Digital Commons Network^™

A Qualitative Exploration Of First-Generation Asian Indian Women In Cross-Cultural Marriages, Monica Thiagarajan

Dissertations

The literature on Asian Indian women has not adequately addressed the experiences that first generation Asian Indian women face while going through the process of making the decision to marry cross-culturally. The purpose of this exploratory study was to identify, describe, and understand the struggles, challenges, and conflict experienced by Asian Indian women who decide to marry cross-culturally and to understand the consequences of the decision on the lives of these women and their interpersonal relationships.

Initial and follow-up phone interviews were conducted with eight Asian Indian women who had experienced cultural and familial challenges regarding their decision to marry …

Gender Disparity In Nigerian Education: Women’S Experience Of Barriers To Equal Educational Opportunity, Eugene Okoli

Dissertations

Discrepancies between males and females in access to schooling, school completion rates, and participation in employment opportunities are still more the norm in some regions of the world than others. Limited access to education plagues women in Nigeria as well as in Sub-Saharan Africa. Disparity in access to educational opportunity is a pressing gender equity issue in Nigeria (World Bank, 2003).

Relatively few studies have focused on obtaining the viewpoints of women who experience this phenomenon. To hear the voices of these women regarding how they gained or were denied access to education in the Nigerian context, a cross-section of …

Breaking The Be Nice Rule: Direct Action Community Organizing, Adriana Rosas

Masters Theses

Focusing on the Kalamazoo Homeless Action Network (KHAN), this thesis explores the dynamics of transformation in community organizing, and the crucial and often complicated role of anger in that process. Current Anthropological literature on the topic of resistance and poverty leaves unexamined the micropolitics of individuals' transformation as they become civically engaged as well as the laborious organizing techniques culminating in such events that lead to social change and individual empowerment. I will contribute to the literature on poverty and resistance by examining the 'behind-the-scenes' dimensions of direct action community organizing that influence individual and social transformation. Through this examination …

Moment Of Encounter: A Critical Exploration Of Parent-School Communication, Gary Samuel Marx

Masters Theses

Relationships among parents and schools are situated in a complex hegemony. Communication is central to the identification and construction of power in schools. Schools employ a model of communication that locates power predominately with their representatives and values parents for conformity to organizational expectations. Shared power relationships challenge actors to encounter one another and co-contribute to the development of children. The goal of this study is to uncover various meanings and understandings from what parents recall from Moments of Encounter with school personnel. Such an examination is designed to reveal power at the microlevel, in the encounter itself, as well …

Wmu International News November 2007, Haenicke Institute For Global Education

WMU International News

In this issue:

Two decades of twinning success celebrated in Malaysia

Tailgate party and parade an international celebration at WMU's Homecoming

WMU professors perform in prestigious Russian festival, foster student exchanges

Japanese interests compels a major switch to global and international studies

WMU and Hispanic American Council collaborate to expand community ESL classes

WMU’s Japan liaison officer finds many parallels between life in Kalamazoo and Tokyo

Summer study abroad is a short-term affair

Prism #24, September 2007, Office Of The Provost

Prism: Western Michigan University's Newsletter for Academic Affairs

No abstract provided.

Family Literacy: The Missing Link To School-Wide Literacy Efforts, Vicky Zygouris-Coe

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

Everyone has a literacy component to their lives. Family literacy refers to the ways people learn and use literacy in their home and everyday lives. Many times there is a disconnect between family and school literacies. Schools do not have systematic ways of tapping into the wealth of knowledge families possess and linking that knowledge to school literacy efforts. This article provides a brief review of family literacy issues and perspectives. Sample family literacy programs are summarized and suggestions are given for strengthening the link between family and school through food, photos, family publications, journals, literacy events, and using parents …

What Role Should Civil Society Organizations Play To Address Ethnic Conflicts In Ethiopia?, Sisay Gebre-Egziabher

International Conference on African Development Archives

The Ethiopian people are ethnically heterogeneous, speaking multiplicity languages comprising of more than 100 groups. Hence, the country presents a mosaic of nationalities, each speaking a dialect of one of more than 70 languages and has a long history of rich culture and strong social values. Although there were some ethnic-conflicts, that go back a long way, among few of the ethnic groups (mainly for control over resources, such as grazing land, water points, cultivable land), people solved such conflicts using their own conflict resolution mechanism; for instance elders meeting and community tribunal system. The indigenous civil society groups have …

Towards Resolving The Ethiopia-Somalia Disputes, Daniel Kendie

International Conference on African Development Archives

The 46-year-old dispute between Ethiopia and Somalia has been commonly called a “border dispute.” Contrary to that description, it may be more appropriate to portray it as a dispute that has been driven principally by economic interests and by the effort to control scarce resources. Among these interests and resources are the following: the struggle for water wells and fresh grazing pastures for nomads; the insecurity Somalia feels about the Juba and the Wabi Shibeli rivers, as their sources are in Ethiopia; the discovery of gas and oil in the Ogaden; Somalia’s challenging geographic shape that makes communication between the …

Estimating Remittances From The United States To Ethiopia, Gezahegne Bekele

International Conference on African Development Archives

No abstract provided.

From Sandbox To Altar: What I Didn’T Know, Thought I Knew, And Discovered About Learning And Relationships, Cherilyn L. Gardner

Masters Theses

In this theoretically-based thesis, I metacognitively explore the transactional relationship between critical inquiry and literacy development. Throughout the writing, I reveal my own learning in studying these concepts. Embedded in the discussion of research, readers will engage with my personal reflections, confessions, and applications of what I learned (and am still learning).

Through countless dialogues (academic and otherwise) and my study of literature and self, I found that literacy is much more than what it has been carved out to be by programs promising to raise standardized test scores. Additionally, by breaking the mold, I found that critical inquiry provides …

An Eco-Philosophical Ecofeminist Critique Of Victimology: Examining The Anthropocentric And Speciesist Borders And Boundaries Of Victimology, Angela K. Simon

Masters Theses

This work is a critique of the anthropocentric and speciesist borders and boundaries of victimology. Essentially I challenge victimology for failing to incorporate the victimizations of non-human animals and the environment, and instead focusing narrowly on only specific forms of human victimization. I do this by examining the history of victimology and exploring how its boundaries became what they are today. Focusing on the role criminology has had in the general development of victimology. I then go on to juxtapose the limited presence of animals and the environment within criminology with their relative absence in victimology. In conjunction with this …

Nude With Anything, James D'Agostino

Dissertations

Nude With Anything is a book-length manuscript of poetry that sources itself in a painterly world, one in which a visual vocabulary privileges the materiality of language in all its attempts to rival experience. Its teleos leans often toward velocity, a fevered stacking up of phrases, and so its range of poetic forms documents attempts at building calm into the rapids, intersecting verbal excess with contrasting silences, a kind of late-phase Henry James short through by haiku. With each syntactical tactic and shift in diction, Nude With Anything employs an abiding collage aesthetic, braiding different strands of discourse and seeking …

Evaluating The Immediate Impact And Short-Term Therapeutic Effects Of The “Internalized-Other” Interviewing With Couples, Shai M. Brosh

Dissertations

The present study examined empirically the immediate and short-term therapeutic effects of the internalized-other interview (Tomm, 1996) with couples during a single session and compared it with the standard method of interviewing couples (i.e., treatment as usual). Thirty-two married couples (N = 64 participants) were randomly assigned into one of two conditions (internalized-other versus standard interviewing). Couples attended an initial interview session and two follow-ups (one and four-weeks respectively). Self-reported measures of session impact were taken immediately after the session, while self-reported measures of marital satisfaction, intimacy, closeness and empathy were taken at baseline (before the session) and during …

Work Stress, Non-Work Stress And Mental Health Among School-Based Speech-Language Pathologists: Effects Of Social Support, Lena Gloria Caesar

Dissertations

This study utilized secondary data from the Work and Well-being of SLPs survey (Caesar, 2004) to examine possible sources (predictors) of work stress, job satisfaction, and psychological distress among 409 speech-language pathologists (SLPs) employed in public school settings in Michigan. This study also investigated the relationship of work-related and non-work-related stress to the mental health status of SLPs and sought to determine the mediating and/or moderating effects of varied types of social support on the mental health of respondents. Data analysis was done in three stages. First, each of the dependent and independent variables were described statistically. Secondly, correlation analyses …

Private Narratives In Public Places: The Experiences Of Predominantly White Gay Male Undergraduates On Lgb Classroom Panels, James Patrick Dolan Jr.

Dissertations

The scholarly literature addresses the common practice and effectiveness of using classroom panel presentations by lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) speakers to increase awareness of LGB experiences and to change attitudes. However, little is known about the experiences of the speakers themselves or how the experience may affect the speaker's sense of self or identity. From an identity as narrative perspective, the goal of this study was to learn what effect the repeated telling of a coming out story in a public setting may have on the teller's identity, the story they tell, and the meanings and feelings associated with …

Metaevaluation Case Study Of Four Evaluations Of Osha Vpp Programs, Jafar Momani

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the controversy about shifts in the U.S. Administration's policy related to the Labor Department (OSHA) shift from enforcement to partnerships and voluntary protection programs (VPP). A metaevaluation of four OSHA VPP evaluation reports was conducted and included the investigation of objectives, methodologies, strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. Conducting a crosswalk of the 1994 Joint Committee evaluation standards (JCS) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) standards was an opportunity to provide additional validity to the evaluation standards, evaluation reports findings and conclusions, and to highlight the importance of the shared elements between …

Journal Of Sociology & Social Welfare Vol. 34, No. 2 (June 2007)

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• SPECIAL ISSUE ON GLOBALIZATION, SOCIAL JUSTICE & SOCIAL WELFARE
• INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE - Frederick (Fritz) MacDonald and James Midgley, Special Editors
• PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBALIZATION, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND WELFARE - James Midgley
• GLOBALIZATION AND DRUG AND ALCOHOL USE IN RURAL COMMUNITIES IN NIGERIA: A CASE STUDY - Charles Fiki
• COLOR-BLIND INDIVIDUALISM, INTERCOUNTRY ADOPTION AND PUBLIC POLICY - Pamela Anne Quiroz
• THE CHALLENGE OF COMMUNITY WORK IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY - Howard Karger, Christian Iyiani and Pat Shannon
• GLOBALIZATION, IMMIGRATION AND THE WELFARE STATE: A CROSS-NATIONAL COMPARISON - Qingwen Xu
• GLOBALIZATION AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING - Loring Jones, …

An Evaluative Model For Incorporating Diversity Training Into Teacher Preparation, Amy Sue Desonia

Dissertations

In 1949, W.E.B. DuBois noted, "Of all the rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental (Foner, 1970, pp. 230-231)." Yet, inequity, so deeply embedded in the United States public education system, severely inhibits the free exercise of this right by many. Teachers struggle to teach, and students struggle to learn. Preparing pre-service teachers for diversity in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade (PK-12) classrooms throughout the United States is becoming increasingly urgent based on demographic trends--students will progressively become more diverse as they represent different races, ethnicities, cultures, …

The Role Of Automatic Reinforcement In Early Speech Acquisition, Barbara E. Esch

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

"Bird In A Cage:" Exploring Transnational Immigrants' Identity Negotiations, Ewa Urban

Masters Theses

Recent research demonstrates that the experience of contemporary immigrants is largely defined by their continued efforts to maintain symbolic and/or physical connections with their homelands ( e.g., Levitt, 1998). This study explored how these transnational connections affect the negotiation of immigrants' multiple identities. To explore the fluidity and the multilayered nature of transnational identities, the communication theory of identity was utilized as a theoretical lens. This theory allowed for an understanding how immigrants enact salient aspects of their multiple identities across contexts and situations. Phenomenological methodology was used to explore immigrants' lived experiences and hear their voices both individually and …

Evaluation Of An Outpatient Training Service For Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders And Their Families, Britt Winter

Masters Theses

Autism spectrum disorders have a substantial impact on the lives of families and can result in a variety of enrichments to the family environment as well as certain specific stressors (Hecimovic & Gregory, 2005; Tidmarsh & Volkmar, 2003). One service that has proven effective for treatment of individuals with autism spectrum disorders as well as improvement in family dynamics is parent training (Schreibman, 1988). The current study examined 46 individual client files from an outpatient parent training clinic serving children with autism spectrum disorders. Parents were taught to implement interventions for skill acquisition with their children using a behavioral skills …

Perspectives On Globalization, Social Justice And Welfare, James Midgley

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Although the social science literature on globalization has proliferated, social policy and social work scholars have not adequately debated the consequences of globalization for social welfare and social justice. Drawing on different social science interpretations of globalization, four major perspectives that offer different analytical and normative insights into globalization are identified and their implications for social welfare and social justice are briefly examined. The implications of these perspectives for social policy and social work scholarship are also considered.

Globalization And Social Work Education And Practice: Exploring Australian Practitioners' Views, Marina Findlay, John Mccormack

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The process of globalization is a controversial movement supported by some due to the potential cross-national benefits, but criticized by others because of the fragmented or uneven distribution of those benefits. As many social workers interact with clients who may be affected by globalization processes, we were interested to investigate their educational preparedness and practice views on this topic. Sixty-six social workers completed a questionnaire which explored the relationship between local and international issues. Practitioner responses indicated a strong interest in the topic and widespread agreement that there is a link between local and global issues on clients in their …

Martha A. Brozyna, Ed., Gender And Sexuality In The Middle Ages: A Medieval Source Document Reader. Mcfarland, 2005, Jacqueline Murray

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Insider Vol. 8 No. 2 Spring 2007, College Of Arts & Sciences

College of Arts and Sciences news

A Publication for Friends of the College of Arts and Sciences

Somos Y Estamos, Spring 2007, Department Of Spanish

Somos y Estamos

No abstract provided.

Banish Belly Bulge And Chisel Your Bis: A Semiotic Analysis Of Gender Representations In Fitness Magazine Advertising, Lauren A. Teal

Masters Theses

This study examined gender ideologies in the advertising of two popular fitness magazines, Shape and Men's Fitness, using Kress and van Leeuwen's visual semiotic theory (1996). The aim of this study was to determine how fitness magazine advertising participates in the construction of gender identities, and to identify what rhetorical and visual strategies are commonly employed.

Through an examination of the way gender identities are constructed by fitness magazines my research has concluded that advertising within both magazines promotes idealized body types and stereotypical gender identities for men and women. In Shape's advertisements, women are wives and homemakers; they …

The Independent Press In The Emerging Democracies: The Case Studies Of Poland, Ukraine And Russia, Lyudmyla Pustelnyk

Masters Theses

My research will entail the election coverage in the mainstream papers of Poland, Ukraine and Russia, these are the Gazeta Wyborcha, the Den, and the Izvestiya respectively. The diverse levels of media-freedom in the observed countries explain the difference between all three outlets in featuring political issues. The purpose of this Master's Thesis is to contrast and compare the state of the free press in Poland, Ukraine and Russia as well as the factors that determine the media-independence. In particular, these are the media-legislation, civil society and the economic performance.

This study revises the empirical claims made by …

From Reading Clinic To Reading Community, Deborah Ann Jensen, Jennifer Amy Tuten

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

This paper discusses the shift from a clinic model to a community model for the practicum experience for literacy education graduate students. The traditional program for the remediation of struggling readers followed a deficit model. Therefore, the reading specialist would pull out the child from regular classroom instruction to isolate a reading problem using standardized assessments and then to remediate the problem with programmed instruction. While the shifts in the understanding of the reading process which occurred in the 1980s and 1990s influenced instruction and assessment and the role of the reading specialist, researchers have found that instruction of struggling …