UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item Visualizing Active Bodies: Knowledge-Making in Visual Physical Culture(2013) Sterling, Jennifer; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Within a "world replete with images and representations" (Haraway, 1997, p. 202), visual discourses play significant roles in the ways that bodies, and in particular active bodies, are organized, represented, and experienced in society. In physical culture, visualizing practices shape ways of seeing, and being seen, through the display, and interpretation of, active bodies in a wide variety of settings. Consequently, visual discourse in physical culture takes place, and makes meaning, through a range of visual events, texts, and technologies. To explore these sources and sites for their (re)production of differentiated social positions, I examine the visualization of (im)proper, (un)healthy, and physically (in)active bodies across multiple locations. These include: 1) the exhibition of heroic sporting portraiture in Champions at the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC); 2) the gross anatomy lessons of plastinated cadavers in the Body Worlds exhibition at the Maryland Science Center (Baltimore, MD); and, 3) my commemorative, yet critical, construction of Champions All as part of the Fear the Turtle Sculpture Project at the University of Maryland (College Park, MD). Broadly located within the theoretically fluid, interdisciplinary, and multi-method project that is physical cultural studies, I utilize visual discourse analysis and (auto)ethnographic methods to examine the role of visual discourse in physical culture. In particular, I examine each of the above visual events, and their visual and interpretive texts, for their "key themes, claims to truth, their complexities, and their silences" (Rose, 2007, p. 187). In understanding what positions are being constructed, and how they are advanced, challenged, or denied, my research reveals who is rendered (in)visible, and the consequences of such (in)visibilities. Extending empirical definitions of both the visual and the physical, this research illustrates the breadth of visual physical culture and its impacts; the productive nature of visual displays and their practices; and the knowledge-making, and thus world-making, contributions of the visualization of active bodies.Item Relational Dynamics in Teacher Professional Development(2013) Finkelstein, Carla; Valli, Linda R; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Teacher professional development (PD) is considered essential to improving student achievement toward high standards. I argue that while current notions of high quality PD foreground cognitive aspects of learning, they undertheorize the influence of relational dynamics in teacher learning interactions. That is, current conceptions of high quality PD may be necessary but insufficient to engender teacher learning, and attention to relational dynamics may be essential to leveraging teachers' engagement and productive participation in learning opportunities. A review of the literature from related fields provides preliminary recommendations for addressing affective concerns and relational dynamics in learning, but extrapolation of these recommendations for PD is problematized by particular considerations of teachers as learners, including bureaucratic presses and hierarchical school contexts. A conceptual framework that incorporates power/knowledge considerations may allow for investigation of relational dynamics in PD interactions in a way that takes into account the participants' individual characteristics as well as institutional context. This study uses discourse analysis to examine interactions between three focal teachers and their PD facilitators in a science learning progressions project and a literacy coaching cycle. Examining moments of tension or questions raised by the focal teachers, my analysis finds that close attention to both verbal and nonverbal discourse moves in PD interactions illuminates the ways in which relational dynamics were consequential to the teachers' participation and can help explain the progress or lack of progress for each teacher.Item FROM INTERACTION TO INTERACTION: EXPLORING SHARED RESOURCES CONSTRUCTED THROUGH AND MEDIATING CLASSROOM SCIENCE LEARNING(2010) Tang, Xiaowei; Coffey, Janet E; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent reform documents and science education literature emphasize the importance of scientific argumentation as a discourse and practice of science that should be supported in school science learning. Much of this literature focuses on the structure of argument, whether for assessing the quality of argument or designing instructional scaffolds. This study challenges the narrowness of this research paradigm and argues for the necessity of examining students' argumentative practices as rooted in the complex, evolving system of the classroom. Employing a sociocultural-historical lens of activity theory (Engestrӧm, 1987, 1999), discourse analysis is employed to explore how a high school biology class continuously builds affordances and constraints for argumentation practices through interactions. The ways in which argumentation occurs, including the nature of teacher and student participation, are influenced by learning goals, classroom norms, teacher-student relationships and epistemological stances constructed through a class' interactive history. Based on such findings, science education should consider promoting classroom scientific argumentation as a long-term process, requiring supportive resources that develop through continuous classroom interactions. Moreover, in order to understand affordances that support disciplinary learning in classroom, we need to look beyond just disciplinary interactions. This work has implications for classroom research on argumentation and teacher education, specifically, the preparation of teachers for secondary science teaching.Item Awakening Sleeping Beauty: Promises of Eternal Youth Packaged Through Scientific Innovation(2008-10-30) smirnova, michelle hannah; Mamo, Laura; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The definition of what constitutes "healthy" aging has recently experienced a shift in emphasis from internal to external components--especially for the white, affluent, heterosexual woman. The emergence of the skincare cosmeceutical industry and its attention to aging women's bodies raises questions about the discursive logics regarding health that both produce and are produced by modern aesthetic ideals and how they have produced this emergent aesthetic component of the "life-extension project." Similar to Nikolas Rose's (2001) "will to health", I propose that ideals of health, youth and beauty have become collapsed into a civic duty of this women--the "will to youth". A discourse analysis (124 cosmeceutical advertisements from More--a niche magazine directed at 40+ women), revealed how this industry constructs the aging woman's body as pathological by invoking the idea that the fairytale dreams of Sleeping Beauty and the fountain of youth may be realized through scientific innovations, most notably the cosmeceutical.Item A Framework for Recognizing Mechanistic Reasoning in Student Scientific Inquiry(2006-11-26) Russ, Rosemary Stallings; Hammer, David; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A central ambition of science education reform is to help students develop abilities for scientific inquiry. Education research is thus rightly focused on defining what constitutes "inquiry" and developing tools for assessing it. There has been progress with respect to particular aspects of inquiry, namely student abilities for controlled experimentation and scientific argumentation. However, we suggest that in addition to these frameworks for assessing the structure of inquiry we need frameworks for analyzing the substance of that inquiry. In this work we draw attention to and evaluate the substance of student mechanistic reasoning. Both within the history and philosophy of science and within science education research, scientific inquiry is characterized in part as understanding the causal mechanisms that underlie natural phenomena. The challenge for science education, however, is that there has not been the same progress with respect to making explicit what constitutes mechanistic reasoning as there has been in making explicit other aspects of inquiry. This dissertation attempts to address this challenge. We adapt an account of mechanism in professional research science to develop a framework for reliably recognizing mechanistic reasoning in student discourse. The coding scheme articulates seven specific aspects of mechanistic reasoning and can be used to systematically analyze narrative data for patterns in student thinking. It provides a tool for detecting quality reasoning that may be overlooked by more traditional assessments. We apply the mechanism coding scheme to video and written data from a range of student inquiries, from large group discussions among first grade students to the individual problem solving of graduate students. While the primary result of this work is the coding scheme itself and the finding that it provides a reliable means of analyzing transcript data for evidence of mechanistic thinking, the rich descriptions we develop in each case study help us recognize continuity between graduate level learning and elementary school science: part of what students are able to do in elementary school finds its way to graduate school. Thus this work makes it possible for researchers, curriculum developers, and teachers to systematically pursue mechanistic reasoning as an objective for inquiry.Item Mimetischer Zauber: Die englischsprachige Rezeption deutscher Lieder in den USA, 1830-1880(2005-04-22) Hadamer, Armin Werner; Frederiksen, Elke; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The English-language reception of German songs in the United States was a textual practice that extended across many social contexts in the 19th century. Translation, adaptation and circulation of these songs were a form of rhetorical and quasi mimetic representation that helped various American discourses constitute their worlds and identities (Transcendentalism, reform movements, revivalism, education, popular culture, political parties and the Civil War). Homi Bhabha's concept of the "Third Space" is a valid approach to the reception as these discourses made German songs part of their negotiations of American national identity, class, moral values, gender, and ethnicity, thus creating their own usable as well as ambivalent German point of reference. German and American cultures did not simply coexist in symbiotic relations. Rather, as the reception shows, they constructed their identities and differences through multiple intertextual relations within a shared discursive sphere of song. Cultural transfer was thus as much an inside as an outside phenomenon. The dissertation builds on extensive archival research and a collection of several hundred German songs, each with melody and English text, ranging from the Classics, Romanticism, the Napoleonic Wars, to German, Austrian and Swiss folk songs. The main objective is to move the American reception of German songs from its hidden archival existence into the light of scholarly investigation by applying an interdisciplinary Cultural Studies approach. The dissertation uses Michel Foucault's discourse analysis to refine this approach methodologically, demonstrating with an in-depth archeology the discursive function of the songs within their contexts. Two results of this analysis are crucial. First, it goes significantly beyond the existing scholarship on German-American relations in the 19th century (New England Transcendentalists, immigrant history) as it explores the German within the wider contexts of American popular culture. Second, by doing so it reads these relations against their scholarly and collective narratives, sharing Walter Benjamin's emancipatory vision of history as a site of potentially many readings. In addition, the dissertation contributes to a broader understanding of German literature within the historical, cultural and interdisciplinary contexts of German Studies.