Education Commons^™

Harry Potter And Queering The College Classroom, Hannah Yanow

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation reimagines the college classroom through a queer pedagogical practice that, I argue, results in a queer space. Through a mixed method study that utilized duoethnography and student survey, I find that queer pedagogy, or the resistance of heteronormativity, challenging binaries, welcoming the student’s lived experience as fodder for learning academic concepts, paired with a beloved fantasy text such as Harry Potter, can be a medium with which to deconstruct the traditional college classroom and reconstruct a queer space that encourages student self-authorship and questioning of the traditional hierarchy in higher education. The data suggests that queering the college …

Promoting Tolerance Through Learning About Human Evolution And Creation Myths, Afsoon Alishahi

Doctoral Dissertations

The role that religion plays in the lives of humans is complex, contradictory, and deeply impactful. According to Allport (1979), religion has a paradoxical function in that it can either combat or contribute to prejudice. A meta-analysis by Hall, Matz, and Wood (2010) found a significant correlation between being deeply religious and having racial prejudice. Similarly, many social scientific studies since 1940 have concluded that religious individuals are more prejudiced than less religious individuals (Hunsberger & Jackson, 2005).

Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine whether gaining knowledge about human evolution, creation myths, and their relationship to religious …