Digital Commons Network^™

An Interdisciplinary Lesson Plan Of Social Studies And English Language Arts For Third Graders, Sidney L. Yant

Honors Theses

My name is Sidney Yant and I am a current senior honors student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I am majoring in Elementary Education. For my honors senior project, I have created a four-week-long unit lesson plan that focuses on English Language Arts and Social Studies. This unit starts off with two weeks of separate lesson plans for English Language Arts and Social Studies and then the last two weeks the lessons are completely integrated together into one plan.

Lincoln's Carnegie Library: A History Of Community And Philanthropy, Emily Blomstedt

Honors Theses

Nebraska received 69 Carnegie libraries from the Carnegie foundation between 1899 and 1922. The first and most expensive Nebraska Carnegie library was granted to Lincoln in December 1899, after a fire destroyed Lincoln’s previous library. Lincoln’s main Carnegie library served the community between 1902 and 1960 before it was torn down in 1961 to build the present-day Bennett Martin library. This thesis explores the 60-year history of Lincoln’s Carnegie library, how it connects to national trends surrounding Carnegie libraries, and the role community and philanthropy played in the development of Lincoln’s public library system. These themes are examined through a …

Defining And Transferring Digital Literacies: What Does This Mean For High School And College Educators?, Jocelyn Spoor

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis aims to create a digital literacies transfer framework through a discussion regarding current conversations on transfer and digital literacies in the English field, including synthesizing the two ideas to think about the transfer of digital literacies as a concept. This digital literacies framework is made up of five components: the functional skills, critical skills, and rhetorical skills found in digital literacies scholarship and the genre awareness and meta-cognitive ideas found in transfer literature. This digital literacies transfer framework is then used to analyze information gleaned from four college and five high school English educators. The key findings from …

Life, Strength, Woman: English Translation Of Julia De Burgos’S Poetry, Alexis Stoffers

Honors Theses

The purpose of this translation project is to make Puerto Rican feminist and political activist Julia de Burgos’s poetry available to a wider audience. Its feminist themes and exploration of powerful emotions are just as relevant today as they were in Burgos’s lifetime. Translating these poems to English in the twenty-first century means a whole new generation of developing women will have access to Burgos’s words. They will feel Burgos’s deep and intricate emotions and understand that it’s okay to struggle as long as they remain true to themselves. A detailed history of Burgos’s life accompanies the translated poems in …

Dancing And Poetry: A Study Of The Whirling Dervish Dance Through Rumi’S Poetry, Tasneem Huq

Honors Theses

This exploration investigates the influence of Rumi’s book of poetry, Mathnawi, upon the Sufi practice of the Whirling Dervish dances. It argues that Rumi’s Mathnawi underlies the choreography of the Whirling Dervish dances. Each step of the dance expresses, manifests or embodies themes found in Rumi’s poetry: separation from Unity, ascension, annihilation, and a return to Unity. The thesis introduces this argument, and then discusses historical, theological, and linguistic themes related to Rumi, Sufism, and the Whirling Dervish dances. Following this, the thesis provides a framework that begins with the Neoplatonic theory of emanation grounding Rumi’s poetic thought, followed by …

Nasty Woman: An Analysis Of Women's Rage In Popular Culture, Sarah Kee

Honors Theses

The goal of this senior project was to analyze the underlying cause for why certain female characters in popular culture were villainized for their behavior and generally deemed to be “nasty woman.” After reading numerous books and viewing films that contained “nasty woman”, there was a common denominator that linked their behavior and influenced their decision to enact their often-bloody retribution: the patriarchy. These women were a victim of some aspect of the patriarchy, commonly sexual assault, and could not receive the support they needed, so they decided to take matters into their own hands. The “nasty women” analyzed in …

The Impact Of Women On The Life And Legacy Of Mark Antony, Lauren E. Yaple

Honors Theses

Throughout the life of Mark Antony, the women he became involved with had a large impact on his political career, life, and legacy. These women, such as Fulvia and Cleopatra, used Antony as a means to achieve their own political, economic, and personal goals and were able to gain power in a very anti-feminist society through their relationships with and manipulations of him, affecting the career of Antony in many ways including his politics and his actions as a military commander, as showcased by the examination of primary sources from the late Roman Republic and early Roman empire periods. This …

Research Visualization On Teaching, Language, Learning Of English And Higher Education Institutions From 2011 To 2020: A Bibliometric Evidences, Dr. Muhammad Shoaib, Mr. Nusrat Ali, Dr. Behzad Anwar, Dr. Shamshad Rasool, Dr. Raza-E Mustafa, Mr. Shi Zici

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

No abstract provided.

The George Eliot Archive: Current Reception & Comparison Of Dh Projects 2020, Mackenzie Burch, Beverley Rilett

UCARE Research Products

• Current legal gray area for digital collections: An exception for public libraries and archives as educational tools exists for copyright infringement, but digital archives are not currently protected by this exception unless they can prove that the content is transformative.

• Benefits of archiving scholarship together: Grouping like scholarship together regardless of genre or authorship allows for unique cross-purpose or interdisciplinary connections to be drawn from the collection.

• Humanists of today must devote time and resources to the educational tools and platforms of tomorrow: Without the successful building and completion of means to ensure digital archives can be …

The George Eliot Archive: Current Reception & Comparison Of Dh Projects, Mackenzie Burch

Honors Theses

As the field of Digital Humanities continues to grow, the projects also continue to develop their own identities with unique goals. The interdisciplinary nature of multimedia projects has allowed DH to develop in a number of different directions. As a research assistant for the George Eliot Archive digital project launched in early 2019 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, it is essential for us to stay current this development in the field of DH.

Through exploring twenty digital projects and archives at various stages of development or establishment, I have gained a cohesive and current snapshot of Digital Humanities projects, and …

Fanfiction As A Form With Merit, Alyssandra Holmes

Honors Theses

Fanfiction is a form of writing with a vast wealth of merits, and it should be respected as a unique and valuable literary genre. I have read a number of scholarly articles written regarding fanfiction, analyzed certain works and my own experiences within the fan community, and considered original media in order to construct my defense of fanfiction's value as a literary form. Fanfiction has an unfortunately poor reputation, given the unique advantages it provides to authors. Fanfiction is an egalitarian learning tool, with a thriving community and a significant impact upon the individuals engaging with fanfiction creation. Fanfiction is …

The Reality Of Escape In Fantasy, Abbigail Mazour

Honors Theses

This paper seeks to examine the instances of escape experienced by the characters in popular fantasy novels such as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and looks at how this escape teaches its audiences lessons about the real world and philosophical truths. It answers the question of whether or not fantasy is escape and why, accepting fantasy as escapist, this genre—and escape itself—is valuable to its audiences. The method for completing this project was a close analysis of the primary texts The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter along with the research and writing done by Tolkien …

Foreword To D.W. Robertson, Jr., Uncollected Essays, Paul Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

During the late summer of 1992, I received a call from Darryl Gless, a professor of Renaissance literature at the University of North Carolina and my former student, asking me if it would be all right if he and other people looking after the literary remains of D. W. Robertson would send me a package of published and unpublished articles that Robertson had left behind upon his death in July of that year. Gless had been a friend of Dr. and Mrs. Robertson in Chapel Hill, visiting with them frequently while trying a bit to look after their well-being in …

Requiem, Jacob K. Lee

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Creative Work, and Performance

Traditionally, the requiem form began as a Catholic mass to honor the dead. Today, the requiem is generally composed conveying messages of solace to troubled hearts. Many composers, such as Britten and Rutter, choose to abandon some of the orthodox text of the mass to provide an added measure of connection for the audience. The result of these later requiems is often a baring of the composer’s soul – something profoundly personal shared in the hope of inspiring others. This latter process is my aim in creating my Requiem. I approach this end in several ways, compositionally: There is a …

Engl 487: English Capstone Experience—A Peer Review Of Teaching Benchmark Portfolio, Kelly Stage

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This portfolio documents the teaching objectives, strategies, and assessments for a capstone course in the English major at UNL. As the English Studies Capstone and as an ACE (Achievement-Centered Education) 10 course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, English 487 must help students meet key outcomes for the department and the University, but it also allows flexibility and creativity in the methods chosen to meet these requirements and structure the course. This portfolio thereby reflects on the intellectual labor of designing a particular version of these requirements and on guiding students through the design. The assessments included here are measuring traditional …

Arab 202: A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Inquiry Portfolio, Abla Hasan

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This project examines the impact of adopting a text book of teaching Arabic for nonnative speakers that doesn’t use any English. The project targets “ARAB 202”, second year Arabic, since this course has already used a text book that uses English for instructions and grammar for 3 semesters, ARAB 101 , ARAB102, ARAB 201 and before the new curriculum was available in the market. Students of ARAB 202 will be the first to experience the switch to the new curriculum and therefore can be the best to evaluate the experience. For the project, students were asked to complete a pre-course …

Teaching Self: The Ambiguity Of Lived Experience In Classroom Discourse, Scott V. Gealy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Inspired by Paul Heilker’s notion of the essay as a form of exploration over argument, embodying an anti-scholastic and chrono-logical approach, and Candace Spigelman’s endorsement of experience as evidence in academic discourse, this thesis weaves memoir into more traditional scholarship in an effort to complicate the archetype of the effective teacher. Furthermore, the essay seeks to deconstruct conventional student, teacher, and cultural binaries with the help of the theoretical work of Deborah Britzman, Parker Palmer, Mikhail Bakhtin, Joy Ritchie and David Wilson and others, while using Scott Russell Sanders’ narrative essay “Under the Influence” as a mentor text for …

Using Place Conscious Education And Social Action To Plug The "Rural Brain Drain", Danielle M. Helzer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following thesis will explore the Rural Brain Drain phenomenon as outlined by researchers Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas and its relation to a rural Nebraska school. In order to take action against the exodus of small-town America’s best and brightest, I propose a pedagogical solution that is a blend of Place Conscious Education and Social Action. The last part of the document features a narrative section describing how I’ve implemented the aforementioned solution into English 9 classes at Ogallala High School and the impact this had on students involved.

Adviser: Robert Brooke

Keep Going, Jeff Lacey

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Keep Going is a collection of poetry whose themes include life in modern America, man’s relationship with the natural world, and living in the Midwest. The collection includes both free verse and metric poetry and both narrative and lyric poetry.

"Good English": Literacy And Institutional Systems At A Community Literacy Organization, Charise G. Alexander

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the impact of institutions and the systems and communities of which they are a part on literacy instruction, practices, and rhetoric at a community literacy organization in Lincoln, Nebraska. A majority of students served by this organization are adult English Language Learners, many of whom receive instruction from volunteer tutors. In this unique context, a number of factors affect literacy learning, particularly the perpetuation of conservative, hegemonic discourses about literacy by the organizations which fund literacy education programming at this site.

The power dynamics at work in these granting organizations and in larger systems that control and …

Nf05-645 Infants And Toddlers — Developing More Than One Language, Janet S. Hanna, Kayla M. Hinrichs, Carla J. Mahar, John Defrain

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension: Historical Materials

When infants and toddlers are developing more than one language, the goal is that they will learn English and develop fluency in their home language. Children can become truly bilingual and be able to use two or more languages with fequal fluency. Children, families, schools, and communities all benefit when children keep their connection to their language and heritage.

Legal Restrictions On Foreign Languages In The Great Plains States, 1917-1923, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

A major effect of World War I on American social history was that it focused attention on the nation's apparent difficulty in assimilating the millions of immigrants and their children who had streamed to the United States during the preceding two decades. The national mood, darkened by fears and resentments of long standing and deepened by systematic wartime propaganda, favored the adoption of stringent laws limiting the use of foreign languages, especially in the schools. During the war itself, restrictions were usually extralegal and often the consequences of intense social pressure recklessly applied. After the war, however, many state legislatures …