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"Now You Know What You're Reaching For...On The Up And Up": An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Scholar Identity Development Among Black Male Achievers, Coretta Andréa Irby

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Common discourse concerning the educational trajectories of African American males consists of dismal future outcomes due to defective schooling experiences in kindergarten through twelfth grades. There has been a disregard of counter narratives of high academic achievement and overall school success coupled with a highlighting of failure through deficit-based research practices. Consequently, African American males are positioned as delayed or troubled, which serves to perpetuate educational inequity. This study attempts to increase the scarcity of literature by giving voice to the experiences of high achievement among African American adolescent males attending a school designed to support the achievement of impoverished …

Slope Settlement And Post-Disaster Health Needs Of Urban Displacement In La Paz, Bolivia, James Steven Arango

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 2011, a landslide displaced approximately six thousand people from the urbanized mountain slopes of La Paz, Bolivia. The municipal government of La Paz (GAMLP) managed the displacement by housing thousands of people in displacement camps throughout the city. By 2013, residents were attempting to return to still damaged lands. This research used participant observation and interviews with residents over eight weeks in 2013 to address the following questions: 1) What social, cultural, economic or historic factors influence the settling and then resettling of at-risk slope neighborhoods in La Paz, Bolivia? 2) What are the most pressing health needs of …

The Political Pilgrim: William Lithgow Of Lanark On God And Country, Philip Anthony Davis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Travel literature has been understood to comment on the expectations and impressions of the traveler as they encountered foreign spaces, customs, and people. There has been an unspoken understanding, at best, that travelers who wrote their tales used these foreign spaces to engage in debates that were meaningful to their domestic audience. However, the author has been central to much of the analysis, disconnecting travel literature from other linguistic exercises that more directly offered observations that were directly rooted in domestic culture. Author-centered analysis isolates the traveler from the wider world in which they engaged. It also ignores the other …

Trash Talk: Understanding Food Waste At A Charter Elementary School In Florida, Steven A. Williams

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Waste as a topic for anthropological investigation has enjoyed a recent resurgence in interest, mirroring burgeoning discussion among policy-makers and the general public about questions of environmental impacts, economic costs, and social detriments of contemporary waste management paradigms. While waste management in the United States has largely focused on technical and organizational solutions typically considered the domain of environmental planning and engineering (such as source reduction, recycling, and reuse), anthropology and the social sciences have become more prominently involved in efforts to inform policy-makers and researchers about the social and behavioral factors influencing waste norms and habits, particularly in educational …

Cross-Cultural Spaces In An Anonymously Painted Portrait Of The Ottoman Sultan Mahmud Ii, Alison Paige Terndrup

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes an anonymous portrait painting of the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839), called by its descriptive title Seated Portrait of Mahmud II, within the context of the extensive portrait campaign commissioned by the sultan. Surviving examples from this series of diplomatic portraits share a unique set of intercultural iconographic vocabularies as a reflection of their time as well as implicit reinforcement of the sultan's political goals. By focusing on Seated Portrait of Mahmud II, I argue that a closer inspection of the campaign within a context that pays attention to Ottoman, European, and Persian visual practices reveals …

Facilitating Motivation In A Virtual World Within A Second Language Acquisition Classroom, Andrew Warren Gump

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Stories Of Care In The Virtual Classroom: An Autoethnographic Narrative Inquiry, Brooke Boback Eisenbach

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since their inception in 2006, K-12 virtual classrooms have spread across the nation, reaching millions of students every day. Despite the technological changes in today's society, adolescents who lack key personal characteristics may struggle to successfully complete online coursework. A caring teacher-student relationship may assist today's virtual learners in ways that enhance motivation, learning, and online education success. Although a veteran teacher of nine years, in this autoethnographic narrative inquiry, I shared my experience as a novice, English I virtual teacher as I strived to enact relational with my virtual education students.

Interpretations Of Educational Experiences Of Women In Chitral, Pakistan, Rakshinda Shah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This feminist oral history project records, interprets, and analyzes the educational experiences of seven Ismaili college women in Chitral, Pakistan. Chitral is a part of the world where educating girls and women is not a priority. Yet in the scarce literature available one can observe an increase in the literacy rates, especially amongst the Ismaili Muslims in the North of Chitral District. This thesis introduces students' accounts of their personal educational journeys. I argue that the students' accounts exemplify third space feminism. They negotiate contradictions and social invisibility in their daily lives in quiet activism that shadows but changes the …

A Gramscian Analysis Of Roman Bathing In The Provinces, Diana Danielle Davis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper argues the institution of Roman bathing was an instrument of cultural hegemony, which allowed the Roman Empire to maintain hegemony over the Roman provinces. Numerous frameworks have been suggested in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between Rome and the provinces. Roman imperialism has been a topic of debate for over one hundred years and the vicissitudes of scholarly thought are highlighted by the changes in the characterization of the theory of Romanization. In the recent past, scholars have sought a framework that could progress beyond the problematic concept of Romanization in order to better …

Effects Of Response Cards And The Number Of Teacher-Directed Questions On Classroom Behaviors, Neelam K. Khan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Active student responding increases student academic outcome and on-task behavior. Response cards are an effective and efficient strategy for increasing active student responding. This study examined the effects of response cards on student disruptive behavior, percentage of questions answered, and accuracy of questions answered while alternating the number of teacher-directed questions across sessions. An alternating treatments design was used with 5 teacher-nominated students. During baseline (BL), the teacher used her standard lecture format, having students raise their hand when responding to a question. During the response card (RC) intervention, the teacher asked students to write responses on their white boards. …

Abjection, Telesthesia, And Transnationalism: Incest In Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy, Daniel L. Holland

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many consider Oldboy be the defining film of the most recent wave of South Korean cinema, with scholars such as Terrence McSweeney and Kim Kyun Hyun arguing the film's representation of South Korean culture through collective memory, trauma, and Westernization. However, most of the current scholarship that surrounds the film does not adequately address the film's prominent theme of incest. My thesis explores the anxious implications of the film's incestuous imagery and reads it as a figure for the film's transnational presence. Specifically, in my project, incest is the nucleus on which I build each argument outward. First through abjection …

Landscape Legacies Of Sugarcane Monoculture At Betty's Hope Plantation, Antigua, West Indies, Suzanna M. Pratt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sugarcane cultivation has played a key role in the development of the Caribbean since the seventeenth century A.D. The Eastern Caribbean island of Antigua in the West Indies was almost exclusively dedicated to sugarcane monoculture from the mid-1600s until its independence from Britain in 1981. This research seeks to better understand the landscape legacies left by long-term sugarcane monoculture at the site of Betty's Hope Plantation in Antigua. This study creates a 400-year simulation of crop yields using the USDA's Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator (EPIC), and evaluates the simulated trajectory of landscape change using historical information about the plantation's agricultural …

"In Heaven": Christian Couples' Experiences Of Pregnancy Loss, Grace Ellen Peters

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how young, married, heterosexual Christian couples talk about and make sense of pregnancy loss, specifically loss before the twentieth week. Studies of pregnancy loss often focus on individual differences in response to pregnancy loss, but this research engages a shared, relational notion of pregnancy loss. Furthermore, this project focuses on Christianity as a tool for making sense of pregnancy loss, not simply a demographic characteristic. I conducted six open-ended interviews with two couples, with one interview together and an individual follow-up interview with each spouse. Following the interviews, I analyzed and interpreted the interview transcripts for symbols …

Myths And Miracles In Mexico City: Treatment Seeking, Language Socialization, And Identity Among Deaf Youth And Their Families, Anne Elaine Pfister

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation research investigates the experience of deafness among deaf youth, adults, and their families in Mexico City, Mexico. Deaf children cannot fully access the spoken languages of their hearing families and mainstream society. Hence, participating families embarked upon extensive treatment-seeking pilgrimages, encountering myths about deaf lifeways and the promise of miracle cures that formed Mexico City's cultural system for coping with childhood deafness. This ethnography uncovers persistent misconceptions in medical and mainstream discourse, including strong recommendations against exposure to sign language, which directly impacted participants' access to relevant communities of practice, the social networks that proved most significant to …

Auteurs At An Urban Crossroads: A Certain Tendency In New York Cinema, Rene Thomas Rodriguez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Perhaps more than any other major American city in the 1970s, New York represented the decline of an urban existence. Job loss from factors related to deindustrialization and intense crime occupied local and national news, reflecting the increasing anxiety of America's future. New York City was positioned at the center of this frightening chaos. Films made during this period, known by film scholars and journalists as the "New Hollywood" captured the collective temperament of the people and the physical space they inhabit during its disintegration. The depiction of New York during the 1970s has been widely discussed in the writing …

How Luck And Fortune Shape Risk-Taking Behaviors, Andrea Yvonne Ranieri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study uses a lottery-based paradigm to examine how risk taking is affected by two specific types of good and bad experiences, luck and fortune. Though the terms are often used interchangeably, we suggest that they refer to two separate aspects of risk. Fortune refers to the overall positivity or negativity of the overall context, whereas luck refers to the probability of a better or worse outcome. To make the lottery context fortunate or unfortunate, a set of mixed-valence control lotteries were surrounded by all gain (good fortune) or all loss lotteries (bad fortune). To make the lotteries lucky …

Origins Of Music Programs In Liberal Arts Institutions: The Story Of Three Florida Catholic Universities, Cynthia S. Selph

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the music programs in liberal arts colleges through the historical lens of three Catholic Universities in the state of Florida. Although there are numerous historical dissertations and theses written about individual music schools and departments, and a few that compare music programs in similar types of institutions, none have compared music programs in Catholic universities within the same state. After teaching at Saint Leo University and experiencing the process of rebuilding a music program after it was almost completely lost in the mid-1990s, I wanted to study the histories of Saint Leo and other Florida Catholic institutions …

Women's Narratives Of Confinement: Domestic Chores As Threads Of Resistance And Healing, Jacqueline Marie Smith

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The term "narratives of confinement" redefines the parameters by which first-person, fictive and non-fictive, accounts of female captivity are classified, broadening the genre beyond Indian captivity narratives and slave narratives to include other works in which female narrators describe physical and/or psychological confinement due to tangible or non-tangible forces. Often these narratives exhibit the transformation of the drudgery of housewifery into powerful symbols of resistance and subversion, especially in reaction to traumatic events related to confinement. Needlework and food, including its preparation and distribution, frequently emerge as metaphors that express the ways in which disempowered women seek to regain control …

The Encultured Mind: From Cognitive Science To Social Epistemology, David Alexander Eck

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There have been monumental advances in the study of the social dimensions of knowledge in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But it has been common within a wide variety of fields--including social philosophy, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of science--to approach the social dimensions of knowledge as simply another resource to be utilized or controlled. I call this view, in which other people's epistemic significance are only of instrumental value, manipulationism. I identify manipulationism, trace its manifestations in the aforementioned fields, and explain how to move beyond it. The principal strategy that I employ for moving beyond …

Navigating Collective Activity Systems: An Approach Towards Rhetorical Inquiry, Katherine Jesse Royce

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this formative intervention was to design a professional and technical communications course around rhetorical inquiry. The participants, undergraduate health sciences majors (N=22 for section A, N=20 section B), were observed throughout the fall semester of the 2014-2015 academic year. A rhetorical inquiry framework was applied via activity systems, and data were collected using several methodologies including participant observations, research questionnaires, as well as participant deliverables, and were transcribed using Daisy Mwanza's Eight-Step Model. Results demonstrated students successfully used activity systems as a means of approaching rhetorical inquiry. Furthermore, students indicated a high level of engagement in the …

Speaking Their Language: Textisms In Today's Communication, Adam Lloyd Drum

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study is an exploratory look into the use of text-based slang, or textisms, in modern communication. People use textisms in multiple media of communication, whether it is in text messages, emails, and various types of social media. This study asked a focus group about their uses and gratifications from textisms. The focus group delved into their appreciations as both users and receivers. Participants reflected on their personal experience and preferences with textisms for their personal communications as well as their opinion for various types of businesses using them in their larger message design efforts.

The participants were comprised of …

The Relationship Between Hearing Status And Cognitive Performance And The Influence Of Depressive Symptoms In The Older Adult, Julie A. Daugherty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Hearing loss and cognitive impairment are significant health problems, threatening the independent function of older adults. While there appears to be a strong relationship between the two conditions, the mechanisms underlying this association are complex and are not fully elucidated.

The purpose of this secondary analysis was to explore the relationship between hearing ability and cognitive performance in older adults. In addition, this study attempted to examine the role of depressive symptoms in the relationship between hearing loss and cognitive performance. Comprehensive measures of peripheral hearing, central auditory processing and cognitive performance were utilized to examine these relationships in a …

What You Know Counts: Why We Should Elicit Prior Probabilities From Experts To Improve Quantitative Analysis With Qualitative Knowledge In Special Education Science, Tyler Aaron Hicks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Qualitative knowledge is about types of things, and their excellences. There are many ways we humans produce qualitative knowledge about the world, and much of it is derived from non-quantitative sources (e.g., narratives, clinical experiences, intuitions). The purpose of my dissertation was to investigate the possibility of using Bayesian inferences to improve quantitative analysis in special education research with qualitative knowledge.

It is impossible, however, to fully disentangle philosophy of inquiry, methodology, and methods. My evaluation of Bayesian estimators, thus, addresses each of these areas. Chapter Two offers a philosophical argument to substantiate the thesis that Bayesian inference is usually …

Parental Deportation And Cape Verdean Youth Experiences: A Case Study, Leila Rosa

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The consistent academic underperformance of students from diverse backgrounds is a national concern and the subject of study by numerous researchers. Some scholars suggest this underperformance indicates teacher lack of preparation to address the needs of a highly diverse student population (Hollins & Guzman, 2005; Ford, 2008; Darling-Hamond, 2004). Central to the overall efforts for improving achievement outcomes should be a focus on the educational experiences of the segment of population that is underperforming, namely students of color, from diverse cultural and linguistic background. Policies of immigration are particularly relevant for the students who are immigrants to the United States …

Relationships Between Perceived Parenting Behaviors And Academic Achievement Among High School Students In International Baccalaureate (Ib) Programs: A Comparison Of Asian American And White Students, Wenjun Chen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Parenting style as a predictor of students' academic achievement is gaining increased interest by parents, educators, and psychologists. Current literature suggests that a combination of three parenting dimensions (i.e., responsiveness, supervision, and autonomy granting) is relevant to characterizing one's parenting style into four types (i.e., authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, and neglectful), and each dimension of parenting behavior has a different effect on students' academic performance. Based on the different cultural backgrounds and the methods parents use to educate their children at home, some literature suggests that the school performance of some Asian American students could benefit from different parenting behaviors as …

Learning Preferences Of Commercial Fishermen, Robert W. Miller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study surveyed 435 commercial fishermen across eight coastal regions of the United States where commercial fishing takes place. The regions of the study included: Northeast Atlantic, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Great Lakes, Southern Pacific, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska. Participants were asked to complete the Commercial Fishing Worker Survey (CFWS), which is a survey instrument consisting of an approved, adapted version of the Index of Learning Styles instrument (ILS) combined with a demographic section which included questions designed to obtain data regarding the four variables of the study: age, education level, captain's license status, and method of fishing. …

Design And Synthesis Of Bioactive Peptidomimetics, Yaogang Hu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) play a very important role in biological functions and therefore the inhibition of specific Protein-Protein Interactions has a huge therapeutic value. The most successful small molecular PPIs inhibitors do not fit with the prevalent `Rule of Five' drug profile. To overcome the disadvantages of small molecular PPIs inhibitors, peptide based PPIs inhibitors were developed. Herein we describe the development of a new class of peptidomimetics AA-peptides. The AApeptides were designed based on chiral PNA backbone. Substitution of nucleobases yields AApeptides that are resistant to proteolysis and capable of mimicking peptides. Two types of AApeptides were discussed in …

An Analysis Of The Reported And Unreported Baccalaureate Degree Recipients In Ipeds At A Large Public Research Institution, Mary Elizabeth Wallace

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One of the challenges facing higher education today is to graduate undergraduate students in a timely manner. Graduation rates are reported to students, parents, and the general public as well as academic and political leaders. The rates are derived using different methodologies. The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) collects data annually by law from every institution offering federal financial aid in the United States. The "IPEDS reported" students are considered students who start in the fall semester, full-time, first-time in college, and graduate from the original institution (no transfers). The adult, part-time, returning, and transfer students, or "IPEDS unreported" …

The Effects Of Repetitive Thought And Construal Level On Alcohol Consumption, Andrew Mark Kiselica

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Repetitive thought, or the recurrent, often cyclical, focus on self-relevant concerns and experiences, is one liability that may be common across internalizing (INT) and externalizing (EXT) disorders. One particular area of interest for examining repetitive thought as a transdiagnostic process is in relation to alcohol use because alcohol abuse and dependence are the most common, and possibly most costly, EXT disorders. This study experimentally induced abstract repetitive thought, concrete repetitive thought, or distraction to test if repetitive thought and construal level have an effect on drinking behavior. It was hypothesized that individuals in both repetitive thought conditions would drink more …

Elite Deviance, Organized Crime, And Homicide: A Cross-National Quantitative Analysis, Carol L.S. Trent

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Both elite deviance, committed by the upper echelons of society, and organized crime threaten development and the rights and security of people across and within nations; however empirical research on these topics is limited, especially in the field of criminology. This study addresses this gap in the literature by testing hypotheses derived from Simon’s symbiotic theory of elite deviance, which posits that direct and indirect relationships exist between elite deviance, organized crime, and conventional crimes exist (2008). The intervening effects of national culture and political economic ideology are also considered.

To test the research hypotheses, this study uses homicide rates, …