Digital Commons Network^™

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Marshall Mcluhan And Communication Ethics: The Taming Of Americanitis, Julie A. Cramer Hunsberger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1880 neurologist George Miller Beard identified the diagnosis of neurasthenia. Popularly referred to as Americanitis, Beard treated an increasing number of people for symptoms of anxiety, malaise and gastric discomfort. Per Beard, the illness resulted from the rapidly changing mechanical landscape of modernity. Similarly, contemporary Media Ecology literature suggests that Americanitis continues amidst our current digital moment. Manifest as narcissistically anxious nervous exhaustion, digital Americanitis results due to technological encouragement of existential and communicative closure, thereby negatively implicating the human condition, human communication and communication ethics practices. As such, this project considers Marshall McLuhan’s Media Ecology to examine the …

Leaps Of Faith: Trainees' Experiences Of Not Knowing In Psychotherapy, Rachel Francine Gottlieb

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study presents a qualitative analysis of four clinical psychology PhD students’ experiences of not knowing how to proceed in sessions with clients, and how they handled those experiences. A narrative analysis of each participant interview was employed, in which tone, rhetorical function, and identity work were closely examined. Participants took up the concept and the experience of not knowing in very different ways from each other and from the assumptions of the researcher, although sitting back and waiting in response to not knowing was a theme in common. Anxiety, uncertainty, and tension in various identity positions abounded within participant …

Vico's Narrative Art: From The Forests To The Academies, Ariana Ragusa

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), most famously considered a philosopher of history, is above all a philosopher of narration. I unfold Vico’s narrative response to and rejection of traditional philosophical discourse; through relating the story of himself and the story of mankind, Vico demonstrates that storytelling gives birth to the human self and world. Furthermore, I emphasize the ontological import of narrative, often overlooked, in his two major works, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico and The New Science. Finally, I conclude by showing the relevance of Vico’s pedagogical call to cultivate the child’s narrative imagination in …

The Return Of Participatory Scriptural Hermeneutics In Evangelicalism: An Augustinian Philosophy Of Communication, Joshua David Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Using a philosophy of communication approach adapted from St. Augustine’s rhetorical theory, I propose the recovery of Augustinian scriptural hermeneutics to meet the hermeneutical crisis in current Evangelicalism. Evangelical identity is centered on scripturally mediated belief and mission that ties together its ecumenical coalition, but its hermeneutic principles were co-opted by modernism and have now become further embattled by the turn away from modernism to philosophical hermeneutic approaches. Augustine’s hermeneutical principles of charity, hermeneutical humility through responsiveness to the Word, and the social/communal action of lived hermeneutics are explained in terms of Augustine’s pre-modern cosmology of “participation” and are clarified …

An Imaginative Theory Of Doctrinal Development: An Attempt To Open Western Traditions To Contextual Faith, Caesar Montevecchio

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the contemporary age of irreducible pluralism, it is a challenge to conceive of the development of doctrine in way that can truly appreciate and be responsive to the diversity that it entails and the postmodern intellectual paradigm that it necessitates. The position of this work is that the imagination provides the space in which a new model of doctrinal development can be formulated in response to such a challenge, one in which fidelity to the theological uniqueness of Christianity can be maintained but in which historicity and pluralism can be given fuller appreciation. Using Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of the …

The Role Of Rhetoric: Ong’S Ramus Research As A Hermeneutic Opening For Mediated Communication, Melinda Farrington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project examines Walter Ong’s scholarship and further situates Ong in the field of media ecology. Ong’s conceptions of mediated communication begin to take form in his early-career graduate research on Peter Ramus. While Ong’s scholarship on secondary orality, and orality and literacy generally has an optimistic tone, this project seeks to further understand how Ong frames his optimistic perspective on mediated communication by looking at his scholarship across his career.

Beginning with Ong’s dissertation project, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue and his related research we see thematic ideas that appear in his work throughout his career. Something …

Use Of An Integrated Multimodal Communication Treatment With Individuals With Severe Traumatic Brain Injury, Sarah K. Diehl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

People affected by severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) often live with co-occurring speech and language deficits, including apraxia of speech and dysarthria. Using augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) strategies (e.g., gesturing, writing, speech generating devices and applications) to communicate can help people with TBI compensate for deficits. The most effective method to teach people with TBI to use multiple strategies in resolving communication breakdowns has not been determined. However, recent research suggests the most effective method for teaching with people with aphasia to use AAC strategies to resolve communication breakdowns is an integrated multimodal treatment approach. This study used a …

Perception And Language: Using The Rorschach With People With Aphasia, V. Terri Collin Dilmore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the use of the Rorschach with eight individuals diagnosed with mild to moderate fluent or non-fluent types of aphasia to consider the extent to which the Rorschach captured aspects of language impairment not otherwise probed by traditional neurolinguistic measures. A ninth participant, with Wernicke’s aphasia, produced non-scorable responses and was therefore left out of all analyses. Of primary interest was whether the Rorschach, historically understood as a projective psychological instrument, would allow individuals living with language impairment to recognize, retrieve and coherently express words that reflected their thoughts. At the same time, this study sought to explore …

Social Functioning Characteristics Of A Young Adult With A History Of Childhood Apraxia Of Speech, Nicole Anne Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a pediatric speech sound disorder (SSD) that results from a motor planning impairment for volitional speech movements. This underlying impairment causes pervasive errors in speech sound production and often leads to problems with intelligibility, thus inhibiting effective communication. Longitudinal studies have found children with various communication impairments to be less successful in social interactions compared to their typically developing peers, and that this can lead to poor social functioning outcomes (Beitchman et al., 1996; Clegg, Hollis, Mawhood, & Rutter, 2005; Craig, 1993; Durkin & Conti-Ramsden, 2007). Yet, there is no research to date on …

Group External Memory Aid Treatment For Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alyssa Lanzi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Short-term memory deficits associated with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) make complex daily activities challenging. External memory aids (EMA) could help compensate for impairments. The study purpose was to examine the effects of group EMA treatment for individuals with MCI on functional EMA use, cognitive abilities, maintenance of skills, and EMA preference. Six participants (divided into wait-list control and treatment groups) completed six weekly group treatment sessions. Post-treatment participants slightly increased or maintained functional EMA use and cognitive abilities. Mixed results related to maintenance of skills indicated the importance of treatment to reinforce EMA use. Clinical implications and research directions will …

Student Engagement And Its Relationship To Mobile Device Ownership And The Role Of Technology In Student Learning, Robin R. Pynos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to explore student engagement and its relationship to mobile device ownership and the role of technology in learning. The primary purpose was to examine if there are overall differences in student engagement between students who use school issued mobile devices and student owned mobile devices for student learning. The study further investigated whether there are group differences in the multidimensional constructs of student engagement based upon device ownership groups. Student engagement was identified as having cognitive, social and emotional dimensions. The secondary purpose of the study was to examine if there are differences in …

A Qualitative Analysis Of The Native Advertising Model With Reference To The Conventions Of Journalism, Aaron Warnick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Native advertising has rapidly gone from a relative unknown form of content marketing to a highly sought-after form advertising online in a few short years. With the help of ad blocking services and consumer rejection of advertisements that consumers perceive to invade their privacy, native advertising is projected to continue its rapid growth in popularity. By design, native advertising assumes the form and function of its host's own content. This study examines whether native advertising has adopted not only the aesthetic form and goals of journalism, but the conventions of journalism formed over more than the past century.

Taxonomy Of Affective Curriculum For Gifted Learners, Derek Cavilla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teaching and learning in the current milieu of standards-based accountability has resulted in a near-exclusive focus on academic growth and development for students in today's schools. This is particularly acute for gifted students, whose label inherently focuses on superior intellectual capacity and aptitude for academic success. However, there is a growing demand for equal support of social-emotional learning (SEL) across the globe. In the United States, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has shed significant light on the power of affective development for school-aged children, indicating that, without it, students are limited in their ability to reach …

Perspectives On Creativity: Theoria, Praxis, And Poiesis, Kathryn Bryan-Bethea

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Theoretical perspectives on creativity encompass ideas such as risk, inquiry, resistance to conformity, and attraction to complexity. In response to these philosophical tenets I have organized my dissertation into three distinct but related manuscripts that explore creativity through theoria (knowing), praxis (doing), and poiesis (making). These manuscripts present an integrated approach to creative pedagogy. 1. The first manuscript is a review of literature with the aim to: provide a brief overview of creativity theories; consider an imbricated definition of creativity; and evaluate current empirical research. Research in creativity should provide a spectrum of methods that reflect the complex nature of …

Between Species: Biopolitics, Resistance, And Interspeciesality, Temple Jo Gowan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three twentieth-century novels—Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats—in the context of posthumanist animal studies. A Foucauldian biopolitical lens foregrounds the inextricably linked ways that both human and nonhuman animal bodies are governed and controlled in a biopolitical era. Each chapter focuses on textual links between speciesism and the oppression of particular human groups based on gender, sexuality, and race, arguing that each novel offers new ways of thinking about both our own species, other animal species, and how humans relate to the nonhuman world.

A Hermeneutic Study Of Secondary English Language Arts Teacher Candidates' Writing Instruction Experiences In Esol Methods Courses, Paula Bello

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this hermeneutic study was to understand, describe and interpret secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teacher candidates'(TC) experiences with writing instruction while attending English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) methods courses. The study included a purposeful convenience sample of 15 (fifteen) secondary ELA teacher candidates' (TC) attending 4 (four) different sections in 2 (two) ESOL methods courses. TCs were invited to participate in inquiry driven activities including written reflections in response to a literacy questionnaire, oral interviews responding to open-ended questions and focus/work groups' discussions, which allowed them to reflect about their past and present literacy and …

Developing Methods For The Estimation Of Stature And Their Use As A Proxy For Health Among The Ancient Chachapoya Of Peru, Armando Anzellini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Population mean stature and patterns of health are often linked in anthropological studies, yet few studies control for the multifactorial nature of achieving adult standing height. This thesis explores the intersection of health and stature by analyzing the skeletal remains of 161 adult individuals from the archaeological site of Kuelap, in the eastern slopes of the northern Peruvian Andes, and also tests current biometric methods for estimating stature from skeletal remains. This Chachapoya site dates to the Late Intermediate Period (AD 900 – 1470) and Late Horizon (AD 1470 – 1536) and resides in the high altitude sub-tropical forests of …

The Crossed Bands Motif: What Does It Mean?, Brittany Luther

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The crossed bands motif is an iconographic symbol that appears among many Mesoamerican cultures' art including Olmec, Izapan and Maya spanning from the Early Pre-Classic to the Classic periods in Mesoamerica. Pierce explains in his theory on signs that icons, symbols and indices all contain meaning. This meaning was given to the signs by the one who commissioned the medium on which the sign is placed; therefore it is important to understand the meaning of these signs to learn more about the person or people who built them. The crossed bands motif has previously been studied based on individual pieces …

Afro-Caribbean Parental Influence: Family Chronicles Of The Educational Journey From Child To Medical Student, Carlene Grant

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many ethnic groups in the United States have struggled for the opportunity to be identified as an individual group. In academia, these students are often aggregated into a larger category, with little acknowledgment for the difference in their cultural heritage. Along with these cultural differences, Afro-Caribbean parents and their children are met with other challenges in the pursuit of lifelong goals (Sowell, 1978). The decision to become a medical doctor is one that can often not be made alone. Using the framework of Cultural Ecological Theory and Social Construction (Ogbu 1990, 1992; Berger & Luckman, 1991) this study was conducted …

El Efecto De La Variación Dialectal En El Procesamiento, Kirsten Schanze

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lexical variation, or the existence of multiple lexemes that can be used to denote a particular concept, is a phenomenon characteristic of most of the world’s language systems. Often times the source of this variation is difficult to determine, with a variety of inter- and intra-linguistic factors at play. This thesis was conducted with three main goals: 1) to delineate lexical items typical to specific dialects of Spanish and generate country-specific word lists that focus on salient contrasts between the different varieties of the language; 2) to determine whether speakers of particular varieties of Spanish, namely Puerto Rican and Venezuelan …

Towards A Theory Of Autism Spectrum Disorder Program Implementation, Ian Gesundheit

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the increased prevalence of students qualifying for services within Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) programs (Odom, Cox and Brock, 2013), it is imperative that the field comes to better understand how successful programs can be replicated at scale. The implementation of effective instructional programs for students with ASD across school systems on a large scale is a difficult task. School systems have tried to replicate successful programs for diverse learners but have been largely unable to do so. For students with disabilities, who perform poorly compared to their peers without disabilities (Odom et al., 2013), the need to replicate successful …

The Impact Of Various Characteristics Of Prekindergarten Services For Students With Disabilities On Later School Performance, Tanya Shores

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study addressed the problem of limited data for determining the effectiveness of prekindergarten programs for students with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between participation in ESE services during prekindergarten and long term outcomes for students who received these services. Outcome measures included third grade academic performance and needs for exceptional student education (ESE) services. Regression analysis and correlational analysis were conducted for each of two research questions as appropriate. The findings of this research indicated inconsistent statistically significant relationships between the characteristics of ESE services students with disabilities received during prekindergarten and the …

A Comparison Of The Academic Achievement Of English Learners And Non-English Learners In Digital And Non-Digital Learning Environments, Enrique Vela

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to identify the extent to which learning in a digital school environment impacts the reading and mathematics achievement of English learners (ELs) in elementary and secondary school settings. In addition, this study intended to determine the extent, if any, that learning in a digital school environment narrows the achievement gap in reading and mathematics between ELs and their non-EL counterparts in elementary and secondary schools. Based on data collected from the first year of a 1:1 digital pilot implementation in a large urban school district in Florida, the results of this study identified grade …

Examining Elementary Preservice Teacher Efficacy To Teach Writing In A Title 1 School: A Mixed Method Study Of A School-Based Teacher Education Course Intervention, Norine Blanch

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As the demographics of the United States change, barriers persistently thwart efforts to ensure that all students, regardless of ethnicity, academic ability, or family circumstance, have equal opportunities to learn. Diminished retention rates of effective educators in Title 1 schools, elevated rates at which students from low-income families are taught by inexperienced or unqualified teachers and insufficient preparation of preservice teachers (PSTs) to teach in Title 1 schools are three such barriers. Policy reform organizations interested in improving the effectiveness of teacher education programs nationwide suggest forging strong clinical partnerships between universities and schools by relocating coursework to school-based settings …

The Role Of Virtual Avatars In Supporting Middle School Students From Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Backgrounds On Science In After School Programs, Benjamin Gallegos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Students who receive additional educational supports in afterschool programs were the focus of the investigation. This study was conducted to measure what effects a TeachLivE avatar, a mixed-reality virtual environment, used in combination with a video game, had on the activation of prior knowledge in science for students in rural middle school. The delivery of the biology science lessons on cell structures and processes were delivered using the video game, Cell Command. The TeachLivE adult avatar was customized as a biologist who spoke to students in the treatment group about science concepts prior to playing the science video game. Unexpected …

Examining Presence And Influence Of Linguistic Characteristics In The Twitter Discourse Surrounding The Women's Right To Drive Movement In Saudi Arabia, Abdulsamad Sahly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been popular tools for social and political movements in non-democratic societies in which traditional media outlets are under government control. Activists in Saudi Arabia, particularly women, have launched several campaigns through social media to demand the right to drive for women. This study used framing theory as the foundation for looking at the degree to which cognitive, emotion, and religious or moral language has been used to frame discussion of this issue on Twitter. Additionally, this study observed the relationship between these linguistic attributes in Twitter and retweeting behavior to understand the …

Confluence Of Vision And Natural Language Processing For Cross-Media Semantic Relations Extraction, Amara Tariq

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we focus on extracting and understanding semantically meaningful relationships between data items of various modalities; especially relations between images and natural language. We explore the ideas and techniques to integrate such cross-media semantic relations for machine understanding of large heterogeneous datasets, made available through the expansion of the World Wide Web. The datasets collected from social media websites, news media outlets and blogging platforms usually contain multiple modalities of data. Intelligent systems are needed to automatically make sense out of these datasets and present them in such a way that humans can find the relevant pieces of …

A Contextual Approach To Real Time, Interactive Narrative Generation, James Hollister

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Oral story telling has become a lost art of family histories because social media and technology have taken over the personal interactions that once passed on the important stories and facts from generation to generation. This dissertation presents and evaluates a method of generating a narrative with input from the listener without actually forcing him or her to become an actual character in the narrative. This system is called CAMPFIRE Story Telling System (STS) and employs a contextual approach to story generation. This system uses the Cooperating Context Method (CCM) to generate and tell dynamic stories in real time and …

Developing New Power Management And High-Reliability Schemes In Data-Intensive Environment, Ruijun Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing popularity of data-intensive applications as well as the large-scale computing and storage systems, current data centers and supercomputers are often dealing with extremely large data-sets. To store and process this huge amount of data reliably and energy-efficiently, three major challenges should be taken into consideration for the system designers. Firstly, power conservation–Multicore processors or CMPs have become a mainstream in the current processor market because of the tremendous improvement in transistor density and the advancement in semiconductor technology. However, the increasing number of transistors on a single die or chip reveals a super-linear growth in power consumption …

The Meaning Of Educational Travel In The Lives Of Urban Middle School Students In A Low-Income Neighborhood: A Transformative, Sequential Mixed Methods Study, Carrie Arlene Olson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This transformative, explanatory, sequential mixed methods study addresses a gap in the literature regarding the meaning of educational travel in the lives of urban youth in a low-income neighborhoods. The framework for this study stems from educational travel, culturally responsive teaching, effective middle level education (AMLE), and experiential learning. First, a quantitative phase examined data from former travelers (n = 344) compared to non-travelers (n = 6,100) at Harold Middle School from 2003 to 2011. Academic achievement data examined consist of: American College Test (ACT) scores, Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) scale scores, and grade point averages (GPA). School engagement …