VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Student teachers and their journey: a reflective ethnography
Keywords: Student teachers
Student teaching, Training of
Teachers, Training of

While field experiences are deeply entrenched elements in Bachelor of Education programs, the theoretical basis for fieldwork is still underemphasized in the literature (Guyton and McIntyre, 1990). This study focuses on following questions: What does the process of learning to teach do to teacher candidates, and teacher educators? What do student teachers learn during practice teaching sessions? What possibilities, tensions, and challenges do pre-service teachers experience in the field during practicum; and how can Bachelor of Education programs offer effective teacher development programs to prepare student teachers for these experiences? This study will follow six student teachers through university and field experiences during the 2000–2001 academic year. It will focus on their expectations and experiences within their first and second practicum placements. Objectives include: (1) What are the most important lived experiences of practice teaching and their consequences? (2) What program features do teacher candidates feel inhibit classroom practice teaching? (3) What do preservice teacher candidates believe is needed in the academic program that will help teacher candidates in their classroom practice? The research is conducted using qualitative data collection methods. Specifically, as the researcher, I used a reflexive ethnographic methodology to study the teaching journey of 6 elementary education student teachers and myself. While this dissertation focuses primarily on the experiences of six students it also “unearths” and “unravels” the researcher's own autobiographical journey as a teacher educator. It is this focus on “their journey” and “mine,” that the study is described as a reflexive ethnography by virtue of the autobiographical journal entries of the researcher that appear alongside the narratives of the participants. The complexities of the dialogic qualities of teaching and learning can never be underestimated with a study ending with what appears to be a “complete” list of “recommendations” and fewer questions concerning about becoming a teacher than when the study was first conceived. This study invites the reader to see learning to teach as a continuous process that seeks no final answers, inasmuch as it seeks out new possibilities for preservice teacher education.
Factors That Affect the Decisions of Racial/Ethnic Minorities to Enter and Stay in Teaching and the Implications for School Boards' Teacher Recruitment and Retention Policies
Keywords: Minority teachers, Canada
Educational anthropology
Discrimination in higher education, Canada
Race relations in school management, Canada
Teachers, Training of
Teachers, Canada
Sex discrimination in education, Canada
Cultural relativism

This study examines the underlying reasons for the shortage of racial/ethnic minority teachers in Canada and presents strategies to address the issue. The data are based on interviews with 125 African-, Chinese-, and Portuguese-Canadian subjects, which include elementary and high school students, teachers-in-training, and teachers, each representing a different stage of the teaching pipeline. The study found that racial minorities reject or select teaching based on a combination of intertwining personal, family/cultural and institutional factors. Some of the same structural barriers may appear in various forms for different groups and span several stages of the teaching pipeline. Also racism, sexism and classism were found to intersect to impede minority youth from teaching. The three racial/ethnic groups cited both different and similar factors. The major barriers to teaching were: (1) an exclusionary Euro-centric learning environment in the pre-university and university stages which tend to disengage Black Canadians from school; (2) among Chinese-Canadians, parental emphasis on numerical skills and de-emphasis on language skills, and pressure to choose higher status, higher paying careers; (3) parental low priority on education and expectations for early employment among Portuguese-Canadians. The primary motivating factors to become teachers were: (1) a strong desire to reform the educational system (mainly for African-Canadians); (2) parental support for post-secondary education (mainly for Portuguese-Canadians); (3) interest in working with children; (4) exposure to teaching-related experience; & (5) teacher support to excel in school and/or to consider teaching as a career. Policy implications for recruiting more racial/ethnic minority teachers include: (1) making the school environment more inclusive; (2) intervening at elementary grades before the student's career path is set; (3) customizing outreach strategies for different communities and subgroups within the communities; (4) paying attention to conditions that have facilitated minority youth to overcome barriers to teaching; (5) focusing on the inner motivation of minority youth to teach; (6) providing more teaching-related experiences for minority students; (7) increasing teachers' awareness that they are influential in shaping minority students' future career choices; (8) exploring unconventional sources of teacher recruitment; (9) having the various stakeholders cooperate; & (10) monitoring the representation of minority teachers through on-going data collection.
Being "brown" in a small white town: young Guyanese women negotiating identities in Canada
Keywords: Guyanese, Ontario
Women, Ontario
Women, East Indian, Ontario
Group identity, Ontario
Linguistic minorities, Social conditions
Linguistic minorities, Ontario
Memory
Minorities, Ontario
Orientalism, Ontario
Women immigrants, Ontario
Hindu diaspora
Ethnicity, Ontario

This work investigates the subject formation among a select group of individuals: Indo-Guyanese women who were raised in white small towns in South Western Ontario. The author investigates how notions of "the Indian", as a "colonial ideological reflex", are reproduced in the small town. The five participants in this study offer historical accounts of migration, custom, and heritage that shape the textual repertoire available to these young women. The author raises three continuous threads within this project. First, she investigates how memory work causes us to question how the past is remembered and represented. Secondly, she analyses how members of the Indian Diaspora are constructed as socially invisible and hypervisible as a result of dominant discourses. Finally, an underlying goal within this project seeks to dismantle essentialist notions of the Indian woman.
Context and justification: a comparative analysis of affirmative action
Keywords: Affirmative action programs
Equality before the law
Minorities, Legal status, laws, etc

This paper focuses on the relationship between the empirical conditions under which affirmative action policies have been applied and the normative justifications for these policies. By analysing the affirmative action jurisprudence of the United States, South Africa, India and the European Union, the four jurisdictions whose policies have generated the most literature, this paper seeks to determine the manner in which particular features of affirmative action policies influence the choice of justifications relied upon. This analysis is then applied to the Malaysian model of affirmative action, a model which, in contrast to the aforementioned jurisdictions, has not been the subject of extensive analysis, in order to explore possible rationales.
The nation of Quebec in a united Canada: recognizing and defining Quebec's distinctiveness in the Constitution of Canada
Keywords: Constitutional law, Québec (Province)
Constitutional law, Canada

This thesis examines the implications of recognizing Quebec as a nation within the Constitution of Canada. Based on a comparative analysis of the legal scholarship relating to the 'distinct society' provisions of the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accord, s this thesis concludes that the effect of constitutionally recognizing Quebec as a nation would be to enlarge the jurisdiction of the Quebec Government, and to limit the scope of Charter rights, while expanding the permissible limitations thereof. However, on the basis of self-recognition, the entity within Quebec that can best be described as a nation is the ethno-cultural nation of the Quebecois (francophone Quebecers), rather than Quebecers as a whole. Thereore, the thesis concludes that constitutional recognition of Quebec as a nation should not occur before a majority of non-francophone Quebecers also self-identify as part of a civic nation of Quebec.
Work satisfaction and perceived job skills: impact on motivation to learn among ethnic minority women
Keywords: Motivation (Psychology)
Motivation in education
Motivation in adult education
Women, Employment
Minorities, Employment
Learning, Psychology of
Sex role in the work environment
Discrimination in employment

This study is an attempt to consider some linkage between the work satisfaction experienced by ethnic minority women working in non-ethnic based organizations and their motivation to learn for personal growth and development. Other studies show that ethnic minority women, especially immigrants, encounter various adverse job conditions while pursuing their career in Canada. These barriers not only affect the level of work satisfaction of these women, but may also change their own perception of job skills they possess, resulting in unforeseeable obstacles for them to fulfill their career and personal goals. Learning as a source of empowerment may help ethnic minority women to attain their unfulfilled goals and dreams together with a better understanding of their situation in relation to their minority status. The objective of this research is to draw a connection between their working experience and their desire to continue to learn in expanding their knowledge base.
Early childhood education reform: a narrative study of teachers' responses
Keywords: Educational change, China
Early childhood education, China
School improvement programs, China
Early childhood teachers, China

In a two and a half year Home-School-Institute narrative study, from the perspective of a teacher educator/reformer/researcher, how participants interacted in a collaborative school improvement reform landscape was explored. The focus was to promote long-term school improvement. Using intensive participant observation and ongoing co-participant inquiry in the practical world, teachers' lives were found to be shaped by their professional knowledge landscape that was complex, each having its contextual, personal and social narrative history. Social changes tend to have an inevitable impact on shaping teachers' lives. In order to understand and facilitate reform in early childhood education, there are temporal and interactive elements to examine. Reformers view reform as a part of the school curriculum and a life course of action. Most likely, reformers themselves change. It reveals that reformers' change is as significant as the teachers that needed to be reformed. Working to collaborate with other people in a new landscape is not easy for it involves personal, social and epistemological issues. However, in this study when teachers and reformer/researcher engaged in making meaning of their lived stories in three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, they understood who they were, how they interacted with the world, and how they knew the world. Indeed, teachers are knowers. With this increased understanding and knowledge of their practice, they improved their practice and provided a more meaningful curriculum. Being a teacher educator/reformer/researcher, the researcher herself developed practical meanings for school reform and teacher education. Teachers are key persons in promoting quality education for children. It was found that the process of understanding, knowing and improving practice required a reflective and reflexive capacity that developed through a narrative approach. This narrative approach encouraged teachers to develop this essential capacity that is crucial for long-term school improvement. And finally, the practical world is complex and ever changing. Whether researcher/reformer/teacher, each participant in the reform functions as a narrative collaborator-learner-inquirer to enrich knowledge in a challenging world.
Modeling uncertainty with evolutionary improved "fuzzy functions"
Keywords: Industrial engineering
Artificial intelligence
Computer science

Fuzzy system modeling (FSM)--meaning the construction of a representation of fuzzy systems models--is a difficult task. It demands an identification of many parameters. This thesis analyses fuzzy-modeling problems and different approaches to cope with it. It focuses on a novel evolutionary FSM approach--the design of "Improved Fuzzy Functions" system models with the use of evolutionary algorithms. In order to promote this analysis, local structures are identified with a new improved fuzzy clustering method and represented with novel "fuzzy functions". The central contribution of this work is the use of evolutionary algorithms--in particular, genetic algorithms--to find uncertainty interval of parameters to improve "Fuzzy Function" models. To replace the standard fuzzy rule bases (FRBs) with the new "Improved Fuzzy Functions" succeeds in capturing essential relationships in structure identification processes and overcomes limitations exhibited by earlier FRB methods because there are abundance of fuzzy operations and hence the difficulty of the choice of amongst the t-norms and co-norms.
From course content to teaching practice: Understanding teachers' moral awareness through an intervention project in a Mexican public elementary school
Keywords: Moral education (Elementary), Mexico
Teaching, Moral and ethical aspects
Teaching, Mexico
Teacher-student relationships, Mexico
Classroom management, Mexico
Elementary school teachers, Attitudes
Elementary school teachers, Mexico
Educational change, Mexico

The moral nature of education has become a relevant issue in Mexico as well as in other countries in the world. Several attempts have been undertaken in Mexico to promote teachers' professional development in their role as moral agents. The purpose of this ethnographic study is to develop a better understanding of teachers' moral awareness through an intervention project conducted in a school located in a Mexican city. The sample included thirteen public elementary school teachers and the school principal. The findings show that teacher-participants reflected different levels of moral awareness in the way they interpreted and integrated moral concepts in their everyday practice. It was also observed that the motivation and success these teachers had in implementing changes varied in relation to their level of moral awareness. This study highlights important elements to take into consideration when making decisions to implement changes in teaching practice from a moral perspective.
A space-control theory of paramedic scene-management
Keywords: Allied health personnel, Ontario
Emergency medical personnel, Ontario
Emergency management, Social aspects
Emergency management, Ontario
Symbolic interactionism

The purpose of this qualitative inquiry was to investigate an important, and to date un-researched aspect of paramedic practice specifically, the management of emergency scenes. This aspect of paramedic practice involves relying heavily on social relations between individuals and groups. Symbolic interactionism, with its sensitivity to the social aspects of behavior, was chosen as the study's theoretical perspective. Consistent with this perspective, and in order to draw on strengths in the areas of exploring and identifying basic social processes, a Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) was also employed. Data were obtained from paramedics who work in a variety of settings including those who practice in rural, sub-urban, and urban settings. To further provide for input from a variety of perspectives, these paramedics were chosen from three specified groups including novice, experienced, and expert paramedics. Data were obtained during private, in-depth and semi-structured interviews lasting from one to two hours. The study resulted in the generation of a Space-Control Theory of Paramedic Scene-Management. This theory claims that in order to deliver effective patient care, paramedics must establish social control over their work areas. In order to do so, paramedics must be skilled at interpersonal relations and employ sophisticated social processes. These include antecedent (and sustaining) processes to establish a safety zone, as well as specific processes including (a) reducing uncertainty through social relations, (b) controlling the trajectory of the scene, (c) temporality at the scene, and (d) collateral monitoring. Additionally, expert paramedics were found to have developed the specialized ability to know when and where to act at a scene and this is conceptualized as a new term, the "pre-hospital kairotope". This study provides insight into a "silent" yet important aspect of paramedic practice. As such it offers a contribution to Higher Education by informing the design of learning outcomes for both pre and in-service professional education. Utilizing the theory in this manner to re-frame paramedic education would increase the continuity between educational programming and the field of practice, as well as promote effective transfer of learning from the classroom to the field.
'HIV is no picnic': Social constructions of the queer HIV-positive body in HIV prevention pedagogies of fear
Keywords: AIDS (Disease), Prevention
AIDS (Disease), Prevention
AIDS (Disease) in mass media
HIV infections, Prevention
HIV infections, Prevention
Advertising, Social aspects
Gays in advertising, Social aspects

This thesis examines the HIV-positive queer male body as a surface for the production of meaning and discursive inscription of AIDS-related ideologies. The bodies I examine appear in a fear-based HIV prevention campaign entitled 'HIV is no picnic.' Campaign images depict four suffering bodies to highlight the consequences of unprotected sex. My analysis is situated at the juncture of queerness, disability, HIV/AIDS, and prevention pedagogy which collaborate to construct the HIV-positive body as a cultural artifact. These corporeal representations are analyzed for how HIV-related suffering (re)produces the social world by structuring the cultural intelligibility of a pandemic and the subjectivities configured within its discourse. By using a Foucauldian and phenomenological lens, I explore how 'HIV is no picnic' enlists spectators into a mediated interpretive labor of embodiment through the deployment of historically-based ruling relations of power/knowledge which organize the visual scene of recognition to make bodies appear in circumscribed ways.
Mindstorms Robolab: developing science concepts during a problem-based learning club
Keywords: Problem solving in adolescence
Robotics, Study and teaching
Student activities
Technology, Study and teaching
Problem solving in children
Science, Study and teaching

The study examined how each club taught science and technology in an environment that supported problem-based learning. The case study method was used for three robot clubs. This study found a wide range of science concepts were used by students that made LEGO(TM) robots with Mindstorms Robolab RTM. The concepts included stability, motion, forces, gears, motion, switches and mechanical efficiency. Activity theory explained the observable outcomes of problem-based learning. The following outcomes for problem-based learning were observed: usable science and technology concepts, successful problem solving, self-directed learning and collaboration. The observable outcomes of Science and Technology principles for problem-based learning were described by substantive and group processing behaviour. The data analysis was based on a grounded theory approach.
State responsibility for the violation of women's human rights: the case of domestic violence in Ecuador
Keywords: Abused women, Ecuador
Marital violence, Ecuador
Human rights, Ecuador
Women, Legal status, laws, etc
Women, Ecuador

Ecuador as any other state is held accountable by customary international law or the ratification of treaties and covenants. There exist specific obligations under CEDAW and the Convention of Belen Do Para to eliminate violence against women, but despite these obligations, executive, judicial and legislative powers deny these obligations in their decisions. This is a failure to comply with the obligations assumed in international agreements. Ecuador can be held accountable under International Human Rights Law given that most of Ecuadorian women reported to have been assaulted by their husband or partners. These victims disclosed a lack of diligence of the state to prevent and specially punish the perpetrators of domestic violence. Ecuador can be held accountable under CEDAW and Belem Do Para provisions not because of the high rate of domestic violence but for the lack of diligence in implementing measures to eliminate it.
Differentiating children with and without a history of repeated problematic sexual behaviours following adult reprimand
Keywords: Children and sex
Problem children
Discipline of children
Child sexual abuse

The goal of the current study was to determine factors that differentiate children who repeated and did not repeat inappropriate sexual behaviours following adult reprimand. A literature review revealed 33 factors likely related to repeated sexual behaviours. Predictive accuracy of these factors was investigated in 62 children (9 females) recently assessed for problematic sexual behaviours. The children were divided into those with and without a history of repeated problematic sexual behaviours following adult reprimand. A relationship was found between eight individual factors and group membership and the combination of these factors demonstrated accuracy in identifying group membership. The results indicate factors that may assist in identifying children who require intervention and those likely only requiring adult reprimand to deter continued problematic sexual behaviours.