I wish school was like this: one teacher\u27s journey towards creating a student-led learning space

The purpose of this study was to use the principles of the Reggio Emilia Approach to change how children in a high poverty school in West Virginia are educated. Specifically, this study was an exploration of the learning space as a third teacher, teachers as researchers, and giving students agency in their learning. A philosophy supporting emergent and participatory inquiry was developed and carried out for this project. Data were collected using several qualitative methods such as participant observation, discussion, interviews, photo elicitation, and student work. Conclusions from this project include: that there is potential of using space as a third teacher; that reformulating teachers as researchers will make the craft of teaching stronger; and that students who are given the opportunity to exercise true agency in their learning will be more engaged in their learning and have a breadth and depth of work more complex than traditional learning

Evaluation Tool for Collecting Statewide Outcomes for Single-Session Programs

Evaluation is critical to demonstrating program value and impact and to better communicating outcomes to stakeholders. Purdue Extension Health and Human Sciences (HHS Extension) created an evaluation tool based on the need to collect statewide metrics on a standardized set of questions addressing the topics of food, family, money, and health. This evaluation tool, Survey Builder, allows Extension educators to customize evaluations for single-session programs using a streamlined online approach. Data from Survey Builder allow HHS Extension to demonstrate the collective outcomes of statewide programming efforts. Survey Builder was developed to be used by other organizations as well

Makerspaces: The library as the the change agent in public schools

Makerspaces are the trend in public education. What is a Makerspace, is a makerspace right for our school, how do you set up a Makerspace, and how will it drive change in your school are all questions we will help answer

Orientations and lifeworlds of carers of older people in Tyne and Wear, UK

This thesis focuses on the subjectivities and everyday routines of people who provide home-based care to older people at a political juncture which is reorienting social care towards self-directed support. Promoting the uptake of personal cash budgets and encouraging more person-centred provision, personalisation agendas loosely knit with the recognition politics of the disability movement, and connect to the emerging ‘Big Society’ discourse by encouraging more support from family, friends and volunteers. Their discursive combination strengthen and legitimate choice and control agendas that are potentially progressive in many ways, but have less obvious benefit from a carer perspective. This qualitative research draws upon semi-structured interviews and solicited diaries to explore the everyday practices, spaces and emotional investments of paid and unpaid home-based carers in Tyne and Wear, UK. Using feminist and poststructuralist understandings of diverse care economies, and phenomenological concepts of orientation and life-world, I argue that in negotiating the right thing to do, carer orientations in ‘being for others’ traverse competing social expectations, and disrupt and constitute caring spaces, practices and identities. Individualised notions of choice and control may fray and unravel when directed towards carers who de-limit possibilities in their everyday lives in a desire for coherence, predictability and legitimacy. Findings suggest that ‘good enough’ care imaginaries are often co-produced in a context of significant constraint. Yet, in augmenting imagined notions of home and family in everyday caring routines, carer respondents often insist on the necessity of practices which extend beyond utility, reflecting on the life-course to sustain meaningful stories and coherent identities for older people and for themselves.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceESRCGBUnited Kingdo

Talent Identification and Development in Sport

The early identification of talented individuals is considered increasingly important across many performance domains. Traditional concepts of talent have primarily emphasized genetically driven variables, proclaiming that exceptional abilities are the result of favourable genes matched to the required performance domain. Consequently, an oversimplified concept of sporting talent exists where the focus has typically been on discrete, one-dimensional measures at unstable periods in the athlete’s development. Talent identification processes adopted by several countries around the world have evolved from this oversimplified concept of talent and are unlikely to reflect adequately how talent emerges in sport. In fact, retrospective interviews with successful athletes emphasized that a range of factors impact success within sport and these are not solely governed by genetic determinants of performance. In particular, athletes highlighted the crucial role that psychology can have on the ability of an individual to translate potential to performance. It is concluded that TI models need to place a greater emphasis on the development of potentially talented performers rather than early identification. In this thesis, the concept of talent is revised as a complex, dynamical system in which future behaviours emerge from an interaction of key determinants such as psychobehavioural characteristics, motor abilities, and physical characteristics. A generic model of talent identification and development (TID) that addresses these issues, and resources that enable its practical application, is proposed. Initial findings from this pilot study are discussed and implications for further work are provided

87th Annual Georgia Public Health Association Meeting & Conference Report

The 87th Annual Meeting of the Georgia Public Health Association (GPHA) was held in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 22-23, 2016, with pre-conference (March 21st) and post-conference (March 23rd) Executive Board meetings. As Georgia’s leading forum for public health researchers, practitioners, and students, the annual meeting of the GPHA brings together participants from across the state to explore recent developments in the field and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. In recent years the venue for the GPHA annual conference has been Atlanta, with the 2017 GPHA Annual Meeting and Conference also scheduled to be held in Atlanta. Several new initiatives were highlighted as part of this year’s conference. These included three pre-conference workshops, expansion of academic sponsorships, an enhanced exhibit hall integrated with the poster sessions, silent auction, breaks and President’s Reception, an information booth, and an inaugural administration section track. The 2016 Annual Meeting & Conference added the Certified in Public Health (CPH) Continuing Education (CE) designation. The theme for the conference was Understanding Public Health: Research, Evidence and Practice, which reflects the science of public health