Lack of teacher technology integration is a documented concern within education. Effective staff development practices, the need for on-going support, and the presence of elements of diffusion are all recognized as factors that lead to higher rates of technology integration. These elements are not currently studied as a whole in research on technology education. This study sought to examine all three of these factors within a southern metropolitan school district’s technology teacher development initiative. The following questions guided the research: 1. How do teachers experience the five elements of diffusion (complexity, triability, observability, relative advantage, and compatibility) in the area of technology integration in elementary schools? 2. How do teachers experience instructional technology support and the impact of support on their technology integration instruction? 3. How do teachers experience technology staff development and the impact of staff development on their classroom technology integration? Data were collected from 81 online survey participants, 16 oral interview and web log analysis participants, and an interview with the project director at the completion of the first year of a two-year initiative. Participants received updated technology tools within their classroom and were required to take technology related courses, keep web logs, and complete technology projects. Research was conducted within a mixed methods triangulation design using a pragmatic paradigm with descriptive statistics and correlations as forms of quantitative analysis and a phenomenological approach applied in qualitative analysis. Findings showed the presence of elements of diffusion and support across all data sources. Teachers’ experiences with the program were positive and led to frequent and varied technology integration. Correlations indicated high levels of interrelatedness among the variables of support, elements of diffusion, and impact on instruction. Teachers reported enhanced engagement in learning among themselves and their students. The fact that teachers chose to be in the staff development program and had choices within the program to fulfill the requirements appeared to engage and motivate them. Even though teachers self-reported they were early adopters of technology, the program support structure was highly valued. The program could be used as a model for effective technology staff development.

This qualitative action research case study seeks to modify a Middle School Computer Science Course at a medium‐sized private school in North Atlanta, Georgia by examining the intersection of media literacy, technology, and adolescent teens. The main purpose of this project is to improve the course by incorporating media literacy skills into the curriculum. Guided class discussions, active participant observation, participant journals, and participant projects will be used to learn more about students’ experience with Media Literacy education. Centering on reflective practices, teacher‐student dialogue, and peer collaboration, this project aims to identify, engage, and explore issues critical to the effective implementation of a new Media Literacy curriculum. The findings from this completed project shall be made available to school administration and the larger community for the continued improvement of the Middle School Computer Science program.

21st-century Neo-anticolonial Literature and the Struggle for a New Global Order explores the twenty-first-century fiction of five writers and investigates the ways in which their works engage the legacy and evolution of empire, and, in particular, the expansion of global capitalism to the detriment of already-subjugated communities. Taking up a recent call by Postcolonial scholars seeking to address the contemporary challenges of the postcolonial condition, this project traces out three distinct forms of engagement that function as a resistance in the texts. The dissertation introduces these concepts via a mode of analysis I have called Neo-anticolonialism, a counter-hegemonic approach which, I argue, is unique to the twenty-first century but rooted in the anticolonial work of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Building on a foundation laid by those activist scholars, this project argues that Neo-anticolonialism necessitates the bridging of discourse and activism; thus, the dissertation delineates the utility of Neo-anticolonialism in both literary scholarship and practical application. Through a close analysis of the fiction of the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jamaican Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, a South Asian writer, African American writer Edward P. Jones, and Black British writer Caryl Phillips, the project offers a Neo-anticolonial reading of several twenty-first-century texts. In doing so, I explain the depiction of these instances of resistance as Neo-anticolonial Refractions, literary devices which function as prisms that cast images thus exposing the perpetuation of inequality in the twenty-first century and its direct link to the past epoch. Moreover, each chapter, through an explication of the refractions, reveals how resistance occurs in the face of the brutal reality of oppression and how this cadre of writers engages with the history of empire as well as with its contemporary permutations.

My dissertation focuses on a set of Anglo-American novels that deal with the events of 9/11. Identifying thematic and stylistic differences in the fiction on this topic, I distinguish between novels that represent directly the jolts of trauma in the wake of the attacks, and novels that, while still holding the events as an underlying operative force in the narrative, do not openly represent them but envision their long-term aftermath. The first group of novels comprises Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). The second one includes Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). Drawing on concepts from trauma theory, particularly by Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, and combining them with the ethical philosophies of Levinas and Heidegger, I argue that the constructions of 9/11 in Anglo-American fiction are essentially twofold: authors who narrate 9/11 as a tragic human loss in the city of New York turn it into an occasion for an ethical dialogue with the reader and potentially with the “Other,” whereas authors who address 9/11 as a recent sociopolitical event transform it into a goad toward a bitter cultural indictment of the US middle-class, whose ingrained inertia, patriotism and self-righteousness have been either magnified or twisted by the attacks. Considering processes of meaning-making, annihilation, ideological reduction and apathy that arose from 9/11 and its versions, I have identified what could be called, adapting Peter Elbow’s expression from pedagogical studies, the “forked” rhetoric of media and politics, a rhetorical mode in which both discourses are essentially closed, non-hermeneutic, and rooted in the same rationale: exploiting 9/11 for consensus. On the contrary, in what I call the New-Yorkization of 9/11, I highlighted how the situatedness of the public discourses that New Yorkers constructed to tell their own tragedy rescues the Ur-Phaenomenon of 9/11 from the epistemological commodification that intellectual, mediatic and political interpretations forced on it. Furthermore, pointing to the speciousness of arguments that deem 9/11 literature sentimental and unimaginative, I claim that the traumatic literature on the attacks constitutes an example of ethical practice, since it originates from witnesses of the catastrophe, it represents communal solidarity, and it places a crucial demand on the reader as an empathic listener and ethical agent. Ethical counternarratives oppose the ideological simplification of the 9/11 attacks and develop instead a complex counter-rhetoric of emotions and inclusiveness that we could read as a particular instantiation of an ethics of the self and “Other.” As much as the 9/11 “ethical” novels suggest that “survivability” in times of trauma depends on “relationality” (J. Butler), the “cultural” ones unveil the insensitivity and superficiality of the actual US society far away from the site of trauma. The binary framework I use implies that, outside of New York City, 9/11 is narrated neither traumatically (in terms of literary form), nor as trauma (in terms of textual fact). Consequently, on the basis of a spatial criterion and in parallel to the ethical novels, I have identified a category of “cultural” fiction that tackles the events of 9/11 at a distance, spatially and conceptually. In essence, 9/11 brings neither shock, nor promise of regeneration to these peripheral settings, except for Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a story in which we are returned to a post-9/11 New York where different ethnic subjects can re-negotiate creatively their identities. The cultural novels are ultimately pervaded by a mode of tragic irony that is unthinkable for the ethical novels and that is used in these texts to convey the inanity and hubris of a politically uneducated and naïve America – one that has difficulties to point Afghanistan on a map, or to transcend dualistic schemes of value that embody precisely Bush’s Manichaeism. The potential for cultural pluralism, solidarity and historical memory set up by the New York stories does not ramify into the America that is far away from the neuralgic epicenter of historical trauma. This proves that the traumatizing effects and the related ethical calls engendered by 9/11 remain confined to the New York literature on the topic.

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Completed in early 2010, the Concerto for Viola and Orchestra is a major foray into composing a concertante work for the viola, an instrument without the rich history of concertos of the violin or ‘cello. In three movements, the Concerto employs a diversity of compositional techniques for the viola and explores the timbral possibilities for the orchestra. The work derives primarily from the series of initial gestures in the viola, and, in the span of over forty minutes, as many possible permutations on these ideas are explored throughout the solo instrument and orchestra. Following the score of the work is a theoretical analysis of the piece, including a condensed history of the viola concerto as a genre. Within this examination, issues concerning approaches to deconstructing a 21st-Century orchestral work are discussed alongside structural, melodic, motivic, and orchestrational analyses. / text

This paper uses an interdisciplinary, multiperspectival approach to analyze biketivism and various anticapitalist biketivist projects in Austin, Texas, in the hopes that a “glocalized” exploration of past and current biketivist struggles can help locate potential sites for political agency in ways that more placeless rhetorical studies cannot. Because the form and content of present-day bike politics in Austin are heavily dependent on biketivism’s historically tense articulations with capitalism, a historical analysis of biketivism as an outgrowth of Progressive Era and Appropriate Technology narratives reveals its crystallization around issues of technological, spatial, and social politics. Three case studies then apply this framework to different sites within the Austin bike community: the sales rhetoric of pro-custom bike shops, the debates over installing a Bike Boulevard in downtown Austin, and the missions and forms of several bike-related cultural organizations. Together, these perspectives on Austin’s bike community indicate that the incorporation (and sometimes outright co-optation) of biketivists’ technological and spatial demands and practices into mainstream culture may fragment the movement into physical and social agendas, but this fragmentation does not necessarily silence biketivism’s more radical social politics. At least in Austin, co-optation of biketivism may paradoxically be helping biketivists meet their goal of bringing (pedal) power to the people. / text

Differential Object Marking (henceforth, DOM) in Spanish involves the use of the object marker a to overtly mark certain direct objects (Juan conoce a la mamá de Pedro.). The literature on this phenomenon is extensive. Previous typological/functionalist work (e.g. Aissen 2003, Croft 2003, von Heusinger and Kaiser 2007) has characterized the likelihood of DOM in terms of properties of the direct object including animacy, definiteness and specificity. According to recent grammatical variationist work on Mexican Spanish (Lizarraga Navarro and Mora-Bustos 2010), these two factors are the most highly correlated with overt DOM in Spanish. While some empirical studies corroborate portions of these findings (e.g. von Heusinger 2008), none have provided a complete quantified analysis of the entire set of features as discussed in terms of the Referentiality Scale (von Heusinger 2008) including specificity and non-argumentals for Modern European Spanish. This empirically-based corpus study investigates the distribution of DOM in the 20th and 21st Century European Spanish focusing on the features comprising the scales of animacy and referentiality. The results obtained in this study provide evidence that the referential features like specificity and definiteness are indeed significant factors that condition DOM along with verb type. This study also sheds light on the validity of the claim made in diachronic work for the systematic spread of DOM (e.g. Melis 1995, Laca 2006, von Heusinger and Kaiser 2010). / text

With the increasing population heterogeneity and rising tensions in Western nations, the governments of those nations have sought ways to manage conflict between different groups. This often comes in the form of laws criminalizing certain speech, and numerous Western nations have passed bills strengthening sanctions against hate speech or adding previously unprotected groups. However, when the European Union attempted to pass strict hate speech legislation, many EU member states disagreed with its provisions and, due to the structure of the EU, managed to substantially change the resulting legislation. This study examines how proponents and opponents of hate speech legislative change frame the issue and the role the EU. / text