical Narrative In Adult L2 Literacy Development, Jessica Elizabeth Peters Apr 2014

(Re)Claiming Spaces Through Story: An Examination Of The Liberatory Potential Of Autobiographical Narrative In Adult L2 Literacy Development, Jessica Elizabeth Peters

Masters Theses

Adult ESL learners at the community education level are frequently undereducated (Lasater and Elliott, 2000, 2005), and fifty percent of limited-English proficient (LEP) adults report having nine or fewer years of formal schooling (NCIIP, 2012). They may be preliterate or only marginally literate even in their L1, which has significant negative implications both for language acquisition and for employment and educational opportunities. Further, many of these adult students also experience feelings of low self-worth with respect to their ability to succeed in any academic setting, let alone a foreign one, which poses a serious barrier to their ability to transition …


Science Youth Action Research: Promoting Critical Science Literacy Through Relevance And Agency, Elizabeth Coleman Jan 2014

Science Youth Action Research: Promoting Critical Science Literacy Through Relevance And Agency, Elizabeth Coleman

Dissertations

This three-article dissertation presents complementary perspectives on Science Youth Action Research (Sci-YAR), a K-12 curriculum designed to emphasize relevance and agency to promote youth's science learning. In Sci-YAR, youth conduct action research projects to better understand science-related issues in their lives, schools, or communities, while they simultaneously document, analyze, and reflect upon their own practices as researchers. The first article defines Sci-YAR and argues for its potential to enhance youth's participation as citizens in a democratic society. The second article details findings from a case study of youth engaged in Sci-YAR, describing how the curriculum enabled and constrained youth's identity …


Invisible But Essential: The Role Of Professional Networks In Promoting Faculty Agency In Career Advancement, Elizabeth Niehaus, Kerryann O'Meara Jan 2014

Invisible But Essential: The Role Of Professional Networks In Promoting Faculty Agency In Career Advancement, Elizabeth Niehaus, Kerryann O'Meara

KerryAnn O'Meara

The benefits of professional networks are largely invisible to the people embedded in them (O’Reilly 1991), yet professional networks may provide key benefits for faculty careers. The purpose of the study reported here was to explore the role of professional networks in faculty agency in career advancement, specifically focusing on the overall relationship between the social capital gained from networks and faculty agency in career advancement. Findings suggest that off-campus networks are particularly important for faculty agency but that the benefits of networks may take time to develop.


Enabling Possibility: Women Associate Professors’ Sense Of Agency In Career Advancement, Aimee Terosky, Kerryann O'Meara, Corbin M. Campbell Jan 2014

Enabling Possibility: Women Associate Professors’ Sense Of Agency In Career Advancement, Aimee Terosky, Kerryann O'Meara, Corbin M. Campbell

KerryAnn O'Meara

In this multimethod, qualitative study we examined associate women professors’ sense of agency in career advancement from the rank of associate to full. Defining agency as strategic perspectives or actions toward goals that matter to the professor, we explore the perceptions of what helps and/or hinders a sense of agency in career advancement. Our participants consisted of 16 women associate professors at a major research university who participated in an institutional intervention program designed to enhance sense of agency in career advancement, and a subset of 12 attendees who also participated in a follow-up focus group 6 months later. Participants …


Inclusion And Sport: Analysis Of Selected South African Township Schools, T. M. Makoelle Jan 2014

Inclusion And Sport: Analysis Of Selected South African Township Schools, T. M. Makoelle

Electronic Journal for Inclusive Education

In 1994, South Africa adopted an inclusive system of education in line with the rest of the world. The doors of learning were opened to all learners regardless of their background or disability. However, in spite of the changes, the notion of inclusive school sport as enshrined and articulated in White Paper 6 on special needs’ education published by the South African Department of Basic Education in 2001 has not been fully realized in terms of enabling a diverse inclusive sporting environment for all learners. The research on which this article is based therefore attempted to analyze the nature of …


The Retention, Revival, And Subjugation Of Indigenous Fire Knowledge Through Agency Fire Fighting In Eastern Australia And California, Christine Eriksen, Don L. Hankins Jan 2014

The Retention, Revival, And Subjugation Of Indigenous Fire Knowledge Through Agency Fire Fighting In Eastern Australia And California, Christine Eriksen, Don L. Hankins

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

This article explores the potential impact of training and employment with wildfire management agencies on the retention of Indigenous fire knowledge. It focuses on the comparative knowledge and experiences of Indigenous Elders, cultural practitioners, and land stewards in connection with ''modern'' political constructs of fire in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia, and California in the United States of America. This article emphasises the close link between cross-cultural acceptance, integration of Indigenous and agency fire cultures, and the ways in which knowledge types are shared or withheld. While agency fire fighting provides an opportunity for Indigenous people to connect and …


An Analysis Of Erickson's Concept Of School Legitimacy In Relationship To School Success And Failure, Michael Griggs Jan 2014

An Analysis Of Erickson's Concept Of School Legitimacy In Relationship To School Success And Failure, Michael Griggs

Theses and Dissertations

School legitimacy is the approval of principal and teacher authority that derives from the school community's trust (Erickson, 1987). When clients--the various stakeholders, including parents and students--recognize their school as legitimate, they trust that those in authority will help their economic future, protect their personal identities, and look out for their best interest. The concept of school legitimacy is applied to four case studies that involve poor and minority students to examine its role in a school's success or failure. The dissertation seeks to examine the process for constructing school legitimacy through reviewing literature, case studies, and surveys. Surveys are …


Examining Emotional Responses To Effective Versus Ineffective Virtual Buddies, Kathleen Ingraham Jan 2014

Examining Emotional Responses To Effective Versus Ineffective Virtual Buddies, Kathleen Ingraham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research study was to explore the impact of virtual character design on user emotional experience and user behavior in a simulated environment. With simulation training increasing in popularity as a tool for teaching social skills, it is essential that social interactions in virtual environments provide authentic opportunities for practice (Swartout et al., 2006). This study used Interactive Performance Theory (Wirth, 2012) to examine the effect of designing a virtual buddy character with ineffective traits instead of effective or expert traits. The sample population for this study (n = 145) consisted of first year university students enrolled …


A Critical Turn In Higher Education Research: Turning The Critical Lens On The Academic Language And Learning Educator, Alisa Percy Dec 2013

A Critical Turn In Higher Education Research: Turning The Critical Lens On The Academic Language And Learning Educator, Alisa Percy

Alisa Percy, PhD

This paper suggests that historical ontology, as one form of reflexive critique, is an instructive research design for making sense of the political and historical constitution of the Academic Language and Learning (ALL) educator in Australian higher education. The ALL educator in this paper refers to those practitioners in the field of ALL, whose ethical agency has largely been taken for granted since their slow and uneven emergence in the latter half of the twentieth century. Using the lens of governmentality, genealogical design and archaeological method, the historical ontology proposed in this paper demonstrates how the ethical remit of the …