Digital Commons Network^™

Framing, Public Relations, And Scientology: An Analysis Of News Coverage And A Controversial Organization, Kristy Mcallister

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the most common frames used in news coverage of the Church of Scientology from 2009 to 2013. Using textual analysis, with framing and public relations theories as lenses, this study examined recent news coverage – both print and television – to identify frames used, and the potential public relations crises the Church is currently facing due to this media exposure. Analysis showed three major frames used during coverage, along with their corresponding sub-frames, which highlight certain aspects of the frame: Culture of Abuse (Imprisonment, Controlling, Family Disconnection, Exploitation of Children, Violence, and Financial Abuse), The Information Paradox …

Human Trafficking For Sexual Exploitation In Southeast Asia, Nodwarang Niamvanichkul

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study centers on the political aspects of human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Southeast Asia. Specifically, the human trafficking is a security studies concern because it is not only a social issue, but also a security threat. Just as with drug trafficking, human trafficking has security consequences. The study analyzed human trafficking issues in the following three countries in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Myanmar, and Cambodia. These three countries were chosen due to the high levels of human trafficking. In each of the chosen cases, there is an examination of human trafficking issues in terms of political structures, political policies, …

The Moral Oppression Of The Teaching Profession: Learning To Transcend, Rebecca Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is both descriptive and philosophical, and at its core, it justifies the need for social foundations of education courses and programs in the university setting. It begins by analyzing the meaning of oppression and the part knowledge plays in confining the individual. The analysis then draws upon Patricia Hill Collins' theory of intersecting oppressions to get at the complexities and restrictions of working in the public schooling institution. It works through the ways in which sexist, classist, and racist practices afflict everyone in the institution through the bureaucratic mechanism and collateral oppression. The four components that make up …

Stereotypes, Perceptions Of Similarity, And Cultural Identity: Factors That May Influence The Academic Achievement Of Immigrant Students., Tamara Fagan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For decades, the United States has been known as the nation of immigrants due to the increasing number of immigrant students in the public school system. Although the population of immigrant students steadily increases annually, American society still pressures immigrants into acculturation to fulfill the United States ideals of academic achievement despite the United States claim of multiculturalism (Malcolm & Lowery, 2011). This research focuses on 1st - and 2nd generation immigrant students’ strife of acceptance in U.S. culture, while sill preserving their own native culture, and the influence it has on academic achievement. The researcher interviewed eight (8) adult …

The Latina/O Student's Experience In Social Studies: A Phenomenological Study Of Eighth Grade Students, Christopher Busey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research investigation was to explore the experiences of eighth-grade Latina/o students in a large, urban school in the Southeastern United States. Overall, the study uncovered the essence of the Latino/a student experience in social studies and furthermore revealed that social studies is not meeting the needs of Latino students. Using phenomenology as a method of research, two interviews were conducted with twelve research participants who were selected through purposive sampling. In addition to the interviews, students wrote narratives and drew images as a form of data triangulation. The goal was to give students various methods for …

Too Few Voices, Too Many Distractions, Too Little Concern, Too Little Understanding: The American Media During The Rwandan Genocide Of 1994, Skip-Thomas Parrish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Upwards of one million people died during the Genocide, Civil War, and Refugee Crisis in Rwanda and surrounding nations, during one of the fastest Genocides to occur in modern history. Even though the United Nations and its member states had a legal mandate to intervene in cases of Genocide due to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, the world chose not to. While there were a myriad of reasons for this the media played a part in this situation. Using the coverage of US print magazine articles, this thesis argues that the media missed the …

Examining Facebook As A Digitally Immersive Language Environment For French Language Learners, Shelly Wyatt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This quasi-experimental study examined the impact of interactions with native French language Facebook posts on beginning French language learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC) and their attitudes towards the target language and culture in a university setting. In addition, the degree of interaction, by participants, with the French language Facebook posts was recorded and analyzed. This study was conducted during the Spring 2013 semester at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida. Participants in this study were recruited from two sections of FRE 1120, Elementary French Language and Civilization I. Native French language Facebook posts were “pushed” to participants’ personal …

Belief And Christmas: Performing Belief And The Theory And Practice Of Christmas Performance, Brenna Nicely

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the United States, Christmastime has become a time of tension between the holy ideals of family togetherness, childhood innocence, and goodwill towards men and commercial idolatry. Christ and Santa Claus are pitted against each other in the war on Christmas between religion and secularism instead of feasting together on ham and figgy pudding in the traditional fashion. While many would agree that the everyday realities of the Christmas season do not often live up to the ideals imposed upon the holiday, few are able to tell why this is so or even trace the roots of their discontent. In …

The Recipe Of A Digital Story: An Analysis Of The Residency "The Recipe Of Me", Amanda Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores the processes and outcomes of “The Recipe of Me,” a digital storytelling residency whose goals were to foster autonomy and community among disadvantaged youth aged twelve to fifteen living in the Orlando Union Rescue Mission. Using on-site experience and data, I explore the possibilities and advantages digital storytelling offered the students living in this population and consider the challenges of creating digital stories specific to this site. This case study provides a portrait of the residency which outlines the phases, techniques, tools and approaches used to create the digital stories and empower youth to create using multiple …

Intercultural Communication In The Global Age: Lessons Learned From French Technical Communicators, Nicole Tallman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the cultural considerations American technical communicators must address when working with French colleagues and when creating technical documentation for French audiences. A review of the literature on intercultural communication theory was conducted, along with a review of the limited research on technical communication in France and the needs of French audiences. A qualitative online survey of French technical communicators was also conducted. Through this survey, French technical communicators reported on their intercultural beliefs, experiences, and practices, and information, language, and cultural needs. Survey responses were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Two main themes were developed as a …

Virtual Teams And Intercultural Ethics: Preventative Measures For Ethical Dilemmas, Rebecca Blanton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the ethical challenges faced by technical communicators working in global virtual teams. Virtual teams usage are becoming increasingly more popular and diverse. As a result, it is valuable for technical communicators to understand and recognize the challenges that are faced within global virtual teams in order to find solutions and preventive measures for these challenges. The ethical challenges present in global virtual teams were determined by examining the literature on virtual teams and intercultural ethics and conducting a survey of practicing technical communicators who have experience in virtual teams. The purpose of the survey was to determine …

Authority And Personality In M.M. Bakhtin's "Author And Hero In Aesthetic Activity", Joel Scott Ward

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

M.M. Bakhtin's fundamental claim in his seminal essay "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" situates verbal action as the most essential constituent of human personality. A careful reading of this text reveals important truths about the relationship between free individual personhood and the nature of the speech utterance. Bakhtin connects the human experience of speech to the life and person of Jesus Christ emphasizing the incarnation and the Trinitarian view of God as essential principles for understanding the creative power of the word and consequent liabilities. Bakhtin develops these theological and philosophical coordinates around a discussion of the author-hero relationship …

Restrictive And Expansive Views Of Equality: A Grounded Theory Study That Explores The Influence Of Racial Consciousness On The Behaviors Of White Faculty In The Classroom, Chayla M. Haynes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Attempts to address the ever increasing achievement gap among students have failed to explain how and why educational traditions and teaching practices perpetuate the devaluing of some and the overvaluing of others. This predicament, which plagues our educational system, has been of increased concern, given the growing racial diversity among college students and the saturation of White faculty in the academy. White faculty make up the majority, 79%, of all faculty in the academy. White faculty, whether consciously or unconsciously, are less likely to interrogate how race and racism both privilege them within the academy and influence their faculty behaviors. …

Storytelling In Appreciative Inquiry, Joel Jeppson Richards

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study is an examination of the role of story and storytelling within Appreciative Inquiry, a method of organizational change that orients around a consensus model building on individual and collective strengths instead of focusing on overcoming problems. Interviews with 12 Appreciative Inquiry practitioners were conducted, transcribed, and analyzed using a process of iterative coding consistent with a General Inductive method of qualitative research. Once consensus with a secondary coder was achieved, 6 themes emerged. The 6 emergent themes outlined general roles that story and storytelling plays in the Appreciative Inquiry process: relationship building, coauthoring a future, reframing narrative, narrative …

A Comparison Of Inclusion And Pullout Programs On Student Achievement For Students With Disabilities, James Matthew Hurt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Students with disabilities have traditionally achieved to a lesser degree than have their nondisabled peers. Since the 1950s the federal government has enacted laws to provide free, appropriate public education to students with disabilities. In the first decade of the 21st Century the government has produced legislation requiring schools to be responsible for improving instruction for students with disabilities. One of the major trends in accomplishing this task is a move toward inclusive education. This study determined the relationships of assessment type (Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments versus Virginia Grade Level Alternative (VGLA) assessments) and models of service delivery (general …

The Art Of Natality : Virginia Woolf's And Kathe Kollwitz's Aesthetics Of Becoming., Jennifer Brooke Goldberg 1973-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Though Virginia Woolf’s and Kathe Kollwitz's personal histories and specific cultural circumstances were quite different, their aesthetics share fundamental qualities. This dissertation demonstrates that both artists affirm memory, the maternal, and creativity as coalescent, and through doing so assert a principle of connectivity that counters the turmoil of their times. Through this constellation, Woolf’s and Kollwitz's aesthetics exude faith in the continued viability of beauty and of possibility, faith that a commitment to becoming will undermine the sources of hopelessness that enshroud the modem world. Channeling their losses into their creative endeavors, Woolf and Kollwitz appropriated crises from their pasts …

Toward An Isomorphic Diagram Of The Backus-Naur Form., Neil A. Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Computer scientists studying formal languages have made use of a variety of representations to both reason, and communicate their ideas to others. Symbolic representations have proved useful for rigorously defining the theoretical objects of the preceding topics; however, research shows that diagrammatic representations are as fundamental to these subjects. Previous research in this domain has typically been interested in studying the semantics that a particular representation is intended to capture. By contrast, this treatise considers the importance of the format of the representations themselves, and how format influences the ability of a person to uncover characteristics, relevant to the problem …

Computer-Based Modeling Of K-12 Faculty Activities: A Case Study, Amanda Rose Kyker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis sought to lay the foundation for an application for tracking K-12 teacher activities. Its primary contribution is a descriptive model of K-12 activities. The work's starting point, the Faculty Activities System project, is an ETSU initiative that seeks to produce a tool for university-level academic accountabilities management. It was possible to adapt the FAS project's data model for K-12 activities. The resulting model was validated by experts in the field of education and teachers and administrators across Tennessee.

A second strategy for model validation, using national and state legislation and expert recommendations, determined that the model did well …

An Ethnographic Study Of The Moth Detroit Storyslam, Catherine Jo Janssen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Moth Detroit StorySLAM is one of many storytelling events staged in urban bar environments. Unlike the increasingly aged audiences attending the National Storytelling Festival and similar story festivals, the Detroit StorySLAM consistently yields at capacity crowds of college students and young professionals.

Participants were informally interviewed during the September, October, and November slams of 2010 and the January 2011 slam. In addition to conducting these interviews, the researcher was a participant observer—throwing her name into the hat and being twice called to the stage. Data are presented as a thick description organized according to Richard Bauman's 6 situational factors …

A Meta-Analytic Review Of Cooperative Learning Practices In Higher Education: A Human Communication Perspective, William Patrick Huddy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The phrase cooperative learning refers to a pedagogical learning and teaching technique in use in schools from kindergarten through higher education. The technique involves the structuring of an active classroom environment with students working in groups to discover, solve, and at its basic, provide a framework for dialogue and conversation. Cooperative learning is grounded in the development of a theory of social interdependence (Morton Deutsch) which states that individuals, working in groups, can in most cases provide for greater productivity and ideas than individuals working alone. The development of cooperative learning was greatly expanded in the late 1960’s and early …

Abbot Suger's Silent Soliloquy Of Public Aesthetics In The Medieval Saint Denis Abbey, Sandra Jean Ceas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abbot Suger transformed the twelfth-century medieval Saint Denis abbey from a didactic Romanesque prayer hall to a spiritually illuminating pre-Gothic worship center. The extant culture, although primarily illiterate, was poised on the threshold of Scholasticism, the rational pursuit of "reason," which challenged the Christian doctrine of "faith." Abbot Suger, fully aware of the secular threat, was suitably positioned to be a significant instrument for saving souls from the diversion of their trust in God toward a reliance on logical thinking. Suger undertook a major art restoration campaign for the Saint Denis abbey to create an environment of public aesthetics that …

An Exploration Of African Folktales Among The Gullah Community Of The South Carolina Sea Islands : History, Culture, And Identity., Tytianna Nikia Maria Wells Smith 1987-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration of Black cultural space and its influence on the retention, adaptation, and transmission of African folktales during and after the antebellum era. During slavery, the survival of kinship and family helped to create an environment that existed through which African folktales were used to educate and socialize children on South Carolina Sea Islands plantations. This research conducted a literary and cultural analysis of the historical and current function of ten folktales that impart moral lessons and cultural values that encourage children in Gullah communities to appreciate their African heritage and challenge the world in which …

Narrative Of Modern Chinese Masculinity In Ha Jin's Fiction., Lezhou Su

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of readings of three selected novels by Ha Jin-Waiting, The Crazed, and A Free Life. These novels cover three historical periods of Contemporary China under the rule of the Communist Party in sequence-the Mao's era (1949-1976), post-Mao era (1976-1989) and post-Tiananmen Square Incident era (1989 onwards). The readings are predominated with gender issues in the literary works, particularly with the construction and representation of contemporary Chinese masculinity. Drawing mainly on the Kam Louie's theory which pins down traditional Chinese masculinity in terms of wen (literary power) and wu (physical power)-the two concepts deeply entrenched in Confucianism, the …

Enhanced Web-Based Summary Generation For Search., Brent Wenerstrom 1980-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After a user types in a search query on a major search engine, they are presented with a number of search results. Each search result is made up of a title, brief text summary and a URL. It is then the user's job to select documents for further review. Our research aims to improve the accuracy of users selecting relevant documents by improving the way these web pages are summarized. Improvements in accuracy will lead to time improvements and user experience improvements. We propose ReClose, a system for generating web document summaries. ReClose generates summary content through combining summarization techniques …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Response To Intervention : Comparing The Reading Achievement Of Ells And Native English Speakers., Philip Kiersten Sapienza

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teaching reading in the mainstream classroom is a challenge. This challenge is compounded when trying to meet the needs of English language learners. Recently, Response to Intervention (RTI) has been suggested as a framework for classroom teachers to use in order to meet the wide range of needs of their students. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an RTI reading instructional model when used with English language learners (ELLs) in mainstream classrooms. A mixed-method, quasi-experimental, pre/post design was implemented. A purposive sample was drawn from third grade students in schools that integrated ELLs and native …

Rethinking Human And Nonhuman Animal Relations In J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003)., Rodrigo Martini Paula

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For the past four decades, scholarship on the relationship between human and nonhuman animals has been growing inside the academy and sprouting ontological and epistemological concerns about the status of the Humanities as an institution. Between 1997 and 2003, South-African author and Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee created Elizabeth Costello, an Australian writer that delivers lectures at certain universities and causes controversy when addressing the nature of animal rights movements. This work aims at analyzing the situations in which Coetzee uses Costello to speak about the cruelty to nonhuman animals. What I argue is that in entering the conversation through …

Ideological Tensions, Pedagogical Gaps : Multilingual Engineering Scholars' Response To Language Variation In Academic Writing., Ghanashyam Sharma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how nonnative English speaking (NNES) faculty and students in engineering respond to language variation and how that response influences their teaching and learning of academic writing. Using grounded theory approach to analyzing data gathered from multiple rounds of interview, writing samples, informal discussions, and class observation among ten participants, the study draws on and responds to two related bodies of scholarship in composition studies and writing in the disciplines (WID). Contrary to claims in much of current scholarship on engineering writing, the findings of this study show that in spite of subscribing to views about language and …

Leveling The Field Is Not Enough: Promoting Culturally Responsive Pedagogy In Teach For America Through The Evaluation Of Intercultural Competence, Colorblindness, White Racial Identity Attitudes, And The Belief That Culture Matters In Education, Amber K. Kim

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research study examined constructs and beliefs essential to culturally responsive teachers for the purpose of understanding corps members’ needs and promoting culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) in the Colorado region of Teach for America (TFA). This study employed a transformative, sequential mixed methods design with a theoretical lens of CRP and a corresponding framework for preparing culturally responsive educators described by Villegas and Lucas (2002). First, a quantitative phase assessed participants’ levels of intercultural competence, colorblind racial attitudes, and White racial identity attitudes at two times—upon entering TFA (n = 139) and after one year of teaching and training (n …

Ibn Khaldun And The Modern Social Sciences: A Comparative Theoretical Inquiry Into Society, The State, And Revolution, Douglas H. Garrison

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis represents a link in a long chain of recent Western scholarship that has attempted to bring the work of Ibn Khaldun, the late 14th century Tunisian jurist and historian, into the mainstream of historiographic, political, and sociological learning. Why Ibn Khaldun? What makes his work stand out among the classics of pre-modern and early-modern political and social theory? Why are his ideas still relevant to the study of politics and societies today? My thesis attempts to answer these questions through the lenses of comparative political theory and theoretical reinterpretation.

The study hinges on a thematic comparison of Ibn …

Posthumanist Rhetorical Agency, Matt Dunn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The postmodern criticism of humanist agency initiated by Dilip Gaonkar nearly twenty years ago set in motion a discipline wide discussion concerning the conceptualization rhetorical agency. Rhetorical agency is difficult but vital to conceptualize because the term bears directly on the discipline's theorizing about the speaker or rhetor, the effect of the speaker or rhetor's rhetoric on an audience, and the extent to which the speaker or rhetor's agency is constrained by ideology and discourse. What emerged from this discussion about agency did distance the discipline from the humanist conceptualization of rhetorical agency that persisted at the time Gaonkar published …