The sequential and moral (dis)order of public disputes: how speakers resist, partition and do being reasonable in talk-in-interaction

This thesis puts forward a strong argument for why more up-to-date interactional research is needed into disputes and why disciplines, methodological approaches and theories should come second to the phenomenon. This thesis investigates how people behave in disputes. Disputes are a ubiquitous part of everyday life – we know a great a deal about disputes in particular contexts, how people disagree, and how disputes can be resolved. However, little is known about the specific interactional features of public disputes. Public disputes are disputes which occur in a public place where there are onlookers – for instance, on public transport, on the radio, or during protests, for instance. These are activities which regularly occur throughout everyday life as our opinions, beliefs, views, identity and/or knowledge etc. clash. This research examines actual, naturally-occurring disputes between strangers in public. The focus is on the ways that people challenge those contestations, resist those challenges, and manage their relationship with their co-disputant.The data comprises a corpus of over 100 recordings of disputes between members of the public. The data were collected, transcribed, and analysed within an ethnomethodological framework using a combination of conversation analysis, membership categorisation analysis, and discursive psychology in order to demonstrate how the phenomenon is handled sequentially and rhetorically. This combination of approaches centres the phenomena rather than focusing on the application of methods. The three analytic chapters are organised around different features of disputes and address the overall structural organisation of a dispute.The first analytic chapter inspects enticing sequences, which is a way that a challenge can be produced that reverses the logic of the other’s argument. This chapter (Chapter 3) builds on previous research, and lays the groundwork for the other chapters, to show the sequential placement and forms of resistance to challenges. This illustrates resistance as a solution to the practical problem of being trapped in a challenge with nowhere to go. The second analytic chapter investigates how people do partitioning, that is, how they exploit the boundaries of their situated identity, or category (i.e. from radio caller to father). This chapter (Chapter 4) shows how people reconfigure their relationship with their co-disputant(s), and how certain actions (i.e. requests, directives, instructions) trade on the relevance of this new relationship. The final analytic chapter examines how people work to appear ‘reasonable’ in a dispute. People seek to win a dispute and one way of accomplishing that is to be the ‘reasonable’ person relative to the other’s unreasonable behaviour. In this chapter (Chapter 5), I unpack this to show how, through meta-talk, people present their behaviour as reasonable, or the other’s behaviour as unreasonable, to produce a purportedly-rational argument. I reveal that whilst participants rarely express reasonableness, they do respond to transgressions of conversational norms (i.e. turn-taking, sequence). Consequently, this accomplishes a turn-at-talk and a chance to control the direction of the dispute.The thesis presents a state-of-the-art examination of disputative interactions and contributes significantly to our understanding of the structural organisation of disputes and how people behave in public places. Throughout the course of the thesis, I establish frameworks for future research that combine ethnomethodological approaches, deals with the ‘messiness’ and difficulty of public video-recordings, and develops an understanding of what a dispute actually is.</div

Alternative School Principals’ and Teachers’ Perceptions of Their School Setting

This session will present principal and teacher survey responses from a Georgia service area to show the level of existence of 40 effective alternative school characteristics and the importance of these same characteristics in their respective alternative schools. Principal and teacher interview data will be presented. Implications of the data will be discussed

NYAR Savannah Program 2014

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Improving Health Literacy for At-Risk Youth: Educating in the Age of the Internet

Health literacy has been gaining broader attention as a viable method for improving health outcomes. Most of the information on health literacy has addressed its function among adult populations in healthcare settings. This presentation will describe the basics of health literacy, such as how it is defined, how it can be operationalized in adolescent populations, how it must be part of the prevention vocabulary for adolescent service providers. It will also provide practical strategies to improve health literacy in the age of technology for those who work directly with youth. The ultimate goal is to reduce health risk behaviors in this population

NYAR Savannah Program 2012

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Academic Achievement for All: How to Reach and Teach Diverse Struggling Learners

In this session, we will be discussing different instructional strategies aimed at facilitating learning among socio-culturally and linguistically diverse students. These strategies incorporate the use of activities, visuals, graphic organizers, and foldables to enable students to improve their reading comprehension and learning skills. We will mainly focus on strategies that focus on motivation, accessing prior knowledge, reinforcing vocabulary, and questioning

NYAR Savannah Program 2012

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Principled Approaches to Automatic Text Summarization

Automatic text summarization is a particularly challenging Natural Language Processing (NLP) task involving natural language understanding, content selection and natural language generation. In this thesis, we concentrate on the content selection aspect, the inherent problem of summarization which is controlled by the notion of information Importance. We present a simple and intuitive formulation of the summarization task as two components: a summary scoring function θ measuring how good a text is as a summary of the given sources, and an optimization technique O extracting a summary with a high score according to θ. This perspective offers interesting insights over previous summarization efforts and allows us to pinpoint promising research directions. In particular, we realize that previous works heavily constrained the summary scoring function in order to solve convenient optimization problems (e.g., Integer Linear Programming). We question this assumption and demonstrate that General Purpose Optimization (GPO) techniques like genetic algorithms are practical. These GPOs do not require mathematical properties from the objective function and, thus, the summary scoring function can be relieved from its previously imposed constraints. Additionally, the summary scoring function can be evaluated on its own based on its ability to correlate with humans. This offers a principled way of examining the inner workings of summarization systems and complements the traditional evaluations of the extracted summaries. In fact, evaluation metrics are also summary scoring functions which should correlate well with humans. Thus, the two main challenges of summarization, the evaluation and the development of summarizers, are unified within the same setup: discovering strong summary scoring functions. Hence, we investigated ways of uncovering such functions. First, we conducted an empirical study of learning the summary scoring function from data. The results show that an unconstrained summary scoring function is better able to correlate with humans. Furthermore, an unconstrained summary scoring function optimized approximately with GPO extracts better summaries than a constrained summary scoring function optimized exactly with, e.g., ILP. Along the way, we proposed techniques to leverage the small and biased human judgment datasets. Additionally, we released a new evaluation metric explicitly trained to maximize its correlation with humans. Second, we developed a theoretical formulation of the notion of Importance. In a framework rooted in information theory, we defined the quantities: Redundancy, Relevance and Informativeness. Importance arises as the notion unifying these concepts. More generally, Importance is the measure that guides which choices to make when information must be discarded. Finally, evaluation remains an open-problem with a massive impact on summarization progress. Thus, we conducted experiments on available human judgment datasets commonly used to compare evaluation metrics. We discovered that these datasets do not cover the high-quality range in which summarization systems and evaluation metrics operate. This motivates efforts to collect human judgments for high-scoring summaries as this would be necessary to settle the debate over which metric to use. This would also be greatly beneficial for improving summarization systems and metrics alike

Managing post-merger corporate culture: A case study of two mergers in the United States transportation industry.

One company proactively sought to recognize and adopt the best cultural characteristics of both pre-merger partners. The other company chose to rapidly integrate two competitors with an expectation that the culture of the acquired organization would be assimilated into the culture of the new owner.The number and value of mergers and acquisitions involving a United States company continue to grow at record rates. The excitement about doing a merger or acquisition is driven by the anticipation of financial success due to reduced competition, operational synergies, and access to larger customer bases. The dark side of mergers and acquisitions, however, is that two-thirds of them either fail or under perform expectations. Although blame is often placed on financial considerations or unrealistic business plans, there has been a recent interest in how the human side of mergers and acquisitions may affect their ultimate success.The creation of these case studies has contributed to the body of knowledge by providing the rationale, results, and consequences that might be analogous to other organizations considering a post-merger culture change. The two mergers selected for this research represent the extreme ends of the change spectrum. The case studies were written based on 23 personal interviews with current and previous employees in a range of positions at both companies. The research also relies heavily on document examination, reference to published materials, and observations of the companies in their natural setting.Since no two mergers are alike, this case study research provides information that may be of value to those considering a merger or acquisition. Merger participants should take into account such factors as the workforce size, geographical distribution, strength of collective bargaining agreements, and tenure of employees when making post-merger culture change decisions of their own.In the second case, no underlying development strategy was used to guide the process. Operating problems attributable to the disregard of job skills developed within months. Many employees who resisted were given an exit opportunity causing a knowledge deficit in territories germane to the acquired company. Severe and costly service disruptions resulted which took years for the company to recover from.This dissertation examines and discusses---in case study format---the different approach the leadership of two organizations took to manage corporate culture in their transportation industry mergers.The second case studies the merger of two competitors that sought to build a larger end-to-end network. Using the Harrison and Stokes (1992) descriptors, the acquired company in this example had an achievement type culture while the acquiring company had and still has a role type culture. In this case the post-merger culture change (P. M. C. C.) methodology consisted simply of requiring that the acquired company adopt the rules and practices of the acquiring company.Using descriptors coined by Harrison and Stokes in 1992, the first case study examines a merger that featured the combination of a company with a power culture with a competitor that had a support culture. According to senior management, both cultures contributed to the financial success of the predecessor companies. With the approaching merger, however, the leadership team recognized that a clash of the different values, attitudes, and driving forces could be detrimental to the new company.One topic often disregarded when a merger is planned is how the corporate cultures of the two companies will react with each other when the companies are brought together. Since every organization has a unique culture, it is possible that the two cultures could clash and undermine the benefits of the merger by reducing productivity, disrupting operations, disturbing the supply chain, or alienating customers.The post-merger culture change (P.M.C.C.) at one company relied on the identification and adoption of best practices from both predecessor companies. That merger has been declared to be successful by senior management based on levels of employee satisfaction, profitability, and share price as indicators