VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Attribution Processes in Parent-Adolescent Conflict in Families with Adolescents with and without ADHD

This study examined parent-adolescent conflict and the attributions for conflict. Adolescent participants (29 ADHD; 22 Comparison) aged 13-17 and their mothers and fathers completed questionnaires. Adolescents with ADHD have conflicts over more issues with their parents according to self and parent report. Adolescents who believed that the conflict occurred in many contexts and that their parents were responsible for that conflict reported that they had conflict over more issues. Attributions were not predictive of conflict according to mother report. ADHD status moderated attributions in predicting father reported conflict. Among fathers who believed that conflicts were their son or daughter’s responsibility, fathers of youth with ADHD were less likely to report more issues involving conflicts than fathers of youth without ADHD. Conversely, among fathers who believed conflict was pervasive across contexts and time, having a son or daughter with ADHD was associated with more issues involving conflict.

Keywords: parent-youth conflict
attributions
ADHD
adolescents
Advisor: Wiener, Judith
Career Compromise in Immigrant Professionals in Canada

This study presents the investigation of the career transition experience of immigrant skilled workers with a focus on their experiences with career compromise and the coping strategies that they used. The grounded theory approach of qualitative analysis method was used to analyze 20 interview transcripts with participants who had received their education/training and had at least 1 year of work experience prior to immigrating to Canada. The interviews revealed that the career transition journeys of immigrant skilled workers were thwarted with acculturation and career-seeking barriers, which made their career transition experiences quite compromising. The findings support the notion of positive compromise whereby the participants utilized their human agency and open-mindedness to deal with their career compromise. An immigrant vocational theory and an immigrant career compromise theory are proposed. Practical implications and future research directions are discussed.

Keywords: career compromise
immigrant skilled workers
career transition
Canada
career
immigrant professionals
immigrants
career development
Advisor: Chen, Charles
Praxis, Informal Learning and Particpatory Democracy: The Case of Venezuela's Socialist Production Units

Using a Marxist perspective, this thesis examines Venezuela’s Socialist Production Units (SPU). SPUs have emerged as a clear alternative to the neoliberal model that characterized Venezuela and most of Latin America for the past 30 years. However, SPUs exist within capitalism and their political economy remains contradictory, a reality that manifests in the concrete experiences of their workers. Although facing contradictory experiences, SPU workers are acquiring important learning that challenges dominant market relations and builds the preconditions for a new, more just society. This learning is being acquired informally, in particular, through workers’ democratic participation in their SPU. For these reasons, SPUs should be considered important sites where revolutionary praxis is taking place. Therefore, I conclude, SPUs are making a significant contribution to the building of ‘socialism in the 21st century’, but further struggles, in particular, against the state bureaucracy and large local landowners are needed to advance their goals.

Keywords: Informal Learning
Social Movement Learning
Marxism
Popular Education
Praxis
Bolivarian Revolution
Venezuela
Political Economy
Social Economy
Community Development
Cooperatives
Popular Economy
21st Century Socialism
Participatory Democracy
Advisor: Schugurensky, Daniel
Preschools and the Pedagogy of Domestication: The Ideologically Haunted Landscapes of Early Learning

This thesis analyzes the “home area” learning center in open-ended preschool classrooms to address the various forms of gendered learning and pedagogy elicited by its presence in geographies of early learning. I argue that the home and block areas spatially and symbolically mimic the traditional division of public and private spheres of sociality characteristic of the patriarchal social order. I suggest that the gendered enactments of space and place in open-ended classrooms function to socialize children into heteronormative forms of sex-role consciousness through what I identify as a spatial pedagogy of domestication. I suggest that this pedagogy is enforced by ideologically haunted landscapes like the domestic landscape of the home area. By outlining critical, feminist, and queer interventions in early learning I suggest that taking a spatial approach provides a more capacious explanatory frame for analyzing how, in a neo-Marxist sense, the ideo-culturally bound relations of production are reproduced through the socializing apparatus of the preschool.

Keywords: Early Childhood Education
Space, Queer Theory
Advisor: Boler, Megan
Assessing the Impact of Peace Education Training Programs: A Case Study of UNESCO-APCEIU

Each year the Asia-Pacific Centre of Education for International Understanding (APCEIU), operating under the auspices of UNESCO, hosts a peace education training-of-trainer’s program for teacher-educators from across the Asia-Pacific. In this thesis, I examine through a qualitative case study approach the programmatic design and evaluation of the APCEIU training program, seeking to monitor its medium-term impact on educators. The research is framed within a larger study of peace education programs around the world. Frameworks of peace education conceptualized by Betty Reardon and Swee-hin Toh, and critical approaches to peace and development as animated by Paulo Freire and Johan Galtung, provide the theoretical foundations for the study. Research findings are based on consultation records, documentary analysis, observations, and questionnaire responses from evaluations of the 2009 program. In the medium-term impact assessment report, 14 educators offered data pertaining to their post-program implementation of peace education concepts and practices in their work.

Keywords: Peace Education
Teacher Training
International Education
UNESCO
Advisor: Schugurensky, Daniel
Goodman, Anne
Japanese Indigenous Knowledges and Impacts of Vibrating Energy: Pedagogical Implication in Education

The purpose of this study is to engage in a discussion that is currently marginalized in academic spaces, about the notions of energy and impacts of it on students' learning process and accomplishment in the educational space. While teachers' low expectations and negation on racialized students, and hostilities from other peers has been studied, not much attention has been paid to how those teachers' and peers' energy such as hostility has impacted on students' learning process and accomplishment. In this thesis, I employ Japanese Indigenous ways of knowing to explore this theme. However, my discussion about the impact of energy on student learning process is not limited to the Japanese context only; I have expanded the discussion to the Eurocentric educational system as well. My thesis aims to contribute to the instructional and pedagogical implication for classroom teachers.

Keywords: Japanese Indigenous knowledges
Impacts of Energy
Pedagogical Implication
Advisor: Wane, Njoki
Responding to Alienating Trends in Modern Education and Civilization by Remembering our Responsibility to Metaphysics and Ontological Education: Answering to the Platonic Essence of Education

This thesis explores the most basic purpose of education and how it can be advanced. To begin to analyze this fundamental area of concern, this thesis associates notions of education with notions and experiences of truth and authenticity, which vary historically and culturally. A phenomenological analysis, featuring the philosophy of Heidegger, uncovers the basic conditions of human experience and discourse, which have become bent upon technology and jargon in the West. He draws on Plato's account of the 'essence of education' in the Cave Allegory, which underscores human agency in light of truth as unhiddenness. Heidegger calls for ontological education, which advances authenticity as it preserves individuals as codisclosing, historical beings.

Keywords: philosophy of education
authentic education
Plato
human
truth
authenticity
west
western
phenomenology
Martin Heidegger
ontotheology
discourse
technology
technologization
jargon of authenticity
Theodor Adorno
cave allegory
unhiddenness
aletheia
ontological education
essence of truth
student alienation
Donald Vandenberg
Stephen Mulhall
enframing
metaphysics
inauthenticity
hiddenness
unhiddenness
the good
nihilism
thrown
Michael A. Peters
Iain Thomson
David E. Cooper
Joan Stambaugh
Advisor: Norris, Trevor
Stickney, Jeff
Unequal Opportunities for Citizenship Learning? Diverse Student Experiences Completing Ontario’s Community Involvement Requirement

This thesis examined diverse students' experiences completing Ontario's community involvement requirement. An analysis of quantitative surveys and qualitative focus groups among 50 current and recently graduated secondary school students from widely contrasting socio-economic settings showed ways in which diverse participants perceived their community involvement activities, the support for community involvement in their schools, and their associated opportunities to develop capacity to make changes toward a more socially just world. Results indicated that low-income participants reported dissimilar experiences from high-income participants, in relation to the support for community involvement provided by school staffs, participants' direct or distant relationships with service recipients, and their sense of individual and collective agency to effect change. Thus, this study challenges the assumption that all students in Ontario have equal access to the citizenship education learning opportunities embedded in meaningful community involvement activities.

Keywords: citizenship education
community service
community involvement
secondary school students
social class
socio-economic status
adult role models
teacher mentorship
critical pedagogy
qualitative research
quantitative research
mixed method
Ontario
curriculum
reflection
social justice
service learning
graduation requirement
mandatory
high school students
youth
adolescent
young people
active citizenship
agency
self-efficacy
social change
privilege
volunteer
independent school
private school
public school
alternative school
at-risk
high-income
low-income
social problems
service recipients
mandated
focus group
survey
Canada
citizen
participation
comparative
access
Advisor: Bickmore, Kathy
Evans, Mark
The Role of Family and Faith as Resources within South Asian Muslim Newcomer Communities Settling in Canada

This study examines the psychological and emotional experience of settling in Canada for South Asian Muslim newcomers and the coping systems they use to manage the challenges associated with moving to a new country. Ten South Asian Muslims were interviewed within the Greater Toronto Area. They were posed questions related to the hardships they encountered as they settled in Canada and how they managed those challenges. The data was analyzed using Grounded Theory. A model was developed to illustrate resources used by newcomers to help maintain their mental health and well-being. Upon settling in Canada, the participants experienced psychological stressors and therefore sought help from their Islamic faith, their families, and community services. The combined resources facilitated the immigrants’ resilience and allowed them to maintain a positive outlook towards their immigration experience.

Keywords: South Asian Muslim newcomers
Canada
Faith
Islam
Social support
Settlement
Newcomer
South Asian Muslim
Resources
Coping mechanisms
Advisor: Moodley, Roy
An Examination of Intimate Partner Violence Prevention Programs for Adolescent Males, Teen Boys and Young Men

This study examined 11 programs designed to prevent violence in youth intimate relationships with a focus on programs for male youth currently or recently used in Ontario. The BIAS FREE Framework was used to reveal hierarchies and biases in the program materials and to help formulate solutions to the identified problems. Gender, race, class, geographic location and at risk factors were considered. Most programs maintained and denied gender hierarchies by failing to examine differences and using double standards, mainly due to second person and gender neutral language. Programs for mixed-sex audiences were found to be biased in favour of male, urban audiences. Programs for male youth were biased in favour of urban audiences. Most programs examined contained many useful elements. Recommendations include the need for gender inclusive practices, audience-specific intimate violence prevention program content, particularly for male youth, communication across involved sectors and consistency in related definitions and terminology.

Keywords: violence prevention
male youth
dating violence
gender bias
Advisor: Eichler, Margrit
The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching

The Top Level Quality Project (jingpin kecheng, 精品课程) is a large project in Chinese higher education which uses the production of Open Educational Resources to improve the quality of undergraduate education. Widely understood in the West to be a form of OpenCourseWare inspired by MIT’s example, this thesis traces the roots of the project back to the history of Russian influence on Chinese higher education, the introduction of course evaluation systems in 1985, a string of large-scale funding projects to promote excellence in the 1990’s, and the massification of higher education from 1988 to 1998. After a detailed description of the project, the thesis suggests that university teaching is conceptualized very differently in North America and in China, drawing parallels both to the historical French and German models of the university, and to the Chinese tradition of using “models” to promote virtue and excellence.

Advisor: Hayhoe, Ruth
Narratives of Hope in Anti-oppression Education: What are Anti-racists For?

This project explores the connections between the worlds we hope for and the worlds we help create. Over the course of several months, I conducted three sets of narrative interviews with three anti-oppression education facilitators, and a self-study with myself. Using narrative inquiry through a specifically anti-colonial lens as my method of analysis, I worked in partnership with my interview participants to draw meaning out of our interviews. Growing from these discussions, this thesis explores the work that discourses of hope do in our practices as facilitators of education for change. How do the things that we learn to hope for inform the way we teach, and the possibilities that are allowed in, or locked out, of our classrooms? In problematizing certain functions of certain discourses of hope, this study also explores the possibilities of anti-colonial hopings as a process of generating decolonizing dreams through education for change.

Keywords: Anti-Oppression Facilitation
Hope
Decolonization
Anti-Racism
Advisor: Gaztambide-Fernandez, Ruben
Using a Computer-based Intervention to Foster Communication Skills in Children and Adolescents with Asperger's Syndrome

An important part of written communication involves thinking about one’s reader’s mind, yet students with Asperger’s syndrome (AS) have difficulty representing the minds of others. The present study investigated whether providing visual feedback to AS students would help them learn to consider their readers’ knowledge state in their emergent compositions. Using a computer-based intervention, thirteen AS children constructed unconventional figures and then dictated instructions so that a confederate in another room could reproduce the images based on their instructions. Children assigned to an experimental condition received visual feedback; however, children assigned to a control condition did not. Compared to the control group, experimental participants significantly improved the descriptiveness of their instructions and could apply their newfound skills to a novel context approximately 6.7 weeks post-intervention. This intervention effectively improved the students’ communication skills and could serve as a practical educational tool to advance social and literacy skills in AS children.

Advisor: Peskin, Joan
Solidarity in the Borderlands of Gender, Race, Class and Sexuality: Racialized Transgender Men

This qualitative study uses multiple autobiographical narratives of racialized transgender men to examine the intersecting axes of oppression at work in the borderlands of identity. The research contributes more complex understandings of transgender lives by raising questions about how gender, race, class, and sexuality intersect in the lives of racialized transgender men, and how such identities negotiate their place in the various communities constituted by those particular social locations. In particular I look at the ways that solidarity works in the borderlands, the liminal space composed of intersecting subject positions. I ask what constitutes solidarity, and I discover the contingencies operating in the borderlands that facilitate or pose barriers to full participation and solidarity of racialized transgender men. Findings reveal the complex negotiations racialized transgender men must engage in, both within and outside of queer and feminist communities, and challenge us to think through the meanings of solidarity.

Keywords: solidarity
transgender
borderlands
racialized
Advisor: Mirchandani, Kiran
Rolling Out the Transformative Social Economy: A Case Study of Organic Intellectualism in Canadian Settlement Houses

Social economy community development organizations (SECDOs) are social service organizations that provide poverty relief but do not necessarily inspire a counter-hegemonic antipoverty strategy against a neoliberal welfare state. Tension between providing human social services and engaging in advocacy is at the core of how SECDOs may be both complicit to as well as working against the neoliberalization of the welfare state. This study explores how SECDOs can nurture a new paradigm for community economic development organizations. Through a case study of a Canadian settlement house, the research demonstrates how transforming work may encourage a culture of organic intellectualism or, a culture of emancipatory consciousness-raising. By re-organizing workplace practices, such as working collaboratively, providing a hub for services and engaging in popular education, transformative SECDOs help provide the conditions for citizens to affect governance. The research theorizes how SECDOs may foster a culture of organic intellectualism to promote the transformative social economy.

Keywords: activism
adult education
advocacy
alienation
anti-poverty
Canadian settlement houses
case study
community development
community economic development organizations
conscientization
counter-hegemony
governance
marxist-humanist
organic intellectualism
popular education
roll-out neoliberalism
social change
social economy
social movement
social service provision
social work
sociology
Toronto
transformative
welfare
Advisor: Schugurensky, Daniel
Women and Leadership: Towards a Gender, Race and Class Analysis

This study examines women and leadership and presents a critique of leadership within a framework of gender, race and class. It discusses the crucial role that leaders play in transforming Canadian society, and how women factor into that role. It explores the way in which leadership is also contextualized within and outside of gender. It also examines the way changes in Canadian demographics have resulted in a more diverse group of students in schools, out of which have arisen new problems. Consequently, this study proposes alternative educational leadership to help transform the situation. This study is based on content analysis using a series of books, periodicals, journals, and internet articles, and incorporates a theoretical framework of feminist theory, black feminist theory and black feminist thought and spirituality, and anti-racism theory.

Keywords: Women
Racial Studies
Advisor: Dei, George Jerry Sefa
Pinyin and Chinese Children's Phonological Awareness

This paper critically reviewed the literature on the relationships between Pinyin and Chinese bilingual and monolingual children’s phonological awareness (PA) and identified areas of research worth of further investigation. As the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet providing pronunciation of the universal Chinese characters, Pinyin facilitates children’s early reading development. What research has found in English is that PA is a reliable indicator of later reading success and meta-linguistic training improves PA. In Chinese, a non-alphabetic language, there is also evidence that PA predicts reading in Chinese, which confirms the universality of PA’s role. However, research shows the uniqueness of each language: tonal awareness is stronger indicator in Chinese while phonemic awareness is stronger indicator in English. Moreover, Pinyin, the meta-linguistic training, has been found to improve PA in Chinese and reading in Chinese and possibly facilitate the cross-language transfer of PA from Chinese to English and vice versa.

Keywords: Chinese reading
English reading
Pinyin
Phonological awareness
Advisor: Chen-Bumgardner, Xi
The Myth of Olympic Unity: The Dilemma of Diversity, Olympic Oppression, and the Politics of Difference

The dilemma of diversity is the tension that exists when prescriptive claims are required across reasonable pluralism. Scholar and philosopher Dwight Boyd believes that the dilemma of diversity must be addressed for the continued health of multicultural societies, and suggests that the solution can be found through democratic reciprocity. Though the International Olympic Committee (IOC) markets unity and peace through its Olympic Games, does the Olympics relieve the dilemma of diversity? By critically examining the IOC’s historic and recent treatment of Aboriginals, its encouragement of divisive nationalism, and its educational programs, it is clear that the IOC does not embrace reasonable pluralism. The IOC’s public pedagogy is one that conceals its dominance through diversity. In exposing this dominance, I will argue that the IOC must embrace democratic reciprocity that allows for conversation across difference. Adopting an authentic acceptance of difference will alleviate the IOC’s propagation of Western ideology through neo-imperialism.

Keywords: Dilemma of Diversity
Politics of Difference
Olympics
Oppression
Aboriginal Appropriation
Sportive Nationalism
Educational Materials
Dwight Boyd
Iris Marion Young
Branding
Multiculturalism
Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games
Advisor: Boler, Megan
Norris, Trevor
Set Stabilization for Systems with Lie Group Symmetry

This thesis investigates the set stabilization problem for systems with Lie group symmetry. Initially, we examine left-invariant systems on Lie groups where the target set is a left or right coset of a closed subgroup. We broaden the scope to systems defined on smooth manifolds that are invariant under a Lie group action. Inspired by the solution of this problem for linear time-invariant systems, we show its equivalence to an equilibrium stabilization problem for a suitable quotient control system. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the quotient control system and analyze various properties of such a system. This theory is applied to the formation stabilization of three kinematic unicycles, the path stabilization of a particle in a gravitational field, and the conversion and temperature control of a continuously stirred tank reactor.

Keywords: set stabilization
lie group symmetry
Advisor: Maggiore, Manfredi