The notion of a teacher is an archaic, dynamic, and diverse concept that is embedded in and therefore revealed in the various complex and coexisting cultural and national contexts, ways of teaching and learning, and the entanglements with beings in multiple worlds. However, under the fundamental impacts of westernization, coloniality, and…

The purpose of the study is the country of Burkina Faso and the pedagogical aspects of Yacouba Sawadogo's leadership and commitment to ecology, using epistemologies of the South to address climate change in Africa. Knowing that Sawadogo's achievement happened within a contextualized community whose members impacted him, this study explores the…

Preceptors play a vital role in supporting nursing/midwifery students and new employees' transition and assimilation into their new role. Furthermore, with the increasing focus on educating more qualified nurses and midwives to meet health-related United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, there is a need for a more standardized and coordinated…

Researchers have been looking into the stressful nature of teaching for quite some time. Kyriacou (2001) maintains that teaching is one of the top five most stressful careers, while Stoeber and Rennert (2018) indicate that teachers exhibit a higher level of stress than any other profession (Bowen, 2016, p. 1205). Much educational and psychological…

Children of teachers follow their parents into the profession at lower rates than those whose parents come from professions that are perceived to be more prestigious such as physicians, lawyers, and engineers. Teaching often suffers from a lack of prestige, low pay, potential danger, lack of autonomy, and other factors that contribute to negative…

This dissertation explores two main questions of farmers in Western Kenya -- how they see farming as a creative process and their role in that - and how change is made possible in their community. I explore stories from farmers themselves, using photographs they have taken and stories they tell about those photographs, which answer these two…

Organizations advance and grow by solving problems one at a time, and management graduates should possess critical thinking and problem-solving capacities to be effective business managers and creative engineers. The problem was that critical thinking and creative problem solving are operationally ill-defined in engineering and management…

The purpose of this study was to identify whether there is a difference in the average levels of burnout, as defined by Maslach and Jackson's (1981) three-factor model, experienced by higher education staff members depending on their occupational role or job title. This investigation responded to the problem of increasing levels of stress and…

This dissertation comprises three chapters. The first two address issues within the education system, focusing on strategies to attract and retain high-quality teachers in the public sector. The third chapter, a collaborative effort with Martin Martinez and Miguel Saldarriaga, explores the application of machine learning tools for nowcasting…

This dissertation investigates work-based learning as a method to prepare students for agricultural careers through three interconnected studies. The first two studies investigate secondary education programs in the United States, while the third study explores postsecondary education in Rwanda. In Study 1, a philosophical research approach…

Worldwide, 50 million people live with dementia. There is a failure to identify best practices for teaching students to identify the common features of dementia and to determine effective ways to prevent behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia. The purpose of this quantitative quasi-experimental study was to examine whether exposure to a…

Food insecurity is a global concern and is acute in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa as well as pockets in the global North. In the lush green spaces of "God's Own Country", the state of Kerala in India, about 379,000 women are engaged in farming in about 75,800 groups. Spearheaded by Kudumbashree, the State Poverty Eradication Mission…

The purpose of this qualitative, multiple case study is to explore the different pathways into teaching in rural primary and middle schools. As a conceptual framework, the continuum of teacher learning and occupational choice theory were used to study teacher preparation and recruitment. Research participants included twelve teachers (seven male…

This research examined self-efficacy, locus of control, age, gender, and years teaching as a predictor for teaching job satisfaction among a sample of Filipino teachers working in the USA for three years or less. The sample size consisted of 96 participants. Participants completed three surveys, Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale, Rotter's Locus of…

According to the American Immigration Council (2021), 14 percent of the United States population is foreign-born. Immigrants have enriched American culture and enhanced our influence in the world. People feel a need to belong and have an inherent desire for deep, lasting, and meaningful connections (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Research suggests…