Shifting Mindsets Within

Author(s):  
Brenda Wolodko ◽  
Cherry Stewart ◽  
Nicole Green ◽  
Helen Edwards ◽  
Margaret Brooks ◽  
...  

In an educational environment focused on providing flexible learning options to diverse student groups—rural and remote, cross-cultural, mature-aged, and second-chance learners—there need to be effective capacity building strategies for the professionals who provide these educational services. People do not resist change; they resist being changed. This chapter describes the capacity building of early childhood educators redesigning curriculum for distance learning. They engaged in self-study using metaphor as a research strategy to investigate their own adaptive practices. The creation of a professional learning community was made possible by supporting personal mastery and reflecting on the shared vision. The process of focusing meta-cognition on one’s own values and beliefs brought about a change in attitudes and perspectives relating to what could be achieved in an online learning environment. This chapter describes the research strategies and outcomes of an academic self-study professional development project. In addition, the authors suggest broader application of metaphor analysis as an elucidating strategy for capacity building.

Author(s):  
Susanne Ravn

AbstractThis paper sets out from the hypothesis that the embodied competences and expertise which characterise dance and sports activities have the potential to constructively challenge and inform phenomenological thinking. While pathological cases present experiences connected to tangible bodily deviations, the specialised movement practices of dancers and athletes present experiences which put our everyday experiences of being a moving body into perspective in a slightly different sense. These specialised experiences present factual variations of how moving, sensing and interacting can be like for us as body-subjects. To use of these sources inevitably demands that qualitative research methodologies – especially short-term ethnographical fieldwork – form part of the research strategy and qualify the way the researcher involves a second-person perspective when interviewing dancers and athletes about their experiences. In the subsequent phases analysing the data generated, I argue that researchers first strive to achieve internal consistency of empirical themes identified in the case of movement practices in question thus keeping to a contextualised and lived perspective, also denoted as an emic perspective. In subsequent phases phenomenological insights are then actively engaged in the exploration and discussion of the possible transcendental structures making the described subjective experiences possible. The specialised and context-defined experiences of ‘what a moving body can be like’ are accordingly involved as factual variations to constructively add to and potentially challenge phenomenological descriptions. Lastly, I exemplify how actual research strategies have been enacted in a variety of projects involving professional dancers’, golfers’ and sports dancers’ practices and experiences, respectively.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (9) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Oksana Bashtannyk

The relevance of this study is explained by the need to find out the heuristic parameters of one of the segments of the institutional analysis of Ukrainian political science - sociological institutionalism. At the present stage of world development of institutional research in politics, it is no longer enough to turn to the formalized aspects of the essence of political institutions, which is still a fairly common approach - in contrast to the general theory of the new institutionalism. Also, there is a widespread view that the latest models of research strategies can be offered only by foreign political science and it is among its developments that the necessary analytical tools should be sought. Due to certain historical aspects of the political development of our country, political science research has not been able to develop synchronously with global trends for a long time, but it is possible to assume that today this situation is gradually changing. Therefore, the purpose of our study was to concretize in domestic political science the analytical field of such research areas of the new institutionalism as sociological institutionalism and systematize the main parameters of its research strategy. As a result of the study, it was found that the provisions of sociological institutionalism of political science are based on more normative-formalized approaches compared to other types of institutionalism because its formation was significantly influenced by the theory of organizations. Most Ukrainian scholars use the methodological tools of this area of institutionalism for a comprehensive analysis of the nature of the political institution as a research unit, which is close in its characteristics to the latest world examples and requires an appropriate research methodology. The group of specific issues considered by domestic scholars on the basis of the provisions of sociological institutionalism is opened by the normative aspects of the functioning of international politics (for example, humanization), which in this dimension is in the center of attention of foreign scholars as well. A more interesting area of research is the peculiarities of the process of European integration, the analysis of which also begins in the works of foreign scholars, but we are interested in this question given Ukraine's European ambitions - whether its regulatory Europeanization will have appropriate prospects. Another important aspect of research using the methodology of this area of institutional analysis, and again - important for our country, are the socio-political processes in transition societies, where democratization has begun, but the achievements in this way are difficult to call sustainable.


Author(s):  
Judith Mavodza

The library and information science (LIS) profession is influenced by multidisciplinary research strategies and techniques (research methods) that in themselves are also evolving. They represent established ways of approaching research questions (e.g., qualitative vs. quantitative methods). This chapter reviews the methods of research as expressed in literature, demonstrating how, where, and if they are inter-connected. Chu concludes that popularly used approaches include the theoretical approach, experiment, content analysis, bibliometrics, questionnaire, and interview. It appears that most empirical research articles in Chu's analysis employed a quantitative approach. Although the survey emerged as the most frequently used research strategy, there is evidence that the number and variety of research methods and methodologies have been increasing. There is also evidence that qualitative approaches are gaining increasing importance and have a role to play in LIS, while mixed methods have not yet gained enough recognition in LIS research.


Author(s):  
Clark Shah-Nelson ◽  
Ellen A. Mayo ◽  
Patience Ebuwei

An American K-12 cooperative educational services provider (“The Agency”) has an issue: partner school districts are saving money by building internal capacity for professional development, rather than fully utilizing expertise from the Agency. The aim of this evidence-based case study is to inform the Agency on capacity-building for innovation. The researchers performed three separate rapid evidence assessments, followed by a standard systematic review process to synthesize findings across 31 studies. Key findings identified from the research include (1) organizational capacity and program evaluation lead to organizational sustainability, (2) agency leadership should guide strategic organizational change in order to establish a shared vision for evaluation and feedback, and (3) organizations benefit from practicing continuous and ongoing learning through feedback loops. The findings of this study may be generalizable to other similar educational service providers or non-profits looking to strengthen organizational capacity and partnerships.


Author(s):  
Sunil Chaudhary ◽  
Eleni Berki ◽  
Linfeng Li ◽  
Juri Valtanen

Public awareness is a significant factor in the battle against online identity theft (phishing). Advancing public readiness can be a strategic protection mechanism for citizens' vulnerability and privacy. Further, an effective research strategy against phishing is the combination of increased social awareness with software quality and social computing. The latter will decrease phishing victims and will improve information systems quality. First, the authors discuss recent research results on software quality criteria used for the design of anti-phishing technologies. Second, it is argued that the dynamics of social surroundings affect citizens' trust and can compromise social security. Third, the authors outline basic research needs and strategic steps to be taken for timely citizens' protection. Last, the authors propose strategic research directions for improving information systems total quality management through international collaborative research and by focusing on: i) increasing social awareness; ii) predicting information phishing attempts; iii) adopting social computing approaches.


1971 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Struever

AbstractThe attempt to delineate the processes underlying cultural evolution has become a central problem for archaeology today. Yet, present attempts to explain prehistoric culture change are based on exceedingly fragmentary archeological evidence, a fact resulting partly from inappropriate research strategies and partly from the “one-man scholar” basis on which archaeological research has been traditionally organized.This paper shows that certain long-held assumptions about the nature of culture which have governed excavation strategy and methods limit the value of currently existing data for attacking processual questions. The paper also examines both the quality of archaeological data required for discovering evolutionary process and the research strategies necessary for recovering these data. It argues that these research strategies cannot be put into effect unless the scale of archaeological staff, facilities, and funding increases greatly, and equally important, unless the concept of how research is organized changes.


Author(s):  
Imre Horváth ◽  
Ernest van Breemen ◽  
Debasish Dutta ◽  
Derek Yip-Hoi ◽  
Jongwon Kim ◽  
...  

Abstract Three universities on three continents co-operated in teaching global product realization. The Global Product Realization (GPR) course is a highly innovative course in which virtual classrooms and workshops have been formed via ISDN lines, internet facilities and other information technological means representing the state-of-the-technology. This paper gives an insight into the background, the goals, and the implementation of the course. It also outlines the course contents, the layout, and the supporting infrastructure. The GPR course is based on three backbones: academic lectures, company case studies, and a product development project. Parallel to learning of the theoretical and practical backgrounds from academic and industry experts, the international student groups were busy with the development of a global product. It was a coffeemaker for the American, Dutch and Korean markets. The results achieved by the students were presented at the GPR Closing Workshop and Exhibition, where all participants came together to meet the media and the interested parties from academia and industry. The GPR course is a good example of a successful utilization of the opportunities offered by the latest technologies for the implementation of global design and manufacturing in a global environment.


2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 1031-1038 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Baillie ◽  
Christel Bjarnholt ◽  
Marlies Gruber ◽  
Roger Hughes

AbstractObjectivesTo describe a conceptual framework to assist in the application of capacity-building principles to public health nutrition practice.DesignA review of the literature and consideration of the determinants of effective public health nutrition practice has been used to inform the development of a conceptual framework for capacity building in the context of public health nutrition practice.ResultThe limited literature supports a greater integration and application of capacity-building strategies and principles in public health nutrition practice, and that this application should be overt and strategic. A framework is proposed that identifies a number of determinants of capacity for effective public health nutrition action. The framework represents the key foundations for building capacity including leadership, resourcing and intelligence. Five key strategic domains supported by these foundation elements, including partnerships, organisational development, project management quality, workforce development and community development, are proposed. This framework can be used to assist the systematic assessment, development and evaluation of capacity-building activity within public health nutrition practice.ConclusionsCapacity building is a strategy within public health nutrition practice that needs to be central to public health nutrition intervention management. The present paper defines, contextualises and outlines a framework for integrating and making explicit the importance of capacity building within public health nutrition practice at many levels.


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