Understanding the Elements of Executable Architectures Through a Multi-Dimensional Analysis Framework

The objective of this dissertation study is to conduct a holistic investigation into the elements of executable architectures. Current research in the field of Executable Architectures has provided valuable solution-specific demonstrations and has also shown the value derived from such an endeavor. However, a common theory underlying their applications has been missing. This dissertation develops and explores a method for holistically developing an Executable Architecture Specification (EAS), i.e., a meta-model containing both semantic and syntactic information, using a conceptual framework for guiding data coding, analysis, and validation. Utilization of this method resulted in the description of the elements of executable architecture in terms of a set of nine information interrogatives: an executable architecture information ontology. Once the detail-rich EAS was constructed with this ontology, it became possible to define the potential elements of executable architecture through an intermediate level meta-model. The intermediate level meta-model was further refined into an interrogative level meta-model using only the nine information interrogatives, at a very high level of abstraction

The Sustaining Factors of Service-Learning at a National Leader School: A Case Study

This case study examines the sustaining factors of a fully implemented and nationally recognized high school service-learning program. More specifically, it investigates why Community Service Learning has sustained itself for nine years at a New England high school recognized as a National Service-Learning Leader School by the Corporation for National Service. The study describes the process of adoption, design, implementation, and paths to institutionalization. It also considers the organizational conditions that promoted institutionalization at this site. The research approach was primarily qualitative. The study exposes the broad narrative of the case from the perspective off Our data sources: observations, documents and artifacts, interviews and a faculty survey. Key actors and supports as well as obstacles and coping processes are noted in the findings. Recommendations gleaned from the study are directed at sustaining comprehensive service-learning programs that provide a framework of meaning and higher purpose to academic work

The Sustaining Factors of Service-Learning at a National Leader School: A Case Study

This case study examines the sustaining factors of a fully implemented and nationally recognized high school service-learning program. More specifically, it investigates why Community Service Learning has sustained itself for nine years at a New England high school recognized as a National Service-Learning Leader School by the Corporation for National Service. The study describes the process of adoption, design, implementation, and paths to institutionalization. It also considers the organizational conditions that promoted institutionalization at this site. The research approach was primarily qualitative. The study exposes the broad narrative of the case from the perspective off Our data sources: observations, documents and artifacts, interviews and a faculty survey. Key actors and supports as well as obstacles and coping processes are noted in the findings. Recommendations gleaned from the study are directed at sustaining comprehensive service-learning programs that provide a framework of meaning and higher purpose to academic work

Brokering Governance? A Political Ethnography of the UN Tenure Guidelines in Struggles for Access to Land, Fisheries and Forests in Nepal

This thesis examines the brokerage of rights-based governance, and the role of intermediary organisations therein; a key yet neglected issue in the global food and agricultural governance literature. Governance brokerage encompasses overlapping forms of mediation: brokers translate rights and development projects, across a continuum of state-society and global-local relations. The thesis assesses how civil society actors employ the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (2012) in their struggles in Nepal. The context is Nepal's 2015 Constitution, and the newly enshrined rights to food and to food sovereignty.Through a multi-sited political ethnography, I interrogate how the Tenure Guidelines were introduced into Nepal, and I observe how these spaces of policy dialogue are adapted and operationalised by three organisations, affiliated to different transnational advocacy networks. I locate state and non-state actors' uneven mediation practices at the interstices of national efforts toward inclusive deliberative spaces. I assess the extent to which they employ the Tenure Guidelines to amend and draft laws with participation of affected peoples. I analyse how the focus on law reform and multi-stakeholderism condition this process of adaptation. Based on empirically grounded research, substantiated by historical and sociopolitical analysis, I show that governance brokers play critical functions in connecting grassroots struggles to decision-makers. Yet their role as well-placed connectors isreinforced by the project-based approach to governance, in an unstable grey area of statecivil society and global-local intermediation. Beyond policy dialogue, I conclude that to bring social forces together to use human rights-based instruments as a tool in grassroots struggles, deliberative spaces need to equally be created or adapted by local activist networks, closer to the conflicts themselves

Understanding voice in the disciplines : the struggles of Latina non-traditional students and their instructors.

For years, university faculty has complained that students come to the university unprepared to meet the demands of their content courses. In particular, they complain that students do not know how to cite or how to quote the work of others. To help students, university and content faculty have taken a series of measures which include creating a series of junior and academic writing courses, developing academic honesty policies and bringing APA or MLA handouts to class, and including in their syllabi academic honesty policies. All these measures come from a view of writing as a set of rules that can be applied across contexts, situations, and audiences. Given that students continue to struggle with issues of voice in their academic writing, it is important to review these views and practices and find other ways to help students. In the past 40 years, genre and SFL scholars have been arguing for a more situated view of writing in which writing is a social practice that varies from one context to another and from one discourse community to another. Drawing on these theories, this study explores how content faculty can more effectively help students in general, and ESL nontraditional students in particular, develop their disciplinary voices. This study examines the difficulties that a group of undergraduate Latina nontraditional students encountered while adopting a disciplinary voice and incorporating the voices of others in their texts, including the reasons for these difficulties and faculty support received. Ethnographic, Critical Language Awareness, and Systemic Functional Linguistics methods of data collection and analysis were used to explore these issues. Findings suggest that to effectively help ESL students respond to the different writing and voice demands of their disciplinary courses, content faculty need to work collaboratively with students and college ESL and writing instructors in adopting and presenting a more dynamic view of writing and voice. In this dynamic view, students are not required to memorize rules for attribution of voice applicable across disciplines, but to analyze the situation and the audience before deciding what voices to use and how to use them

Alternative Spring Break and Social Responsibility is There a Relationship?

Humans are living in a complex, interdependent, global society. Violence by youth is at an all-time high, the school system is failing to educate students (especially in urban areas), and all of this is compounded by major economic and social forces that are significantly altering the fabric of our lives. According to Keith (1994) these forces include: “… the impact of technology and the globalization of the economy on social relations and the structure of work (Broyn. 1991; Mingrone, 1983; Offee & Heinz. 1992; Wilson. 1987); the depletion of non-renewable resources and the ecological crisis; the mounting pace of population movements across national boundaries. especially from the \u27poorer\u27 to the \u27richer\u27 countries (Schaefer. 1990); differential rates of population growth favoring so-called people of color (Pallas, et. al., 1989); the economic and political shifts attendant to post-cold war transformations; and the visible social tensions accompanying all of these, which find expression in part, in a growing intolerance of diversity and violence towards those defined as \u27Others\u27 (313). With all this chaos. how do we develop socially responsible citizens for the future? The current research in community service-learning might provide some answers