Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item Composition and aleche : Native American education, scholarship and the pedagogy of John Dewey(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2005) Jenkins, Nathan Joseph; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Kirk BranchThis thesis approaches the historical and contemporary education of Native Americans in order to analyze and combat the American academic system's failure to educate Native students. The chapters cover 1) boarding schools aims and student resistance, 2) problems still faced by Native American students, and 3) possible solutions to these problems. Chapters 1 and 2 give an overview of history and research done by educators and scholars. Chapter 3 is a combination of suggestions by educators of Native students and John Dewey. The first sections demonstrate problems and voids in academia, and the final section attempts to show practical and realistic methods for correcting institutional mistakes and/or ignorance which result in high attrition rates. Dewey's pedagogy succinctly breaks down and challenges academic ideology, while at the same time challenging educators with progressive methods. The thesis challenges not only the error of conventional education, but also how education gets defined and placed upon Native students. Also recognized in this thesis, are those areas where an academic self-examination demonstrates difficult, or problematic, areas and situations, where the black and white, or binaries, of education, are not easily noticed, nor navigated by the student or the teacher. In general, the aim of the discussion is to further democratic methods in Native American education by literally bringing those students into consideration, and to look at what we do in academia in light of the past, present, and future, within an unbroken link of time and pedagogy.Item The point of view of the author : intersections in philosophy and literature(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2004) Leubner, Benjamin Jordan; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Philip GainesThe question of this thesis is what does it mean to write under the temporal categories, or categories of understanding of, repetition, recurrence and return. Naturally, before the question can be dealt with, these categories must be investigated, as well as set off against the traditional categories which they aim to expand. The method of exposition utilized within the thesis is meant to walk, as it were, hand in hand with its content. The content being largely the "three R's" mentioned above, the thesis accordingly repeats, recurs and returns to the same ideas and the same metaphors, throughout. The materials incorporated within the thesis include, but are not limited to, the philosophical writings of Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida, as well as the literary writings of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Cees Nooteboom. There are no acknowledged borders between literature and philosophy within the thesis; instead I work from the tautological premise that a text is a text. The conclusion of the thesis is, at best, inconclusive. My methods of elucidation may be quite foreign to some readers. Through working as a tutor with Japanese exchange students for several years, I have found that rather than stating and continually restating the thesis throughout the course of the essay, starting away from the goal and from there slowly circling in upon it, in an elucidatory spiral, with the thesis, or center, being reached substantially for the first time only at the end, is more to my liking as a method.