This thesis contains two parts. the preface theorizes memory and examines the author’s own experience writing her identity. Part II is a memoir framed with the process of training for a marathon. the marathon acts as a narrative thread that pulls together scenes of memory from the author’s childhood which features the author running away from home on several occasions. Running a marathon and running away from home intertwine to allow the writer to draw conclusions about her life and her family.

In 2007, it was estimated that approximately 20% of the United States population spoke more than one language (Grosjean, 2012). As this statistic continues to rise, it is imperative that speech-language pathologists (SLP) are prepared to serve a linguistically inclusive caseload. Dynamic assessment (DA) allows clinicians to assess bilingual children while avoiding sources of bias that are often associated with norm-referenced testing. Utilizing DA to evaluate the multifaceted skills associated with narrative language can provide clinician’s clinical direction for intervention planning (Douglas, Chanthongthip, Ukrainetz, Spencer, and Steeve, 2017). DA is often structured as a pretest-teach-posttest model, which provides insight on current learning ability rather than current skillset. Dose refers to both the measured quantity of a therapeutic agent to be taken at one time and the specification of on-going exposure to an again (i.e., daily, weekly, monthly, etc) (Justice, 2018). In reference to speech-language pathology, dose often refers to the duration of intervention sessions over a given period. However, researchers are beginning to conceptualize dose as the engagement in therapeutic events rather than the duration of time spent in a session (Williams, 2012). In such cases, dose is represented as something the child does (e.g., produces a target phoneme) and as something the clinician does (e.g., providing exposure to a target phoneme) (Hassink & Leonard, 2010). While research on dose continues to develop, there is little research on implications of dose in bilingual populations. Due to the current COVID-19 global pandemic, many SLPs have transitioned their practice to alternative methods of delivery. The current study aims to examine the impact and opinions of practicing SLPs on dose, narrative intervention, and dynamic assessment of bilingual populations. The study surveyed licensed SLPs to obtain information on the current practices and definitions of dose, DA, and subsequent language interventions to bilingual populations.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Biblical interpreters have often been unwittingly anthropocentric in their reading of biblical narratives, ignoring the living and nonliving presence of physical world characteristics that underpin the narrative’s overall framework. Moreover, with a focus on men, women’s role as water fetchers has been overlooked, resulting in the text’s dual undermining of ecological and gender issues. This thesis attempts to move away from such interpretations and reread selected biblical texts about water and women using a dual-mode of inquiry, namely gender-ecocriticism. A central question within ecocritical inquiry is—how is nature represented in the narrative? Furthermore, on the subject of gender criticism— how are daughters narrativized in the text? These are the two critical questions that this thesis intends to explore. There are only five explicit narratives of ‘daughters fetching water at the well’ in the Bible. Nevertheless, these scenic activities are significant because of their historical link to the waterfetching daughters in the contemporary world. This study draws attention to the gendering of the water-fetching task by a gender analysis of the five texts. To understand why only daughters are assigned the task of water-fetching, the study draws on theories of the sexual division of labour. The first theme I discuss in this dissertation is water symbolism as found in Judeo-Christian and contemporary stories of water and its interplay with current issues of water scarcity. The focus of the second part is the water-gender intersections found in those five narratives. These themes are explored in this thesis through an exegetical analysis of the five biblical water-drawing narratives. The interpretation is based on socio-historical analysis as well as literary analysis employing narratology and biblical hermeneutical methods. This dissertation concludes that water stories demonstrate that water is more than a symbol. The current water shortage crisis in some parts of the world directs our attention to the urgency of reconfiguring water in our religious and theological imaginations. Water becomes an intrinsic feature in the reader’s mind when read from a gender-ecocritical angle. Being appreciative of each physical element in the vast expanse of the ecosystem, allows a reader’s imagination to reflect on the global negative impact and the distortion of those valuable connections we as humans have with the rest of the physical world.

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AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF Elaine Conrad, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication Studies, presented on September 21, 2018, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: “I WANT TO TELL YOU MY STORY”: THE POTENTIAL OF NARRATIVE TO BRIDGE CULTURAL DIVIDE MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Nilanjana Bardhan In this dissertation, I examine a strange kind of divide or disconnect that occurs between international students and U.S.-American students. While international students studying in the United States are often strongly interested in forming connections within their newly adopted country and are anxious to get to know and make new friends with U.S.-American students as well as with other community members, it is not always reciprocated by their U.S.-American counterparts. According to data collected in a survey at Midwestern University, frequently U.S.-Americans lack the same motivation for forming connections, find conversing with international students “awkward” at best, threatening or frightening at worst, and view international students as “very foreign,” “strange,” and “too different from me.” Some are fearful of even beginning a conversation, afraid that they will say or do the wrong or politically incorrect thing. Or they may purposely distance themselves from anyone they perceive as different from themselves, preferring that those they view as different stay “someplace else” as far away as possible. My principal concern and overall question in this dissertation is how to begin to bridge these gaps between U.S.-American students and international students so the divide does not become even greater when they leave the protected environment of a college campus and venture out in the world. Perhaps a good starting point to begin to build bridges toward such understanding is through narrative and the stories that international students tell. Stories connect people. They ii draw us in and engage us. It seems only natural to turn in the direction of narratives about the challenges international students experience while negotiating their newly adopted culture in the United States as that potential connecting point, and to begin with audiences of primarily U.S.-American students and community members. In this qualitative study, I was a participant observer in the U.S.-American audiences for the presentations delivered by international students who volunteered to tell their personal stories about the challenges that they have faced. The topic and the exact nature of the challenges they experienced was left open regarding what information and what stories they chose to share with their audiences. I followed up each presentation by conducting qualitative interviews with the 6 female international students involved. In addition, I conducted interviews with 10 audience members who participated and volunteered to be interviewed. My interest was in learning what the U.S.-American students and community members heard when listening to the narratives, stories about how these international students have constructed and negotiated their identities in relation to their “Other” (in this case those of us who are U.S. American). Did U.S.-Americans pick up the same messages that the story-tellers believed that they were delivering? What questions were the audience members motivated to ask? What did they learn from listening to the storytellers’ stories? Did they gain any new insights? Were there commonalities between the different audience members who volunteered to be interviewed? And did they hear common messages? Regarding the students telling their stories, I was interested in discovering what they chose to discuss as well as how much they chose to disclose, and if they gained any insights from the process of telling their stories or from questions that the audience members asked or did not ask. What were their observations about the audience and the audience reactions? How did they iii feel when they were telling their stories? Did the process of telling their stories impact their own identities? There were similar themes that both the storytellers and their audience members discussed during their interviews; however, the subthemes differed. The primary themes that the storytellers believed that they focused on were: cultural issues and differences, religious perceptions, and to a lesser degree, language and communication. While these primary themes were consistent across the storyteller narratives, how strongly they were emphasized and what subthemes were discussed differed from storyteller to storyteller. Among the audience members, the themes heard and discussed were similar to those of the storytellers; however, when the U.S.-Americans discussed cultural differences, they emphasized similarities as opposed to differences, and focused more on communication and language challenges. Religious perceptions were viewed through a western, mostly Christian lens. Subthemes mentioned by U.S.-Americans were bullying, gender, and stereotypes. When I began this dissertation, many of us in the United States were celebrating our first Black president and I, along with many others, hoped that U.S.-Americans would begin to feel more comfortable with diversity in that new and historic reality. However, the political environment has changed once again. Unfortunately, many U.S.-Americans appear to feel even more threatened by diversity, viewing those who are “different” from themselves with ever increasing amounts of anxiety, fear, xenophobia and anger, which are fueled by almost daily news reports. In the current environment, narrative has become even more important as a way to connect and begin to better understand each other, with the potential of bridging cultural divide.

The focus of this research is on the involvement of narrative learning within technical communication and the benefits that such an involvement can bring to the field. I analyze literature from within technical communication to determine how narrative is perceived, as well as the traditions in technical communication that made the field resistant to the use of narrative in the past. These findings are considered with respect to the history and definition of narrative, as well as to how narrative can improve learning outcomes when compared to expository learning approaches commonly used in technical documentation. While narrative is not a new concept to technical communication, this thesis offers new insights through a multidisciplinary approach that considers the work of philosophers and narratologists that are relatively unknown to the field. Philosophers Daniel Dennett and Jerome Bruner, as well as narratologists Gerard Genette, David Rudrum, and David Darby, show that narrative forms the basis for the construction of reality and that all human learning is based on the stories that we construct to give meaning to the world. Research studies conducted on the efficacy of narrative based learning are discussed in detail and an analysis of the areas where narrative use would most benefit technical communication is provided. Recommendations are made for the future use of narrative in technical documentation and for further research on the implementation and cost of narrative solutions.

The high age limit established by the compulsory school attendance law has caused the presence in high schools of many pupils of low intelligence. Classes composed entirely of these pupils will be referred to in this discussion as slow-moving groups. Teaching literature to these pupils is a particularly difficult problem. Many of them do not read with ease and hence cannot master the content when it is presented in the narrative method. They can not concentrate for a sufficient- ly long time to master it when the teacher uses the lecture method. It becomes necessary then to find some plan for teaching literature which will take into consideration the limited natural capacities of these slow-moving pupils

This study employed a mixed-methods strategy to assess how narrative writing is perceived and utilized in first-year composition (FYC) courses at American 4-year institutions. The history of narrative writing instruction is reviewed in an examination of the literature of rhetoric and composition scholars, as well as those who study narrative theory. The survey tool was created for instructors and course/program designers to provide an overview of their FYC curricula, methodologies, and perceptions related to narrative writing. Findings indicate that FYC instructors and course designers perceive narrative writing as an introductory writing tool, much like the progymnasmata of antiquity, wherein narrative writing is used as scaffolding for more academic writing tasks. Though rarely assigned beyond the first project of the semester, when narrative is assigned, the learning objectives are difficult to meaningfully articulate beyond the general goals of the FYC course. The implications for future research are plentiful, as this study was necessarily limited in scope by its exploratory goals, so there are many opportunities to expand and build upon the work of this study.

<p> At Home in Stories asks how stories contribute to addressing the problem of becoming at-home for an exiled people or person. This question is set in the context of the internal exile experienced by First Nations and immigrant communities as a result of the dominance of Empire, nation-building, resource extraction and consumer-culture stories. How do members of an exiled community remember their story and continue their history in the face of and in response to all that estranges and threatens to erase them as a people? How do exiles write their stories to develop their own particular identity in contrast to a dominant story? Through close textual analysis I trace how these questions are imaginatively taken up in the following contemporary Canadian fictional stories: Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers, Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach, and Shelley Niro's It Starts With a Whisper and Suite: INDIAN. </p> <p> Drawing on critical work from fields including Indigenous Studies, hermeneutics, M.M. Bakhtin's philosophy of language, and postcolonial and postmodern theories, I explore the relationship between home-making and storytelling by highlighting three aspects of becoming at-home. Humankind is born into and a part of a particular ecological household made up of the relationships that sustain life in a specific locale, in itself a story-soaked place; becoming at-home includes cultural belonging whose integrity is marked by boundaries and a cultural hearth-fire; finally, as different cultures share the same land, developing a sense of mystery that indwells difference between peoples is crucial. </p> <p> This thesis takes up the ability of stories to get at the complexity of the meeting between different persons and cultures, the ways in which dominant stories silence the many non-human and human voices that make up life on earth, and how through their alternative vision other stories provide counter narratives to this silencing. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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