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.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2010 - 20153

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    TRANSPARENCY AND TRUST IN JOURNALISM: AN EXAMINATION OF VALUES, PRACTICES AND EFFECTS
    (2015) Koliska, Michael; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Journalism scholars and practitioners have repeatedly argued that transparency is crucial to generate trust in the news media, which, over the years, has faced continues decline in public trust. As news organizations have been encouraged to implement transparency in their daily work, transparency has increasingly gained the status of a professional norm in journalism. However, very little is actually known about how journalists think and apply transparency in their everyday practices or how news organizations in the United States implement transparency. Similarly, normative assumptions about the trust-generating effects of transparency have not been consistently shown to exist. This dissertation examined to what extent journalists at 12 national news outlets embraced transparency on a day-to-day basis and how these news organizations implement transparency online at the news item level. Moreover, this dissertation tested whether existing features of transparency (hyperlinks, editorial explanations, corrections, staff biographies etc.) impact audiences’ trust perception of a news story. The results of the mixed method approach showed that transparency in journalism is far from being a professional norm, which guides journalists’ news production processes. An analysis of 27 in-depth interviews found that journalists rarely consider transparency in their work. Journalists agreed that the notion of transparency has value. They repeatedly suggested that the news outlets they work for utilize transparency as a promotional tool to engage audiences and to appear transparent, rather than significantly disclosing information about the inner workings of their news organization. The results of the content analysis supported this claim as the findings show that the transparency features news organizations currently use provide little information for audiences to learn about how journalism is done. Meanwhile, the results of two experiments indicate that participants may not recognize the intended meanings of the varied transparency features, as participants’ trust perception did not vary across different transparency conditions. The findings of this dissertation suggest that transparency in journalism is still a goal rather than reality. News organizations have not opened up to the extent that they may be understood as transparent organizations; instead their efforts to pull back the curtain so that audiences may see the inner workings of newsrooms can be considered translucent at best.
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    Journalists or Cyber-Anarchists? A qualitative analysis of professional journalists' commentary about WikiLeaks
    (2013) Roberts, Jessica Stewart; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    New media for sharing information online have presented a challenge to professional journalism in a variety of ways, as new tools or media for communicating information allow more of the public to share information in a publicly available way. WikiLeaks, an online site that began publishing secret and classified information in 2007, provides a useful lens through which to examine professional journalists' responses to one such challenge. In responding to these challenges, journalists may engage in paradigm repair, making efforts to reinforce and police their professional norms and practices by identifying and normalizing violations. This study examines the terms and the frames used in commentary about WikiLeaks by professional journalists, in an attempt to understand how professional journalists define and defend their own profession through their efforts at paradigm repair, and to consider the professional, social, and political consequences of those efforts. Journalists primarily framed WikiLeaks as a non-journalist actor, one that threatened the national security of the United States. This framing can be seen as paradigm repair, as journalists excluded WikiLeaks from their profession on the basis of its lack of editorial structure, physical location, and concern for U.S. public interest. The consequences of this exclusion are to leave WikiLeaks and other non-traditional journalistic actors more vulnerable, and to make it more difficult for professional journalists to stay relevant and adopt improved practices in the changing media ecology.
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    In Search of Signature Pedagogies for Teacher Education: The Critical Case of Kodály-Inspired Music Teacher Education
    (2010) Baumann, Paul J.; Malen, Betty; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purposes of this study are to identify the features of Kodály-inspired music teacher education programs that either confirm or refute the notion that signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005 a, b, c) are present in this form of teacher education and to identify whether and how philosophical, pedagogical, and institutional influences support such pedagogies. Signature pedagogies are shared modes of teaching that are distinct to a specific profession. These pedagogies, based in the cognitive, practical, and normative apprenticeships of professional preparation, dominate the preparation programs of a profession, both within and across institutions. This study employs a collective case study design to examine Kodály-inspired teacher education programs, specifically those endorsed by the Organization of American Kodály Educators (OAKE). This study serves as a critical test of the applicability of the construct of signature pedagogies to teacher education. Because these programs purport to hold shared philosophical and pedagogical ideals and are governed by an endorsing body (OAKE), signature pedagogies ought to be present in these programs if they are present in any teacher education programs. Embedded in this collective case are: (1) a history of Kodály-inspired pedagogy and its adoption and adaptation in the U.S., (2) case studies of two prominent and influential OAKE-endorsed Kodály-inspired teacher education programs, and (3) case studies of four to five faculty in each of these programs. Data sources include primary and secondary texts and documents, observations of the various events and activities that occur as a part of Kodály-inspired teacher education programs, and focus group and individual interviews with program faculty and students. This study finds that the two case sites possess four signature pedagogies: (1) demonstration teaching, (2) master class teaching, (3) discovery learning, and (4) the music literature collection and retrieval system. These pedagogies appear to be inextricably tethered to the contexts, professional body (OAKE), and work of Kodály-inspired music educators though multiple complex linkages. The study closes by assessing the applicability and usefulness of the construct for the discourses and study of teacher education and by offering revisions to the construct that may help to improve the construct's usefulness in future research.