This study examined the responses of two 11-year-old African-American girls to two folktales: one with a passive female protagonist and one with an active female protagonist. The goal of the study was to add to the small body of previous research on childrens responses to folktales by exploring the opinions of African-American girls, who had been thus far overlooked, and to illuminate areas for future research. Data were collected through a series of four interviews with each girl and analyzed using qualitative research methodologies. Some of the data reflected previous findings from studies of Caucasian girls responses to folktales. The data echoed the finding that children are active makers of meaning (Trousdale, 1987) in responding to folktales. Both girls in this study related the stories to their own lives by inserting modifications into the original tales. The data also suggested that the girls were drawn to active, helping female characters but held mixed feelings about emulating such active characters, reflecting a 1995 study (Trousdale). The study challenges the assumption that children necessarily identify with the protagonists in fairy tales. In both types of tales the girls seemed to make qualified identifications with the main characters. The study also suggests that girls readiness to identify with active female characters may depend on their prior experience with such characters. Moreover, the study found that both girls were reluctant to describe the characters in terms of specific physical traits. Further research was called for to determine whether such responses are typical of children from ethnic groups who do not often see themselves represented in literature.

How does author relate to audience? This overarching question guided a case study focused on author Rick Norman and his novel Fielders Choice. Specific questions were (1) What was, and is, this authors conception of his audience for the book? (2) How do members of the audiencespecifically five high school studentsrespond to the novel? (3) How do the audiences responses relate to the authors stated intentions? Data came from the following sources: interviews with the author, the student readers, and the editor of the book; students written responses to the book and the authors written reactions to those responses; an interactive dialogue between the author and the students; records and documents provided by the author; and reviews of the book. Data analysis employed Glaser and Strausss (1967) comparative method and Spradleys (1979) developmental research sequence. Findings include the following: (1) This author saw his audience, which he portrayed as multi-faceted and dynamic, through the lens of self. He attributed to his audience his own characteristics when he originally planned and wrote the book and also when he talked about it ten years later. Self was at the center of his generic audience as well as his defined audience. (2) The audience of readers in this study varied in the extent to which they connected with the author. Most of them did, however, speculate about his intentions relative to the content as well as to text features. (3) Author intention and audience response did not always match. When mismatches were revealed in written and oral exchanges, subsequent dialogue between author and audience was directed to mutual understanding. The author wanted to learn what there was in his writing that led the readers to unintended meanings, and the readers wanted to learn why the author wrote as he did. This study, focused on author-audience relationship, fits into a growing body of work examining connections between reading and writing. Its uniqueness lies in its dual focus on both author intention and audience response and in the opportunities provided for author and audience to meet to discuss intentions and responses.

Dyslexic students struggle to read and write at a level commensurate with their intellectual ability. This study examines the impact of remedial instruction on reading and writing progress of six fourth grade students chosen from three different schools within one school district. These six students, all males, had been previously identified as having characteristics of dyslexia as defined by the protocol in their school district. The remedial instruction for these students was provided in a pullout setting by one itinerant teacher. The instruction was administered in two forty-minute sessions over a period of thirteen weeks. Project Read Written Expression was the program used for this instruction. Every effort was made to maintain as much consistency in the remedial instruction of these students as was possible. There were, however, variables which could not be eliminated. The students' classroom teachers had varying degrees of training and experience in administering instruction based upon a multisensory structured language program. The actual physical setting provided for the instruction varied from school to school, affecting the consistency of instructional time. The willingness and desire to participate, as well as the degree to which each student was supported and encouraged by his teacher and parents, was inconsistent. Reading progress (skill in decoding and comprehension) was assessed via pre- and post-testing using the Gray Oral Reading Test-4 (GORT-4). Progress in written language skills was assessed via pre- and post-testing using the Test of Written Language-3 (TOWL-3). Writing samples were collected at each lesson. Testing revealed that some students made progress in reading comprehension. Subtests of the TOWL-3 also indicated some progress in writing skills.

The current severe teacher shortage in the United States is exacerbated by the numbers of new teachers leaving the profession after only a year in the classroom. What do new teachers expect? How does the reality of their experience match up to their expectations? The purpose of this nine-month qualitative study was to look closely into the expectations and experiences of a small number of beginning teachers. The study focused on four young women's relations with their administrators, other teachers, and their students. The first-year teachers participating in the study included three elementary and one junior high teacher,all of whom taught in a southern Louisiana parish,where the Acadian culture persists and where their families had roots. Data came from observations and written documents as well as from interviews with the teachers; their administrators; other teachers at their schools, including their district-assigned mentors; their students; and members of the communities in which they taught. All four wanted to be "good" teachers and defined "good" in terms of relations with other people - students, colleagues, and administrators. However, they had different ideas about what represented quality in these relationships: degree of reliance on administrators, the nature of the connections they established with their peers, and rapport with their students. The actual social relations that the teachers experienced in the school contexts differed from what saw as ideal, particularly with respect to the students and other teachers. This conflict was compounded by a required assessment each had to pass in order to become a state-certified teacher as well as by a high-stakes assessment of their students' achievement, both of which provided additional definitions of what it meant to be a "good" teacher. Also, the study showed that, in some cases, being a good teacher seemed to conflict with being a good wife or good family member or good friend because of the numbers of hours devoted to preparing lessons each day.

This dissertation reconceives curriculum through an historical approach that employs Ludwig Wittgensteins later philosophy. Curriculum is more than the knowledge taught in school. Curriculum, as I a theorist conceives it, is concerned with the broader intellectual and ideological ways a society thinks about education. Hence, the current school curriculums focus on specific learning outcomes offers a limited view of the knowledge fashioned by a society, thereby offering an intellectual and social history that is highly selective. Wittgensteins concept of language-games offers curricularists a way to re-include some of these stories. The concept of curriculum emerges at the end of the Renaissance from Peter Ramuss refinement of the art of dialectic into a pedagogical method of logic. The modern curriculum field arose at the end of the nineteenth century as educators sought to further refine the remnants of scholasticisms pedagogical practices by employing social efficiency and scientific management to more effectively organize American education. Social efficiency and scientific management became the underlying premises of Ralph Tylers (1949) rationalization of the school curriculum. During the nineteen seventies, curriculum theorists began disrupting Tylers rational foundations by reconceptualizing curriculum using philosophies and theories developed outside of education to alter the language used to describe education. I use Wittgensteins later philosophy to further disrupt the school curriculums rational underpinnings. Wittgenstein maintains that knowing does not require some internal or external authority, thereby rejecting the empirical and logical foundations of knowledge that underlie Western education. Using a Wittgenstein approach suggests that education is an indirect activity of teaching students the use of words. Wittgenstein suggests that educating students indirectly more closely resemble the kinds of playful activities in which children engage in their ordinary lives. He suggests that learning is a synoptic presentation that connects concepts that emerge from our everyday use of language in new and interesting ways. By asking students to see the resemblances among concepts synoptically, rather than logically, education cannot be reduced to the acquisition of a set of facts, ordered in a sequence of steps. As such, a Wittgensteinian approach reconceives curriculum as an act of language-play.

This dissertation examined the efficacy of using minimally trained college undergraduates to tutor third- through fifth-grade students with reading difficulties. Tutors receiving four hours of training in scripted reading program based on the principles of Direct Instruction and emphasizing explicit instruction in phonological awareness and decoding. Thirty-six students from two elementary schools in a large southeastern city in the United States were selected and randomly assigned to treatment (tutoring) or contrast (non-tutoring) conditions. Treatment students received an average of fourteen and a half hours of tutoring over a twelve-week period. Data indicated that university students with minimal training successfully implemented the scripted tutoring package with experimenter feedback. Although, significant differences were only found for word identification, the treatment students out gained the contrast students on all measures. Effect sizes were moderate to strong. In addition, separate data for regular and special education students indicated statistically significant differences on two measures on two measures of fluency (correct words per minute read) for regular education treatment students over regular education control students. The efficacy of using minimally trained adult tutors to supplement classroom reading instruction for students with reading difficulties is also discussed.

Kindergarten children learn through hands-on interaction with materials. Additionally, the environment contributes to their learning. Therefore, if children are learning about concepts that naturally occur outside, they need to learn these concepts through active exploration, using as many senses as possible. This thesis examines the influence that an outdoor environment may have on children's abilities to comprehend and recall concepts in a science lesson. The sample for this study came from four kindergarten classrooms from a semi-rural school in Louisiana. Three treatment groups received a lesson on trees. The control group was not given a lesson. Two groups participated in the lesson indoors, interacting with either pictures only or pictures and concrete objects. The lessons presented concepts about trees (height, width, roots, leaves, and bark). Children in the fourth group explored each concept as it naturally occurred outdoors in a lesson. Children's initial understanding of concepts and subsequent learning were measured by pre-and post-test drawings. The author found an influence by the outdoor environment on kindergarten children's comprehension and recall of the science concepts. Children taught outdoors demonstrated more accurate understandings of the overall concept of "tree" and of the "leaf" concept.

This dissertation focuses on Lavinia Lloyd Dock's (1858-1956) re-envisioning of nursing and caring as social responsibility and the implications of this conceptualization for democracy. Dock was an American nurse, educator, settlement worker, suffragist, pacifist, social activist, writer, and historian. Her conception of holistic welfare embodied a 'new ideal' of society (Dock 1907, p. 899), a new understanding of democracy, and an expression of citizenship based on social responsibility for the welfare of others. Dock's idea of democracy embraced women's values and ways of being in the world; disputed universal, individual rights; and privileged communal values, collaboration, inclusion, and diversity. Moreover, she envisioned the world as a global democracy beyond national boundaries and other differences which often separate individuals. This study aspires to promote an understanding of an internationalist notion of citizenship and democracy that includes caring, collaboration, social responsibility, pacifism, and the holistic well-being of all individuals. This historiography also explores Dock's relentless social activism for the construction of a 'new ideal' of society and democracy. This study aims to empower nurse educators and practicing nurses to interrogate traditional notions of caring. Inspired by Dock's epistemology, the author proposes a re- conceptualization of nursing curricula as democratic and as embracing caring as social responsibility for the holistic welfare of others. Finally, this dissertation seeks to recuperate Lavinia Dock as a nurse educator, historian, philosopher, writer, feminist, social worker, social activist, and one of many turn of the 20th century progressive women who enhanced the welfare of society and improved American democracy.

This study investigated the effect of music on text recall and involuntary mental rehearsal (din) with students from four college-level Beginning Spanish classes. Two groups heard texts as songs, one group heard the same texts as speech, and one group was the control group. For the text recall variable, a cloze test was administered at the end of each song treatment to determine total words recalled. Students from one of the music groups heard the melody of the song while testing. For the din variable, students were asked to report on the amount of this phenomenon experienced. Data was collected to answer the following questions: (1) Is there a significant increase in text recall when that text is learned through the use of songs?, (2) Is there a significant difference in delayed text recall for students who learned the text with song, as compared to those who learned the text with spoken recordings?, (3) Is there a significant difference in the recall results when one group of students from the song groups hears the melody of the song during the recall test?, and (4) Is there a significant difference in the occurrence of involuntary mental rehearsal after listening to song rather than text? Immediate recall of text showed higher scores for the music class in all three songs. This difference reached significance in Songs 1 and 3. Delayed text recall showed no significant difference between the classes. There was no advantage observed for the group that heard the background melody during testing. Overall results for the din occurrence showed a significant difference between the classes. Students in the classes that heard music reported a higher occurrence of this phenomenon than did those who heard only spoken text. Students of the melody group reported a significantly higher frequency than did students from the text group. These findings suggest that the use of songs in the foreign language classroom may aid memory of text. The results evidenced that the occurrence of the din is increased with music, and therefore may be a more efficient way to stimulate language acquisition.

Based on semiotic, aesthetic response, reader response, and drama in education theories, this phenomenological study seeks to describe the literary experience of text through oral interpretation for middle to high SES, fourth and eighth grade students as compared to Low SES fourth and eighth grade students. Using the research methodology of Moustakas (1994) and data analysis of Teddlie (2000), this study proposes to describe and understand the relation of literary understanding and oral dramatic expression implicit in the descriptive paralinguistic and chronemic patternizations of the oral rendition of text and describe the act of reading as phenomenology. Descriptions of the perceptions and reading experiences of Low Socioeconomic Status (SES) and Middle-High SES dramatic readers was obtained through multiple interviews and recorded readings. Rich descriptions were used as the basis for a reflective structural analysis. Ultimately, the goal was to determine the effect of the voice of interpretation on the perception of the reader and to determine the benefit of dramatization as a tool for comprehension across varied educational and experiential backgrounds. Results reflected an across the board positive correlation between students' perceptions of reading as a significant and meaningful learning experience and students' use of dramatic interpretation through the indices of the voice. For oral dramatic readers, the purpose for reading was the process, not just the product. Dramatic readers see reading as something composed that must be performed. They are able to perform the "story" much like a musical score, backing for patterns, beats, and rhythms. Literacy then is a performing art, by definition a form of aesthetic response that is autobiographical in essence, constructivist in nature, and a highly personal "phenomenon."