Browsing by Subject "discourse"
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Item Adult education, popular culture, and women's identity development: self-directed learning with The Avengers(2009-06-02) Wright, Robin RedmonThe purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of popular culture, especially prime-time television, on women learner-viewers? identity development. More specifically, this study explores one specific television show, the 1962-64 Cathy Gale episodes of The Avengers as a portal to adult learning. It further explores the ways in which television, as a form of public pedagogy, can help facilitate the formation of a critical or feminist identity among adult learner viewers. The research questions guiding this study were: 1) How and what did women learn from watching The Avengers? 2) How did women incorporate that learning into their lives and into their identities? and 3) How did women interpret and accommodate the feminist example of Cathy Gale? Data for this study was collected over a two-and-a-half year period. Data consisted of interviews with contemporaneous viewers of the Cathy Gale Avengers episodes, interviews with scriptwriters and the actor who played Cathy Gale, Honor Blackman, numerous documents from statistics obtained at the British Film Institute, fanzines, and newspaper articles of the period. Analysis revealed that in particular historical times and situations television viewing can become a form of public pedagogy, facilitating transformational learning in adult viewers that produces lasting, life-changing effects. The investigation revealed that not only did biologically-born women incorporate Cathy Gale?s feminist example into their identities and actions, but biologically born males whose core gender identity was female did also. This dissertation is written in article format. Each of the six sections has been designed as stand-alone pieces to aid accessibility and enhance readers? engagement with the study.Item Deep Frames, White Men's Discourse, and Black Female Bodies(2012-02-14) Slatton, Brittany C.In this qualitative study, I examine the persistent trend of black women as an excluded relationship partner for white men. Integral to understanding the exclusion of black women as relationship partners is the construction of black female bodies, by influential white men historically and contemporarily, as the abject opposite of hegemonic femininity, which holds "middle-class, heterosexual, [w]hite femininity" as the norm (Collins 2005:193). This construction essentially places black women outside the bounds of hegemonic femininity, beauty, sexuality, and womanhood. Using the theoretical concept deep frame, which is the "conceptual infrastructure of the mind" (Lakoff 2006a:12) and representative of one's commonsense world view, I argue that the ways in which influential white men have constructed black female bodies is a critical component of the raced, gendered, and classed deep frame of white men. This deep frame undergirds how many white men perceive, interpret, understand, emote, and engage in actions where black women are concerned. Hence in this study, I qualitatively examine, through analyzing and interpreting the in-depth online questionnaires of 134 white male respondents, how the deep frame of white men affects how they perceive black women and ultimately the relationships they seek with black women. The results of the study show that many white male respondents, despite most having very limited or no personal interactions with black women, viewed black women through the one-dimensional lens of the raced, gendered, and classed deep frame. Many respondents perceived black women as unattractive unless capable of a white normative standard, as possessing a negative "black" culture, and as possessing negative and "unfeminine" attributes that make them complicit in their own rejection. These findings show how the deep frame disciplines white men to view black women as "out of bounds" as legitimate relationship partners, and disciplines the types of relationships they seek with black women. The results of this study also reveal that the conceptual approach of deep frame rooted in an understanding of the power of influential white men to control and construct society provides a theoretical alternative to the outmoded interracial marriage theories of caste and exchange.Item Defining a changing world: the discourse of globalization(Texas A&M University, 2004-09-30) Teubner, GillianGlobalization has, within academic, political and business circles alike, become a prominent buzzword of the past decade, conjuring a diversity of associations, connotations and attendant mythologies. The literature devoted to the issue of globalization is both vast in scope and diverse in nature, becoming increasingly prominent not only in academics and politics, but in the popular press, as well. The goal of this dissertation is to provide the reader with a map of themes, narratives, and characterizations related to globalization circulating in the United States in order to demonstrate the potential ways that individual thought on the issue is shaped by public discourse. A secondary goal is to critically examine specific texts to identify areas where their arguments overlap, conflict, or may be misconstrued due to weak or inaccurate evidence. By better understanding the map of rhetorical formations in widely-read texts regarding globalization, it may be possible for people to be better able to understand the concerns and intentions of those voicing various and often competing viewpoints.Item Teacher questioning: effect on student communication in middle school algebra mathematics classrooms(Texas A&M University, 2007-09-17) Matthiesen, Elizabeth AprillaThis study investigates the components within teacher questioning and how they affect communication within the mathematics classroom. Components examined are the type of question, the amount of wait time allowed, the use of follow-up questions, and the instructional setting. The three types of questions analyzed in this study were highorder, low-order, and follow-up questions. High-order questions are defined as questions which promote analysis, synthesis or evaluation of information versus low-order questions which only seek procedural or knowledge of basic recall of information. The third type of question, follow-up, is the second question asked of a student when the initial question is not answered or answered incorrectly. This study observed video of three teachers from three different adjacent school districts. Upon watching three lessons of each teacher and recording data, conclusions were made. All three teachers were found to use low-order questions at least 50% of the time during instruction. Wait time following high-order questions met the minimum three second time as suggested from previous researchers. Follow-up questions were found to occur more frequently after high-order questions, but followed similar trends as stated above related to the type of question asked. Instructional setting does differ in the types of questions asked with a small group setting more likely to elicit high-order questions than a whole group setting. The researcher concluded that high-order questions with a minimum of three seconds wait time in a small group setting encourage communication within the mathematics classroom.Item The Achievement Gaps and Mathematics Education: An Analysis of the U.S. Political Discourse in Light of Foucault's Governmentality(2013-08-06) Indiogine, Salvatore Enrico PaoloThe research question that I posed for this investigation is how the principles of Foucault?s governmentality can shed light on the political discourse on the achievement gaps (AGs) at the federal level. The AGs have been for some years now an actively researched phenomenon in education in the U.S. as well as in the rest of the world. Many in the education profession community, politicians, social activists, researchers and others have considered the differences in educational outcomes an indication of a grave deficiency of the educational process and even of the society at large. I began this work with a review of the educational research relevant to the above mentioned research question. Then I presented my research methodology and de- scribed how obtained my data and analyzed them both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results of the analysis were discussed in the light of federal legislation, the work of Foucault on governmentality, and the relevant literature and woven into a series of narratives. Finally, I abstracted these narratives into a model for under- standing the federal policy discourse. This model consists of an intersection of eight antitheses: (1) the rgime of discipline versus the apparatuses of security, (2) the appeal to danger versus assurances of progress or even success, (3) the acknowledgement of the association between the AGs and the ?disadvantage? of the students and the disregard and even prohibition of the equalization of school funding, (4) the desire for all students to be ?equal,? but they have to be dis-aggregated, the (5) injunction of research based instruction practices imposed by an ideology-driven reform policy, (6) we expect equal outcomes by using market forces, which are known to produce a diversity of results, (7) the teacher is a ?highly qualified? professional, but also a functionary of the government, and finally (8) the claim to honor local control and school flexibility versus the unprecedented federalization and bureaucratization of the schools, which is a mirror of the contrast between the desire to establish apparatuses of security in schools and the means to establishing them through rgimes of discipline.Item The time course of discourse priming in the interpretation of conceptual combinations(Texas A&M University, 2006-10-30) Sappington, Randy EarlPeople often create novel lexical expressions to efficiently communicate their thoughts to others. Noun-noun phrases, also known as conceptual combinations, serve as an example of these novel expressions. Most of the research on conceptual combination has focused on structural features of the phrases. However, other research has demonstrated that discourse context can also influence how these phrases are interpreted. Across two experiments, we demonstrate that discourse context has a greater influence on how people interpret these combinations than does a structural level manipulation. We also examine the strength of this contextually based-effect over a series of time delays. The findings from this study indicate that, while structural features of a given conceptual combination influence how that combination is interpreted, the discourse surrounding the novel combination plays a more influential role in the resulting interpretation. The influence of context is more pronounced than has been suggested in much of the research on conceptual combination.