Browsing by Subject "Knowledge"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Building Local Agency Capacity for Public Engagement in Local Road Systems Planning and Decision Making
    (Minnesota Department of Transportation, 2014-05) Quick, Kathryn; Narváez, Guillermo; Saunoi-Sandgren, Emily; Zhao, Zhirong Jerry
    Aging infrastructure, changing patterns in road demand, and persistently constrained revenues challenge the sustainability of local road systems. This research is a comparative analysis of public engagement methods for involving stakeholders in decision-making about these complex issues. It is the result of an engaged scholarship project conducted in three Minnesota counties: Beltrami, Dakota, and Jackson. This report analyzes qualitative and quantitative data collected from 91 study participants through observations of policy dialogues, media content analysis, interviews, focus groups, and surveys of attitudes about these policy issues and public engagement methods. In-depth case studies of three counties describe the local road policy issues, the public engagement approaches, and their effects. This research identifies convergences and divergences in information and perspectives among stakeholders. Tools developed for addressing the communication gaps are available at http://tinyurl.com/local-roads. Some public engagement methods allowed study participants to change their perspectives on what road management options were achievable and acceptable. This occurred through active recruitment of diverse stakeholders, focus groups with individuals of similar backgrounds, and a facilitated policy roundtable among all the different stakeholders. An additional finding relates to evaluation measures for public participation, which scholars and practitioners acknowledge are poorly developed. This study documents a fresh perspective by identifying the likes and dislikes of participants in public participation processes about how they are organized.
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    Environmental Education for Forest Resources Management in Loliondo Area, Northern Tanzania
    (2018-02) Silisyene, Majory
    In this dissertation, I analyze the impact of three environmental education strategies implemented in rural northern Tanzania focused on forest-related knowledge. In Chapter Five, I assess the impact of two strategies—face-to-face group discussion and mobile phone texting—on knowledge. I also compare the effectiveness of the two strategies in terms of change in knowledge among participants and cost-effectiveness. I find a positive association between environmental education and knowledge, but only for the face-to-face group discussion strategy. In Chapter Six, I assess the impact of using a photo-map (a high-resolution map made from satellite imagery) on knowledge about forest health status. Increasingly, satellite images are being used for knowledge transfer and land use planning as they facilitate visual learning. While survey data show no evidence of increased knowledge, qualitative data suggest that knowledge increased among participants. To understand the actual health status of the forest, I analyzed satellite imagery and determined how the forest's land use land cover changed between 2003 and 2014. I compared land cover results with participants' knowledge about health status. Results suggest that people's answers to the question about forest health status were politicized; participants ensured that their answers aligned with community's conservation obligations. In Chapter Seven, I assess factors that influence engagement in environmentally friendly behaviors and found that, as in previous studies, both knowledge and sense of personal responsibility are strong determinants of engagement among people in Loliondo.
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    An Epistemology of Solidarity: Coalition in the Face of Ignorance
    (2018-11) Bowman, Melanie
    Privileged ignorance about the structures of domination consists not merely in the absence of knowledge, but in the positive production of false information, of encouragement to look away and to actively not-know. I argue that for a person subject to privileged ignorance, attempting to remedy this ignorance by seeking more knowledge brings its own challenges: We have good reason to think that the cognitive distortions that produce privileged ignorance continue to affect a person’s knowledge production even when she becomes aware that they exist. Instead, the epistemically and morally responsible behavior for people privileged with respect to a system of oppression is to interrogate the purpose and provenance of their ignorance and to practice critical trust in the experts (i.e., those who are oppressed under that system). Learning to trust wisely is good for liberatory politics because it demands that we cultivate relationships of trustworthiness. It is also better for knowledge production than pursuing epistemic autonomy, which either vastly constricts what we can know or causes us to overestimate our epistemic abilities in ways that reinforce the cognitive distortions of privilege. Evaluating what we think we know in terms of narrative significance—Whose story does this advance? Which characters are undeveloped? What future narratives does this enable, and which does it foreclose?— in addition to truth-value can offer a solution to paralyzing skepticism and can spur coalitional political action in the face of uncertainty.
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    Essays in International Economics and Macroeconomics
    (2017-08) Ayres Queiroz da Silva, Joao Luiz
    The three chapters of this dissertation investigate major puzzles in international economics and macroeconomics. Chapter 1 proposes a new measure of knowledge production within corporations and analyzes how the production and flow of knowledge within multinational cor- porations can account for the cross-country correlation in corporate sector GDP fluctuations. Chapter 2 studies how fluctuations in the price of primary commodities can account for fluctua- tions in bilateral real exchange rates between the United States and United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. Finally, Chapter 3 studies the role of firm entry in accounting for the slow recovery in employment following the World Economic Crisis in 2008–2009.
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    Expanding Landowner Adoption of Snow Control Measures Through a Better Understanding of Landowner Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices
    (Minnesota Department of Transportation, 2019-12) Current, Dean; Motschke, Collin; Serra, Airton Jr.; Wyatt, Gary; Zamora, Diomy
    Previous research demonstrated the ability of snow fences to significantly lower both public and private costs related to the control of blowing and drifting snow. Follow-up research specifically addressed the knowledge of MnDOT staff and attitudes and practices related to the promotion and implementation of snow control measures. These efforts identified a need for a better understanding of landowners' knowledge, attitudes and practices related to snow control measures to develop more effective outreach and foster the adoption of snow control measures. We identified four regions of the state with highway corridors with snow problems. In each region, we carried out listening sessions with landowners and MnDOT personnel, and based on those sessions while applying the KAP (knowledge, attitudes and practices) methodology, we designed a landowner survey to explore landowner knowledge, attitudes and practices related to snow problems and the willingness of landowners to implement snow fences to address the problems. The survey was carried out once prior to an outreach effort and then again after the outreach effort to measure any changes in landowner knowledge, attitudes and practices resulting from the effort. We found that landowners were generally not aware of MnDOT's program to address snow problems and were able to identify constraints to adoption as well as incentives that might be required to promote adoption. We also identified the most acceptable channels for outreach to landowners as well as ways to better structure the MnDOT program to address constraints identified by landowners and provide the assistance and incentives needed to promote greater adoption.
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    Social, Field And Regional Conditions Of Knowledge: News On Darfur In African Media
    (2018-06) Wahutu, Nicholas
    This project is embedded within Max Weber’s 1910 call to study the press while taking his message to a region of the world that is often studied within sociology for what it lacks rather than as one engaging in activities that could be considered on their merit. With few exceptions, sociology has approached sub-Saharan Africa as a space that is paradigmatic of incompleteness and beset by continual setbacks. By and large, sociological scholarship on knowledge production is still constrained by coloniality, which leads to a privileging of western organizations’ construction of knowledge while treating knowledge production by organizations in Africa as ephemeral. The result of this imbalance is that we know more about how the New York Times and Washington Post covered Rwanda and Darfur than how Kenya’s The Daily Nation represented either atrocity. Because sociology has been mostly silent on how countries neighboring Darfur covered the atrocity, there is an implicit message that African fields are not part of the ‘global’ in the same way fields in the global north are. To analyze how African media fields construct knowledge about mass atrocity, this dissertation project is based on a content analysis of every single news article on Darfur from Kenya, South Africa and Rwanda published between 1st of January 2003 and 31st December 2008. Results from this content analysis are used to provide overarching themes of how Darfur was represented in these three countries. Although these data suggest convergence in how Darfur was framed by media fields analyzed here - and those from the global north examined by Joachim Savelsberg- this project’s focus on by-lines to differentiate articles by African journalists from those lifted from wire agencies provides a level of nuance hither missing. While the content analysis offers macro-level evidence for how Darfur was covered, it is sufficient in explaining why and how African media fields employ these frames. To provide this explanation, journalist interviews were conducted in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria from the summer of 2012 to the summer of 2015. These interviews were conducted in Nairobi, Mombasa, Johannesburg, and Lagos. All except three were conducted face to face and the three over the phone. Overall, findings suggest that, although African journalists and scholars are often critical of the use of the ethnic conflict frame as reliant on colonial tropes, arguing that it de-contextualizes and de-politicizes atrocities, they used this frame relatively frequently. Further, although most of the sources quoted were Sudanese state actors, non-Sudanese African sources were marginalized by both wire agencies and African journalists. Sources from the United States and the United Kingdom played a more prominent role in influencing narratives about Darfur in the countries studied here. African media fields are primary narrative constructors of the atrocities in Darfur for African audiences. Being African conspires to produce a condition of invisibility and erasure of African voices in the global narrative construction of knowledge about mass atrocity.
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    The transition to teaching reading: knowledge, beliefs, and identities of novice teachers of reading.
    (2010-09) Kelly, Catherine M.
    The purpose of the study was to examine the knowledge, beliefs, and identities of reading teachers within the transition to teaching by exploring the connections between coursework, field placements, teaching contexts, and participants' conceptions of teaching reading. While there has been an increased focus on the transition to teaching, little is still known about the experiences of reading teachers as they move from the university classrooms to their own K-12 classrooms (Anders, Hoffman, & Duffy, 2000; Risko et al., 2008, Dillon et al., 2010). The following questions guided this research: How do novice reading teachers conceptualize their knowledge and beliefs about the teaching of reading? (2) How do knowledge, beliefs, and identities of novice reading teachers change and continue to develop over time (e.g., within the first 4 years of teaching)? (3) How are novice reading teachers' knowledge and beliefs about teaching reading visible in their teaching practice? (4) How does teaching context influence the development of novice reading teachers' knowledge and beliefs about teaching reading, and their identities as teachers of reading? The study was conducted as a qualitative case study, and data sources included formal interviews, classroom observations, and a survey. Participants included 2 preservice teachers, 3 first-year teachers, and 2 third-/fourth-year teachers prepared at the same large, Midwestern Research University. Analysis indicated that novice reading teachers benefit from clear links between theoretical grounding and instructional practice in actual classrooms. As well, the knowledge, beliefs, and identities of novice reading teachers continue to develop after completing teacher education programs, and strong leadership and mentors are necessary for supporting the continued professional development of new reading teachers. Therefore, a recommendation of this study is that teacher education programs work in concert with schools to provide carefully designed programs and field experiences. As well, schools have a responsibility to recognize and maintain a focus on the development of effective literacy practices for novice reading teachers in the powerful site of continued learning - the novice teacher's own classroom.