Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/733
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Item Welcome hauntings: 'The Odyssey', 'How I Became a Ghost', and subjectivity production in English language arts curriculum(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2023) Telling, Hannah Ruth; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Linda KarellAnalyzing 'How I Became a Ghost' and 'The Odyssey' through the lenses of the Gothic, temporality, and memorial/monument studies offers new ways of understanding how subjectivity production and the United States' nation-building project function in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms. In particular, this study analyzes how these curricular offerings consume and produce human-ness and non-being through alt-right, Indigenous, and settler-colonial temporalities. This study gives practicing teachers and scholars a method to help students form a Gothic historical consciousness as a framework of connection, communication, and healing in order to combat curricular violence.Item From turning away to listening in: instruction to facilitate civic dialogue through regional literature(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2022) Hall, Nicole JoAnna; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Allison Wynhoff OlsenThe purpose of this paper is to discuss how trauma-reducing student-centered instruction (TR-SCI) offers a solution to the cycle of traumatizing and retraumatizing student experiences within classroom environments. TR-SCI is a way to center the student experience and focuses on reducing trauma inducing practices in the classroom. I discuss what the classroom experience might entail then I explore why TR-SCI might allow for environments of trust and reciprocity which is needed to create civic dialogue. Civic dialogue consists of conversations built upon reciprocity and respect, while listening across conflict toward understanding differences. Civic dialogue provides opportunity for students to step outside echo chambers and has the potential to widen students' view of the experiences of others. Critically exploring regionally relevant literature is a way to begin civic dialogue and has potential for students to find connections and disconnections that are situated within the context of their regional experiences. I interject my own experiences as a mother, educator, student, community member, and researcher to explore why I think we need trauma-reducing classrooms that engage in civic dialogue by exemplifying, through writing and discussion, an attempt to connect personal and regional experience with author Ivan Doig's text and archives. I have written a series of letters to Ivan called 'Dear Ivan' that exemplify my work to build connection with the author and archives. My hope is that discussions on TR-SCI, civic dialogue through regional literature, and my explorations with connecting to Ivan help to facilitate further conversations in these fields. I see the connections with these concepts and methods as potential for teacher education workshops and further qualitative research studies in classroom environments. It is not my purpose here to propose a solution but simply to begin dialogue toward relatable ways to build equity and inclusion within the classroom.Item Deepening human connection and understanding through diverse visual narratives in the ELA classroom(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2022) Erickson, Tasheena Mesha Angel; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Allison Wynhoff OlsenFor too long graphic narratives and film have been marginalized and excluded from English language arts (ELA) classrooms. Along with these modalities, the over use of the literary canon in classrooms has prevented voices of diverse races and cultures from being represented or heard in the stories teachers share with their students. This paper dives into all three of these topics: graphic narrative usage, film usage, and most importantly, diversifying the texts included in ELA curriculum. After presenting findings on each of these topics, an inclusive thematic framework has been included as a suggestion, a guide to teachers who wish to move away from the canon and towards a classroom that recognizes people across races, across cultures, and across modalities. This thematic framework includes text set suggestions, film suggestions, a grading guide for choice projects, and lists of questions that will help guide both students and teachers in their journeys to recognizing the human behind all stories.Item The ball's in your court: the effect of sports in rural English classrooms(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2020) Reierson, Elizabeth Anne; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Allison Wynhoff OlsenEducation in rural areas is affected by the place in which the education takes place. This affects how students interact with the community as well as the classroom. The most visible way in which the community interacts with the school is through spectating at high school games. The author interviews four English teachers in rural eastern Montana to explore the ways in which community, school, English classrooms and sports interact. Educators noted that while sports had many benefits, there was no sports literature being explicitly taught or being directly incorporated into the classroom. Furthermore, absences caused by school athletics create a tension between academic needs and extracurricular expectations. These absences are directly affecting the ways in which English teachers create their curriculum. The author offers next steps for teachers looking to create a connection between classroom and community through athletics.Item Teaching english on the moon: a memoir of teaching at a rural school(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2020) Hoffmann, Alan David; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Allison Wynhoff OlsenMontana is a primarily rural state. The majority of Montana's high schools are 'Class C' schools with enrollments under 107 students. Of these, over sixty Montana high schools have enrollments under sixty students. In these schools, high school academic departments normally consist of one person. This experience is rarely examined. Even existing literature that focuses on rural education focus on settings with higher enrollments than many of Montana's smaller schools. Drawing on the author's personal experience of teaching at high school with an enrollment of around 25 students, this memoir provides an account and guide for working in these settings. Through this, the author details the benefits of teaching in these settings, such as smaller class sizes that allow for more one-on-one interaction. It also examines the challenges of coming and teaching in rural places, including the stresses of prepping for seven different classes and difficulties of integrating into rural communities. Given the number of these schools in the state of Montana, many graduates from the Montana University System's education programs will go on to teach in these settings. This work aims to advocate for rural settings and to give teachers that may go into these areas an idea of what to expect.Item My dildo called Nicaragua: rewriting cultural mythos(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2018) Benton, Sonja Annalise; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Linda KarellThis, more than anything, is a retelling of a story. It is a retelling of being an activist, a cancer victim, a writer, a student, a teacher, and an American. It is a new mythology of the classroom, the university, of the creation of language. I draw on Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde, and countless others, to guide a new conception of how to move in the world, how to become, and how to rewrite the myths that have been told about us. I hoped to create an answer and precedent for my own experience and shed new light on the work of 80s intersectional feminists as a guide for activism in the 2010s and 2020s to come. Its success as a paper depends on those who do work in the future, on the guidance it manages or doesn't manage to provide to others. I will never know how this work concludes, since it is just a continuation of previous work meant to help fork into new continuations in the future. It is the drawing of a map that was already partially drawn, and that is nowhere near finished yet. It is a call for more people willing to draw.Item Taking creative risks in the high school writing center: how secondary writing centers foster the development of risk taking that ultimately leads to creative agency in high school student writers(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2018) Juedeman, Elaina Renée; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michelle MileyThis thesis explores how high school writing centers foster the development of risk taking that ultimately leads to creative agency in high school students, which, I argue, works in opposition to the current neoliberal educational agenda. To explore this topic, I used a mixed-methods approach for data collection. Working with the frameworks of both teacher research and ethnography, I gathered data through observations, interviews, and surveys. The results of this research show that particular methods of writing centers grounded in sociocultural theory do foster the development of risk taking that ultimately leads to creative agency in high school students. The results also show that some of these methods transfer to other educational settings as well. This project concludes with a discussion of the value of research that explores educational environments that oppose the neoliberal agenda.Item Exploring satire in the early postmodern American war novel(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2018) Brown, Kolby Elizabeth; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Robert BennettAfter the Second World War, young soldier-writers such as Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones and Joseph Heller responded to the cultural impact and horrors of World War II by engaging a satire that was meant to not only expose problems of society, but inspire change. Too often, readers mistake satire for pure entertainment. Although satire has a longstanding reputation as comedy, satire is a vital weapon for democratic societies to challenge lies, corruption and the abuse of power. By focusing attention on a diverse range of satiric expression, this thesis aims to fill a gap in the scholarship on early postmodern American war novels and the way they attack systems that objectify and dehumanize human bodies for the agenda of war.Item Writing-about-writing and Joan Didion: creating a space for emotion as epistemic tool in first-year composition(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2018) Christen, Julie Ann; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Kathleen RyanThis project considers the problem of the cultural binary created between emotion and reasoning as ways of knowing. I address this binary within the context of first-year composition (FYC) by developing three central tenets for emotion as epistemic tool through a review of emotion scholarship in rhetoric and composition. These include: 1) emotions must be specific and nameable; 2) emotion challenges cultural assumptions and beliefs; and 3) we use the connection between emotion and experience as a method of inquiry. Having established these tenets, I situate emotion as epistemic tool in a writing-about-writing (WAW) approach to FYC and argue that this pedagogy is an effective site for emotion as epistemic tool, though it lacks concrete examples for how this works in writing. To address that, I suggest Joan Didion's memoirs as an access point for students to see emotion working as epistemic tool outside academic writing. Finally, I connect these agendas in a curriculum design for a WAW course in FYC on emotion as epistemic tool that includes a course schedule, assignment sheets, and unit rationales.Item Bitter business and spoken daggers: George Peele's senecanism and the origins of William Shakespeare's ethos of revenge in 'Titus Andronicus'(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2017) Lynch, Jeff Raymond; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Gretchen E. MintonFor nearly three centuries, scholars and critics have argued that Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's earliest revenge tragedy, lacks for thematic and characterological consistency and dramaturgical merit. Many have suggested that Titus was not written by Shakespeare--or not written by him alone. In 2002, British scholar Brian Vickers presented a comprehensive study of the authorship of the play, concluding that Titus was co-written by Shakespeare and his early modern contemporary George Peele. Critical literary scholarship has not caught up with Vickers's settlement of the authorship question and there exists a lacuna in the analysis of the play, namely, for my purposes, how do the disparately authored scenes reflect sourcing influences and intratextual character development regarding revenge as a literary descendant of classical drama and as an ethical enterprise of moral agents. Shakespeare's subsequent treatments of the ethical dimensions of vengeance, as both a public and private manifestation of the quest for justice and a psychological response to injury, spawn from the complex tropology in Titus--both those he assumed from Peele and those he introduced into the text himself. A study of the moral philosophy espoused in the joint composition of Titus affords the opportunity for a deeper understanding of how early modern playwrights addressed the desire for revenge as a psychological and moral activity and how the jointly composed play launched Shakespeare's subsequent negotiation with the revenge tragedy genre and the ethos of revenge in his later revenge tragedies.