The Transition House Association of Nova Scotia (abbreviated THANS and TRANS) is a Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada-based organisation that runs women's shelters. THANS was founded in 1989. THANS organises an annual purple ribbon awareness campaign in memory of the École Polytechnique massacre. THANS conducted interviews with 34 physically abused women who subsequently sought resolution through family law mediation. In 2000, THANS released a report based on these interviews, stating that most of the women would not recommend legal mediation to other abused women. In 2008, THANS supported Bill 81, which they hoped would become the Domestic Violence Elimination Act, but Minister of Justice Cecil Clarke chose not to call the bill for a third reading. In 2009, Darrell Dexter of the New Democratic Party identified THANS in his promise to increase government funding of halfway houses in Nova Scotia. In 2012, THANS partnered with the World YWCA, Family SOS, Silent Witness Nova Scotia, and Leave Out Violence to host the Atlantic Ballet Theatre of Canada's Ghosts of Violence, a ballet about domestic violence, in Halifax.Shiva Nourpanah is THANS's Provincial Coordinator. Rhonda Fraser, the executive director of Chrysalis House, is a member of THANS. .
Background: Upper-primary students struggle with writing, focusing on surface aspects when writing and rewriting. Dialogic talk between writers and readers may increase audience awareness and feedback engagement, which can lead to more meaningful comments and text revisions. Aims: This quasi-experimental study investigates the effects of a dialogic writing intervention on the nature and focus of the dialogic peer conversations, and on students' revision behavior. Sample: Participants were 84 grade six students from four regular classrooms including monolingual (n = 59) and multilingual students (n = 25). Two classes were randomly assigned to the dialogic writing intervention and received support for dialogic talk by a conversation card for students and a practice-based professional development program for teachers. The other classes formed the control group. Methods: All students wrote four argumentative texts by writing a first draft, discussing the text in groups of three, and revising the text. We collected all the drafts and revised versions of students' texts, resulting in 204 texts in total. We also recorded peer feedback conversations in each class and for each writing task, resulting in 86 peer feedback recordings - 37 in the intervention condition and 49 in the control condition. We adopted a mixed-methods approach to the data, with discourse and conversation analysis to evaluate the nature and focus of the dialogic peer conversations and text analysis to examine text revisions. Results: Students who received additional support for dialogic talk engaged in more exploratory peer conversations marked by open-ended questions and collaborative reasoning. Qualitative results showed that both the teacher and the conversation card have a crucial role in shaping meaningful dialogic peer conversations. These dialogues led to a shift in peer comments from a focus on lower to higher-order aspects of the text, resulting in higher-order text revisions. Conclusions: This study suggests that a dialogic writing intervention with support for students and teachers enhances students' ability to engage in meaningful discussions about their writing. This promotes comments on higher-order aspects and effective text revisions.
Environmental comfort directly influences student learning. Thus, to strengthen this process, it is possible to identify school buildings' most favourable environmental conditions and consider them when designing and constructing infrastructure for educational purposes. This has motivated research to determine how the envi-ronmental factors of school buildings influence the teaching-learning processes. This study aims to systematically organise, classify, categorise, and analyse the existing literature on the environmental conditions of classrooms and their influence on students' learning processes. Thus, future researchers will have a helpful guide to define the elements to consider when studying, analysing, and determining the environmental variables in school buildings that favour learning. Consequently, 71 studies classified in a scheme comprising categories designed to ensure an in-depth analysis of the most relevant topics in this area of research were considered. The results present multiple research opportunities in this field of study. The main conclusions are that the countries with the most significant interest in researching this topic are in Europe or Asia, with a common motivation to explore the adaptations necessary for the change in season. In contrast, the study variables of the most significant interest were associated with thermal comfort. Finally, it is concluded that these studies, in most cases, do not measure variables related to learning or identifying a variable of potential study to define environmental conditions.
This book, a review of the latest trends in the practice of ecological protection and waste treatment, contains articles published by Trans Tech Publications Inc. in the last few years. The edition will be helpful and interesting to a broad audience of specialists in environmental engineering and engineers-technologists.
