Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item AFRO-MEXICAN FOLKTALES AND POETRY IN MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES(2024) Tenorio Carrillo, Nancy Berenice; Collins, Merle; Long, Ryan; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The aim of my dissertation is to challenge what I call mestizo normativity. In creating and coining the term mestizo normativity, I borrow from Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant’s work on queer theory. In their work “Sex in Public” (1998), Warner and Berlant note that heterosexuality only appears to be normal because of public structures that regulate the sex binary. In their work they note that everything in public life is done with the aim of normalizing the male/female binary. This binary affects all aspects of daily life and can be seen, for example, in the male/female designations in public bathrooms and male/female categories in sports. I use the term mestizo normativity to interrogate how Afro-Mexican works of poetry, folklore, ballads, and stories disrupt accepted definitions of Blackness and Latinidad in the Americas. As Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores note, in The Afro-Latin@ Reader (2010), “we are accustomed to thinking of “Afro” and “Latin@” as distinct from each other and mutually exclusive: one is either Black or Latin@.” In essence, those who do not fall neatly along the Black/Latino binary are asked to choose between their identities. They can be either Latino or Black but not both. In a similar fashion, queers and bisexuals are made to choose between the heterosexual/homosexual binary; they can be heterosexuals or homosexuals but not both. With these definitions in mind, I read Afro-Mexican literature as queer literature. Afro-Mexicans do not fit neatly along the Afro/Latino binary; they are both, and in that two-ness lies their queerness. My dissertation adds to the field of Afro-Mexican studies by positing that Afro-Mexican literature shares similarities with African traditions, history, and culture. As Nicole von Germeten has pointed out in her work “Juan Roque’s Donation” in Afro-Latino Voices (2009), the African diaspora in Mexico is as much a part of Mexican history as Spanish history. Throughout the colonial period, Spaniards always constituted a small minority in New Spain and were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Africans throughout the colonial period. African culture, like Spanish culture, is also part of Mexico. In order to prove my thesis of mestizo normativity, I have organized my dissertation into four chapters. In chapter one I argue that Afro-Mexican folktales share similarities with West and Central African storytelling practices. In my analysis, I note that Afro-Mexican tales share similarities with trickster rabbit tales from the Bantu people in Central Africa and Hausa people in West Africa. And moreover, I note that these tales fall into the tatsuniya genre of storytelling found among the Hausa people of West and Central Africa. This genre of tales is known as a subversive category of tales, for it includes tales of small animals taking down larger animals. I argue that these tales are how Afro-Mexicans remember their African heritage. As is discussed in my first chapter, the first scholars to analyze Afro-Mexican folktales moved away from comparing them to West and Central African folklore because they understood all Mexican literature to stem from Mexico’s Amerindian and Spanish roots. That is, their readings upheld mestizo normativity. In my second chapter, I argue that the ballad tradition in the Costa Chica shares similarities with West African storytelling traditions. Moreover, I argue that through ballads, versos, and maroon poetry, Afro-Mexicans disrupt the notion of a mestizo Mexico. That is, they question the single story that has been told about Mexico and create a multifaceted and culturally complex site that they recognize as home. To drive this point home, I compare Afro-Mexican corridos to calypsos and argue for readings that include Afrodiasporic strategies of resistance when dealing with Afrodesendant peoples. In chapter three, I read Afro-Mexican works written by writers in the U.S. diaspora. I examine how these writers’ perceptions of race are formed in the U.S. Lastly, I examine how contemporary writers such as Aleida Violeta Vázquez Cisneros, Abel Emigdio Baños Delgado, and Filemón Silva Sandoval use social media to promote their written works and challenge readings that depict Mexico as a Black free space.Item "These Songs will Save our Language": Reclaiming Kiowa Language and Music through Kiowa Sound Resurgence(2023) Yamane, Maxwell Hiroshi; Rios, Fernando; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the intersection of Indigenous language reclamation and music, primarily among the Kiowa Tribe. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, music/language analysis, and participatory action research, I show how music plays a key role in the resurgence of Kiowa language and identity. I begin in Washington, D.C. by revealing how Kiowas (and other Indigenous Peoples) strategically use their own modes of storytelling and music making to resist the imposition of settler colonial narratives. Indigenous performers reclaim stories about their language initiatives and challenge problematic congressional language planning and policy. The dissertation then moves towards Oklahoma and examines the language efforts of a community-based institution: the Kiowa Language and Culture Revitalization Program (KLCRP). I show how KLCRP used Kiowa Christian hymns—which are performed in the Kiowa language and musical style— as a pedagogical approach to revive and strengthen forms of Kiowa sound and audibility, including speech, music making, storytelling, and listening. I frame the recovery of these practices as Kiowa sound resurgence. I explore the multiple ways in which Kiowas engaged in Kiowa sound resurgence through traditional and non-traditional pedagogies before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This dissertation contributes to interdisciplinary dialogues in ethnomusicology, Native American and Indigenous studies, and linguistic anthropology on Indigenous language reclamation and music scholarship. The case study of Kiowa sound resurgence illuminates how Kiowas creatively reclaim, revive, and resurge sound through Kiowa ways of knowing, doing, and being. The findings of this dissertation have relevance to both academia and Indigenous communities who are actively engaging in efforts of cultural reclamation and resurgence.Item #BlackLiteracyLivesMatter: REVEALING AFRICAN AMERICAN ADOLESCENTS’ MULTIMODAL LITERACY PRACTICES IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS AT A COMMUNITY CENTER(2016) Pope, Kelsey; Turner, Jennifer; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigated the multimodal literacy practices of African American adolescents as they navigated online social networks. Participants ranged from ages 13 to 17 and resided in an inner city East Coast neighborhood. Data collection tools included an online social network survey, online social networking activities log, audio recorded literacy interviews, and screenshots. Pieces of data were carefully analyzed and coded for potential literacy practices. The study revealed four distinct literacy practices of this particular group of African American adolescents: communication, entertainment, information gathering, and taking a stance. Participant data defined each multimodal literacy practice while explaining how and why skills and experiences combined to create the practice. Engagement in online social networks involved these multimodal literacy practices. Often they involved interactions with peers and family members. Participants did not readily compare their multimodal online social network literacy practices to traditional forms of literacy, however, they used traditional words such as reading, writing, and spelling to explain their skills and experiences. Literacy was brought to life in a unique way through the words and multiple modes of communication, entertainment, information gathering, and stance taking of participants. This study questions ‘what’ and possibly ‘whose’ literacy counts. Technology and its affordances allowed participants to engage in practices through multiple modes. Additionally, this group of African American adolescents exposed an avenue through which race related injustices and tensions might be expressed through multimodal literacy practices in online social networks. The results of this study encourages future research to examine what literacy counts, whose literacy counts, and how or why adolescents engage through literacy practices. #BlackLiteracyLivesMatterItem Memory Palace(2015) Brown, Thomas Aaron; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What happens when memories are altered or lost? When the journey we try to take back to where we once were proves fruitless, time and again? My thesis, Memory Palace, deals with this tenuous, liminal state between my childhood spent in rural Chad, Africa, and the adulthood in which I now find myself in urban America and elsewhere. I search for a place of belonging--knowing that the road back to the days I spent sipping tea just miles from Saharan dunes has long since disappeared. This project reflects not only metaphysical journeys but also formal and stylistic departures as I search for a means of expression that is as much a personal journey as it is linguistic. Memory Palace is ultimately an exploration of experiences abroad and beyond--an effort to find a path for myself that connects past with present, grief with consolation.Item Digital Alchemy: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Investigation of Digital Storytelling for Peace and Justice(2013) Gibbins, Thor; Hultgren, Francine; McCaleb, Joseph; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores the experiences of undergraduate students enrolled in an education I-Series (University of Maryland undergraduate courses designed to inspire innovation, imagination, and intellect) course, Good Stories: Teaching Stories for Peace and Justice. In this course students are asked to produce digital stories that project themes of peace and justice. The locus of this study focuses on the essential question: In what ways do participants world their experiences producing digital stories for peace and justice? The methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology is employed in order to elucidate interpretive understandings about digital storytelling for peace and justice in the experiences of nine undergraduates over the course of one semester. The metaphor of alchemy is used since the practice of alchemy entailed amalgamating base metals in the hopes of transmuting them into gold. Jung (1968) likens this process to our experience of becoming individuated, whole, and healthy human beings. Digital media amalgamates image sound and written text in order to enhance narrative, making it an apt metaphor since it captures the synergism inherent in both the metaphor of alchemy and the multimodality inherent in digital stories. The methodological practices for this inquiry employ van Manen's (1997) human science research. This inquiry elucidates the participants' experiences on being students of digital media in addition becoming agentive knowers capable of projecting digital stories for the purposes of peace and justice. The conspicuousness of developing the technological know-how of producing digital media also takes particular precedent in this study. Themes of the ways in which students are concerned by being students, producing digital stories the "right" way, and developing particular stances on their understandings of peace and justice are disclosed. Additionally, the pedagogical implications for designing teaching and learning of digital media are discussed. These implications focus on ways educators may develop pedagogical tact in engaging and apprenticing students in digital media. These pedagogical understandings may open possible opportunities for classrooms to be transformed into digital media studios where students develop critical stances through the practice of digitally designing narratives for the purposes of extending care, caring, and caring for others to possible global audiences.Item CHANNELING THE CURRENT: THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF MOVING MEDITATION FOR FINDNG A FLOW IN THINKING AND WRITING(2013) Morris, Sarah Lynn; Hultgren, Francine H.; McCaleb, Joseph; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)CHANNELING THE CURRENT: THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF MOVING MEDITATION FOR FINDNG A FLOW IN THINKING AND WRITING Sarah Lynn Morris, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation Directed by: Professor Francine H. Hultgren Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership, University of Maryland, College Park This phenomenological study explores lived experience of moving meditation for finding flow in thinking and writing. Moving meditation is intentional practice of mindfulness that brings us deeply into our selves and the world. Connecting to pedagogical implications for teaching composition, this study suggests embodied practices may open a flow of words and ideas for those practicing movement meditation. Grounded in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and van Manen, this work explores embodiment and lived experience, using human science phenomenology as method. Further grounded in writing process and moving meditation texts, this work connects body movement and writing practices through lived experience. I first turn toward my own experience to examine moving meditation as method of finding flow in my thinking and writing. Next, I explore the phenomenon in a range of traditions to further uncover the lived experience of moving writers. The metaphor of the circuit as descriptive of writing process and body process further illuminates the phenomenon. Initial emergent themes include process, practice, flow, solitude, and nature. Recognizing the intersubjective in the particular, this study focuses on lived experience of four high school English teachers as they make meaning through focused movement. In four sessions of meditative contemplation, these teachers walked in the woods, wrote reflections, and considered personal and pedagogical experiences. Renderings of these teachers' journals and conversations suggest themes including fear, care, wholeness, and transcendence. Drawing from these conversants' insights, I explore ways in which meditative movement opens a flow in thinking and writing for these teachers, writers themselves in the current of life. Orienting toward pedagogical implications, I engage with lived experience in order to suggest ways in which teachers of writing may create wholeness of experience for classroom communities: taking students outside, seeing students in wholeness, positioning themselves as more experienced writers, focusing on process rather that product, and being bodies themselves. In doing so, they may generate a culture of care that fosters growth of writing and writers--body, mind, and spirit wholeness-- with the world as classroom and lived life as text.Item Technology in their hands: Students' voices from a Nook summer reading program for non-proficient fifth-grade students(2013) Mitchell, Chrystine Cooper; Turner, Jennifer D; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Researchers have documented a "summer reading setback" where a demonstrated achievement gap between proficient and struggling readers expands during the summer months (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 2003). Educators need to devise a plan to foster diverse independent reading (Byrnes, 2000) by providing students access to texts of interest (Ivey & Broaddus, 2001; Hughes-Hassell & Rodge, 2007) and researchers suggest when given opportunities to read e-books, students read more (Fasimpaur, 2004). This study was designed to reveal students' perceptions of a Nook summer reading program granting the students access to a wide variety of eBooks, paying particular attention to the non-proficient fifth-grade students' reported summer reading behaviors and the influences for students' summer reading. Using a qualitative exploratory approach, I studied 20 students who participated in a summer independent reading program using Nook digital readers. I was able to analyze and interpret the student voices regarding their summer reading experiences using an online book log, student questionnaires, focus group interviews, and through two individual student case studies. I analyzed and interpreted the data through an interpretive mosaic focused on four overarching themes and the intersection of those themes which included: the reader, access to text, social relationships and Nook digital readers. I found important implications that were generated from the students' reported reading behaviors and perceptions: 1) Social reading relationships were cultivated through the experience, 2) Access to a variety of texts shaped the kinds of reading students engaged in, and 3) Nook digital readers helped to foster students' reported positive summer reading behaviors. This study serves as a foundation to consider how and in what ways technology shapes students' literacy experiences as we forge ahead in this technological saturated society.Item A Portrait of a First Grade Teacher Committed to the Literacy Classroom as a Community: A Teacher Educator's Action Research Collaboration(2012) Clark, Summer Ray; Afflerbach, Peter; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this study I examined the vision and practices of a beginning first grade literacy teacher in an urban school district. I used action research methods to collaborate with the teacher in her classroom based on her needs and take action with her in response to themes we generated together. As the teacher used and reflected upon literacy instruction while I worked within her classroom, we both explored how the lessons from her work and our collaboration might inform literacy pedagogy as well as teacher education. My first research question examined how my participant conceptualized and acted upon her conceptualizations of sociocultural models of literacy. My second question explored the action implications of this collaborative inquiry, as it applied to both her classroom and my teacher education work. My research also drew from the tradition of participatory action research (PAR), which involved the teacher's "praxis" (Freire, 1970), reflection and action to affect change. In PAR tradition, together the teacher and I used the data we collected to address issues of relevance to her, through the action components of classroom teaching as well as professional co-presentations for preservice teachers on literacy instruction in urban schools. The overall emerging construct was the concept of literacy teaching as the facilitation of classroom community. The following categories arose beneath this overall construct: community as teacher vision, community as teacher strategy, community as love, and community as challenge. Finally, I used these emerging themes to theorize tentatively on implications for teacher education; I suggested that teacher education should prioritize promoting love and vision as the backbone to support teachers' development strategies and challenges. Overall, my analysis suggested the constructs of literacy pedagogy as "community" and teacher education as "professional accountability."Item ADOLESCENTS' CONSTRUCTIVELY RESPONSIVE READING STRATEGY USE IN A CRITICAL INTERNET READING TASK(2011) Cho, Byeong-Young; AFFLERBACH, PETER P; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The goal of this study was to examine types and patterns of reading strategies that proficient adolescent readers used while reading on the Internet. Informed by research related to reading comprehension, intertextuality, and new literacies, I drew upon the model of Constructively Responsive Reading that had evolved from print reading to Internet reading (Afflerbach & Cho, 2009; Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). The model offered an analytical tool to construct descriptions of the complexity of use of the four general types of strategies in Internet contexts: Realizing and Constructing Potential Texts to Read, Identifying and Learning Text Content, Monitoring, and Evaluation. Seven highly proficient adolescent readers (Mean Age = 17.5) individually performed Internet reading, with a goal to create a critical question about their self- selected controversial topic across two 45-minute sessions: Open Website Searching and Focused Website Learning. I used multiple sources to triangulate complementary data to infer participants' Internet reading strategy use. Participants' think-aloud verbal reports were synchronized with their reader-computer interactions recorded in the computer. These real-time strategy data were complemented by other contextual data (e.g., pre-/post-reading interviews, participant-generated critical questions). I integrated these data into Internet Reading Strategy Matrices of the individual participants, which were analyzed, both qualitatively and quantitatively. During the entire course of data analysis, I constantly referenced the model of Constructively Responsive Reading with the four strategy categories. My data analyses afforded detailed descriptions of diverse constructively responsive reading strategies in Internet contexts and dynamic patterns of such reading strategy use. Grounded-analysis of data resulted in the identification of an array of reading strategies and many instances of strategy interplay among the four strategy categories. Chi-squared analysis of aggregated strategy data revealed the goal-directed nature of strategy use, as participants' use of these four types of strategies was associated with two different session tasks. Also, analysis of the processing chains visualizing the flow of strategy use indicated differences in the performances of Internet reading strategy use among the participants and their distinctive modes of Internet reading. Overall, my study supported the theoretical model of Constructively Responsive Reading, with empirical data that described diversity and patterns of constructively responsive reading strategies in Internet contexts. The complexity of Internet reading was discussed with regard to constructively responsive reading that coordinates different roles and functions of the four general types of strategies.