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- Creator:
- Fernandez, Danielle
- Description:
- This thesis takes a case study approach to acknowledge the existence of micro communities in classrooms and to highlight the many purposes these communities serve for students as an important part of their learning experience. The term micro community is an adaptation of the term community of practice, which has been studied extensively by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. By observing the micro community formed by three students in a section of English 30, we can better understand the kinds of support that students need from each other and how we, as teachers, can build practices into our classrooms that allow for such beneficial peer-to-peer interactions. In the introduction, I will introduce the three students whose micro community I observed and in the following chapter I will review the scholarship on concepts like identity construction, participation, and the underlife phenomenon in order to develop my definition for the term micro community. Chapter 3 will outline my methods for conducting my research, as well as my methods for recording data and Chapter 4 includes my interpretations of that data. Using the terms and concepts discussed in the review of the literature, I draw connections between the theories of learning discussed in Chapter 2 and the practices that I witnessed students engaging in throughout the semester. My final chapter serves as a space where I imagine ways in which micro communities can be built and maintained with intention in college writing classrooms.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Allen, Janette A.
- Description:
- This study examines the similar subversive feministic themes that exist between Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of Pointed Firs and Willa Cather’s My Antonia. First, this thesis explores the relationship between these women, then it examines the similar literary techniques they utilized and finally, this thesis presents findings of an analysis of those techniques. This study contributes to the discipline of feminist and women's studies in American literature because it is focused on the experience of women and studies women via a contemporary feminist perspective. Also, this study contributes to the concept of coding in literature. This thesis adds to the study of literary coding by furthering an analysis of coding techniques. Primarily, this study adds to scholarship on the work of Stowe, Jewett and Cather by bringing contemporary perspectives into the act if textual analysis. This study develops a definition of literary coding and applies that dentition to textual analysis. This act could be the first step in decoding literature. This thesis examines The Pearl of Orr’s Island, The Country of Pointed Firs and My Antonia, pinpointing both literary techniques and thematic issues that were passed-on, responded to and furthered between Stowe, Jewett and Cather.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Swain, Derek
- Description:
- In 2014 CSU Chico decided to use game-based learning principles to redesign Early Start into something that didn’t feel or look like remediation. Students, not their teachers or the institution’s curriculum, would be the center of this course. Using predominant theorists in the field of game Chico designed an Early Start that would focus on helping students learn how to learn, participate, and be in the University as well as its environs. The new Early Start, named EPIC, was built with kinesthetic structures that stress the concept of learning-by-doing. Constructivism calls this concept legitimate peripheral participation while gaming studies refers to it as embodied learning. But both entail a performative experiential approach where the learner gradually internalizes the practices needed to become a more capable participant. It is in this way that good learning, according to the field of game studies, requires the making of goals stemming from an ongoing construction of a more capable identity. Unfortunately the effect of traditional remediation like Early Start is typically the exact opposite: students become so put off at being labeled remedial that they lose all confidence to perform or internalize the activities of remediation. And if they can’t perform or participate, and already feel the opposite of confident, how is that they are to be remedied in remedial programs? Game based structures bear a striking resemblance to Vygotsky’s theories of play, learning, and development. Vygotsky’s sociocultural methodology emphasizes social relations specifically between learners and more capable peers as a means to produce genuine learning rather than information regurgitated on an exam. Games don’t cultivate knowledge prepended for a test but an identity conducive to producing more expert participation in a specific context. This study explores the results of this gamebased course, its curriculum, and the engagement we saw from the students within the program as they started to take on the identity of college learners.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Portillo, Vincent
- Description:
- This thesis is an autoethnographic exploration of the theoretical concept of rhetorical agency, which develops over time through practice amongst a community of writers. I use the theoretical concept of "communities of practice" to describe the ways in which the practice of writing is learned and rhetorical agency is developed in local and situated contexts. Through the description and analysis of scenes of writing I study how newcomers to a community of practice gain access to practice through the use of digital writing technologies; I also study how access to members within a community of practice facilitates the practice of writing through revision. Finally, I consider implications for a community practice model of teaching writing to engage rhetorical agency that students bring with them to the classroom.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Crescenti, Rebecca
- Description:
- What I would like to challenge is this notion that graffiti has to be eradicated because it causes damage and that it is nothing more than vandalism, waste, and destruction. Rather, I claim that graffiti is a representation of an alternative visual narrative to the dominant forces of the city, and as such, contests what it means to live in the urban environment. I argue that all graffiti acts are personal accounts, though, not all are politically motivated. I employ the use of fictional characters from Don Delillo’s Underworld, Moonman 157 and Klara Sax, in order to illustrate graffiti as a visual narrative (Delillo 1997). These characters felt an intense drive to tell the world about their experiences with people, places, and things that had passed through the world unnoticed, which is described as the urge to write graffiti. Their passion and natural propensity for writing untold narratives, in untraditional ways, is what drove them. I claim that the graffiti instinct contests the urge to give in to accepted norms, which are often heavily dictated through media as well as the ordered urban environment. Thus, the graffiti instinct, I claim, is the missing element in current academic scholarship on graffiti as a visual narrative. I will be using narrative theory in order to argue that graffiti, as a visual narrative, has the ability to make positive contributions to scholarship. I will begin with a brief summation of graffiti’s background and history, as well as its criminal reputation in the United States. I will then give examples as to how Delillo’s novel illustrates the use of narrative theory and its impact on how history is recorded and perceptions of graffiti, as a problem, and how this has been perpetuated in the media. In other words, I will show how his words seek to disrupt order, much like the graffiti writer who seeks to both disrupt and create. By using this methodology, it is my hope to bring new perspectives into the complex, provocative, and controversial world of graffiti as a worthy subject of study that continues to thrive and evolve well into the twenty-first century.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Almaimani, Salwa
- Description:
- This thesis will examine marital difficulties in Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God and Seraph on the Suwanee, in a way that undercuts issues of race, because both her black character and her white character face many of the same problems. The thesis examines Janie Crawford’s and Arvay Henson’s marital relationships that appear to be a form of protection as well as financial security. It explores how Hurston’s male characters attempt to establish a chauvinistic approach towards their wives, which is even further unfair considering that women are the weaker sex. Despite the tough marriage, these women are capable of surviving and making their decisions impactful.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Smith, Mark
- Description:
- When an individual enters a new field of practice, an integral part of that process is the development of an identity that situates the individual as a legitimate participant in that practice. This study combines elements of identity theory with theories of distributed cognition to examine the possibility that the identity construction process can be distributed across multiple contexts and platforms. To approach this question, the author interviewed members of two online forums in order to reach an understanding of the extent to which their participation in the online communities impacted their overall identity development. The author argues that individuals use participation in online forum communities to access crucial “identity resources” that help them develop and maintain identities related to their fields of practice. It was also found that online contexts offered certain affordances to the identity development process which were not available in offline contexts, suggesting that some aspects of identity construction could be more profitably pursued in online communities. Furthermore, the transfer of these identities between online and offline contexts was found to be routine and constant, with users often benefitting in offline spaces from identity construction work performed online.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Fitzpatrick, Michael Clark
- Description:
- This thesis provides the first philosophical systematization of John Milton’s views on freedom and uses this systematic exposition to interpret the most pivotal choices in the final three poems of Milton’s literary career—Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). Rather than approaching each of these poems as an isolated work, I argue for reading the three late poems as a conceptual trilogy, where each work depicts a unique paradigmatic figure in the Christian logic of standing and falling. The movements of standing and falling are the movements of Miltonic freedom. Drawing from both Milton’s late poems and his more theoretical prose, I build on the pioneering work of Dennis Danielson and Benjamin Myers to develop a complete philosophical exposition of Milton’s views on freedom, with regard to God, angels, and both unfallen and fallen humans. Understanding what the category of freedom meant for Milton allows the representations of freedom in the poetic trilogy to be read through the lens of Milton’s theory. I examine the freedom of the four sets of protagonists in the poems: the fallen movements of Satan, as well as Adam & Eve, and the standing movements of Jesus and Samson. My exegesis challenges popular critical approaches which find the central choices of these characters unintelligible and reveals the practical Milton who sought to demonstrate the path of true freedom to his readers.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Krone, Jarret W.
- Description:
- This thesis examines the role dualistic conceptual frameworks play in the decision making process, and I make claims about how these limiting systems of thought impact our culture on many levels, including academia. I introduce readers to the concept of “digital dualism,” and use this concept as a way to illuminate the types of modern dualities and oppositions that are at play in the education world, and in the collective mind of society. Using this lens, I call attention to the common tradition/innovation duality, and argue that this duality causes fragmented and conflicted perceptions of what progress looks like. Nostalgia and tradition play a key role in complicating our understanding of progress, and these forces prove to be quite powerful in an education system where change and innovation move far too slowly. I ultimately make the claim that Nathan Jurgenson’s concept of “Augmented Reality” (anti-digital dualism) represents a theoretical counterpart to the concept of multimodality and transliteracy, and that for instructors there is much to gain from understanding and being aware of the underlying principles of this relationship.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Elliott, Jennifer L.
- Description:
- Although studies show that students are reading frequently outside of school, teachers often find that students struggle with reading activities inside the classroom. This study uses network and reader-response theories to explore some of the possible reasons for this dichotomy. The author argues that the problem underlying reading issues for students is that they are trying to navigate two distinct reading networks: one created in school and one cultivated outside of school. This separation begins in the K-12 years and continues into college. In order to understand the impact of separated reading networks on freshmen coming into the university, the author conducted an ethnographic study of 200 students. Using surveys, interviews, and observations of students, the author found that students’ perceptions of reading activities are largely shaped by external forces that work to discourage them from forming efficient reading networks. Ultimately, the author suggests using game theory to design assignment sequences or even syllabi, as a way to help students begin to build robust reading networks.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English