Faculty of Education -- PhD Dissertations

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Writing in the Key of Life: Inquiry into Writing Processes and Pedagogies
(Mount Saint Vincient University, 2016) Domm, Kristin Bieber
This inquiry investigates the complexities of writing and teaching writing in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms. What must we understand about language in order to teach writing well? How can inquiry into language and our lived experiences of language inform writing processes and pedagogies? Using writing itself as a method of inquiry, this autoethnographic study investigates writing as a multidimensional process, a linguistic, composing, rhetorical, and inquiry process, searching for streams of meaning among childhood language experiences, public school teaching experiences, university teaching experiences, and writing experiences. By layering one teacher’s lived experience of language, writing, and teaching writing with scholarly literature, teaching artifacts, and curricular documents, a more complex perspective on writing processes and pedagogies has emerged, one that views language diversity as a resource, not a deficit, in writing development in educational settings. This investigation concludes by proposing an inquiry-based framework for understanding the complexities of writing processes and pedagogies in the twenty-first century, highlighting the imperative of an inquiry stance—toward writing processes, writing pedagogies, and the lived language experience of all developing writers.
Children’s Shared Understanding of Media Marketing
(Mount Saint Vincent University, 2016) LeBlanc, Lyse Anne
Through an examination of the contextual relationship between theory of mind and media literacy, this exploratory research study contributes to the fields of both education and psychology, as well as the broader digital economy, in its production of knowledge about children’s understanding and for their well-being. “Children think differently from adults and there are qualitative differences in the way children of different ages understand the world around them” (Greig & Taylor, 1991, p. 31)—a world, today, that greatly encompasses media. In Western societies, where contemporary digital and electronic media forms and the marketing messages they disseminate are primary social and cultural influences, it is crucial that parents and educators have a solid understanding of children’s developmental ability to interpret and engage critically with media forms. Theory of mind is the ability to understand the mental states and intentions of others and ourselves (Premack & Woodruff, 1978; Doherty, 2009; Astington & Edward, 2010; Miller, 2012). If we consider that the development of a mature theory of mind enables individuals to explain, predict, and manage others’ behaviours and is considered to be an integral component for developing the ability to reason logically and abstractly (Frye & Moore, 1991), it seems both logical and plausible to consider it in relation to the necessary skills for thinking critically about media.
“It Just Happened”: How Motherwork is Learned and Experienced by Canadian Stepmothers in an Online Support Group
(Mount Saint Vincent University, 2018) Careless, Erin Jennifer
This doctoral dissertation study explores the ways in which Canadian stepmothers learn and experience “motherwork” through the negotiation of their role and their participation in an online support group. Life history interviews informed by literature around adult learning, motherwork, and stepmothering pointed to several sites and processes of learning and the factors impacting this learning which is explored as a digital community of practice. The public and private negotiation of motherwork as informed by traditional gender roles, and the Western ideology of mothering has a significant impact on role negotiation for stepmothers – women who are involved in the care of children not biologically their own. The goals of this study are to explore the experience of stepmothering from an adult learning perspective, to question and challenge the impact of traditional gender roles and mothering ideology for diverse families, and to explore the role of modern technologies (online support groups in particular) on the negotiation of traditional caring roles for stepmothers in Canada. This study expands the literature around adult learning, motherwork, stepmothering, and digital communities of practice.
Learning to Lead in Health Care: A Narrative Inquiry of Physician Leadership
(Mount Saint Vincent University, 2018) Jolemore, Shawn
Active physician leadership within health care organizations can shape the way health care is delivered and contribute to improving and strengthening the system. Yet physicians often struggle to be effective in organizational leadership positions due to lack of leadership experience and the preparation that helps develop requisite competencies and skills. Informed by a qualitative narrative approach, this doctoral study explores the question of how physicians who transition into formal leadership positions learn to lead. Twelve physician leaders based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, were interviewed to gain their perspective on this particular adult learning experience. Categorical content analysis was applied in a multi-stage coding process that yielded four main themes: professional identity, organizational culture, workplace context, and leadership learning, along with relevant sub-themes. Communities of practice, organizational learning and transformative learning theories served as a theoretical framework to inform the analysis. Findings illustrate that the reality of formal physician leadership in health care organizations is ill-matched to the core values and professional identities of doctors. Physicians move along a path through a social learning landscape, negotiating a sense of identity that spans multimembership in different practice communities. For some, the product of this cross-boundary learning is the creation of a superordinate leader identity. For others, it seems to be the understanding and appreciation of a dual identity — physician and leader — the relative importance and weight of each varying over time and context This study emphasizes that physician leadership development can be enhanced by attending more explicitly to how people learn and, concomitantly, supports the assertion that adult education theories and practices can make a significant and valuable contribution to enhance leadership development in medical contexts.
“Set our spirits free: Exploring the role of spirituality as an anti-oppressive agent in the formal education of African Nova Scotian learners”
(Mount Saint Vincent University, 2018) Munroe-Anderson, Kesa
The Role of Spirituality and/or Religion for Queer Individuals Negotiating Homonegative Beliefs and Values in Coming Out
(Mount Saint Vincent University, 2018-10-24) Hattie-Longmire, Brenda
This dissertation investigates how out individuals who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer who have been raised in a homonegative Christian faith and have experienced internal conflicts between their sexual identities and religious and/or spiritual identities learned homonegative beliefs and values, and how they negotiated those beliefs and values during their coming out processes. It also explores the role of spirituality and religion during the coming out process. The data for this research were gathered through interviews with eight individuals who grew up in homonegative Christian environments and made the decision to come out as lesbian, gay, or queer. The dissertation draws upon transformative learning theory as a framework to analyze and discuss the learning processes involved in coming out. Queer theory, transformative learning theory, feminist theory and critical theory provide the framework for analyzing the participants’ coming out narratives. Despite enormous pressures from their families, religious communities, peers, and the broader culture to conform to heterosexual norms, through a complex learning/unlearning process, participants disentangled themselves from oppressive values and beliefs, and began aligning their outer lives with their inner realities. The findings of this study demonstrated the learning processes and the specific intrinsic and extrinsic factors that facilitated and enabled those processes. This thesis explains how participants moved from uncritical acceptance of external authority to self-authorship. This research will be useful to faith communities, families, friends, allies, and helping professionals, including educators to support queer members, and to queer communities to support the spirituality of their members. It will also be helpful to educators interested in understanding issues related to identify conflict, particularly for lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer persons.
The Historical Formation of Adult Education Discourses in the Shift from Liberalism to Neoliberalism
(Mount Saint Vincent University, 2019) MacPhail, Scott
This dissertation provides the theoretical under-labouring needed for adult education theorists to understand the ways in which adult education has become part of the ideological veil behind which capitalism maneuvers in our contemporary world. To understand the purpose of adult education in the regime of neoliberalism, this dissertation tracks its historical formation in a context of influential liberal discourses that were supportive of the development of capitalism. An in-depth review of key liberal philosophers provides adult education researchers with insights into how liberal theory moved from its roots as a critique of government to be a regime of justification for the growth of modern capitalism. Using Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, as a regional exemplar, the dissertation examines the shifting nature of adult education in response to shifting national and international liberal, capitalist, and, now, neoliberal discourses.
How Objects in Spaces Help People in Places: Material Object Interactions Affecting Adults’ Informal Learning: Arts-Informed Research using Sculptural Mobile Forms
(Mount Saint Vincent University, 2020) Mason, Stephanie M.
This work is a wide-ranging exploration into the ways adults can be supported to learn informally through material object interactions in public places. In keeping with my methodological lens of arts-informed research, I use a mobile kinetic sculpture to represent entwined strands of thought relating to adults’ informal learning, material object composition, and places’ spatial and historical changes. The design consisted of qualitative interviews and a focus group, in addition to creatively-inspired hand-drawn maps and crafted models, to gather insights from 6 adult participants with lived experiences of 4 public place sites in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The resulting collection of voices, impressions, and images revealed 3 themes–time, tensions, and change–showing attitudes and awarenesses about adults’ informal learning understandings, material objects’ literal and symbolic associations, and public places’ learning opportunities. Enquiry elements proved deceptively complex, revealing that Halifax’s public places are rarely visited for learning purposes, that people value public places reflecting broad social concerns and changes over time, and that visually stimulating displays and features may prompt public place informal learning. Major findings show that • adults rarely connect learning with material object interactions, and generally do not expect to learn in public places, yet are not resistant to these learning possibilities; • public places’ ongoing evident and hidden changes permit balanced tensions that allow different learners’ needs to be accommodated in shared space; • adults who are assisted in imagining places’ size and historical reach through activities like walking or artistic representations are better equipped to recognize materialities connected to buried narratives fostering expanded knowledges; and, • arts-informed research fits this enquiry because entangled ideas are celebrated and because the mobile form permits layers of meaning-making in representing findings, demonstrating research process, and affording adults’ informal learning as itself a material object for interaction. Constructivist positionalities, ecological and new materialisms theories, and stylistic influences from postmodernism and feminisms fashion this writing, producing a bricolage of effects and wayfinding and discovery mirrored in textual author intrusions and literary vignettes. This work adds to knowledge about adults’ informal learning made possible in everyday spaces, and is methodologically significant as a model of interconnected research practice and artful forms. Plus: cats.
The Interrelationship amongst Depression, Loneliness, Self-Regulation, and Academic Achievement in Canadian and International Students
(Mount Saint Vincent University, 2020) Shahidi, Mehrdad
Background: The number of international students in Western universities was estimated to be 7.2 million (CBIE, 2017, 2018) or 8 million in 2025 (Quacquarelli Symonds, 2020). In Canada, this number was 642,480 on December 31, 2019 indicating a 13% increase over 2018 (CBIE, 2020a). This unique historical trend in most Western higher educational systems has engaged researchers’ attention locally and globally. Although, few studies were recently focused on the different economical, educational, and psychological aspects of international students in Canada (Smith, 2016; Sondhi, 2014) or in the other Western countries (Migration Advisory Committee, 2019; Muller & Daller, 2019; Poyrazli, 2015), the literature review revealed that there are several disparities or gaps among those studies that have particularly focused on depression, loneliness, self-regulation, and academic achievement in international and local students in Western countries. Some of these gaps include the lack of replication, ignoring the direct and mediating roles of the above-noted factors in academic achievement, and the lack of comparative studies to explore differences/similarities in International and Canadian students. Also, previous studies were not focused on the interrelationships between and the predictive roles of depression, loneliness, and cognitive regulation in educational performance. Moreover, they had scant attention to the impact of university influencers, involvement, and social connectedness on academic function in relation to above-noted psychological factors. Purpose of Study: To reduce some of these disparities among the literature, the research questions revolved around the predictability of academic achievement through university influencers, academic involvement, social connectedness, depression, loneliness, and self- 2 regulation. In addition to exploring path models to explain academic achievement, the differences and similarities between International and Canadian samples were examined. Method: Based on statistical methods (Meyers, Gamst, & Guarino, 2006; Krejcie & Morgan, 1970), 427 Canadian and International students aged 19 to 37 years old attending MSVU participated in this study and completed five questionnaires/scales. These questionnaires include the Research (Demographic) Questionnaire, Kutcher Adolescent Depression Scale - 11, R-UCLA Loneliness Scale, Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ), and Academic Self-Report Questionnaire. Multiple regression, ANOVA, MANOVA, path analysis, and some other parametric and non-parametric statistical procedures were used to answer the research questions. Results: The research revealed several findings such as higher levels of loneliness, adaptive self-regulation, connectedness to faculty, and involvement in social activities in International samples. As well, lower levels of academic achievement in International samples and some other differences were found. Loneliness, depression, social connectedness, and university involvement could predict between 20% and 28% of variability of academic achievement in both groups of samples. Path analysis showed an appropriate model to explain depression as a significant mediating factor in academic achievement. Implication: Several recommendations and implications for mental health practitioners, educators, educational policy makers, and future researchers were discussed.
Remix + Praxis: A Rapademic Approach to Critical and Culturally Relevant Education
(Mount Saint Vincent University, 2022) McGuire, Michael Douglas
A decade ago, the province of Nova Scotia identified what it designated as achievement gaps—a significant disparity in scholastic performance for Black and Indigenous students relative to those of European descent as a result of longstanding Euro-centrism in educational spaces. This led to a number of calls for culturally relevant pedagogical approaches to be adopted as a means of combatting the negative trend. In the intervening years, however, educators have struggled to find ways to make this a reality. This dissertation makes use of a combined autoethnographic and songwriting-based method to detail the author’s efforts to bring his educational practices in line with culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies. Through a critical hip hop lens, a praxis-based method for curriculum development takes shape, presenting a pathway toward liberatory educational experiences that can be adapted to virtually any cultural context to the benefit of both teachers and students. Borrowing from the hip hop practice of remixing, the author outlines a method that gives educators an opportunity to continually reimagine and realign their curricula in a way that encourages student-centered critical education and adaptable curricular planning. While this dissertation outlines the author’s journey in coming to develop a hip hop-based pedagogy, it presents a praxis-based method that can be achieved through any number of approaches. While this is not presented as the definitive model for culturally relevant and responsive education, it offers an autoethnographic look at one way of attaining those goals.

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