Digital Commons Network^™

Book Review: Troubling Borders: An Anthology Of Art And Literature By Southeast Asian Women In The Diaspora By Pelaud, I. T., Duong, L., Lam, M. B., & Nguyen, K. L. (Eds.), Kim Dieu

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Book review of Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora by Pelaud, I. T., Duong, L., Lam, M. B., & Nguyen, K. L. (Eds.)

A Correlational Study Of Teacher Efficacy And Culturally Responsive Teaching Techniques In A Southeastern Urban School District, Roberta F. Callaway

Journal of Organizational & Educational Leadership

This study investigated the level of personal and general teacher efficacy of teachers from three high schools within a southeastern urban school district. Additional research questions focused on correlational relationships between teacher efficacy and culturally responsive teaching, instructional strategies, student engagement, and classroom management as measured by the Teacher Efficacy Scale (TES), Culturally Responsive Teaching Techniques (CRTT) Scale, and Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES). The CRTT Scale and TSES were combined to create a 29-item instrument to examine culturally responsive teaching, instructional strategies, student engagement, and classroom management. Significant relationships were found between teacher efficacy and culturally responsive teaching, …

Trust Formation When Youth And Adults Partner To Lead School Reform: A Case Study Of Supportive Structures And Challenges, Catharine Biddle

Journal of Organizational & Educational Leadership

This study examines the beliefs and practices that support and undermine trust formation in school leadership efforts that invite students into discussions of continuous improvement. Through a case study of a youth-adult partnership initiative, the study finds that trust between youth and adults was supported by having a shared, accessible language for discussing teaching and learning, opportunities for strengths-based dialogue around school practices, and regular opportunities to meet. However, there was also a perception gap between youth and adults around how well group members fulfilled their roles in the actual data collection process, causing conflict and undermining the long-term stability …

Axioms: Mathematical And Spiritual: What Says The Parable?, Melvin Royer

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2017

Relational structure A is compact provided for any structure Jffi of the same signature, if every finite substructure of Jffi has a homomorphism to A then so does Jffi. The Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) for A is the computational problem of determining whether finite structures have homomorphisms into A. We explore a connection between the hierarchy of logical axioms and the complexity hierarchy of CSPs: It appears that the complexity of CSP for A corresponds to the strength of the axiom "A is compact". At the top, the statement "K3 is compacts" is logically equivalent to the compactness theorem. Thus …

Seeing And Being Seen: A Multimodal Inquiry Of Multilingual High School Newcomers And Their Contributions To Educational Communities, Ivana Espinet

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation research followed the experiences of seven high school newcomers who chose to participate in an internship program, assisting elementary school students, some of whom were also emergent bilinguals. This study used ethnographic and visual methodologies to explore young people’s evolving understanding of teaching, learning, and languaging as members of a community of practice within the internship.

The internship provided a space for the young people to make sense of schooling in their new country. The narratives that the interns shared highlight how the set of linguistic and cultural-historical repertoires of practice that they entered with shaped how they …

Perspectives On Emotional Climate Associated With Classroom Interactions, Hiro Komatsubara

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is difficult for students to learn and teachers to teach in today’s classroom environment especially when events involving strong emotional contradictions occur in classrooms. Such events may elicit emotions that negative affect, teaching, learning and wellness. Various studies show that high levels of negative emotions create stressful classroom environments, and that a positive Emotional Energy (EE) in the classroom encourages attentiveness, enthusiasm and interest. Therefore, it is highly likely that creating calm learning environments by ameliorating classroom participants’ emotional intensity and increasing their mindfulness and awareness will produce positive outcomes. Using both quantitative and qualitative measures this study examines …

Effects Of Multimedia Instruction On L2 Acquisition Of High-Level, Low-Frequency English Vocabulary Words, Euna Cho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examined the effects of multimedia enhancement in video form in addition to textual information on L2 vocabulary instruction for high-level, low-frequency English words among Korean learners of English. Although input-based incidental learning of L2 vocabulary through extensive reading has been conventionally believed to be appropriate for high-frequency words, intentional or explicit vocabulary learning is suggested to be more sensible or realistic for the acquisition of low-frequency academic words. Multimedia support in foreign language instruction has revealed benefits in promoting direct teaching and explicit learning of L2 vocabulary; moreover, adding textual information to video seems to boost students’ …

Performing Human Rights In Neoliberal Asia: Artistic And Activist Engagements In Hong Kong, Malaysia, And Singapore, Melissa Wansin Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines artistic and activist performances that address issues of rights abuses in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. I demonstrate how the centralized ruling parties encourage the neoliberalization of their economies while maintaining autocratic rule, thus intensifying structural inequalities while also clamping down on dissent. This condition then exacerbates the lack of labor, sexuality, and democratic rights. Concurrently, the states’ aspirations to be part of the global capitalist market have paradoxically provided conditional spaces of political and artistic expression. I contend that existing critiques of human rights from sociological and legalistic perspectives are inadequate for contemplating this state of …

Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art Of Claude Cahun And Hannah Weiner, Phillip L. Griffith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In its most common usage in the artistic context, collaboration refers to a practice of creation in which two artists work together to produce a single artwork or object. Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art of Claude Cahun and Hannah Weiner focuses on the nexus of photography, writing, and performance in the work of six female avant-garde artists from the transatlantic twentieth century, informed by the important place of surrealism in that history, to reconsider this understanding of collaboration. Instead of the notion of collaboration as founded in the experience of two artists working together in each others’ presence, I examine …

Spatial-Relational Learning And Memory Deficits Associated With Nmdar Autoantibodies In Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, Brittany L. Bascetta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Individuals with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) experience inflammation that may target any organ within the body, including the central and peripheral nervous systems. Additionally, these individuals often demonstrate psychological dysfunctions including emotional and cognitive deficits; however, research is inconsistent as to the nature and cause of these dysfunctions. While there are multiple factors that may increase risk for variability in cognitive function, such as population differences, socioeconomic status (SES), mood disorders (depression and anxiety), medication effects, and disease activity, these factors do not reliably predict the severity and extent of cognitive deficits. A growing body of animal research associates autoantibodies …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

Not My Queer: Queer Representation In Contemporary Italian Serial Television, Julia Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contemporary Italian television, like many national televisions, has entered a period in which the relationships the producers and consumers of televisual content are increasingly indistinguishable. In this age of media convergence the new participants of this medium work across platforms to actively engage, consume, create, and recreate both televisual content and our understanding of the medium. These new relationships require a new understanding of the semiotic and discursive changes taking place in television so that we may reconceptualize the contemporary interplay between media and society.

This dissertation maps out a new understanding of the televisual economy through an elaboration of …

"Marie Manje La Pom Nan." Examining The Cognitive Process Of Restructuring And Advantage Selection In The Definite Article System In Haitian Creole Among U.S. Born Heritage Speakers Of Haitian Creole, Marie-Michelle Monéreau-Merry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The distributional patterns of heritage speakers’ reanalyzed first language are often grammatically divergent from native speakers. Irrespective of the heritage language, there is converging evidence that the cognitive process of reanalysis of heritage languages is often evident in less salient properties of the language, such as inflectional morphology (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007). Therefore, Haitian Creole (HC) is a candidate for restructuring. In this investigation we compared the morphophonological patterns of the definite article system at the production and perception level between two groups of early learners of Haitian Creole (i.e. native speakers vs. United States (US) born heritage speakers).

The …

Theatre Translation As Historiography: Projections Of Greek Self-Identity Through English Translations During The European Crisis, Maria Mytilinaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project focuses on theatre translation from Modern Greek into English through the examination of three plays translated in the early years of the ongoing Greek crisis (2012-2014). Currently Greek culture is received internationally through two important frames of reference: Hellenism, the admiration for the ancient Greek spirit, and the more recent negative associations with modern Greece provoked by the Eurozone crisis. The three translations I examine challenge these dual external projections onto Greek culture by promoting a more nuanced image that recontextualizes the Greek past. In their capacity to travel between cultures, often in bilingual iterations, these theatrical translations …

The Willfulness Of A Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki And The Politics Of Visual Resistance, Miriam M. Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ahmed Zaki (1949-2005) is one of Egyptian cinema’s most prominent leading actors, with work spanning three decades of critical films that informed a generation’s visual register of masculinity. However, the beginnings of his career were marked by public skepticism around his place as a leading actor due to him being “too dark” and “too poor”; as his career continued to flourish, those very markings of racing and classing Zaki because a foundation for increasingly stamping his public image with the “authenticity” of an Egyptian citizen. At a particularly neoliberal moment in the Egyptian economy, that of the early 80s, new …

The Role Of Language In The Development Of Temporal Cognition In 6- To 10-Year-Old Children, Danielle Denigris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ability to represent and make sense of time requires the mental representations of the ordering of events and temporal relations, abstract time concepts, natural biological rhythms, the self and other through time, and causal relationships. This representational ability undergoes significant refinement in middle childhood concurrent with advances in children’s language and nonverbal skills. This study explored the representational development of temporal cognition, diachronic thinking, and behavioral prediction in relation to a battery of language and nonverbal abilities with the aims of confirming age-related improvements, exploring whether disparate measures are indices of an underlying ability, and examining the role of …

Exploring The Relationship Between Sequence Learning, Motor Coordination, And Language Development, Rita Obeid

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dual-route approaches to language acquisition posit separable mechanisms for acquisition of vocabulary and grammar (e.g., Pinker, 1998). Working within the dualistic framework, Ullman and Pierpont (2005) proposed the procedural deficit hypothesis, which proposes that impairments in rule-based aspects of language (e.g. grammar, phonology) observed in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) may be linked to neural deficits that govern procedural memory and are critical for the procedural/sequence learning of both, cognitive and motor skills. In support of this hypothesis, recent meta-analyses indicate significant deficits in sequence learning in children with SLI relative to controls (Lum et al., 2014). Further research …

The Space Of Alterity: Language And National Identity In Theodor Adorno And W.G. Sebald, Agata Szczodrak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The German Romantic monolingual paradigm of national identity emerged in the late eighteenth century to establish a mother tongue as a national backbone. This paradigm portrayed multilingualism as destabilizing, impoverishing, and unsuitable for aesthetics. Radicalized by the Nazis and overlooked in postwar debates over German national identity, this paradigm persists in contemporary societies and continues to conceal, belittle, and discredit multilingualism. To oppose that paradigm, this dissertation unveils the enriching and nourishing qualities of foreign languages, presents translingualism as a viable alternative to monolingualism, and reveals how translingual literature creates transnational connectedness. The limitations of the paradigm are traced from …

Language Ideologies And The Schooling Of Caribbean Creole English-Speaking Youth In New York City, Dale M. Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to illuminate the ways in which Anglocentric ideologies operate to marginalize and exclude the linguistic and cultural resources of Caribbean Creole English (CCE)-speaking in New York City’s education system. Data was gathered from youths and teachers, and then analyzed to identify the language practices and ideologies relating to both Standard English (SE)and Creole varieties and how they shape teaching and learning for these two groups.

Several broad themes were identified. First, CCE-speaking youths are homogenized as simply black students and as a result, their specific cultural and linguistic resources are rendered invisible and are not included in …

Medical Transnationalism: Korean Immigrants’ Medical Tourism To The Home Country, Sou Hyun Jang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Korean immigrants’ barriers to formal U.S. healthcare, three distinctive types of healthcare behaviors that they exhibit, contributing factors to their medical tourism, and their experiences and evaluations of medical tourism. Analyzing survey data with 507 Korean immigrants and in-depth interviews with 120 Korean immigrants in the New York-New Jersey area, the study finds that more than half of Korean immigrants have barriers to healthcare in the U.S., the two biggest being the language barrier and not having health insurance. The study also finds that there are three distinctive types of healthcare behavior that Korean immigrants employ to …

Do Spellings Of Words And Phonemic Awareness Training Facilitate Vocabulary Learning In Preschoolers?, Robin O'Leary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine the contribution of phoneme awareness training and orthography to the learning of new vocabulary words by partial alphabetic phase readers. We hypothesized that four and five year old children taught to segment words with letters would outperform those trained with shape markers and those that received no segmentation training on an invented spelling task. We also hypothesized that students seeing the spellings of new vocabulary words (names) would learn the words in fewer trials, remember the names and features better and would be able to better recognize letter labels when presented alone. …

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing And Reception Of Catherine Of Siena, Lisa Tagliaferri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing and Reception of Catherine of Siena (https://caterina.io) affirms the 14th-century mystic Catherine of Siena as a writer through contextualizing her texts among the corpus of contemporary Italian literature, and studying her reception in the Renaissance period of Italy and England. Joining an increasing body of recent meaningful scholarship that has been making significant progress to recover many overlooked and peripheral female voices of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this work serves to fully assert Catherine as a writer of work that is literarily significant and worthy of textual analysis alongside contemporary male Italian …

Between Speech & Song: Clarifying The Sprechstimme Of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Sara M. Paar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since its creation, the technique of Sprechstimme has fascinated the audiences, performers, and composers of twentieth century music. What is it? How is it done? How should it be notated? At the fore of investigations into these questions has been Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, the work in which Schoenberg debuted this new technique. Much has been written in regard to Schoenberg’s creation and use of Sprechstimme, as well as his own exploration of the speech/song continuum. Composers, conductors, and performers have all tried to make sense of the notation, instructions, and performances Schoenberg left behind. Despite this, confusion, …

Region, Nation And Gastronomy: Regionalism In Gastronomic Texts Of The Early 20th Century (1900-1939), Lauren Reches

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

France is far from being a uniform culture and yet the food of French provinces is often subsumed into one universally known “French cuisine.” While 19^th-century haute cuisine ignored regional differences, gastronomes of the early 20^th-century, such as Curnonsky, Marcel Rouff, Austin de Croze, and Pampille, defined a new French culinary identity based on appropriating and incorporating the diversity of the regional cuisines. Regional cuisine at the time was, however, quite diverse. Some of the regions of France were newly added to the country, such as Savoie and Nice, while others had been in contention for …

"Resisting From Within": (Re)Imagining A Critical Translingual English Classroom, Kate Anna Seltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic case study of an urban, linguistically diverse English classroom explores what happened when space was made for students both to voice their experiences living amidst ideologies that marginalize their language practices and identities and to resist such ideologies through writing that pushed monoglossic boundaries. Intensive one-on-one work with a high school English teacher led to the creation of a year-long curriculum that emphasized metalinguistic inquiry and discussion, linked language, power, and identity, and modeled the ways that writers and other artists take linguistic risks in order to critique monoglossic language ideologies.

Over the course of the year, students …

Becoming Ghosts: The Public Veiling Of Puerto Ricans In New York City, Samantha Pina Saghera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years Puerto Ricans in New York City have become difficult to locate in the public realm. This is a paradox given that Puerto Ricans make up the largest Hispanic subgroup in the larger metropolitan region. This study examines how, when, and why Puerto Ricans became publicly invisible in New York City.

Demographic, media-based, political, and cultural changes have all contributed to the decline in Puerto Rican ethnic visibility. The consequence is that although Puerto Ricans continue to be racialized (as evidenced by their socioeconomic indicators), their racialization cannot be seen in the public realm. Instead, Hispanic characteristics are …

The Expansion Of The Mandarin Mind, Tyler Okney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study will examine and contrast two periods of xenophobia and stagnation, late Qing dynasty China, and the PRC under Mao, with a genuine market place of ideas, Shanghai and the other foreign treaty ports in the period 1849 to 1949, and explain how this period of cosmopolitan ferment has had beneficial effects on China today. Countries that have shut themselves off from the outside world have frequently suffered first stagnation, and then decay. While this might appear a commonplace in the abstract, the application of this insight in the development of particular nations has been neither as thorough or …

Letter To The President: Longitudinal Critical Discourse Analysis Of Academic And Hip Hop Genres In A Rap Narrative Program, Debangshu Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The objective of this study was to examine an in-school rap narrative workshop through critical discourse theory (Bamberg, 2012; Daiute, 2014). Twelve youth from a public school serving youth in urban Houston, TX were recruited from an in-school and after-school Hip hop/Rap narrative program to participate in a two-year cohort research study. The primary research question guiding the study was “How do young people participating in a school-based Hip hop/Rap program use a wide range of narrative genres for literacy and psycho-social development over two years in the program?”

The data-intensive study involved assessments of literacy and psycho-social development via …

Persistent Pleasures: Agency, Social Power, And Embodiment In Women's Solitary Masturbation Experiences, Christin P. Bowman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Though sexuality has historically been a useful site for examinations of social power, looking at power through the lens of sexuality often involves interpersonal analyses. But social power can also inform solitary experiences through the internalization of social norms and discourses. In this dissertation, I move beyond explorations of how people interact sexually with one another, and instead investigate women’s solitary masturbation experiences throughout their lives as a means to better understand the intricate ways in which sexist, racist, and heterosexist ideologies weave themselves into women’s bodies and lives. Specifically, I ask the following research question in this dissertation: How …

A Political Ecology Of Information: Media And The Dilemma Of State Power In China, Michael L. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I employ a Weberian concept of social power in order to theorize the challenges posed by, and the varieties of state response to, the dilemma of state power: the need of all states to empower societies with social capacities that may, in turn, threaten state interests. Through a comparison of traditional and new forms of media in China, I show that rather than posing qualitatively new types of challenges to authoritarian states, new media exacerbate the dilemma of state power. They do so because along each of three dimensions of social control, new media shift the relationship …