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This thesis offers a rethinking of the role for education as critical workplace pedagogy in complex problems of health care. Taking the case of paediatric diabetes, the study explored how health-care professionals learn the work of supporting children, and their parents, to self-manage the condition. By reconceptualising work problems as sociomaterial learning struggles, this research contributes new understandings of informal professional learning in everyday health-care provision. Data were generated through fieldwork in an outpatient clinic. Particular challenges of supporting self-management in this case were the difficulties of balancing policy aspirations for empowerment with biomedical knowledge about risks to immediate and long-term health. Tracing the materialisation of learning as it unfolded in moments of health-care practice showed professionals handling multiple and contradictory flows of information. Particular challenges were posed by insulin-pump technologies, which have specific implications for professional roles and responsibilities, and introduce new risks. A key insight is that professionals were concerned primarily with the highly complicated perpetual discernment of safe parameters within which children and their parents might reasonably be allowed to contribute to self-management. Such discernment does not readily correspond to the notion of empowerment circulating in the policies and guidelines intended to enable professionals to accomplish this work. As a result, this thesis argues that the work of discernment is obscured. Learning strategies evolve, but could be supported and extended by explicit recognition of the important work of learning as it unfolds in everyday practices of supporting self-management in paediatric diabetes. Most importantly, workplace pedagogies could be developed in ways that attune to the profound challenges and uncertainties that are at stake in these practices.

The current research examines how status change influences helping behaviors within hierarchical groups. Building upon recent advances on the psychology of status change, the current research proposes that the experience of a status change can affect helping, and that the relationship will depend on whether an individual has gained or lost status. Specifically, I propose an asymmetry, with individuals who lose status being expected to help less than individuals whose status does not change; however, individuals who gain status are not expected to necessarily help more than individuals who status does not change. Across four studies, the proposed asymmetry effect is tested as well as the underlying psychological mechanism (i.e., asymmetric changes in other-orientation) and a critical boundary condition for this effect (i.e., source of change: Study 4). In study 1, time-lagged field survey data was collected with teams of Fire Fighters. Within these fire fighter teams I examine the asymmetrical effect of losing versus gaining status on helping while considering varying magnitudes of change and status levels. Applying polynomial regression analysis, or response surface methodology, results support the main effect of loss vs. gain on helping, the asymmetry in loss and gain vs. no change, as well as the mediation through other-orientation. Extrapolating these findings to the group level suggests that groups with more individual status change (i.e., less stable groups) will be less cooperative than those with less individual status change (i.e., more stable groups). Using battalion chief ratings of team cooperation, results support this group level effect.In studies 2 and 3, status change was experimentally manipulated to provide a stronger causal test of the hypothesized model. Results support my hypotheses across two different behavioral measures of helping. Lastly, in a final experimental study (Study 4), it is documented that the attributed source of status change (self versus other) can serve as an important boundary condition. Losing status decreases other-orientation and helping when the change is attributed to a personal status change. However, when the loss in status is attributed to being due to others gaining status, the negative effect of losing status is significantly decreased. The current research provides several theoretical and applied contributions. While status itself is considered to be zero sum (i.e., one person’s loss in status means another person’s equal gain), the current work challenges the assumption that the behaviors resulting from status change follow this same pattern suggesting that groups with more status change (i.e., less stable groups) will be less cooperative. Lastly, in identifying why this asymmetry occurs, and in identifying a critical boundary condition for the negative effect of status loss on helping, I offer practical insight into how managers can maintain cooperation in hierarchical groups where change is likely inevitable.

A technique using multiple images from a single year to find surface roughness-based differences in directional radiance across sparsely-vegetated surfaces has been developed to help efficiently map and understand depositional processes on active, alluvial fan surfaces in Death Valley, CA. Surface roughness on the scales of grain size and topography on alluvial fan surfaces is expected to vary with depositional processes, including fluvial and mass movement events, as well as surface runoff and eolian processes. The Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) describes changes in reflectance based on changes in the angle of irradiance and radiation-scattering effects of a surface. Using Landsat 7 satellite imagery, the changes in observed surface reflectance, resulting from seasonal changes in the angle of incoming, solar radiation, can be classified and interpreted to show differences in surface roughness. Observations of grain size and topography, and other variables that affect reflectance (e.g. vegetation, composition) from field sites on eastern, alluvial fan surfaces in Death Valley show that seasonal changes in surface radiation are related to surface shadowing that result from grain size primarily, but also topography. Statistical tests show that the total amount of sand found on the land surface is the most correlated variable with the remote sensing method. Spatial relationships of surface features provide further interpretation of depositional process in addition to surface roughness. Airborne Laser Swath Mapping (ALSM) data was also used to map surface roughness, and shows positive trends with the Landsat imagery analyses. Mapping surface roughness over large areas and in remote settings using multi-spectral, satellite imagery has the potential to be a powerful tool for studying the geomorphology of both Earth and Mars.