Digital Commons Network^™

The Sound Of Dzongkha: Recent Changes To Its Tonal Paradigm, Qiyou (Ark) Lu , '24

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

This thesis explores the evolving phonetics and phonology of Dzongkha, a Tibetic language spoken in Bhutan, a small landlocked country in the eastern Himalayas, with a particular focus on the transformation of its tonal system over the past three decades. The country has seen noticeable changes to its official language in recent decades due to language policies and migration. This research aims to provide an updated analysis of the language's sound system based on newly collected field data.

The study covers various aspects of Dzongkha’s sound system, including its vowel and consonant inventories, phonotactics and tones. In particular, the language …

Floor Organization In Dungeons And Dragons, Arlowe E. Willingham , '24

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

The floor as a concept of conversational organization is investigated in the context of the tabletop gaming environment Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Building from Carole Edelsky’s 1981 article “Who’s Got the Floor”, I recorded and analyzed one online D&D session to explore collaborative characteristics of floor organization in a recreational, social, entertainment-focused game environment. Due to the unique power dynamic established by the role of Dungeon Master (DM) in a D&D game, a comparison is made to classroom environments to investigate similarities between the floor organization of teachers in academic settings. I observe how the environment of D&D promotes traits …

From Disembodiment To Embodiment In Artificial Intelligence And Psychology - Parallels In Thinking, Sheila L. Macrine, Jennifer M.B. Fugate

Faculty and Staff Publications

This paper briefly traces how both Computer Science and Psychology grew- in tandem- to share similar notions of Embodied Cognition. It concludes an analysis of how the two fields are uniting in their work on Embodied Artificial Intelligence, and future challenges for the field.

Implementing Equitable And Effective Practices For Dual-Identified Learners, Annelise Walsh

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

Walsh, A. (2023). Implementing Equitable and Effective Practices for Dual-Identified Learners English learners in special education make up approximately 1% of students in the United States. As the overall population of English learners rapidly increases, so does this population of dual-identified learners. Educators often do not receive adequate preparation to support dual-identified learners, and misconceptions that these students do not require services in both areas still persist in American public schools. Additionally, disproportionality of English learners in special education remains an ongoing issue. As a result, dual-identified learners are a misunderstood and underserved population. This capstone seeks to answer the …

Implement Translanguaging: Tools For Monolingual Teachers, Shana Hodel

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects

The purpose of this capstone is to provide monolingual teachers with information about the theory of translanguaging and strategies to make it an effective pedagogical tool for multilingual students. Translanguaging is the fluid language practice of multilingual people as they draw on their full linguistic repertoire to make meaning and communicate. How can monolingual English language development teachers and content teachers use translanguaging (TL) strategies competently and effectively in the classroom to help their students capitalize on their full linguistic repertoire? This paper describes both the benefits of translanguaging and the characteristics of classrooms where it is used. The resulting …

Christ As Dialogue With Culture: Reimaging The Church For Incarnational Discipleship And Ministry, Sean Sloan

Doctor of Ministry (DMin)

God spoke, and Logos created. Increased polarization and divisiveness in USAmerican society and the resulting social pain and even violence inspired this project to pursue a healthier and restorative dialogue. If God’s spoken and incarnate Word originated human life and was and is the means of redeeming humans to life with God and one another, how might such a dialogical Christology impact a theology of dialogue capable of addressing brokenness in a culture? As action research, this project tested the potential for a theology of dialogue to impact perceptions as a precursor to altering behaviors through a presentation at Calvary …

Fugitive Administrative Rhetorics, Norma Denae Dibrell, Andrew Hollinger, Maggie Shelledy

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

This article is a work in defining fugitivity in writing program administration. We return to the intersecting phenomena of the pandemic, of climate change, of state-sanctioned violence, of gerrymandering, and of stolen rights. We recognize the complicity writing programs have with this status quo, and we hope that Fugitive Administrative Rhetorics is a helpful framework for developing WPA practices that diverge from this complicity. Our writing is intended to acknowledge a deep scholarly debt within rhetoric and composition to the first fugitives of the academic space, the multiply marginalized students and faculty that built the undercommons: Black, Indigenous, Latinx, queer, …

Beyond The Binary: L1 Strategies For Spoken Non-Binary French, Kate Carlyle , '24

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

French, like other Romance languages, operates on a largely binary morphological gender system, leading to many potential linguistic complications when it is used to index social genders that fall outside of said binary (Michele 2016, Kaplan 2022). Certain morphosyntactic features of French specifically make accomplishing many non-binary (NB) marking strategies in speech all the more challenging. This paper presents an interview-based study conducted with 7 L1 French speakers living in France to assess what strategies are most commonly used in practice to describe a non-binary referent in speech. Through an elicitation exercise that prompted speakers to describe various stick figure-based …

Policy Paper Media Under Pressure: The Trouble With Press Freedom In Kenya, George Nyabuga

Graduate School of Media and Communications

Press freedom in Kenya has undergone significant changes over the past few decades. This resulted in a complex and evolving landscape, where the country boasts of a diverse and lively media landscape, with numerous newspapers, television and radio stations, and a growing online presence giving a credible impression of a plurality of perspectives and voices in the media. Further, the 2010 Kenyan Constitution is recognized as one of Africa‘s most progressive in terms of press freedom protections. It calls for an independent regulator – the Media Council of Kenya – to oversee the media and its standards and safeguard journalists‘ …

Examining Christ’S Method Of Ministering To People Using Maslow’S Hierarchy Of Needs: A Theoretical Analysis, Danie Potgieter

Journal of Adventist Mission Studies

This article seeks to view Christ’s Method through the lens of Maslow’s theory of Hierarchy of Needs. The ensuing theoretical discourse adheres to a structured framework, encompassing the following components: Introduction, Christ’s Methods as Found in Scripture, Christ’s Method as Articulated by Ellen G. White, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory, Christ’s Method and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Application and Implications, and a Concluding Section.

Comparing Agency Costs In Contract Production: Private Equity M&A Versus Corporate And Sovereign Bonds, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Learning Opportunities 2023/2024, Illinois Math And Science Academy

Course Catalogs

The graduation requirements of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy are established by the IMSA Board of Trustees. Each semester students must take a minimum of five academic courses (2.5 credits) for a letter grade (not Pass/Fail) not including Fine Arts, Wellness, SIR, Internship, and Independent Study. Students may enroll in a maximum of nine courses each semester including academic courses, Fine Arts, Wellness, SIR, Internship, and Independent Study. The College and Academic Counselor approves enrollment for students in all courses and experiences. Only courses taken for a letter grade will count towards graduation credit.

Assessing The Effectiveness Of A Transdisciplinary Culturally Relevant Stem Curriculum Intervention On High School Chemistry Students’ And Teachers’ Learning Experiences, Rachel Sparks White

Teaching & Learning Theses & Dissertations

Within traditional secondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, students in the United States and many other nations are taught and assessed in discipline-specific silos through separately required standards and skills. The integration of curriculum across the STEM disciplines is essential to increase student learning and create relevance in the classroom, yet teachers find this approach to be challenging due to the lack of resources and traditional training methods. In Spring 2023, the CReST (Culturally Relevant STEM) research team conducted a mixed methods study in a mid-Atlantic US high school using a uniquely designed transdisciplinary and culturally relevant six-instructional …

Contact Zones, Discursive Spaces: The Case Of The Silliman University National Writers Workshop, Alana Leilani C. Narciso

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

The Silliman University National Writers Workshop’s (SUNWW) historical circumstance has been implicated in the Cold War. As such it is accused of perpetuating colonial ideas on language and literary production. Its use of New Criticism is said to be detrimental to nation-building as this critical pedagogy is seen to be ahistorical and apolitical. This paper investigates the Workshop space and critiques the actual workshop discussions in the years 2019 and 2021. The explorations reveal that the Workshop is a discursive space, a “contact zone” where its participants are always engaged in the act of negotiating ideas about craft, literature and …

Building Leadership Capacity To Support International Educators: A Professional Learning Series, Amanda Hajji Minnillo

Theses and Dissertations

Due to teacher shortages, school districts across the country are hiring international educators to fill their staffing needs. This is particularly the case for world language and dual language immersion programs that seek to hire multilingual individuals. Educators who come from different countries need differentiated support in their acculturation process to the American education system. Rarely does training for instructional coaches or educational leaders provide the cross-cultural knowledge and content-specific training needed to support international educators. The purpose of this mixed-methods action research study is to understand international educators’ experiences coming to teaching in an American school district and leverage …

Critical Literacy And Student Engagement: Disrupting The Canon In The Secondary English Classroom, Katherine Burdick Ramp

Theses and Dissertations

Canonical literature is typically featured on the required texts list of secondary English classes while culturally relevant literature is frequently eschewed. Students struggle to understand and connect with the canonical literature as there are limited cultural connections that are relevant to their lives. As a result of this lack of culturally relevant literature in modern English curriculums, there has been a decrease in student engagement. The purpose of this study was to determine whether students’ engagement and their academic performance increased through the inclusion of these culturally relevant texts. Two research questions guided this study: (1) What effect does the …

Virtual Education Implementation For Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders Amidst The Covid-19 Pandemic, Monika Sinha-Bhamra

Doctor of Philosophy in Translational Health Sciences Dissertations

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures in the Washington DC metropolitan region, necessitating a shift from traditional in-person education to virtual platforms. The context was significantly influenced by the evolving pandemic and its impact on the region's COVID-19 positive rates, with the Washington DC region facing some of the highest positive rates in 2020. These escalating positive rates posed substantial challenges to planning and implementing in-person learning, primarily driven by concerns for public health and safety. The region's persistently low percentages of in-person learning made it one of the worst in the country regarding the provision of …

Towards Agile Academia: An Approach To Scientific Paper Writing Inspired By Software Engineering, Tyler Procko

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The construction of scientific papers is performed in service of the greater scientific community. This iterative process is, in effect, an academic economy, where all members benefit from well-written papers. However, many published scientific papers are poorly written; they often lack sufficient detail to allow replication, there is improper usage of citations or a lack of regard to relevant work, reporting is vague or without linked empirical data to allow verification, figures do not correspond to text or are non-sensical, literary elements, e.g., bulleted lists, are used ineffectively, formatting renders certain sections unreadable, and grammatical errors abound. The issues of …

Absolution: Divine And Human, Cathal Doherty

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

This article is a contribution to an ecumenical theology of the Word, examining how divine absolution is realized in concrete human experience. It addresses both the scriptural and sacramental mediation of divine absolution, emphasizing the commonality of both resting on the power of God's word spoken in human concrete actuality. The philosophical literature concludes that human beings, in order for forgiveness to be real to them, need to hear and know that they are forgiven. In other words, for forgiveness to be complete, the wrongdoer requires an act of “absolution” (even in a secular sense), which may be verbal or …

The Federal Rules Of Emojis: A Proposed Framework For Handling Emoji Evidence In Trial Contexts, Marilyn Hurzeler

Fordham Law Review

Emojis are 3,633 ubiquitous symbols-as-communication used by 92 percent of internet users. These tiny yet influential pieces of evidence hold the power to complete, enhance, mitigate, and flip the meaning of surrounding text. Consequently, court references to emojis have grown exponentially in the last five years. As emojis have become a cornerstone of digital discourse, courts have increasingly encountered the significant impact of emojis on parties’ legal claims. A guide for handling of emoji evidence under the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE), therefore, is important to afford proper treatment to this relatively new evidentiary form.

This Note discusses how the …

Voucher Abuse Detection With Prompt-Based Fine-Tuning On Graph Neural Networks, Zhihao Wen, Yuan Fang, Yihan Liu, Yang Guo, Shuji Hao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Voucher abuse detection is an important anomaly detection problem in E-commerce. While many GNN-based solutions have emerged, the supervised paradigm depends on a large quantity of labeled data. A popular alternative is to adopt self-supervised pre-training using label-free data, and further fine-tune on a downstream task with limited labels. Nevertheless, the "pre-train, fine-tune" paradigm is often plagued by the objective gap between pre-training and downstream tasks. Hence, we propose VPGNN, a prompt-based fine-tuning framework on GNNs for voucher abuse detection. We design a novel graph prompting function to reformulate the downstream task into a similar template as the pretext task …

Language Assessment Literacy: Thai Efl Lecturers’ Language Assessment Knowledge, Beliefs, And Practices, Pariwat Imsa-Arda, Supong Tangkiengsirisina

PASAA

Language assessment literacy (LAL) remains an uncharted area for many English language lecturers, hindering their ability to effectively bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application in language assessment within the classroom setting. This research aimed to investigate the language assessment literacy of Thai EFL university lecturers, with a focus on the reciprocal relationship between their knowledge and beliefs and their assessment practices. Employing a multistage sampling method, the study involved 152 Thai EFL university lecturers from eight public universities in Thailand. Participants completed a language assessment literacy questionnaire and assessment practice inventory. The findings indicated that the majority …

An Evaluation Of Parent Engagement Amongst Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Families Of Haitian Descent, Jeptha V. Petit Frere

Doctor of Education (Ed.D)

Empirical research on family-school partnerships highlights family engagement as a motivating force for educational success. However, the concept of family engagement is an obstacle as the notion of family-school partnerships differs amongst stakeholders. Mutual understanding of the beliefs sustaining family engagement is fundamental to building effective partnerships between educators, families, and the community. The quantitative, non-experimental study aimed to evaluate the cultural and linguistic factors that may influence parental engagement among culturally and linguistically diverse families, especially those of Haitian descent. The findings demonstrated that the study’s demographic identifier variables, such as primary language, child birthplace, parent birthplace, relationship to …

Establishing Scope And Sequence For Newcomers And English Learners, Tyler Robyn

Master's Theses & Capstone Projects

Research findings show that English Learners are the fastest growing subgroup in American public schools. It is the responsibility of the public schools to provide an appropriate and supportive education to these students. Past studies have also examined the history of English learners and the unique challenges they pose, newcomer programs, English learners’ inclusion in the mainstream classroom, and strategies for teaching English learners. With research findings in mind, a school improvement plan was created to revise a current ESL program in a rural Iowa school district to increase student achievement in language acquisition and core content knowledge. This plan …

20th Annual Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference (Program), William & Mary Law School

2023 Property Conference

No abstract provided.

Balanced Blended Space: Proposing A Universal Theoretical Framework For Combinative Reality, David Smith, Frederick Bianchi

Publications and Research

In today's fragmented societies, a unified framework for communication and collaboration across different realities is crucial. We introduce Balanced Blended Space (BBS) as a framework for describing combinative reality, encompassing virtual, physical, and conceptual realms, all intrinsically connected. Interactions within these environments shape our perceptual space. This paper outlines key axiomatic assumptions, criteria for a universal framework, and fundamental terminology. We identify deep symmetries enabling the BBS framework, including Cognitive and Computational Symmetry, Physical and Virtual Symmetry, Mediation Pathway Symmetry, Space-Time Symmetry, and Sensory Symmetry. We propose tests to determine its viability, emphasizing virtual intelligence as a collaborative partner. We …

Creating Diverse And Engaging World Language Communities With(Out) Textbooks, Lucian Rothe, Jordan Gabbard

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Textbooks have been a staple in many world language (WL) programs for decades. But how do current higher education efforts to create more diverse, equitable, and inclusive learning spaces affect the use of commercial textbooks in WL classes? This report presents how a small German program at a large metropolitan university in the Southern United States redeveloped its program goals and materials to create engaging communities, address matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and adjust program practices based on constant evaluation. In doing so, it reflects on how textbooks have (not) been able to contribute to these objectives. Implications speak …

Truth And Knowledge In A Literary Text And Beyond: Lydia Chukovskaya’S Sofia Petrovna At The Intersections Between Selves, Culture, And Paratext, Angelina Rubina

Theses and Dissertations

Although Lydia Chukovskaya’s novella Sofia Petrovna (1965) is not considered to be an autobiographical work, the life story of its protagonist, Sofia Petrovna, and the life of Lydia Chukovskaya herself have certain parallels. Chukovskaya’s very own fate, which she described in the foreword to the novella and in her other biographical works, is often viewed inseparably from the novella. However, among the many connections between the fictional fate of Sofia Petrovna and the real fate of Lydia Chukovskaya, one aspect that has not been properly explored by the critics is the “dialogue” between the author and the protagonist with respect …

The Right To Access Information On Land Recovery, Compensation, Assistance, And Resettlement: Case Study, City Of Can Tho, Vietnam, Hien Trung Phan, Hugh D. Spitzer

Articles

Land recovery in Vietnam is the process of compulsory transfer of land use rights from the hands of land users to the hands of the State by way of local government agencies. Land recovery frequently raises issues of compensation, assistance, and resettlement. It is vital for affected land users and the general public to have access to reports on land recovery, compensation, and resettlement. The article describes a limited survey of Vietnamese people whose land was subject to government recovery and evaluates their access to and understanding of information at each stage of the land recovery process. The study revealed …

Enhancing Autism Education: Exploring Interactive Videos And Ai Integration For Effective Teaching, Fatima Ahmed Alraeesi

Theses

This research focuses on enhancing autism education by integrating interactive videos and AI solutions to improve teacher training. As the number of autistic students rises, it becomes crucial for special education teachers to employ effective teaching strategies tailored to individual needs. The most effective teaching methods for autistic students involve understanding the condition and incorporating customized instruction strategies, such as adapting assignments to suit the student's needs, assisting those with difficulty speaking, and employing visual aids for better organization. The proposed solution involves utilizing interactive video technology to train teachers, bridging the gap between research and practical implementation of educational …