Browsing by Subject "sense of community"
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(2021)Children have an intrinsic motivation to play, and play is an essential part of the versatile development of a child. A child learns, for example, social, emotional, motoric, and cognitive skills through play. The same skills are taught in Finnish schools. It is justifiable that play is a visible part of the Finnish elementary school curriculum, in which play is encouraged to be used as one of the methods in teaching. The significance of play decreases in the curriculum for the 3-6th graders even though that age of students are still children who play. The aim of this research was to study how play appears in 4-6th graders’ actions and speech in the school context, to give a voice to the school children. In addition, the aim was to study how play appears in learning and motivation, and how it appears in the building of the sense of community in a new group. This master’s thesis is qualitative research, and it is conducted through an ethnographic method. The data was collected from a class of 25 students in grades 4-6th in a Finnish ele-mentary school in August and September of 2021. The collected data had field notes, video material, photos, and interviews. The data was analyzed by coding it in themes to answer the research questions. The concluded themes discussed how play appeared in the school con-text and what kind of role play had in the building of the sense of community. The research results indicate that the students experienced play to be an inspiring and moti-vating way to learn. The students felt that play was a refreshing break from the ordinary book-oriented studying even though they were also studying while playing. The results also show that the teacher had a significant role in building both the sense of community and the learn-ing of the students. With the teacher’s support, the students learned while playing and had the courage to play with the classmates who they did not know before.
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(2001)The study of social phenomena in the World Wide Web has been rather fragmentary, and there is no coherent, research-based theory about sense of community in Web environment. Sense of community means part of one's self-concept that has to do with perceiving oneself belonging to, and feeling affinity to a certain social grouping. The present study aimed to find evidence for sense of community in Web environment, and specifically find out what the most critical psychological factors of sense of community would be. Based on known characteristics of real life communities and sense of community, and few occasional studies of Web-communities, it was hypothesized that the following factors would be the most critical ones and that they could be grouped as prerequisites, facilitators and consequences of sense of community: awareness and social presence (prerequisites), criteria for membership and borders, common purpose, social interaction and reciprocity, norms and conformity, common history (facilitators), trust and accountability (consequences). In addition to critical factors, the present study aimed to find out if this kind of grouping would be valid. Furthermore, the effect of Web-community members' background variables to sense of community was of interest. In order to answer the questions, an online-questionnaire was created and tested. It included propositions that reflect factors that precede, facilitate and follow the sense of community in Web environment. A factor analysis was calculated to find out the critical factors and analyses of variance were calculated to see if the grouping to prerequisites, facilitators and consequences was right and how the background variables would affect the sense of community in Web environment. The results indicated that the psychological structure of sense of community in Web environment could not be presented with critical variables grouped as prerequisites, facilitators and consequences. Most factors did facilitate the sense of community, but based on this data it could not be argued that some of the factors chronologically precedesense of community and some follow it. Instead, the factor analysis revealed that the most critical factors in sense of community in Web environment are 1) reciprocal involvement, 2) basic trust for others, 3) similarity and common purpose of members, and 4) shared history of members. The most influencing background variables were the member's own participation activity (indicated with reading and writing messages) and the phase in membership lifecycle (from visitor to leader). The more the member participated and the further in membership life cycle he was, the more he felt sense of community. There are many descriptions of sense of community, but the present study was one of the first to actually measure the phenomenon in Web environment, and that gained well documented, valid results based on large data, proving that sense of community in Web environment is possible, and clarifying its psychological structure, thus enhancing the understanding of sense of community in Web environment.
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