Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster? Children's influence on mothers' beliefs, values, and social/cultural practices.

Obtaining mothers' perspectives and descriptions of incidents in which their child(ren) said or did something that influenced the mothers' values, beliefs, and/or social or cultural practices, that is, the content of socialization, was the primary aim of this research. Bakhtin's (2004) metatheoretical account of dialogism was used to frame this study. From a dialogic perspective utterances (for example, the utterances of children in the present study) are events or acts and are presented as one way to view the process of socialization. In part this purpose, and the decision to utilize a qualitative research orientation, was to address a call (Lollis & Kuczynski, 1997) for qualitative or microanalytic analyses to help elucidate the processes of socialization. Mothers (N=10) in this study were able to provide descriptions of incidents in which their child(ren) said or did something that influenced the mother and hence we have some description of the concept of bidirectionality, a well accepted, but undertheorized concept in developmental psychology. While the concepts of multiple sources of influence and contexts are salient areas of research in parent-child socialization, and were mentioned in the informants reporting these areas did not appear to be as salient in the mothers' accounts. Emotions and the meaning mothers 'derived' from the interactions did, however, take much more prominence in the described incidents.

The new woman, femininity and modernity in Margery Allingham's detective novels of the 1930s /

This thesis examines Death of a Ghost (1934), Flowers for the Judge (1935), Dancers in Mourning (1937), and The Fashion in Shrouds (1938), a group of detective novels by Margery Allingham that are differentiated from her other work by their generic hybridity. The thesis argues that the hybrid nature of this group of Campion novels enabled a highly skilled and insightful writer such as Allingham to negotiate the contradictory notions about the place of women that characterized the 1930s, and that in dOing so, she revealed the potential of one of the most popular and accessible genres, the detective novel of manners, to engage its readers in a serious cultural dialogue. The thesis also suggests that there is a connection between Allingham's exploration of modernity and femininity within these four novels and her personal circumstances. This argument is predicated upon the assumption that during the interwar period in England several social and cultural attitudes converged to challenge long-held beliefs about gender roles and class structure; that the real impact of this convergence was felt during the 1930s by the generation that had come of age in the previous decade-Margery Allingham's generation; and that that generation's ambivalence and confusion were reflected in the popular fiction of the decade. These attitudes were those of twentieth-century modernity--contradiction, discontinuity, fragmentation, contingency-and in the context of this study they are incorporated in a literary hybrid. Allingham uses this combination of the classical detective story and the novel of manners to examine the notion of femininity by juxtaposing the narrative of a longstanding patriarchal and hierarchical culture, embodied in the image of the Angel in the House, with that of the relatively recent rights and freedoms represented by the New Woman of the late nineteenth-century. Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social difference forms the theoretical foundation of the thesis's argument that through these conflicting narratives, as well as through the lives of her female characters, Allingham questioned the Hsocial myth" of the time, a prevailing view that, since the First World War, attitudes toward the appropriate role and sphere of women had changed.

I must walk through the gate : an ontological necessity

This research is a self-study into my life as an athlete, elementary school teacher, leamer, and as a teacher educator/academic. Throughout the inquiry, I explore how my beliefs and values infused my lived experiences and ultimately influenced my constructivist, humanist, and ultimately my holistic teaching and learning practice which at times disrupted the status quo. I have written a collection of narratives (data generation) which embodied my identity as an unintelligent student/leamer, a teacher/learner, an experiential learner, a tenacious participant, and a change agent to name a few. As I unpack my stories and hermeneutically reconstruct their intent, I question their meaning as I explore how I can improve my teaching and learning practice and potentially effect positive change when instructing beginning teacher candidates at a Faculty of Education. At the outset I situate my story and provide the necessary political, social, and cultural background information to ground my research. I follow this with an in depth look at the elements that interconnect the theoretical framework of this self-study by presenting the notion of writing at the boundaries through auto ethnography (Ellis, 2000; Ellis & Bochner, 2004) and writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson, 2000). The emergent themes of experiential learning, identity, and embodied knowing surfaced during the data generation phase. I use the Probyn' s (1990) .. metaphor of locatedness to unpack these themes and ponder the question, Where is experience located? I deepen the exploration by layering Drake's (2007) KnowlDo/Be framework alongside locatedness and offer descriptions of learning moments grounded in pedagogical theories. In the final phase, I introduce thirdspace theory (Bhabha, 1994; Soja, 1996) as a space that allowed me to puzzle educational dilemmas and begin to reconcile the binaries that existed in my life both personally, and professionally. I end where I began by revisiting the questions that drove this study. In addition, Ireflect upon the writing process and the challenges that I encountered while immersed in this approach and contemplate the relevance of conducting a self-study. I leave the reader with what is waiting for me on the other side of the gate, for as Henry James suggested, "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete."