Digital Commons Network^™

The Tale Of The Old Forest: The Damaging Effects Of Forestry In J. R. R. Tolkien’S Written Works, Katrine L. A. Hjulstad

Journal of Tolkien Research

The Old Forest is more often than not considered a wholly villainous woodland, and yet in a letter to the Daily Telegraph (1972), J. R. R. Tolkien claimed that he ‘take[s] the part of trees’ in all his works. Verlyn Flieger takes issue with this claim in her essay ‘Taking the Part of Trees’, as it seems to suggest that Tolkien’s Hobbits in the Old Forest were no better than the Orcs in Fangorn. Here it is argued that Flieger’s interpretation forgets that Tolkien intended The Lord of the Rings to appear as the Hobbits’ writings and recollections, and shows …

Attitudes, Beliefs And Self-Efficacy Of Elementary Teachers Towards Inclusive And Equitable Education In A Diverse Suburban School, Rachel Mcclellan-Kirksey

Graduate Theses & Dissertations

Merging the two philosophies of inclusive and equitable education has significant advantages for all students in the general education classroom. Moving beyond the inclusion of students with disabilities, and focusing on all students, especially those historically marginalized or with diverse needs in today’s classrooms is crucial. This raises the importance about how teachers and school principals might further learn to better support all students in the general education classroom, and to make schools a more productive and engaging experience for all students, despite their diverse learning needs (Woodcock & Hardy, 2017). Therefore, examining teachers’ attitudes, beliefs, self-efficacy, and self-disclosed needs …

A Phenomenological Study: A Pre-Departure Study Abroad Course Interrupted By The Covid-19 Outbreak, James G. Ward Ed.D., Michael Martin Ph.D., Yaprak Dalat Ward Ed.D.

Applied Business Faculty Publications

The original plan of this research was to collect multiple sets of data from business students in a 2020 spring study abroad program including the pre-departure course, the experiential learning in Thailand and post experience. When the World Health Organization (2020c) categorized the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, the predeparture course was interrupted, resulting in the remaining sections of the program to be cancelled. To date, since no previous research was available on a pre-departure course interrupted by a pandemic of this kind, the experiences of the two faculty members teaching the course became central to the research making this study …

Exploring Career Change Transitions Through A Dialogic Conceptualization Of Science Teacher Identity, Lara Smetana, Ali Kushki

Education: School of Education Faculty Publications and Other Works

Research into the construct of science teacher identity has gained momentum over the past decade in an effort to achieve a more comprehensive, holistic understanding of teacher learning and development. As yet few studies have examined the unique identity challenges of science teacher career changers. Akkerman and Meijer’s (2011) dialogical approach to the conceptualization of teacher identity informed this longitudinal, qualitative study exploring the different identity aspects, or I-positions, of two individuals who had changed careers to teach high-school biology. The study identified moments of disequilibrium experienced by the participants and explored how they each eventually restored equilibrium. Analysis included …

Impact Of 2012 Spanish Health Care Reform On Hiv-Positive Immigrants: A Mixed Methods Approach, Megi Gogishvili

Dissertations and Theses

Background: The financial crisis of 2008 hit Spain hard. As a consequence, the government took multiple austerity measures, including reforms in the healthcare system in 2012. Specifically, the government reduced the budget for health and social services by 13.7% in 2012.The reduction was further followed with structural changes via the 2012 Royal Decree Law (RDL) and Royal Decree (RD).The 2012 RDL and RD entailed broad areas of action,but most importantly the Spanish National Health System (SNS) no longer covered undocumented immigrants. The 2012 RDL and RD excluded approximately 500,000 undocumented immigrants from SNS.

The number of immigrants in Spain has …

Misogyny Detection In Social Media On The Twitter Platform, Elena Shushkevich

Doctoral

The thesis is devoted to the problem of misogyny detection in social media. In the work we analyse the difference between all offensive language and misogyny language in social media, and review the best existing approaches to detect offensive and misogynistic language, which are based on classical machine learning and neural networks. We also review recent shared tasks aimed to detect misogyny in social media, several of which we have participated in. We propose an approach to the detection and classification of misogyny in texts, based on the construction of an ensemble of models of classical machine learning: Logistic Regression, …

Dispositions And Dis/Ability In Teacher Education: Teacher Educator Perspectives, Katie Roquemore

Dissertations - ALL

This qualitative study explores the connection of dis/ability and dispositions in teacher education. Although dispositions have been part of contemporary teacher education discourse for over thirty years, their continued ambiguity is a source of debate and contestation (e.g., Diez, 2007; Katz & Rath, 1985; Osguthorpe, 2013; Warren, 2018). Existing literature examining dispositions and dis/ability focuses on the dispositions and attitudes teachers have and/or need to teach students with disabilities (e.g., Campbell et. al., 2003; Castello & Boyle, 2013; De Boer et. al., 2011; Killoran et. al., 2014; McCray & McHatton, 2011; Mueller & Hindin, 2011; Taylor & Ringlaben, 2012; Woodcock, …

Accountable Witchcraft: A Story-Theory Account Of The Witch As A Site Of Disruption For Whiteness And Colonialism, Alex Rae Hillen

Theses - ALL

In this thesis, I seek to wed my experiences of activism, scholarship, and Pagan witchcraft community together through storied theory, in order to give an honest account of my own transformation through both scholarship and community action. I do this for many reasons. Because I want to honor the Queer interracial organizing community who saw me, built me up, opened my eyes and inspired in me an ethic of accountability and critical analysis of the world around me. Because I want to heed the call of scholars like Lisa Flores, Langford and Speight, Nakayama and Krizek to engage in reflexive …

Bidla: The Transnational Influence Of American Hip-Hop On Għana, Amanda Ndidika Eke

Theses - ALL

Għana (pronounced A-na) is a rhyming conversational music form created on the island country of Malta, a country situated between southern Italy and Northern Africa. Hip-Hop was birthed in black and Latino urban communities in New York, where street cultures were isolated from white neighborhoods. Hip-Hop has had an overwhelming influence on the Black American community, as well as the entire U.S. society. Over the past three decades, Hip-Hop has influenced and uplifted the world by speaking up for generations and providing the voice for a group of people trying to deliver a message. This thesis explores how artists on …

Imaging Of Our Ancestors Written By Italo Calvino Through Illustrations And An Animation, Wenpei Li

Theses - ALL

The aim of this thesis is to combine my artwork with literature. The first part of the thesis is an examination of Italo Calvino’s role in 20th-century literature, Our Ancestor. The second section of the thesis explains my evolution as a creative artist. I made an animation called Drifting of A Leaf.

From 1952 to 1957, Italo Calvino published three novels: The Cloven Viscount (1952), The Baron in the Trees (1957), and The Nonexistent Knight (1959). I want to show how an illustrator thinking about this book. It is a series of 8 pieces of illustrations. In this illustration part, …

Copulas In Korean And Japanese, -I And -Da: Grammatical Categorization And Comparison On The Basis Of Morphosyntactic And Syntactic Analyses, Soyoung Kim

Theses - ALL

The behavior of the copula varies by language, and it is often considered as an arbitrary element that is language-specific. While Korean and Japanese copular constructions share many characteristics, the differences between the two languages confirms the language-specific characteristic of the copula. Through examinations and anlayses of the morphosyntactic behaviors of the copulas in Korean and Japanese such as suffixation of tense morphemes, mood morphemes, and morphological derivation/contraction, the differences and similarities between Korean and Japanese copulas are highlighted, thereby contributing to the definition and the language-specific features and parametrization of the copulas in the two languages. This thesis claims …

Security After War: A Theory Of Security Assistance And Governance In Post-Conflict States, Elise Marguerite Roberts

Dissertations - ALL

Donors have increasingly promoted the provision of security assistance to states emerging from civil war as a tool to establish peace. Driven by both security and development concerns, donors have asserted the value of this assistance to improve both the governance and effectiveness of the security sector. Despite this increase in aid, however, we know relatively little about its effects. In some cases, security assistance has promoted security force professionalization and a consolidation of peace. In others, security assistance has gone towards fueling corruption and repression, seriously jeopardizing the stability of the recipient state.

This dissertation seeks to address this …

Making Sense Of Multipolarity: Emerging Powers And Comparative Area Studies, Nora Fisher-Onar

Global Studies Faculty Publications

As the West retrenches and new powers emerge, students of international relations are well positioned to address an outstanding question: How to thrive in a multipolar world? The question—and the answers which we bring to bear—resonate beyond geopolitics. This is because the task of living together in diversity is arguably the greatest analytical as well as normative challenge facing world politics more broadly (Fisher-Onar, Pearce, and Keyman 2018).

Effective Language Teachers’ Characteristics As Perceived By English Language Private Institutes’ Administrators In Iran, Negar Yazdanipour, Mehrnoush Fakharzadeh

The Qualitative Report

Recruiting wisely from the available supply of teachers is one of the instructional roles of school administrators. Their hiring and retaining decisions, among other things, can influence learners' achievements. The number of studies examining the features of effective language teachers in the eyes of administrators is limited. Therefore, the present study was designed to examine how effective language teachers are perceived by administrators of English Private Language Institutes in Iran. To this end, 27 male and female administrators were selected and interviewed. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the narrative data. The results of coding revealed several characteristics of effective …

The Impact Of The Language Allocation Plan On Student Outcomes In Two-Way Dual Language Immersion Programs, Bonnie Sue Molina

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This quantitative study investigated the achievement in English language arts (ELA) and math of students in grades four through six in 50/50 two-way dual language immersion (DLI) programs, as measured by the Spring 2018 PARCC assessments. The study builds on previous research indicating that students in DLI programs perform as well or better than their general education counterparts, and expands on that research by investigating two DLI programs with differing language allocation plans as the program variable of interest: a weekly plan in Englewood, NJ, and a daily plan in Woodstock, IL. Linear multiple regression analysis was used to control …

Human Factors Analysis Of Marine Accidents Based On Hfacs By Nvivo, Chen Liu

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Peripheral Hearing And Central Auditory Processing Skills Of Individuals With Subjective Memory Complaints, Dona M.P. Jayakody, Holly K. Menegola, Jessica M. Yiannos, Jack Goodman-Simpson, Peter L. Friedland, Kevin Taddei, Simon M. Laws, Michael Weinborn, Ralph N. Martins, Hamid R. Sohrabi

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© Copyright © 2020 Jayakody, Menegola, Yiannos, Goodman-Simpson, Friedland, Taddei, Laws, Weinborn, Martins and Sohrabi. Purpose: This study examined the central auditory processing (CAP) assessment results of adults between 45 and 85 years of age with probable pre-clinical Alzheimer’s disease – i.e., individuals with subjective memory complaints (SMCs) as compared to those who were not reporting significant levels of memory complaints (non-SMCs). It was hypothesized that the SMC group would perform significantly poorer on tests of central auditory skills compared to participants with non-SMCs (control group). Methods: A total of 95 participants were recruited from the larger Western Australia Memory …

Exploring The Form And The Function: A Review Of Science Discourse Frameworks In The Service Of Research And Practice, Brett A. Criswell, Gregory T. Rushton, Lisa Shah

Secondary Education Faculty Publications

The importance of how classroom discourse can be used to support science learning has gained national attention with respect to both science teaching and research across K12 and higher education. In this review article, we examine a commonly referenced set of nine frameworks for use inscienceclassrooms. Specifically, we examine the ways in which various frameworks emphasize the structure (i.e.,form) or practical use (i.e.,function) of language across classroom settings, and the impact of such an emphasis on the facilitation and analysis of science classroom discourse. The findings from this review should help researchers investigate and educators facilitate classroom discourse in ways …

Who Wants In On This Linguistic Analysis?, Lane Fischer

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper brings together previous research on the Midland English dialect region construction want + [intransitive preposition] heretofore referred to as the wants in phenomenon. I will build on past research of wants in and present its construction, background, sociolinguistic relevance and will then present further questions I have about the construction, my hypotheses on these questions, and results from my own intuitions as a speaker of the Midland dialect and a linguistic survey. With reference to a similar Midland construction, need + [past participle], I ultimately propose that although these two constructions share many of the same syntactic restrictions, …

‘Gendering Objects At The V&A And Vasa Museums’, James Daybell, Svante Norrhem, Kit Heyam, Emma Severinsson

More Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Research

This article presents two case studies which are the result of an application of a gendered interpretative tool to the collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London) and the Vasa Museum (Stockholm). Objects and their gendered narratives within the museums’ collections have been researched across their lifecycle from commission and manufacture to consumption and display in a museum setting. This research has been developed in close co-operation between researchers/curators/museum professionals. It responds to a need for museums to have gender better integrated into narratives of the past and present. Transforming curatorial and curatorial practice is at the heart of …

Repairing The Teacher Pipeline For People Of Color: Three Essays On Minority Teacher Scholarships, Jeremy Landa

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite near consensus agreement about the importance of increasing the presence of teachers of color in schools, there is limited research on how public policy can solve this problem. Drawing on federal and one university’s teacher education data, this dissertation addresses whether a Minority Teacher Scholarship (MTS) can alter the labor supply of teachers of color. The first essay evaluates whether five states implementing MTS programs increase the proportion of candidates of color earning teacher education bachelor’s degrees. Using event study and difference-in-differences frameworks, I find that implementing states stabilized the share of Black candidates relative to non-implementing states, a …

What Factors Shape Doctors’ Trustworthiness? Patients’ Perspectives In The Context Of Hypertension Care In Rural Tanzania, Kahabi Isangula, Holly Seale, Rohan Jayasuriya, Tumaini M. Nyamhanga, Niamh Stephenson

School of Nursing & Midwifery, East Africa

Introduction: There is increasing evidence that improving patient trust in doctors can improve patients’ use of healthcare services, compliance and continuing engagement with care –particularly for chronic diseases. Consequently, much of the current literature on trust in therapeutic relationships focuses on factors shaping doctors’ trustworthiness. However, few studies on this issue have been conducted among rural populations in low-income Africa, where health service delivery, cultural norms and patient expectations differ from those in high-income countries. This study examined patients’ perspectives of factors that shape doctors’ trustworthiness in rural Tanzania in the context of hypertension care.

Methods: A qualitative inquiry using …

Social Media Literacy Skills Of Post Graduate Students And M.Phil Scholars Of Arts And Science Colleges Affiliated To Mother Teresa Women’S University, Kodaikanal : A Discipline Based Evaluative Study Using The Indigenous Model, Ramasamy K Dr.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The present study aimed at evaluating the information literacy skills and social media literacy skills of the post graduate students and M.Phil scholars of Arts and Science Colleges affiliated to Mother Teresa Women’s University, Kodaikanal. Out of 10 such colleges, 8 colleges were randomly selected. Questionnaires were used to collect data from the randomly drawn sample of Post graduate students and M.Phil scholars. In toto, 940 duly filled-in questionnaires were considered for the study. RPG’s 10 pillar model was used to evaluate the skills. The model was indigenously developed one by the researcher.

The science students are better skilled than …

Adapting A Picture Description Task For Grammatical Analysis In English–Spanish Bilingual Preschool Children, Vanesa Smith, Isabel Cano, Lisa Lozada, Connie Summers

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to assess the use of an adapted picture description task described by Eisenberg and Guo to explore the morphosyntactic error patterns of English–Spanish preschool simultaneous bilingual learners. Language samples were collected from 28 bilingual preschool children aged 3 to 5 years. Language samples were elicited in both English and Spanish using a series of pictures and elicitation questions/prompts. Twenty-one participants produced a language sample in only one language (16 in English and 5 in Spanish) and seven participants produced language samples in both languages. Language samples were analyzed for grammaticality and error types. There …

Virtual Reality Self-Modeling As An Intervention For Stuttering, Johanna M. Deleyer-Tiarks

Doctoral Dissertations

Virtual Reality Self-Modeling (VRSM) is a new self-modeling intervention. It is the coming together of two well established interventions, Video Self-Modeling (VSM) and virtual reality (VR) and can be described as using 360 degree VR videos, viewed through a VR system headset or smartphone, to depict individuals self-modeling a desired behavior. By using 360-degree video, individuals who watch VRSM interventions will be able to view themselves eliciting a desired behavior while feeling as if they immersed within the environment being watched. The distinction between traditional VR treatments and traditional Video Self-Modeling (VSM) treatments is that VRSM delivers both self-modeling and …

"Against The Defendant": Plea Rule's Purpose V. Plain Meaning, Nick Bell

Arkansas Law Review

Rarely is there a proverbial “smoking gun” in criminal prosecutions. Instead, prosecutors and defense attorneys must tell juries competing stories—largely from circumstantial evidence—and allow jurors to determine what happened based on inferences gleaned from argument and testimony. Naturally, this creates substantial uncertainty for both prosecutors and defendants. Instead of rolling the dice at trial, the vast majority of criminal matters are resolved through plea bargaining. Plea bargaining provides both sides with a certainty otherwise unobtainable through a traditional trial. The prosecution guarantees itself a conviction, and the defendant will often receive a lighter sentence than if he or she had …

Full Journal

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

No abstract provided.

Stories Of Community Practice, Artistic Ambivalence, And Emergent Pedagogies, Rebecca Bourgault

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

The reflections and questions discussed in the paper emerged from a teaching artist experience in community-art that led to the examination of the contrasting values between the disciplinary paradigms of social practices, community-based and participatory arts and that of the contemporary artworld aesthetics. As goals of art for social justice often contradict the perception of artistic merit based on aesthetic quality, working at the intersection of artistic creation and community development demands a shift in perspectives. The position demands going beyond one’s artistic ambivalences, to include participants in a reciprocal relationship, attentive to the fact that any goals of empowerment …

Understanding Singleness: A Phenomenological Study Of Single Women In Beijing And Singapore, Chin-Siang Ang Dr., Kam-Fong Lee Ms., Xinyi Lie Ms.

The Qualitative Report

The aim of this phenomenological study was to gain a better understanding in the lives of single women by exploring their thoughts and experiences of being single. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews of a group of six well-educated, ethnic Chinese single women aged between 30 and 45 living in Beijing and Singapore. Transcribed interviews were analysed through reading and rereading and culling for like phrases and themes that are then grouped to form clusters of meaning. Through this process, we found four salient themes: (a) the women had equivocal feelings over the reasons they were single; (b) they recognized …

Cultural Adaptations Of Evidence Based Practices In Supporting Children Diagnosed With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Krista P. James

Indigenous Studies

Research shows that early identification and intervention result in a higher quality of life and contribution to society for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). As society sees an ever-increasing percentage of individuals diagnosed with ASD, identification of culturally responsive, evidence-based practices is of critical importance. While the National Autism Center has provided a guide to evidence-based practices, minimal research has been done to determine if these practices are culturally relevant. This is a community-based formative research project. The purpose of this project was to evaluate the cultural appropriateness of the practices identified as "evidence-based practices" by the National Autism …