UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item THE IMPACT of PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT ON DEMOCRATIC VALUES: EVIDENCE FROM US EDUCATION(2022) Han, Xu; Egan, Toby M; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although performance management is supposed to be a generic, values-neutral tool that can be adapted for any purpose, it has been criticized for ignoring important democratic values. Critics claim that violating these democratic values makes performance management counterproductive to the stated aim of restoring public trust in government through improved outcomes. This dissertation comprehensively examines the impact of performance management on equity and civic engagement in U.S public high schools. Performance management may incentivize prioritizing high-value students who are more likely to contribute to school performance ranking at the expense of others, creating an inequity problem. However, it can also promote the well-being of disadvantaged groups by providing incentives and information on improvement in disaggregated performance. Performance management may draw resources and attention to activities aiming to improve students’ academic performance in high-stakes subjects (reading, math, and science) at the expense of other important activities where students develop skills in and interests for civic engagement. However, activities aiming to improve students' academic performance also prepare students to perform tasks such as reading, writing, speaking, and quantitative reasoning, integral parts of civic engagement. To conduct the analysis, the dissertation draws on a nationally representative survey of administrators and students at public high schools. As students’ academic performance is the result of collaborative efforts among students and staff (teachers and principals), performance management is operationalized for students and staff respectively. The student component includes established student performance standards, frequency of standardized testing, and imposed consequences. The staff component includes principals’ managerial autonomy, teachers’ evaluation, and imposed consequences. Through a multilevel analysis of how performance management influences students, especially for racial minorities’ standardized test scores in math, findings point to an unfilled promise regarding equity. Performance management components for students and staff are each associated with increased average student test scores, but do not shrink the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged student subgroups. Still, not all aspects of performance management perpetuate inequity. Of the two performance management components focusing on staff and students, the staff component is associated with lower test scores for struggling students while the student component increases struggling student performance. By simultaneously analyzing the indirect effects of performance management on volunteering behaviors through cognitive abilities, civic skills, and civic norms in structural equation modeling, the dissertation finds mixed effects of performance management on civic engagement. On the one hand, the student component has a positive but small indirect effect on civic participation by improving students’ cognitive abilities. On the other hand, the staff component has a negative but small indirect effect by reducing students’ participation in extracurricular activities where they develop civic skills. However, the student component does not negatively affect civic engagement. Overall, the findings suggest that despite the negative effects of performance management on equity and civic engagement, performance management can be used to mitigate inequity and reverse the recent decline in civic engagement.Item Reckoning with Freedom: Legacies of Exclusion, Dehumanization, and Black Resistance in the Rhetoric of the Freedmen's Bureau(2017) Lu, Jessica H.; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Charged with facilitating the transition of former slaves from bondage to freedom, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (known colloquially as the Freedmen’s Bureau) played a crucial role in shaping the experiences of black and African Americans in the years following the Civil War. Many historians have explored the agency’s administrative policies and assessed its pragmatic effectiveness within the social, political, and economic milieu of the emancipation era. However, scholars have not adequately grappled with the lasting implications of its arguments and professed efforts to support freedmen. Therefore, this dissertation seeks to analyze and unpack the rhetorical textures of the Bureau’s early discourse and, in particular, its negotiation of freedom as an exclusionary, rather than inclusionary, idea. By closely examining a wealth of archival documents— including letters, memos, circular announcements, receipts, congressional proceedings, and newspaper articles—I interrogate how the Bureau extended antebellum freedom legacies to not merely explain but police the boundaries of American belonging and black inclusion. Ultimately, I contend that arguments by and about the Bureau contributed significantly to the reconstruction of a post-bellum racial order that affirmed the racist underpinnings of the social contract, further contributed to the dehumanization of former slaves, and prompted black people to resist the ongoing assault on their freedom. This project thus provides a compelling case study that underscores how rhetorical analysis can help us better understand the ways in which seemingly progressive ideas can be used to justify exercises of power and domination. Additionally, this interpretation of the Bureau’s primary role as a mechanism of supervision, rather than support, sheds light on the history of unjust practices that persist today in American race relations. Finally, this study affirms how black people have persevered in inventive and innovative ways to disrupt the pervasive discourse that seeks to destroy them.Item INVENTING AND DELIVERING THE WOMAN CITIZEN: SUSAN B. ANTHONY’S EXTEMPORANEOUS SPEAKING AS A PERFORMANCE OF CITIZENSHIP IN SERVICE OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE(2017) Styer, Meridith Irene; Maddux, Kristy; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Susan B. Anthony became the face of the woman suffrage movement as she traveled across the country speaking and organizing. Anthony began speaking extemporaneously in 1857 and embraced the conversational and immediate performance that remained her dominant practice through her public career. This project examines how Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking functioned as a performance of citizenship in service of her arguments for women’s rights and woman suffrage during three periods of the nineteenth century. My research suggests both theoretical and methodological challenges of studying nineteenth-century extemporaneous rhetoric. I also discuss the problems associated with extemporaneous speaking in a movement for social change and engage the theoretical bounds of how citizenship can be performed rhetorically when liberal and republican citizenship status are denied based on an individual’s identity. The first period includes Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking within the social and religious upheaval of the Burned-over District of Upstate New York before and during the Civil War (1849-1864). My analysis suggests that Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking used a millennial and prophetic invention and delivery that derived from what I call the genre of Burned-over District rhetorical culture. Drawing upon this tradition allowed Anthony to speak persuasively to Burned-over District audiences but rendered her message inaccessible to the policy makers in Albany and Washington D.C. The second case examines Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking during Reconstruction (1865-1874). Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking functioned as a performance of citizenship that both constituted women as equal citizens and provided the impetus for national-level politicians and state legislatures to codify the cultural assumptions of male-gendered citizenship into policy language that excluded women from democratic citizenship rights. The third case examines how Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking functioned as a performance of “character citizenship” during the final years of her professional career in the context of the Gilded Age (1875-1906). Character citizenship manifested in that era as a way to define who was or could be a good American through the lens of gendered, middle-class, white, Protestant values. Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking functioned to frame her as a laudable woman of character who was a respectable authority on the topic of woman suffrage.Item Too Much to Belong: Latina/o Racialization, Obesity Epidemic Discourse, and Unassimilable Corporeal Excess(2016) Griff, Ellen Cassandra; Paoletti, Jo B; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines the discursive constructions of Latina/o bodies as excessive in order to examine how Latinas/os are excluded from belonging to the U.S. nation-state. By approaching Latina/o Studies from a Fat Studies perspective, it works to more adequately address the role of embodiment in determining processes of racialization that directly impact Latinas/os in the United States, especially in light of the role of race and racism in “obesity epidemic” discourse. This dissertation argues that cultural and even physiological explanations about the Latina/o propensity for “overweight” and “obesity” create a discourse that marks the Latina/o body as demonstrating an unassimilable corporeal excess. In turn, the rhetoric of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” are rendered inapplicable to Latinas/os, as demonstrated by both nativist and seemingly pro-immigrant discourses that posit Latina/o physical excess in the form of fatness as detrimental and even dangerous to the U.S. nation-state.Item Inappropriate(d) Literatures of the United States: Hegemonic Propriety and Postracial Racialization(2014) Dykema, Amanda; Chuh, Kandice; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The rise of multiculturalism and its impact on the U.S. academy reached its peak at the end of the twentieth century. Since then the rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism that valorized diversity has largely given way to a neoliberal multiculturalism that celebrates postracialism as a means to dismantle the institutional programs and critical discourses that took racial difference as their starting point. Yet the racially inflected demarcations between positions of privilege and positions of stigma that have historically characterized the U.S. nation-state remain intact. In this context, how do we read race in contemporary literature by U.S. ethnic writers when celebrations of colorblindness dominate public discourse? As a repository for what Foucault has called subjugated knowledges, minoritized literatures hold the potential to de-naturalize the neoliberal status quo, critique the academic discourse that surrounds it, and engage with the political economy within which it is produced. This project argues that the institutional work of disciplining minority subjects--once openly performed by racialization in a way no longer possible under neoliberal multiculturalism--has been continued in part by political, social, and economic forces I group under the umbrella term propriety. I expose how the designation "appropriate" becomes a prerequisite for political recognition and representation, analyzing representative political texts that are fundamental to contemporary definitions of minority subjects alongside national and literary-critical genealogies of discourses of difference. I argue that attachments to values and forms explicitly identified as "appropriate" conceal and maintain race-based hierarchies characteristic of U.S. national identity formation. In response, I theorize inappropriateness as a category of political and literary representation for exploring questions of visibility and enfranchisement central to the national narrative of the United States. Inappropriateness is a political and aesthetic movement that deploys subjects and forms often denounced as improper to the contemporary era. Inappropriate aesthetic works are those which attempt to distinguish difference from "diversity," influence minority subject formation, and shape knowledge production in ways that are counter to the objectives of neoliberal multiculturalism. Four chapters establish a taxonomy of the ways inappropriateness operates: formally, corporeally, nationally, and historically.Item "Nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer": Portrayals of Masculinity and Ideal Citizenship in World War II Combat Films, 1989-2001(2013) Cerullo, Michelle; Giovacchini, Saverio; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Traditional platoons of World War II combat films were visualizations of an America that could be, rather than a reflection of the America that was. One might assume that, had the trend toward inclusive representation continued, the World War II combat platoons of the films of the 1990s might have included women or homosexuals, since the military of the 1990s was fully integrated on a racial front. Instead platoons' compositions remained unchanged. And in this new context, rather than acting out of a desire to expand the terms of citizenship, these movies represent a closing off of the terms of citizenship. In the face of demands for a change in the terms of civic participation from women, from homosexuals, from disabled citizens, these movies represent a vision of a shared past that is easier than the one currently inhabited by viewers. What does it mean that this period, out of all the periods in the history of the United States is the one that is deemed most worthy of celebration?Item Difficulties in Loyalism After Independence: The Treatment of Loyalists and Nonjurors in Maryland, 1777-1784(2009) Nath, Kimberly; Ridgway, Whitman; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the difficulties the Maryland legislature encountered with Loyalists and nonjurors after independence. It follows how the legislation passed by the Patriot controlled legislature was implemented from 1777 to 1784. The Maryland legislature first passed legislation to identify those not supporting the American Revolution, mainly the Loyalists and nonjurors. This thesis explores the identification process and then the punitive measures, such as British property confiscation and treble taxes, taken by the legislature. This thesis argues that Patriots succeeded in identifying Loyalists, but struggled to seize all British property and failed to generate vast amounts of revenue.Item From "Quare" to "Kweer": Towards a Queer Asian American Critique(2009) Sapinoso, J. Valero (JV); King, Katie R.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)It is insufficient to think of multiple dimensions of difference in merely some additive fashion--what is needed is a fundamentally different approach. E. Patrick Johnson and Roderick A. Ferguson, respectively, offer such approaches as well as inspiration for this dissertation. More specifically, they posit interventions into queer theorizing and queer studies that attempt to disrupt the (over-)emphasis on whiteness and instead turn the focus to racialized subjectivities. The centrality of African American racial formations in their queer of color critique, however, must be taken into account. Given the vastly different histories between African American and Asian American racial formations, including, but not limited to the ways in which these racial groups have historically been pitted against one another (for the betterment of privileged whites), it is especially important that we consider how the specificities of Asian American subjects and subjectivities might account for distinct queer of color critiques. At the heart of my dissertation is the movement towards a queer Asian American critique, or "kweer studies," that directs attention to nationality and national belonging as a way of expanding beyond the black/white binary which currently predominates. In particular, the key components of nationality and national belonging for queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities that my study foregrounds are cultural, political, and legal citizenship. To this end my dissertation asks, what is needed to imagine and entrench understandings of queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities that are not rendered as alien, always already foreign, or simply invisible within discourses of cultural, political, and legal citizenship? Specifically, through participant observation, critical legal theory, and textual analysis I investigate kinging culture and discourses of U.S. immigration, revealing limits of existing formations that, respectively, have naturalized blackness as the sole focus of queer of color critique, and have narrowly sought queer immigration through seeking asylum and recognition of same-sex partnerships for family reunification, in order to posit a queer of color critique that helps imagine and create more expansive formations and better accounts for the material existence of a fuller range of queer bodies of various colors.Item Beyond Cynicism: How Media Literacy Can Make Students More Engaged Citizens(2008-04-22) Mihailidis, Paul; Moeller, Susan D.; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Beyond Cynicism: How Media Literacy Can Make Students More Engaged Citizens explores what media literacy courses actually teach students. Do students become more knowledgeable consumers of media messages? Do students, armed with that knowledge, become more engaged citizens? A large multi-year study found that classes in media literacy do seem to make students more knowledgeable about media messages--but also found that the increase in students' analytical abilities does not perforce turn them into citizens who understand and support media's essential role in civil society. This dissertation used a sample of 239 University of Maryland undergraduates in a pre-post/control quasi-experiment, the largest-ever study of this kind on the post-secondary level. The study did find that the students enrolled in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism's J175: Media Literacy course increased their ability to comprehend, evaluate, and analyze media messages in print, video, and audio format. Based on the positive empirical findings, focus group sessions were conducted within the experimental group and the control group. The students from the media literacy course expressed their belief that media literacy education enable them to "look deeper" at media, while feeling more informed in general. Yet, when the discussions concerned media relevance and credibility, the students who so adamantly praised media literacy, expressed considerable negativity about media's role in society. Preliminarily, these findings suggest that media literacy curricula and readings which are solely or primarily focused on teaching critical analysis skills are inadequate. Critical analysis should be an essential first step in teaching media literacy, but the curriculum should not end there. Beyond Cynicism: How Media Literacy Can Make Students More Engaged Citizens concludes by recommending a way forward for post-secondary media literacy education. Beyond Cynicism offers a new curricular framework that aims to connect media literacy skills and outcomes that promote active citizenship. With a greater understanding of the limitations of teaching students to be cynics, university faculty can adapt their courses to give students not just analytical and evaluative tools to critique media, but a focused understanding of why a free and diverse media is essential to civil society.Item Fueling the Fire: A Phenomenological Exploration of Student Experiences in Democratic Civic Education(2006-11-28) Paoletti Phillips, Donna Teresa; Hultgren, Francine; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores the lived experience of civic education for middle school students. It is grounded in the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology as guided by Heidegger (1962), Gadamer (1960/2003), Casey (1993), and Levinas (1961/2004), among others. I use van Manen's (2003) framework for conducting research for action sensitive pedagogy in which I follow six tenets including turning to the nature of lived experience, investigating experience as we live it, hermeneutic phenomenological reflection and writing, maintaining a strong and oriented relation and balancing the research context by considering parts to whole. By calling forth the philosophical and methodological tenets of hermeneutic phenomenology, I endeavor to uncover the lived experience of civic education as well as what it means to be a teacher as civic education. A class of twenty-nine students are taped as they engage in discussions, debates, a Simulated Congressional Hearing, and other lessons related to civic education in a social studies class. Their reflective writing about their learning is used as well. Twelve students self-select to engage in conversations about their experiences. These conversations along with the taped class sessions are transcribed and used to uncover themes essential to their experience of civic education in the social studies classroom. Two central existential themes of lived body and lived relation emerge from this inquiry. The importance of embodying one's learning, as well as connecting to one's society, are apparent. When they are face-to-face with the Other in group activities, debates, games, and simulations, students are afforded the opportunity to experience what is fundamental in a democracy, including their ethical and moral obligation to the Other. The students' learning through their corporeal and relational experience create the civil body politic of the classroom and inform their behavior outside in society. These insights from this study may inform curriculum theorists and developers, policy-makers, and social studies teachers. Recommendations are made to reconceptualize social studies in order for students to capitalize on their bodily and relational experiences within the classroom so that they may grow in their role as citizen. Students may then embody the ideals essential in civic education and democratic societies.