Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Political Science, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004. / Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2009 Dec. 27.

Mass media has great influence over its audience. When a sensational story hits the news waves, the general public's attention is instantly riveted to the television screen. News stories that involve the deaths of innocent people often create a culture of fear, fuel false narratives, and scatter misinformation. In fact, this culture of fear, coupled with misleading information, created the myth of the juvenile superpredator, a phrase coined by DiIulio in the early 1990s. The stereotyped superpredator was a homicidal, uncontrollable youth hiding within areas where crime and violence are rare. In particular, this myth was propagated following the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999. Across time, misinformation and false narratives served to spotlight the perpetrators' notoriety—their ultimate motivation for perpetrating this heinous attack. News media, law enforcement, and school administrators are in the unique position to stop the spread of misinformation and prevent school shooters from gaining the fame they desperately seek, a common motivation among school shooters and copycat perpetrators. This study seeks to explore how the media portrayed the Columbine High School shooters and how it fed into the myth of the juvenile superpredator. This study analyzed youth violence risk factors in the wake of the Columbine High School Shooting to determine if news media was accurate in their reporting. We wanted to determine if news coverage was a major influence on the public's perception of youth violence. These risk factors were scrutinized from television news coverage from national news organizations. Results indicate that in the wake of school shootings, strong considerations regarding ethical news reporting and clearer lines of communication between school administrators and law enforcement officials may prevent misinformation from spreading in the first place and may prevent school shooters from gaining notoriety in such aftermaths. Additionally, curtailing the spread of misinformation may help communities prevent reactionary policies that ultimately harm school students through overly punitive measures.

On April 20, 1999, twelve students and one faculty member were shot and killed at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The two shooters also died. Today, over nine years after the tragedy, the community continues to heal and cope with their loss. Rather than investigating the actual tragedy, this study focused on perceptions of three leaders representing the Columbine Memorial Planning Committee, summarizing their responses to 9 questions related to planning the Columbine Memorial. Now completed, the memorial invites students; families; the community of Littleton, Colorado; and the world to never forget this loss or precious life. This memorial represents a positive avenue for coping with their tragedy, the loss of loved ones, and the violence perpetrated on their school and community. The leaders' feedback is important to consider and provides direction and insight for other schools coping with similar trauma. Additionally, previous research on the topic of planning memorials is extremely limited, even more so for school-based memorials. More information is needed to guide practice. As a starting point, this thesis provides a brief overview of childhood and adolescent grief, a historical overview of how national tragedies involving children have been memorialized, and subsequently an initial investigation focusing on planning the Columbine Memorial. After reviewing and summarizing the committee members' responses, a list of suggestions are proposed to guide schools in planning memorials. The discussion section compares and contrasts the planning committee's feedback with previous information provided by the National Association of School Psychologists and other publications related to children and memorials.

School shootings in the United States have garnered significant attention. Since 1999, several high-profile school shootings have taken place across the U.S. in Connecticut, Virginia, Florida, etc. The phenomenon of school shootings and the resultant moral panic is explored by examining media coverage to understand how the media contributes to public responses to these tragic incidents. Although school shootings tend to receive attention, we do not know how this attention can differ across school shootings. This study uses the moral panic framework to assess how national newspaper coverage portrays the Sandy Hook Elementary and Robb Elementary school shootings. I find that the media discourse differs between the two shootings considerably when assessing each attribute of the moral panic framework. This is important as school shootings are reported differently, thus changing public perception. I argue that the level of panic we’ve seen after previous school shootings such as Columbine has decreased.

Les tueries de masse, de par leur caractère extraordinairement violent, provoquent l’indignation de la population. Pour des individus, ces évènements suscitent plutôt un sentiment de curiosité, lequel transite parfois vers l’admiration des auteurs de ces drames et à l’identification envers ceux-ci. Sur la toile, ces personnes se joignent pour former un groupe que l'on peut qualifier de « fandom ». Ce mémoire s’intéresse à ce phénomène qui,bien qu’il suscite la crainte chez la population, reste à ce jour peu exploré. Ainsi, l’étude vise à pousser l’exploration plus loin. Contrairement aux études précédentes, qui se sont davantage penchées sur les particularités individuelles, la recherche qui suit vise àcomprendre la façon le fandom centré sur les tueries de masse s’organise en communautés virtuelles. Pour y parvenir, la recherche a examiné, à l’aide de l’analyse thématique, les discussions tenues par les membres de la communauté r/Columbine, un site hébergé parla plateforme Reddit. Les discussions analysées ont pris place sur une période d’environ un an, la dernière publication ayant été publiée en janvier 2019. Les résultats suggèrent que, un peu à la façon des fandoms plus classiques, la communauté s’approprie, transforme etré interprète le narratif officiel pour créer son propre narratif à propos des tueurs. Ce narratif propre à la communauté r/Columbine semble être influencé par la subjectivité et les expériences de vie propres aux membres qui la composent. Consciente du regard externe porté à son endroit, la communauté négocie sa propre déviance en opposant son identité à celles des communautés qu’elle juge « plus déviantes » qu’elle. De cet exercice naît également un autre narratif, cette fois-ci à propos de l’identité de la communauté. / Due to its extreme violent nature, mass shootings provoke indignation within society. Tosome people, those events rather generate curiosity, which sometimes evolve toward identification to and admiration of the perpetrators of these crimes. Those people reach toeach other through the internet to form a group called « fandom ». This work wishes to explore that phenomena, which has been poorly studied up to now. Unlike previous studies, which have focused on individual peculiarities, this research aims to understand how the fandoms centered on mass shootings are organized into virtual communities. To achieve this objective, the research studied, through thematic analysis, the discussions held by the members of r/Columbine, a community hosted on Reddit. The analyzed discussion took place over a period of approximately one year, the last discussion having been published in January 2019. Results suggest that, in a way similar to the mainstream fandoms, the community appropriates, transforms and reinterprets the official narrative to create its own narrative about the shooters. This narrative specific to the r/Columbine community seem to be influenced by the subjectivity and the life experiences of its members. Aware of the way society sees them, community negotiate its own deviance by opposing its identity to those of the communities it deems ‘’more deviant’’. This exercise generates a second narrative concerning the community’s identity.

Disconnection in teacher-student relationships caused by the alienating processes and goals of the public school system is the most pressing challenge facing high school teachers today. Disrupting this disconnection and subverting the forces that produce it are the primary goals of the savvy teacher. In this dissertation I claim that teachers require two distinct yet interconnected kinds of abilities to achieve this disruption. They need the curriculum teaching skills they are taught in teacher education programs, and they need additional skills not formally taught which would enable them to build and sustain relationships with students, in the face of school structures and processes that produce fear and isolation. These relational skills I term `savvy' (Parelli, 1993).' I contend that teachers who are savvy can establish and sustain teacher-student classroom partnerships that ameliorate the fear produced by the social, political, and economic forces that shape the institution of schooling. The following research describes how I adapted my horse whispering savvy to teaching in a high school setting. Being savvy in the classroom involves the ability to win students' trust, to form partnerships with students, and to sustain those relationships through continuous changes that threaten to disrupt them. While the development of teacher savvy is a very individual process, that process must lead to the acquisition of three vital abilities: the ability to develop teacher-student partnerships, to sustain those partnerships, and to track behavior indicating changes in relational rhythms. These abilities can be developed only in concert with an awareness derived from personal experience of the need to change teaching practice. Acting on this desire to change, the savvy teacher must be able to utilize the inadequate processes of schooling to educate students about the problems produced by our way of living that is neither compatible with our planetary systems, nor sustainable over the long term. To practice horse whispering savvy in the classroom teachers must learn to see the teaching environment as a complex interaction of systems, that is, as a network of interconnected reciprocal relations that function well as long as its interacting systems unfold harmoniously. They must learn to track this relational system from within, immersed in the web of classroom relationship, being sensitive to shifts in relational rhythms, and aware of the patterns and needs of other systems that compose the learning setting. Savvy teachers must be willing to educate students to understand the influence of the corporate agenda in the process of schooling and, to this end, abandon typical prescribed curriculum plans, and rely instead on teachable moments that occur within the classroom setting, all the while camouflaging their intent to educate students to think for themselves. It is important for the savvy teacher to realize how being powerless can make students and even student teachers feel fearful and disconnected, unprepared to handle what occurs in the school setting or even influence the outcome of events. The savvy teacher needs to help form solutions to problems, encouraging and enhancing self-sufficiency in the classroom in order to disrupt dependency on the processes offered to us by the corporate way of living.

No description available.

This research aims to chart four modes of engagement in post-verite documentary films, devoted to an exclusive examination of theatrical formats, that being those documentaries which are originally intended for a cinema audience. As these theatrical documentaries provide a means for spectators to see through the cinema screen and into the real world, it is important to understand how this 'seeing through' is constructed by the documentary production itself. This thesis acknowledges that the 'learning' of documentary stories and subjects has broadened for the global audience of today. After exploring various separate critiques of documentary voice theory, the definition of documentary and film semiotics, I have devised eight paradigms for creating this 'learning' or 'documentary consciousness' in these theatrical or cinema documentaries. I have explored how these eight paradigms can be observed to function in four different modes. These modes contribute to an evolving understanding of viewer comprehension; that thing called documentary consciousness. This is demonstrated through the audio-visual appendix of clips taken from the proto-typical theatrical documentaries I have chosen to analyse, which are: 'Bowling For Columbine' by Michael Moore (2003), which is illustrative of what I have dubbed the 'Outcome Mode'; 'Etre et Avoir' ('To Be And To Have') by Nicholas Philibert (2004), which exemplifies what I call the 'Participant Mode'; 'My Architect' by Nathaniel Kahn (2005), an example of the 'Journey Mode'; 'Baraka' by Magidson Films (1996), a model of the 'Mandala Mode'.

Ce mémoire étudiera en quoi la tuerie du Columbine High School (Colorado, États-Unis) de 1999 fut instrumentalisée. Plus précisément, nous verrons en quoi elle constitua, entre avril 1999 et octobre 2002, une opportunité pour les politiciens, les membres du clergé, les chroniqueurs, les auteurs et les activistes et même les familles des victimes de mettre de l'avant un agenda moral et de dénoncer ce qu'ils jugent comme les travers de la société américaine tout en défendant une vision traditionnelle de celle-ci. Cette recherche reposera sur un corpus de sources varié, rassemblant les propos des membres du Congrès et de la Maison-Blanche grâce au réseau C-SPAN, mais aussi ceux d'autres participants au débat public. Nous nous pencherons plus particulièrement sur les remarques concernant quatre grands thèmes, soit le discrédit des jeunes, des parents et du mode de vie moderne; les spéculations quant au rôle des médias, de la culture populaire et de la sous-culture gothique; la promotion de la foi chrétienne; et la question des armes à feu. / This dissertation will study how the 1999 Columbine High School Shooting (Colorado, USA) was instrumentalized. More precisely, we will see how it became, between April 1999 and October 2002, an opportunity for politicians, members of clergy, columnists, authors, activists, and even family members of victims to assert a moral agenda and to condemn the perceive wrongs of American society as well as to defend a traditional view of it. This research will be based on a varied corpus of sources, gathering the sayings of Congress and White House members thanks to C-SPAN network, but also those of other public debate contributors. We will dwell on remarks about four main issues, being the discredit of youth, parents, and modern way of life; speculations as to the role of media, popular culture, and gothic subculture; the boosting of Christian faith; and finally, the gun debate.