Digital Commons Network^™

Lekuak: The Basque Places Of Boise, Idaho, Meggan Laxalt Mackey

History Graduate Projects and Theses

Lekuak ("Places") traces how Basque places in Boise reflect the evolution of each generation’s expression of ethnic identity in response to American societal forces of the times. The first-generation Amerikanuak (late 1800s to 1920s) predominantly expressed their ethnicity as an internally-focused, solely-Basque ethnic group and built places such as boardinghouses and frontons that met communal needs. The Tartekoak, ("in-between" second generation, 1930s to the 1950s), mostly expressed a dual Basque and American ethnic identity. Tartekoak places often revealed the individuation of this generation with single-family residences and Americanized businesses, and the Basque Center with ancestry-based membership. The Egungoak ("today" …

How You Know You Are Not A Brain In A Vat, Alexander Jackson

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

A sensible epistemologist may not see how she could know that she is not a Brain In a Vat (BIV); but she doesn’t panic. She sticks with her empirical beliefs, and as that requires, believes that she is not a BIV. (She does not inferentially base her belief that she is not a BIV on her empirical knowledge—she rejects that ‘Moorean’ response to skepticism.) Drawing on the psychological literature on metacognition, I describe a mechanism that’s plausibly responsible for a sensible epistemologist coming to believe she is not a BIV. I propose she thereby knows that she is not a …

Simmering, Uxue Alberdi, Nere Lete

World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations

“Su txikian” [“Simmering”] by Uxue Alberdi was published in 2013 as one of the stories in her book Euli Giro [A Sense of Chagrin]. As Alberdi states, “The source of inspiration for this story was an article I had read about an eighty-year-old married couple from Pamplona who had been found in their car parked in the garage after having committed suicide. "Simmering” is a response to the shock the news provoked in me […]. On the one hand, I wanted to hold onto the stereotype of the Basque grandmother. It is not typical to imagine an eighty-year-old Basque woman …

Theorycrafting The Classroom: Constructing The Introductory Technical Communication Course As A Game, Carly Finseth

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

When games are approached as a pedagogical methodology, the homologies between games and technical communication are highlighted: pedagogy that teaches people to play and succeed within certain confines; classroom assessment that provides meaningful feedback to encourage self-improvement; instructional design that incorporates gaming theory and game design principles; and usability to ensure optimum success. This paper provides an overview of these topics for instructors to consider when designing a technical writing course as a game.

Five Poems From Witch In Mourning, Maria-Mercè Marçal, Clyde Moneyhun

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Maria-Mercè Marçal was born in 1952, in the middle of the fascist dictatorship in Spain, which lasted from the end of the Civil War in 1939 to the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. Marçal writes, “A l’atzar agraeixo tres dons: haver nascut dona, de classe baixa i nació oprimida” [I thank fate for three gifts: having been born a woman, to the lower class, in an oppressed nation], a phrase that is still famous in Catalan graffiti today.

Recovering Melville’S Hand: An Inaugural Report On Digital Discovery And Analysis At Melville’S Marginalia Online, Steven Olsen-Smith

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This installment of “Melville’s Hand,” a department of Leviathan originally conceived by Founding Editor John Bryant, is the first to appear in the journal since staff at Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO) printed newly documented marginalia in issue 10.3 of 2008. Through the vision of Bryant’s successor as Editor Samuel Otter and of Associate Editor Brian Yothers, the present installment also constitutes the inaugural printing of what we hope will remain an annual contribution by the online project to Leviathan (appearing in every June issue) for years to come. What gives us confidence that MMO will generate significant material …

Specific Exceptions Driving Variation: The Role Of Orthography In Modern Hebrew Spirantization, Michal Temkin Martinez, Ivana Müllner

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper reports results from a production experiment examining the patterns of variation in the morphophonemic alternations present in spirantization in Modern Hebrew, a phenomenon to which there are many exceptions and diverse levels of variation. Real and nonce verbs were used to elicit variation in a sentence completion task as a follow-up to a perception experiment (Temkin Martínez 2010) which found gradient levels of acceptability in variation due to the presence of exceptionality. The diverse patterns of variation indicate that not all exceptions affect the same level of variation in alternation. Results of the current study suggest that levels …

Man Made Paradise: The Boise Water Project, Heidi Coon, Cheryl Oestreicher

College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs Presentations

The development and economic growth of the Boise Valley was made possible by the efforts of private citizens and the Bureau of Reclamation that culminated in the creation of the Boise Water Project.

Prior to the creation of the Boise Project, the area known as the Boise Valley could be an unforgiving unyielding landscape. Availability of water was scarce, making the development of the land nearly impossible unless a person was fortunate enough to live along a waterway. However, being located near water did not always mean success. The very nature of water can have negative consequences. In the spring …

Let Them Read Trash!, Jeffrey Wilhelm

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

A classroom teacher for fifteen years, Dr. Jeffrey Wilhelm is currently Distinguished Professor of English Education at Boise State University. He is the founding director of the Maine Writing Project and the Boise State Writing Project. He has authored or co-authored 32 books about literacy teaching and learning.

The following article is an adaptation of the Prestige Lecture presented at the University of Canterbury on March 3, 2015. It is based on the research reported in his book Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read what They Want – and Why We Should Let Them. (Scholastic, 2014)

Thomas Savage’S Queer Country, O. Alan Weltzien

Western Writers Online

Novelist Thomas Savage (1915–2003) grew up in the lonely world of the northern Rockies during the twentieth century’s first half and in eight of his thirteen novels continually re‑inhabited it as a scene of gender protest. He left Montana, his native state, at twenty‑two, only periodically visiting after that and returning only once after the 1960s. His daughter said he “hated Montana” and wanted to get as physically far away from it as possible, but that’s not the whole story. In those eight novels Savage critiques the limited roles available to men and women in the high landscapes between his …

They Read What They Need, Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Michael W. Smith

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

An essay on the importance of allowing young people to read what they need to read aside from their assigned readings is presented. Topics include the four kinds of pleasure young people get out from the books they read outside of the school, findings from a case study conducted by the authors on a young girl who is an avid reader of romances, and a suggestion on allowing books that young people like to read into the curricula to help them become life-long readers.

From Archive To Evidence: Historians And Natural Resource Litigation, Jennifer A. Stevens

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Within the field of natural resource law are several specific areas that are well suited for the historian’s skillset and knowledge. The deployment of the historian’s tool box when conducting research in the legal world, however, can result in deliverables which vary significantly from those found in the academy, as they range widely in both size and scope and do not always use the full range of a historian’s skills. New technological platforms provide consulting historians with creative opportunities to disseminate valuable information and sources and enhance important scholarly debates.

Author’S Place, Digital Space: Mapping Tennessee Williams, 1938-1948, Carmi Acosta, Arthur Aguilera, Amanda Baschnagel, Clark Gillespie, Kathleen Hamilton, Sam Hansen, Ty Huff, Bryce Klinger, Janne Knight, Corina Monoran, Laurie Plummer, Brittany Reichel

College of Arts and Sciences Presentations

From 1938-­1948, twentieth-­century American author Tennessee Williams traveled the country with his portable typewriter and a battered suitcase. He wrote every day, and his writings reflect the places and people he encountered. Williams’s journey from obscurity to fame as a writer during this decade parallels the nation’s path from depression to postwar prosperity. The events of this time period remain scattered across Williams’s scholarship; however, our collaborative, interdisciplinary project takes advantage of new methods of investigation and dissemination to create a multimedia map that traces the writer’s movements. We use Google Earth to create placemarks that highlight Williams’s professional and …

Writing Is A Knowledge-Making Activity, Heidi Estrem

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Writing is often defined by what it is: a text, a product; less visible is what it can do: generate new thinking (see 1.5, "Writing Mediates Activity"). As an activity undertaken to bring new understandings, writing in this sense is not about crafting a sentence or perfecting a text but about mulling over a problem, thinking with others, and exploring new ideas or bringing disparate ideas together (see "Metaconcept: Writing Is an Activity and a Subject of Study"). Writers of all kinds—from self-identified writers to bloggers to workplace teams to academic researchers—have had the experience of coming upon …

Disciplinary And Professional Identities Are Constructed Through Writing, Heidi Estrem

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

While people can negotiate how identities are constructed through writing in a variety of contexts (see 3.1 , "Writing Is Linked to Identity") , many first encounter unfamiliar disciplinary (or professional) discourse in college. In most American colleges and universities in the United States, students complete-general education courses (introductory courses designed to introduce students to both ways of thinking and disciplinary perspectives within the university) before continuing on to specialized courses within their chosen disciplines or fields. This increasingly discipline-specific learning process involves both the simple acquisition of new knowledge and an "expansion and transformation of identity, of a learner's …

Threshold Concepts And Student Learning Outcomes, Heidi Estrem

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

One of the premises of this edited collection is that descriptions of writing matter, and matter deeply. Writing—for reasons articulated throughout this collection—is particularly vulnerable to uneven or problematic portrayals. In higher education, it has become common practice to characterize student learning about writing via identified learning outcomes that students are to meet by the end of a course or program; more recently, entire undergraduate degree experiences are described through an outcomes framework. For example, postsecondary educational reform efforts like the American Association of Colleges and Universities' Liberal Education, America's Promise (LEAP) Initiative structure the undergraduate degree experience around identified …

What New Writing Teachers Talk About When They Talk About Teaching, Heidi Estrem, E. Shelley Reid

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

As a discipline with academic roots in pedagogy (Harris 1996), composition studies has fostered increasingly visible and structured programs to mentor new writing instructors. Several recent essay collections compile examples of programs, thoughtfully theorized approaches, and careful explorations of how to best support and nurture new instructors of first-year writing (see, for example, Pytlik and Liggett 2002; Ward and Perry 2002). It is now common that new college writing teaching assistants (TAs) participate in at least one pedagogy seminar designed to guide them through their initial teaching experience and provide an introduction to composition studies (see Dobrin 2005). Additionally, individual …