Place and Environment Commons^™

Neighborhood Cohesion, Neighborhood Disorder, And Cardiometabolic Risk, Jennifer N. Robinette, Susan T. Charles, Tara Gruenewald

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Perceptions of neighborhood disorder (trash, vandalism) and cohesion (neighbors trust one another) are related to residents’ health. Affective and behavioral factors have been identified, but often in studies using geographically select samples. We use a nationally representative sample (n = 9032) of United States older adults from the Health and Retirement Study to examine cardiometabolic risk in relation to perceptions of neighborhood cohesion and disorder. Lower cohesion is significantly related to greater cardiometabolic risk in 2006/2008 and predicts greater risk four years later (2010/2012). The longitudinal relation is partially accounted for by anxiety and physical activity.

Housing Diversity In Children’S Literature, Carla Earhart

Charleston Library Conference

Previous studies have examined diversity in children’s literature: Gender diversity, racial diversity, religious diversity, and diversity in family composition. This project examines an often overlooked diversity issue in children’s literature: Housing diversity. In the stories they read and the accompanying images, children need to see a variety of housing environments and need to see the settings and the people portrayed in a positive manner.

Renting an apartment is an increasingly popular housing option for many families. However, many children’s books glamorize living in a traditional house. Using a rubric designed by the course instructor, students in a university immersive learning …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

Exploring The Caregiver-Child Relationship In Institutional Care Facilities In South Sudan, Jennifer Joy Telfer

MSU Graduate Theses

Institutional care for children separated from parents is expanding in Africa, but little research exists on caregiving at these institutions. This study explores the caregiver-child relationship in two residential institutions in South Sudan by investigating how caregivers experience their role and how children experience their lives in the institution. Semi- structured interviews assessed 14 caregivers’ backgrounds, parenting experience, attitudes, education, and motivations. The Orphans and Vulnerable Children Wellbeing Tool (OWT) assessed 98 adolescent residents, who also gave feedback about their answers. Caregivers employ parenting styles used by their parents and report treating non-relative children the same as biological children. Children …

Dobrodošli: Sensitivity In Learning And Ee, Rachel A. Gugich

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Rachel Anne Gugich defines herself as a superhero. In this speech, Rachel described how being an introvert gives her a “superhuman sensitivity” to her surroundings and work. She hopes to continuously create educational opportunities where students can each bring their own powers for the betterment of learning.

Not My Story: Honoring Diversity Through Multicultural Environmental Education, Kelly M. Sleight

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Kelly Marie Sleight’s presentation had us participants sitting at tables filled with crafting supplies. While some of us started to paint, knit and mold Kelly explained that Multicultural Environmental Education seeks to make an atmosphere where every student can succeed. One of her largest challenges in class is the need for constant hand movement. Without that, she cannot focus. Her personal solution is to knit. Kelly sees the marriage between multicultural and environmental education having students of various backgrounds engaged in many different and unique ways.

Perceptions In (Outdoor) Education: Using Openness And Vulnerability As Learning Tools, Kevin E. Sutton

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

In this presentation Kevin discusses the “masks” that we all wear and how outdoor education can be a tool to help empower people to take control of the masks they wear each day. Examples of masks include proficiency, extraversion and stubbornness.

Dividing By Too: Extremophilia And Environmental Education, Petra D. Lebaron-Botts

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Words do not stand alone. As humans we make meaning of language and have the choice to wield it as a tool of inclusivity and justice, or as a tool of division and subjugation. To that end, language should be used with thought and intention. This paper examines the word “too” and its place in interpersonal and intrapersonal power struggles. “Too” has an inherently anthropocentric bias and serves to separate us from each other and from the natural world. Environmental education also suffers from “too,” but there exists the potential for the field to be bolstered by it instead. If …

Embodied Inner-Knowing, Chelsea E. Ernst

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Our bodies are ecosystems that are just as profound as the complex communities and systems of the forests that surround us here in the Pacific Northwest. Awareness of our bodies as systems and as intuitive beings can facilitate our positive actions towards each other and the environment. Tonight I will provide space for us to explore this awareness through mindfulness practice, storytelling with words, and storytelling with movement. I hope that these practices will lead to more mindfulness of the way we are in the world and of the ways that the systems of somatics, the brain-gut connection, storytelling, ecosystems, …

Awakening To Place, Lauren Ridder

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

I had such a rich, transformative experience in the North Cascades because I was awakening to the teachers all around me and intentionally tuning into the lessons that they had to give. I would like to share my process of awakening with you and provide a space for reflection on your other-than-human teachers. I encourage you to carry those lessons with you and take note of how your teachers influence your life on multiple scales. Awakening to my other-than-human teachers enriched my life. Reminders to be flexible, yet strong and to laugh and be silly shifted my perspective on the …

All My Relations: The Journey Of Discovering My Ecological Identity, Mike Rosekrans

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Everyone has a story to tell; a story about their journey, about their struggles, about discovering themselves, and about how they became who they are as a person. A person’s journey may help explain how one forms their identity and perceives themselves. That journey may include: values, beliefs, attitudes, hobbies, spiritual paths, or profound inspirations that have helped shape and giving meaning to a person’s life. This script is such a story. It is a story about how I became a more confident, complete person dedicated to protecting and preserving the natural world. This occurred while seeking inspiration and solace …

All It Contains: Biblical Perspectives On Environmental Care, Gavin Willis

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

TBD

Root.Ed: A Story That Reconnects, Liz Blackman

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

This paper seeks to examine grief and despair as entry points toward compassion and environmental renewal. When sharing our own stories of grief and healing we access our deep roots as communities of interconnected Beings and find our way to Active Hope. Ecological grief plays a critical role in the environmental destruction of our time and by interrogating our own death denial and despair paradigms through communal story- sharing we can move away from apathy and toward more impactful environmental education. Below I share my own Root.ED journey from interconnection through grief to healing and compassionate renewal and how the …

Girls Are Us: A Collection Of Oral Histories From The Jmu Community, Anne M. Sherman

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

On a campus where women make up a majority of the student population, it is especially important that female voices are heard and given a platform on which they can control their own narrative. I wanted to give those female-identifying voices that platform. I conducted a series of interviews to examine how college-aged female-identifying students feel about their identity and how they construct that identity within the climate of the JMU community. I was particularly interested in the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual preference, and ability. I asked each person to share their stories of times when they …

Factors In Public School Settings That Result In Teacher Agency, Jessica Hadid

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

A quality system for educating a nation’s youth depends upon a teaching force that continually learns, and applies its learning outcomes to active problem solving and development. Many current school and district models minimize teacher ability to engage in meaningful change, ultimately undermining the teachers’ sense of personal and professional agency. Literature suggests that internal forms of motivation are likely to result in the development of agency via self-determination of actions and behaviors. This mixed methods study examined five public schools in a small K-12 district through the lens of self-determination theory. An initial set of quantitative data were collected …

“Good Guys Do Rape”: An Examination Of College Student Perceptions Of Sexual Assault Perpetrators, Taylor Blythe Martinez

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

When people think of a typical sexual assault, they rely heavily on preconceived notions of sexual violence, which often represents stereotypical rape scenarios. Many stereotypical depictions of perpetrators tend to be centered around individuals who are strangers, mentally ill, lonely, with poor or impoverished upbringing. How perpetrators and victims are depicted impact the likelihood of others believing victims and attributing guilt to perpetrators. This may contribute to societal endorsement of acquaintance rape as not real compared to stereotypical rape scenarios. The current study examines how college students, and in particular fraternity men and sorority women, view perpetrators of sexual assault. …

A Retro Development In Education: Evaluating The Feasibility Of Integrating Place-Based Education Into Mississippi Curriculum Standards, Colby K. Mcclain

Honors Theses

This thesis evaluates the feasibility of integrating place-based environmental education activities from Think Green, Take Action: Books and Activities for Kids into the Mississippi Department of Education’s (MDE) Frameworks for Science and Social Studies for K-5. As children develop and experience the world, their ability to understand and interpret the surrounding environments expand; however, Mississippi schools are not focused on experiential environmental education, even though experiencing and understanding the surrounding environment is vital in fostering eagerness to learn. Due to a growing disconnect between humans and the natural world, this thesis examined 37 place- and environment-based activities for children, sixteen …

I Share, Therefore It's Mine, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Alone Together, Evelyn F. Saleh Ms.

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Human Migration And Health: A Case Study Of The Chinese Rural-To-Urban Migrant Population, Leah C. Pinckney

Student Publications

Human migration is a complex, ancient process driven by a variety of social, political, and economic factors. Modern migrants and their families are often compelled to migrate voluntarily in pursuit of new opportunities for study or work and, in extreme circumstances, involuntarily for safety and survival. Chinese domestic migrant populations were mobilized with China’s early 1980s economic reform, which enabled rapid economic development largely dependent on urban factories. While this massive influx of young people predominantly from rural locales to urban locales seeking opportunity enabled China’s rise as a world power, their move not only marked changing internal labor patterns …

Remembering Negdels: Nostalgia, Memory & Soviet-Era Herding Collectives, Maya Sutton-Smith

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

During the socialist period Mongolia’s nomadic herders were grouped into collective herding units called negdels. Today, over twenty years after Mongolia transitioned to democracy, herding has been privatized completely and negdels are a distant memory. This study explores the history of negdels by conducting twenty-five oral interviews with herders about their memories of collective herding. This study focuses on a soum in the Mongolian countryside, Bayandelger, while also incorporating interviews with people from Ulaanbaatar. Bayandelger is a unique location for this project because it was selected by the Soviets to receive assistance in an effort to make it a model …

Analysis Of Worcester's Youth Employment Sector, Laurie Ross Phd, Ramon Borges-Mendez Phd, Alex Rothfelder

Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise

Overall, the employment rate for Worcester youth has improved since 2000; yet mirroring the nation, Worcester continues to have a smaller share of youth 16-24 employed. This situation is intensified for youth of color and young people facing barriers such as homelessness, exiting foster care, juvenile justice involvement, and limited English proficiency. Mass, Inc. estimates that in Worcester there are 3400 disconnected youth—756 are between 16-19 and 2644 are between 20-24. From the youth employment program inventory, we learned that the city’s programs offer many opportunities for “first job” experiences; has some exemplary programs that integrate youth development and workforce …

To Work More Or Less? The Impact Of Taxes And Life Satisfaction On The Motivation To Work In Continental And Eastern Europe, Orkhan Nadirov, Khatai Aliyev, Bruce Dehning

Accounting Faculty Articles and Research

Using country-level data from 2000-2013, we test the relationship between life satisfaction (measured as how people evaluate their life as a whole rather than their current feelings) and the motivation to work (measured as aggregate hours of work). Our hypothesis is that even after controlling for average labor income tax rates in countries with high and low average hours worked, there is a significant negative association between the motivation to work and life satisfaction. The main findings of this paper are that the increase in the motivation to work per employee comes at the expense of life satisfaction, and differences …

“I Wonder What You Think Of Me”: A Qualitative Approach To Examining Stereotype Awareness In Appalachian Students, Chelsea G. Adams

Theses and Dissertations--Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology

Historically, Appalachia has been stereotyped as being a culture bred in poverty and ignorance. Much research has shown that stereotyping reveals a pattern of behavioral change and an impact on psychological well-being for the stereotyped (e.g., Pinel, 1999; Woodcock, Jernandez, Estrada, & Schultz, 2012), and has largely been centered on race and gender (e.g., Byrnes, 2008; Tuckman & Monetti, 2011). Less is known about the development of culture-specific stereotypes such as those related to Appalachians – a highly stigmatized group (Daniels, 2014; Otto, 2002). The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of how adolescents in rural Appalachia …

The [E]Motionless Body No Longer: Tracing The Historical Intersections Of Mental Illness And Movement In The American Asylum, Holly Adele Herzfeld

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

Happiness Index Methodology, Laura Musikanski, Scott Cloutier, Erica Bejarano, Davi Briggs, Julia Colbert, Gracie Strasser, Steven Russell

Journal of Sustainable Social Change

The Happiness Index is a comprehensive survey instrument that assesses happiness, well-being, and aspects of sustainability and resilience. The Happiness Alliance developed the Happiness Index to provide a survey instrument to community organizers, researchers, and others seeking to use a subjective well-being index and data. It is the only instrument of its kind freely available worldwide and translated into over ten languages. This instrument can be used to measure satisfaction with life and the conditions of life. It can also be used to define income inequality, trust in government, sense of community and other aspects of well-being within specific demographics …