Education Commons^™

Beyond The Bedroom Door: Investigating Representations Of Sex In Young Adult Literature, Amelia Gutche

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines representations of sex in young adult (YA) fiction, focusing on negative patterns, empowerment, and healthy relationships. Through analysis of seven YA novels and existing scholarship, three research questions are addressed: the evolution of sexual representations in the twenty-first century, patterns characterizing teenage sexual situations, and distinctions between healthy and unhealthy relationships. Findings reveal a shift toward more inclusive and empowering depictions, yet lingering conservative values and silences persist. YA literature often portrays sex as a source of fear and obsession, limiting adolescent power and perpetuating unrealistic ideals. Healthy relationships are characterized by support systems, mutual respect, and …

Composing From The Margins: The Breaking Of Writing Barriers, Empowering Voices & Broadening The Work Of Feminist Composition Studies, Jasmin Salgado

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The concept of identity politics within Composition Studies acknowledge how a writer’s social identity (race, gender, sexuality, disabilities, etc.) influences their writing style and shapes their language. Understanding the relationship between social identity and writing practices means recognizing the diverse perspectives writers bring to the writing classroom. In alignment with this perspective, feminist composition studies emphasize the importance of centering marginalized voices and creating inclusive learning environments where students can safely express their identities through writing. However, research reveals that diverse perspectives haven’t always been welcomed in academic spaces. Feminist compositionists unveil how discourse around writing conventions and language norms …

Censorship Of Lgbtq+ Books: Causes And Consequences, Merrick Glass

Honors Projects

Censorship in the United States of America has accelerated over the past four years. LGBTQ+ books are specifically being targeted and banned within high school classrooms. Banned books are nothing new--court cases today are influenced by Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982) plurality decision on censorship. Students and professionals alike have power in their rights and voices. In the framework of bell hooks, the classroom can be perceived as a site of resistance in order to take power back into students' hands. Without a diversity of books, students will lack cognitive development and community.

Restorative Practices In English Language Arts: My Journey Towards Linguistic Justice, Ariana Skeese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this final portfolio, I examine anti-racist pedagogy in English Language Arts Education.

Ethics In Literature: A Case Study Of Hades And Persephone, Mckenzie A. Howard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The increased ethical scrutiny on art in the modern era places an emphasis on how those art forms are being taught in the classroom. This thesis seeks to answer the question: how do we teach ethics, if we should at all, when we teach literature to a modern audience? This thesis explores this question by looking at how modern adaptations of an ancient text, the “Hymn to Demeter,” change the ethical issues in the original text, to show the relevance of these issues in the source text and the modern adaptations. Through an argument that the ethical concerns are often …

Decolonization Of The Writing Classroom: Creating Space For Decolonial Theory, Tools, Anti-Racist Pedagogy, And Methods To Improve The Emerging Bilingual Student Experience, Desiree L. Brown

Masters Theses

In this thesis, the author addresses the colonial roots of the secondary writing classroom and the origin of standard academic English which enables strict standardized testing and writing assessment requirements that in-turn incite linguistic violence towards emerging bilingual students. The author frames her study within the framework of April Baker-Bell and Asao B. Inoue through a reflective/reflexive study of her teaching in a ninth grade writing classroom in a primarily Hispanic school district in South Texas, which is assessed by the state of Texas through STAAR. This study seeks to identify instances of linguistic violence being perpetuated in the writing …

Characteristics Of Award-Winning Children’S Books About Agriculture: An Analysis Of Content, And The Perspectives Of Authors, Illustrators, And Publishers, Addison L. Beckham

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this two-article qualitative study was to characterize children's literature about agriculture and to describe the perceptions of authors and illustrators who are responsible for writing and designing these successful publications. This will result in the ability of organizations like Feeding Minds Press to provide writers, illustrators, and publishers with effective strategies and techniques to improve the accuracy and overall quality of children’s literature about agriculture. Few parameters exist for authors of children’s books about agriculture (Biser, 2007). These parameters are necessary to ensure the quality and accuracy of these educational efforts (Serafini, 2012). Though Feeding Minds Press …

Improving Students’ Confidence And Competence Using Critical Media Literacy Skills In A Secondary English Language Arts Class, Leeanne Kline

Doctor of Education in Secondary and Middle Grades Education Dissertations

This is a dissertation for a six-week action research study that investigated how self-regulated learning strategies can affect students’ perceived and demonstrated critical abilities in discussing informational media texts in the secondary ELA classroom. This dissertation examines topical research, gaps in the literature, and theoretical frameworks to justify the study. The qualitative action research study implemented a version of the Article of the Week program alongside self-regulated learning (SRL) and student-led discussion strategies to collect data on students’ self-reported levels and observed critical media literacy (CML) skills. The purpose of this study was to build upon existing research on SRL, …

Challenging Dominant Ideologies In Order To Center Marginalized Voices And Enrich Learning: Theorizing Social Justice In English Studies Teaching, Heather Holliger

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio explores the reproduction of and challenges to dominant ideologies in popular culture and scholarly contexts and examines pedagogies for advancing social justice in the field of English studies through three distinct but interconnected projects. The first project considers pedagogy in the public sphere, examining the power of the meme genre to serve as “critical public pedagogy” within movements for social change. The second project focuses on the role of dominant norms in reproducing social injustices through classroom writing assessment, offering insights from antiracist, queer, feminist, decolonial, translingual, and disability justice scholars. The paper also reviews composition scholars’ strategies …

Breaking Bridges: A Latina's Role In Familismo And Higher Education, Desiree Trejo

Theses and Dissertations

This research and collective experiences have been recorded to bring together an autoethnography that demonstrates my personal experiences of being the eldest daughter in a Latino family and how these experiences situate within a social context. The primary purpose of this autoethnography is to provide insight on Latino culture expectations placed upon first born daughters. My own experiences connect to my research covering Latino culture and gender expectations to further understand social meanings and understandings of this culture. This autoethnography presents qualitive research that allows me to self-reflect and apply these findings to my personal experiences within my family to …

Digitally Rural: Identifying How Technological Inequity Impacts Rural Students In First-Year Writing Courses, Jo Anna M. Nevada

English Language and Literature ETDs

To teach composition in this era means to engage students with technology; it is all but an unspoken requirement at the majority of universities. This dissertation theorizes, however, that the imbricated use of technology in first-year writing (FYW) classrooms places rural students at an inherent disadvantage, with issues of inadequate technological proficiency and inconsistent access causing a substantial learning disparity between this student population and their urban peers. Through mixed-methods data analysis of student survey responses and final FYW course portfolios, this study reveals that the expectation of technological access and presumption of digital literacy is detrimental to rural student …

Sociolinguistics Of Saudi Vision 2030: Paradigm Shift Through English Faculty’S Perspectives Of Translanguaging At A Saudi University., Naif Masrahi

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

Many educational systems around the world insist on applying an English Only Policy (EOP) when teaching the English language at universities without addressing their contextual needs. In Saudi Arabia, this problem leads to reduced satisfaction among faculty regarding students’ English level (Alharbi & Alqefari, 2022; Alkhairy, 2013; Alqahtani, 2020; Alsaawi, 2019; Alshammari, 2022; Altale & Alta’ani, 2019; Alzahrani, 2019; Elyas & Picard, 2010). However, the new educational transformation promised by Saudi Vision 2030 (2016) supports the Arabic language as a mother tongue for Saudis, English as an important language, and the teaching of critical thinking to respond to current global …

Beyond Words: Exploring History Through The Lens Of Literary Theory And Research, Andrea Weaver

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

The narrative of this Master's portfolio reflects on the academic journey of Andrea Weaver. The three projects showcased in this portfolio reflect her experience during the Master of Arts in English with a Specialization in English Teaching program. It includes a rhetorical Ohio Suffragist unit plan created for high school sophomores, a seminar paper critically analyzing the film Interview with the Vampire (1994), and a digital presentation of artifacts and research about literary theorist Wolfgang Iser and his work in Reader Response Theory presented on the platform Microsoft Sway. The framework of New Historicism is threaded throughout each project, linking …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

Moving At The Speed Of Trust, Sun Ho Lee

Masters Theses

Moving at the Speed of Trust is a workbook of strategies — practices, definitions, and techniques — to nurture community-building in support of inbetweeners who live between power structures and cultures and are often left out. Inbetweeners are those individuals whose lives are in transition through recent immigration or forced translocation from Asia to America.

These strategies revolve around threads of trust: kin, giggles, vulnerability, and shared experience. With these threads, we can question power. We can preserve stories, expand the ways we connect, shift perspectives on what is “standard,” and cultivate a community rooted in understanding. To understand each …

Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar

Masters Theses

This paper introduces the concept of "extralingual citizenship," which I define as an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrates the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I am interested in the codification of postcolonial disparity into the teaching, social performance, and material assessment of English language users, and the infrastructural disqualification of World Englishes (and their amalgams) in favor of a standardized English. I frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, shifting the focus of English pedagogy/practice from the syntactical/etymological concerns of language …

The Benefits Of Using Comics In The Classroom, Caedin Brown

University Honors Theses

With more research being done on the use and effects of comics in classes, teachers and the general public are becoming more accepting of them as a teaching tool. A study in the use of comics in classrooms has found positive correlations between comics and learning in academic environments and very few possibilities of negative connotations. Comics are being proven to show an increase of motivation in students along with better retention of knowledge, especially in the field of language learning. Comic activities in language learning environments that have been developed by Stephen Cary have shown an increase of engagement, …

Untangling The Phenomenon Of Teacher Anxiety During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Voices Of Secondary Ela Teachers, Jenise Gorman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Hybrid simultaneous teaching, surgical masks, Lysol wipes, and uncertainty capture the zeitgeist of teaching during COVID-19. This study builds on teachers’ daily stressors in the classroom. Many shifts in education that never seemed possible created angst and anxiety in the classroom (Cupido, 2018; Dubey and Pandey, 2020; El Rizaq & Sarmini, 2021; Zuo et al., 2020; Garcia and Piotrowski, 2022). Teachers entered the 2020-2021 school year having to learn many firsts.The purpose of this study was to understand the interplay of work-life lived experiences of secondary English teachers with moments of anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a post-intentional phenomenological …

Legends Of Light: Crafting Middle Grade Fantasy In The Tradition Of Catholic Philosophy And Medieval Visual Culture, Bernadette Lamb

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay promotes the writing and illustrating of middle grade literature that mirrors the wonder-inducing experiences of leafing through an illuminated manuscript and stepping into a Gothic cathedral. An examination of Catholic medieval visual culture moves into a discussion on its underlying philosophy and theology, which are profoundly centered on relational healing and the dignity of the human person. Christian writers including St. Pope John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Josef Pieper, Madeline L’Engle, Dr. Bob Schuchts, Makoto Fujimura, and Andrew Peterson inform an exploration of mercy, forgiveness, and love as self-gift in the context of illustration and storytelling …

Amplifying Tutor Voices: A Qualitative Analysis For Improving Writing Center Tutoring Practices And Pedagogy, Leah Washko

English Department Masters Theses

Within the walls of university writing centers, tutors and tutees collaborate. They discuss writing, but even more than that, they communicate about ideas and theories bigger than themselves, all while discovering their identities. Exploration of how tutors define their authority and agency, while also highlighting the importance of tutors’ voices, is necessary for the continuation of writing center studies. Writing center tutors’ roles may be understood by some, but the mental hurdles, the questioning natures, and the care-giver roles they are emersed into need to be further investigated. Through a study conducted at Kutztown University’s Writing Center, tutors were surveyed …

Through Her Eyes: Learning And Teaching About Racism Through "To Kill A Mockingbird" And "The Bluest Eye", Sloane Larsen

English Honors Theses

This thesis argues that Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird both merit a place in te United States’ secondary education systems by using use them in the classroom to encourage students to recognize and challenge their biases, perspectives, and choices. One of the many complex questions this thesis addresses is the efficacy of teaching students about racism using such novels. Teaching these novels through Critical Race Theory could help create a new generation of students who are more likely to address and challenge their biases and privilege. At the same time, this approach requires …

Rising Costs Of Universities And The Impact On Teaching Effectiveness And Student Outcomes, Patrick Hanna

English (MA) Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to track the rising costs of attending higher education institutions and the professional development of professors compared to secondary and primary educators. While university and college administrations around the United States enjoyed exponential growth in pay, faculty and staff pay has remained stagnant for over 40 years. The increase in costs of attendance despite the stagnant pay for professors highlights the diminishing return on investment for attaining a higher education degree. By examining the concepts of education production function and extrapolating the findings to apply to postsecondary institutions, the lapse in educator development comes …

Exploring Multiliteracies And Other Approaches To Second Language Teaching, Saralee Dunster

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This teaching portfolio offers a selection from the author’s graduate coursework, teaching experience, and research undertaken while enrolled in the Utah State University Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program. The documents included are a reflection of her pedagogical approach and teaching practice, developed through varying contexts of professional experiences, including teaching English and French as a second language. This portfolio includes: reflections on the author’s teaching environment, a teaching philosophy statement, a professional development peer observation, a reflection paper that demonstrates the author’s experiences teaching with stories within the context of the multiliteracies framework, specifically multimodal fairy tales with …

Faculty’S Experiences Teaching English Language Learners In Higher Education, Chedia A. Ayari

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Conducted in a large size four-year state university, the purpose of this qualitative study was to learn how faculty of multiple disciplines examined and made meaning of their instructional practices and decisions when teaching ELL students, how they modified their instruction to meet the needs of ELLs, and what they saw as areas of struggle when working with this student population. Critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) was used as a theoretical framework to further investigate the complex nature of how higher education faculty make meaning of their instructional experiences when teaching ELLs within the hierarchical structures inherent in higher education and …

Teaching Empathy For Others Through Young Adult Literature, Madison Boeckman

Honors Projects

Literature can let a reader grow in empathy by learning about a character’s experiences and cultures. Teaching literature with diverse characters to young people can help combat bias and hatred towards people who are perceived as different.

This project uses Rudine Sims Bishop’s metaphor of mirrors, windows, and doors, Gloria Ladson Billings’ Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, and Gholdy Muhammad’s Culturally Responsive Pedagogy as foundation for creating activities for diverse literature. These activities are for the texts Ms. Marvel: No Normal, The Poet X, and The Marrow Thieves, all texts that are academically enriching with diverse characters that would …

Banned Or Grand?: Why Graphic Novels Maus And Persepolis Belong In The Classroom, Lauren Volk

Munn Scholars Awards

My capstone essay, “Banned or Grand?: Why Graphic Novels Maus and Persepolis Belong in The Classroom,” seeks to research both the objections to oft-banned memoir graphic novels being incorporated in the secondary school curriculum and the reasons why these graphic novels should not only be incorporated into the curriculum, but also why they assist students in developing necessary skills, such as higher-level critical thinking, a deeper understanding of complicated historical events, and the analysis of form and structure in literature, rather than just content. To enhance my research, I connected my main points to the pedagogical theory of learning transfer.

Centering Diné Literacy In Ela Classrooms: Developing Co-Conspiratorship For Indigenous Sovereignty, Shaadiin King , '23

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

No abstract provided.

Gender Stereotypes And Representation Of Women In Roald Dahl's Books, Sarah Hunt

Senior Theses and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the role and representation of women in Roald Dahl’s children’s novels. To do this, I conducted a document analysis of five of Dahl’s books - “James and the Giant Peach” (1961), “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (1964), “Danny, The Champion of the World” (1975), “The Witches” (1983), and “Matilda” (1988) - in order to answer the following questions: How does Roald Dahl portray women and girls in his novels? What gendered stereotypes are present, and how does this portrayal change over time? I was able to answer this question through utilizing …

Reading Utopian Pedagogies: Discovering The Practical Here And Now Of Utopian Thinking, Carter Johnke

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis offers a way of reading texts for their utopian aims, a term I use to analyze utopian themes and ideas in a text while keeping the focus on practicality. Reading a text for its utopian aims discovers what a text hopes for but always reflects on how those hopes serve the here and now of the author and the reader. The idealistic conclusions of utopian thinking, the utopian visions, only play a role in the utopian aim. This project does not promote the ultimate or extreme ends of utopian visions; instead, it analyzes the educational effects of entertaining …

Finding The Middle Zone; Redefining Spirituality Through Contemporary American Literature, Mickey Mcpoland

Master's Theses

In this essay, I investigate the intersection of post-postmodern literature and postsecular thought. I examine Jonathan Franzen’s novel Crossroads (2022) as a means to examine a religious conception of goodness and how goodness becomes rooted in what we worship. I also look to Infinite Jest and “Good People” by David Foster Wallace. The latter illuminates the conflict between traditional forms of worship and contemporary calls to worship one’s own desires, which results in stagnation, frigidity, and indecisiveness. Characters follow their internal compass, which leads them only further away from a sense of stability. Franzen’s work shows what replaces traditional religious …