Digital Commons Network^™

The Spread Of Buddhism During Ancient China, Emma Englehart

Senior Theses

Stories contain the power to be able to pull people in and engulf them with the teachings and enjoyment they possess. Storytelling is used in many different manners and one of those is through religion. It is through the telling of stories, and eventually the writing of them, that major religious beliefs have successfully spread to other parts of the world instead of staying in one place. Buddhism is one of the religions that is well-known and practiced by many because of the spread of its stories to other parts of the world, especially Asia. In ancient China, Buddhism flourished …

Performing Genders: A Study Of Gender Fluidity, Nicholas Jkmk Coney

Senior Theses

The subjective quality of identity and the relativistic nature of gender bemuse and attract social scientists. In this study I combine both topics by examining gender fluidity – an inconsistent gender identity – within the framework of Western ontology. Within my informants’ narratives I identify what I term feelings of gender as feelings that influence how people perceive and interact with their bodies. Gender fluidity entails a constant yet inconsistent fluctuation of those feelings. Furthermore, I found other important elements that may have influenced my informants' understanding of their gender identities and bodies: upbringing, previous relationships and interactions, communities, and …

Summer Ii Women In Chinese Literature Psycholinguistics, Ohio University College Of Arts & Sciences

All Forum Articles

No abstract provided.

Usa V. Matthew Kolodesh

2015 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Corralling Digital Chaos: Case Studies In Digital Preservation From The Far North, Rachel Seale, Angela Schmidt, Stacey Baldridge

Faculty and Staff

This presentation was given as a panel presentation at the Western Roundup 2015 in Denver, Colorado, on May 28, 2015. This presentation include case studies on the methods by which four different units in the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library have addressed digital preservation and digital collections management.

Integrating Hip-Hop And Cultural Relevant Lessons Into The Public School Curriculum, Sunni Ali

Journal of Research Initiatives

The infusion of hip-hop into the school’s curriculum adds value and meaning for students and teachers (Haaken, Wallin-Ruschman, & Patange). Despite the cultural shift that altered the organic framework of hip-hop, referencing this art form from its most basic construct spurs student achievement, especially females (Henry, West, & Jackson, 2010). Most importantly, it serves as a cultural-relevant paradigm empowering students’ radical engagement with instruction. In addition, it enables teachers to construct lessons that connect students to their community along with social and political aspects influencing society. Students who immerse themselves studying hip-hop lessons have shown literacy improvement and increase activism. …

Discursive Security: F.B.I. Stings And The Nature Of Peace, Adam Testerman

Dissertations and Theses

The current study utilizes Critical Discourse Analysis and Thematic Analysis to study newspaper coverage of F.B.I. sting operations in The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today. F.B.I. sting operations are a modern counter-terrorism policy designed to preempt acts of terrorism. This study develops a theoretical approach to understanding F.B.I. sting operations by reviewing the critique of security. The critique of security suggests that nations construct threats in order to produce and maintain ideological and practical hegemony. Thematic categories of the newspaper discourse are formulated and analyzed in the context of security. The study employs aspects of grounded theory …

The Problem Of Nomological Impossibility For Epistemic Structural Realism, Patrick Manzanares

The Hilltop Review

The philosophical view known as Epistemic Structural Realism appeals to the concept of ‘structure’ in order to defend a version of Scientific Realism that nevertheless respects historical considerations of ontological discontinuity between successive scientific theories. It seems that the structures of some scientific theories are only continuous with the structures of successor theories when the former are characterized as nomologically impossible idealizations of the latter, since this continuity involves allowing some quantity in the formal structure of the successor theory to tend towards some physically unrealizable limit. But if this is the case, then the earlier theory cannot be physically …

Report On The Sacred Heart University Participation In The Ace Internationalization Laboratory By The American Council On Education Peer Review Visit Team February 25-27, 2015, American Council On Education Peer Review Visit Team

Global Engagement Publications

This report is based on a visit to Sacred Heart University (SHU) by an American Council on Education (ACE) peer review team on February 25-27, 2015. This report also draws upon the document Internationalization Self-Study (December 2014) provided to the peer review team in advance.

Emerging Roles Of Health Care Providers To Mitigate Climate Change Impacts: A Perspective From East Harlem, New York, Perry E. Sheffield, Kathleen T. Durante, Elena Rahona, Christina Zarcadoolas

Publications and Research

Professional associations of health care workers are issuing policy statements on climate change and health with greater frequency, calling on their members to act in their duty to protect and fulfill the right to health. These health care providers’ perceptions of their roles in the intersection of climate and health, however, have not been well-studied. This article presents results from a qualitative study using focus groups conducted with health care providers serving the low-income, ethnic minority population in East Harlem, New York. The focus groups sought to identify and explore providers’ perceived health threats of climate change, as well as …

Language And Thought In Egypt's Schools Today: What Does Arabic Mean To Arabic Native Speakers? A Literature Review, Diego Dalle Carbonare

Capstone and Graduation Projects

Sociocultural education initiated by Leo Vygotsky strongly believes that language of instruction affects thinking. With regards to the present situation in Egypt, the present research explores the current literature on the value that Arabic has in the Arabic speaking world. Over against a wide-spread opinion that English should be used as the only medium of instruction in early years of literacy, literature shows that some forms of immersion have negative impact on the mastery of mother tongue, and on the very development of cognitive skills. The linguistic and educational scenario is further complicated by the fact that Arabic is a …

Health Exposure, Socio-Economic Vulnerability, And Infrastructure At Risk To Current And Projected Coastal Flooding In New York City, Lesley Patrick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work uses a GIS-based methodology to develop and map a composite physical exposure, social vulnerability, and critical facilities index for New York City populations exposed to the current and predicted 100- and 500- year coastal floods. The objective is to illustrate how sea-level rise may affect future 100- and 500-year coastal floods in New York City, how these changes in future flood scenarios will affect the number and distribution of people at risk and their associated physical and socioeconomic impacts, and how these impacts will vary among neighborhoods.

Sea-level rise throughout the 21st century will result in increased flood …

Obstruent Voicing And Tone In Siklis Gurung, Danielle Ronkos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines proposals for the tone system of Gurung, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nepal, in light of data collected from a speaker of Siklis Gurung. Although Gurung is widely acknowledged to be a tonal language, existing descriptions of Gurung disagree as to how these tone categories should be defined and whether word-initial obstruent voicing is phonemic or allophonic. The data presented in this paper suggests that, despite claims otherwise, voicing is phonemic in some dialects of Gurung. It also suggests that Siklis Gurung is best analyzed as having three tone categories: a low tone that occurs with breathy …

Representation Without Thought: Confusion, Reference, And Communication, Elmar Geir Unnsteinsson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Philosophy of mind has been dominated, since Frege, by a puzzle-driven methodology. This tradition aims to provide a coherent system for describing specific semantic features of all conceivable cases where the speaker is confused about the identity of an object. The first chapter develops a theory on which confused identity is a mental state of an agent who either believes falsely that a = b or believes falsely that a ≠ b. Many influential arguments in philosophy are puzzle-driven; Kripke on semantic and speaker reference, Reimer and Kaplan on demonstratives. I show in detail how these and other arguments …

An Exploratory Study Of The Role Of Cooperating Teachers In Preparing Teacher Candidates For Academic Success With Students Of Color In High-Need Schools, Audra Michelle Watson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the teaching practices, attitudes, beliefs, and expectations, cooperating teachers hold and model for teacher candidates preparing to work in high-need schools with significant populations of students of color. Using a culturally relevant and critical race theory lens, I argue that the clinical placements in which many teacher candidates are placed provide limited opportunities for them to see and engage in the full spectrum of culturally relevant pedagogical practices.

The data for this study were captured from participants in a nationally-administered, state-based teacher preparation program through surveys, interviews, and observations over a period of four months. Using a …

The Incidence And Evolution Of Palatalized Consonants In Latvian, Linda Zalite

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis traces the evolution of the palatalized rhotic /r^j/ in Baltic languages with focus on the continuation of this segment in Latvian and its recent neutralization with /r/. Historical, phonological, phonetic, and synchronic data is gathered as evidence to further our understanding of the Latvian palatalized rhotic and its near-disappearance in the 20^th century. Previous typological works of Endzelīns (1922, 1951), Dini (1997), Rūķe-Dravņia (1994) and Ābele (1929) were considered intending to answer three central questions. Was the Latvian palatal rhotic a palatalized segment or a true palatal? What factors played a role in the depalatalization …

Effects Of Native Language On Perception And Neurophysiologic Processing Of English /R/ And /L/ By Native American, Korean, And Japanese Listeners, Lee Jung An

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The perception of English liquids /r/ and /l/ is challenging for native Korean and Japanese adult speakers because these sounds are not phonemic in these languages. The Korean language has a partial phonetic model (intervocalic [ɾ]-[11]) that could potentially facilitate processing of English /r/ and /l/ but the Japanese language does not. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of native language on the neurophysiologic processing of English intervocalic /r/ and /l/ by native American, Korean and Japanese listeners using several event-related evoked potentials (ACC, MMN, & P3a) along with behavioral identification and discrimination. Three specific aims …

The Spark That Lit The Flame: The Creation, Deployment, And Deconstruction Of The Story Of Mohammed Bouazizi And The Arab Spring, Elizabeth Ann Cummings

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The story of Mohammed Bouazizi is credited with being the "spark that lit the flame," first of the Tunisian Revolution, then the Arab Spring as a whole, creating a domino effect that brought down the Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan and Yemeni leaders, and threatened to topple still more. In this thesis I explore the narrative structure of the Tunisian revolution, how the story of Mohammed Bouazizi represented that structure and how the narrative sparked the Arab Spring. I also ask how narrative is created and what role social media played in allowing this particular story to become a part of the …

Roman Tragedy And Medicine: Language And Imagery Of Illness In Seneca And Celsus, Michael Patrick Goyette

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the language and imagery of illness in selected tragedies and, to a lesser extent, the philosophical prose of the first-century CE Roman tragic poet and philosopher Seneca, reading these works with and against De Medicina, a nearly contemporary encyclopedic Latin prose text on medical theory and practice by the Roman encyclopediast Celsus. Inspired by previous studies of classical Greek tragedy together with the largely contemporary body of Greek prose writings on medicine known as the Hippocratic Corpus, my dissertation moves the discussion to Latin literature and is the first extended study to do so. I aim not …

Beyond Information: College Choice As A Literacy Practice, Jeremy Samuel Greenfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Every year more than two million high school seniors prepare for and apply to college. These students visit college websites, write college admission essays, complete online application forms and use digital literacy tools to elicit and share knowledge about college. These literacy practices are central to the college choice process. Nonetheless, few scholars have examined how these practices are experienced by students or framed by the schools these students attend. Guided by Gee's Discourse theory, this study examines how a group of 14 high school seniors who attended a high poverty high school in the Bronx, New York developed the …

Maturation Of Speech Discrimination And Attentional Requirements In Late Childhood, Judith Ann Iannotta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ability to perceive speech sounds and contrasts continues to be refined throughout the course of development. While emerging models suggest that development is characterized by shifts from an attentionally demanding mode of processing speech sounds to one that occurs relatively automatically, the specific developmental time-course of these changes remains unclear. The present work reports the findings of two experiments that aimed to provide insights into the time-course by which neural processes underlying speech discrimination in children and adolescents becomes automatic. The experiments used event-related potentials (ERP) measures, with a particular focus on mismatch negativity (MMN) - a developmentally-sensitive index …

Generalized Event Representation In Pre-School Children With Mild- To High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asd) And Children With Cognitive And Linguistic Delays (Cld), Tashana S. Samuel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently establish rigid routines and have difficulties flexibly applying what they have learned. Three experiments were conducted to examine generalized event representation in 34 pre-school children. In Experiment 1, children diagnosed with varying kinds of cognitive and language delays (CLD: n = 14) were tested with the generalized imitation paradigm, a reliable measure of representational capacity. Two sets of perceptually dissimilar objects with similar functions were used to perform the same task: one set consisted of modeling props and the other set was the generalization props. At the generalization assessment, children observed actions modeled …

Teaching Community College Students Strategies For Learning Unknown Words As They Read Expository Text, Leslie Craigo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study reported here investigated methods that enable college students to learn the meaning of unknown words as they read discipline specific academic text. The ability to read and comprehend text is known to be positively correlated with academic success. However that ability is challenging to college students in part because of the sophisticated vocabulary encountered in academic text. The study reported here utilized an experimental design. Forty one participants read specific passages aloud during three sessions. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four intervention groups to investigate alternative methods of learning the meaning of unknown words. In the …

The Domain Of Finiteness: Anchoring Without Tense In Copular Amalgam Sentences, Teresa Elizabeth O'Neill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The central thesis of this work is that a clause consisting only of left-peripheral functional structure can be fully finite. Generative models of clause structure typically assume that a finite clause must be tensed, including a projection of T and a temporal relation between the proposition and the utterance context. In light of evidence from tenseless languages, this assumption has come under scrutiny in recent years. This dissertation offers a new body of evidence from English, a tensed language, in support of the claim that finite clauses can lack the projection of T.

Drawing on the results of formal acceptability …

Narrative Explorations Into The Professional Development Of Lecturers Teaching Higher Education In English Further Education Colleges, Rebecca Turner, Tony Brown, Andrew Edwards-Jones, Julie Hughes, Alison Banks, Janet Bardsley, Yvette Bryan, Claire Gray, Amanda Isaac, Judith Mann, Maureen Mason, Liz Mckenzie, Julie Osborn, Martin Rowe, Mark Stone, Rachel Wilkinson

Plymouth Institute of Education

The diversification of settings in which higher education is delivered has resulted in a growing proportion of lecturers entering teaching from professional backgrounds. This is a challenging transition as lecturers are rarely given the space to consider the implications of this move on their identities and practice styles. Writing is recognised as a powerful methodology through which individuals can make sense of experiences and conceptualise them in light of historical, theoretical and social perspectives. In this paper we consider the experiences of 10 college lecturers who used writing to explore this transition as part of a professional development initiative to …

Densidad Léxica En La Prensa Hispana De Ee.Uu. E Hispanoamérica: Un Estudio Comparativo, Luana Ferreira

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on a quantitative and comparative analysis of lexical density in Spanish print news in the United States and Latin America. Lexical density is the statistical measure that calculates the percentage of terms in relation to the total number of running words contained in a text. Within the context of Spanish in the United States, questions arise pertaining to the level of lexical compatibility and variability in contact situations, as well as in situations where the convergence of different varieties of the Spanish language coexist. Because most existing lexical density studies of Spanish media are descriptive, there is …

Black Migrant Literature, New African Diasporas, And The Phenomenology Of Movement, Christopher Ian Foster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Black Migrant Literature, New African Diasporas, and the Phenomenology of Movement examines immigration, diaspora, and movement in late twentieth and twenty-first century African literature. "Migritude" describes the work of a disparate yet distinct group of contemporary African authors who critically focus on migration within the context of globalization, emphasizing that the "past" of immigration is irreducibly entangled with colonial processes. These writers often refashion the politics or discourses of earlier movements within the black radical tradition, such as Négritude or pan-Africanism, as a way to engage immigration in the present. I argue that although immigration as a system developed as …

A Syntactic Treatment Of Adjectival Non-Intersectivity In English, Alexander Funk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Natural language has long been observed to be rife with apparently 'non-intersective' modification constructions (false teeth, huge flea, heavy smoker, etc.), whose apparent non-compositionality poses difficulties for formally-articulated theories of language. Bolinger's (1967) demonstration of the extent and significance of the issue ushered in several lines of investigation, first in semantics (most notably Kamp 1975, Siegel 1976, Partee 2009), but more recently in syntax as well, with the insights of Larson (1998) and Bouchard (2002) informing approaches to the nominal domain such as that in Cinque (2010). However, 'semantics-only' accounts of non-intersectivity phenomena have limited explanatory …

Do Cultural And Perceptual Factor Matter?: An Investigation Of Factors Impacting Intelligence Test Scores Of Latinos/Hispanics In The United States, Mary E. Ignagni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examined societal and cultural explanations regarding the score differences seen between Latinos/Hispanics and Whites on intelligence tests through focusing specifically on possible explanations for the scores obtained by Latino/Hispanic test-takers. In this paper, it was argued that additional unique factors may impact the test scores of Latino/Hispanic test-takers. Specifically, racial and ethnic self-identification, ethnic centrality, acculturation, cultural distance, test perceptions, and ethnicity were explored as possible unique factors. In addition, an attempt was made to explain within group differences. A non-experimental study was utilized in which a final sample of 194 participants completed an intelligence test and measures …

Black Like Me? A Narrative Study Of Non-Anglophone Black U.S. Immigrant Selves In The Making, Yvanne Joseph

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished discriminatory national origin quotas that favored European immigrants. The U.S. has since experienced steady flows of immigrants of color. These diverse groups have brought their racial, social, cultural and historical experiences, which adds greater complexity to the existing Black/White and ingroup/outgroup models that shape group relations, and psychological theorizing about identity. This dissertation focuses specifically on the smaller, less visible, yet growing segments of these immigrant populations. It presents a study of the lives of ten individual immigrants of African descent originating from a non-Anglophone country within Africa, Latin America …