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- All Subjects: Communication
- All Subjects: Educational leadership
- Creators: Arizona State University
Description
Scholars have attended to paradoxes inherent in wider public discourse where subordinated groups most affected by laws and sanctions have the least political, material, and rhetorical capital to speak back to them. Such scholarship often focuses either on the subordinated status of a group or the work of subordinated groups going public as part of a collective mass movement for social change. In doing so, scholarship risks undermining the agency of subordinated rhetors or treating mass-movement rhetoric as somehow both exceptional and yet necessary for enacting cultural citizenship. What is less frequently studied is the agency that local publics demonstrate through their tenacious organizational decision-making in the face of political, material, and rhetorical sanctions.
In response to this gap, this project features the Puente Movement, a mixed-documentation-status grassroots organization in Phoenix, AZ. Specifically, I’ve analyzed this organization’s public efforts from April 23rd, 2010 to September 6th, 2012 to oppose Senate Bill 1070—a state-specific measure to stop undocumented immigration across the Mexico/Arizona border and deport current undocumented residents. I situate the study in the larger context of Latino cultural citizenship. Combining a critical-incident interview technique and a rhetorically informed decision-making framework, I analyze Puente’s active construction and public circulation of argumentative appeals in relation to their decision-making that attempted to leverage Puente’s identity and membership to serve its constituents and to continue to direct wider public attention to SB 1070. Using a five-part framework to assess potential risks and benefits, the study documents the complexity of this decision-making. For instance, the study shows how Puente’s strategy of Barrio Defense Committees negotiated the tension between protecting the identification of local residents and publically protesting the injustices of immigration sanctions. It also highlights how a strategy to use member’s undocumented status as a point of publicity actively engaged tensions between the narratives Puente members wanted to present to the public about undocumented people and the images otherwise circulated. Behind these strategies and others like them is Puente’s persistent effort to re-frame immigration controversy. Findings are relevant to the study of Latino/a social movements, public-spheres scholarship, and action-research with subordinated rhetors.
In response to this gap, this project features the Puente Movement, a mixed-documentation-status grassroots organization in Phoenix, AZ. Specifically, I’ve analyzed this organization’s public efforts from April 23rd, 2010 to September 6th, 2012 to oppose Senate Bill 1070—a state-specific measure to stop undocumented immigration across the Mexico/Arizona border and deport current undocumented residents. I situate the study in the larger context of Latino cultural citizenship. Combining a critical-incident interview technique and a rhetorically informed decision-making framework, I analyze Puente’s active construction and public circulation of argumentative appeals in relation to their decision-making that attempted to leverage Puente’s identity and membership to serve its constituents and to continue to direct wider public attention to SB 1070. Using a five-part framework to assess potential risks and benefits, the study documents the complexity of this decision-making. For instance, the study shows how Puente’s strategy of Barrio Defense Committees negotiated the tension between protecting the identification of local residents and publically protesting the injustices of immigration sanctions. It also highlights how a strategy to use member’s undocumented status as a point of publicity actively engaged tensions between the narratives Puente members wanted to present to the public about undocumented people and the images otherwise circulated. Behind these strategies and others like them is Puente’s persistent effort to re-frame immigration controversy. Findings are relevant to the study of Latino/a social movements, public-spheres scholarship, and action-research with subordinated rhetors.
ContributorsOliver, Veronica (Author) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This study applies Relational Dialectic Theory to analyze the stepparent and stepchild relationship of one family. The data is documented in an autoethnography. Autoethnography is an approach to data collection in which the researcher’s own experience is the source of data, and the experience is studied to deepen understandings of social reality. This study highlights the complexity of the stepparent-stepchild relationship, the uncertainty surrounding the stepparent role, and identifies the dialectic tensions that exist within the stepparent-stepchild relationship. The dialectics identified by this study include: emotional-closeness-distance, past-present, autonomy connection, and parent-friend. The findings related to how these dialectic tensions emerge and are managed within stepparent-stepchild relationships have implications for stepparents and spouses of stepparents and for new parents and parents in traditional family structures.
ContributorsRoush, Krysti (Author) / Mean, Lindsay A (Thesis advisor) / Gaffney, Cynthia (Committee member) / Waldron, Vincent (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Data and the use of data to make educational decisions have attained new-found prominence in K-12 education following the inception of high-stakes testing and subsequent linking of teacher evaluations and teacher-performance pay to students' outcomes on standardized assessments. Although the research literature suggested students' academic performance benefits were derived from employing data-informed decision making (DIDM), many educators have not felt efficacious about implementing and using DIDM practices. Additionally, the literature suggested a five-factor model of teachers' efficacy and anxiety with respect to using DIDM practices: (a) identification of relevant information, (b) interpretation of relevant information, (c) application of interpretations of data to their classroom practices, (d) requisite technological skills, and (e) comfort with data and statistics.
This action research study was designed to augment a program of support focused on DIDM, which was being offered at a K-8 charter school in Arizona. It sought to better understand the relation between participation in professional development (PD) modules and teachers' self-efficacy for using DIDM practices. It provided an online PD component, in which 19 kindergarten through 8th-grade teachers worked through three self-guided online learning modules, focused sequentially on (a) identification of relevant student data, (b) interpretation of relevant student data, and (c) application of interpretations of data to classroom practices. Each module concluded with an in-person reflection session, in which teachers shared artifacts they developed based on the modules, discussed challenges, shared solutions, and considered applications to their classrooms.
Results of quantitative data from pre- and post-intervention assessments, suggested the intervention positively influenced participants' self-efficacy for (a) identifying and (b) interpreting relevant student data. Qualitative results from eight semi-structured interviews conducted at the conclusion of the intervention indicated that teachers, regardless of previous experience using data, viewed DIDM favorably and were more able to find and draw conclusions from their data than they were prior to the intervention. The quantitative and qualitative data exhibited complementarity pointing to the same conclusions. The discussion focused on explaining how the intervention influenced participants' self-efficacy for using DIDM practices, anxiety around using DIDM practices, and use of DIDM practices.
This action research study was designed to augment a program of support focused on DIDM, which was being offered at a K-8 charter school in Arizona. It sought to better understand the relation between participation in professional development (PD) modules and teachers' self-efficacy for using DIDM practices. It provided an online PD component, in which 19 kindergarten through 8th-grade teachers worked through three self-guided online learning modules, focused sequentially on (a) identification of relevant student data, (b) interpretation of relevant student data, and (c) application of interpretations of data to classroom practices. Each module concluded with an in-person reflection session, in which teachers shared artifacts they developed based on the modules, discussed challenges, shared solutions, and considered applications to their classrooms.
Results of quantitative data from pre- and post-intervention assessments, suggested the intervention positively influenced participants' self-efficacy for (a) identifying and (b) interpreting relevant student data. Qualitative results from eight semi-structured interviews conducted at the conclusion of the intervention indicated that teachers, regardless of previous experience using data, viewed DIDM favorably and were more able to find and draw conclusions from their data than they were prior to the intervention. The quantitative and qualitative data exhibited complementarity pointing to the same conclusions. The discussion focused on explaining how the intervention influenced participants' self-efficacy for using DIDM practices, anxiety around using DIDM practices, and use of DIDM practices.
ContributorsNelson, Andrew (Author) / Buss, Ray R (Thesis advisor) / Preach, Deborah (Committee member) / Buchanan, James (Committee member) / Mertler, Craig A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
To ensure system integrity, robots need to proactively avoid any unwanted physical perturbation that may cause damage to the underlying hardware. In this thesis work, we investigate a machine learning approach that allows robots to anticipate impending physical perturbations from perceptual cues. In contrast to other approaches that require knowledge about sources of perturbation to be encoded before deployment, our method is based on experiential learning. Robots learn to associate visual cues with subsequent physical perturbations and contacts. In turn, these extracted visual cues are then used to predict potential future perturbations acting on the robot. To this end, we introduce a novel deep network architecture which combines multiple sub- networks for dealing with robot dynamics and perceptual input from the environment. We present a self-supervised approach for training the system that does not require any labeling of training data. Extensive experiments in a human-robot interaction task show that a robot can learn to predict physical contact by a human interaction partner without any prior information or labeling. Furthermore, the network is able to successfully predict physical contact from either depth stream input or traditional video input or using both modalities as input.
ContributorsSur, Indranil (Author) / Amor, Heni B (Thesis advisor) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The issue of teacher shortages has been a national crisis in the United States. Teachers have expressed feeling exhausted and burnt out from the profession. The COVID-19 pandemic made these feelings worse, with the rates of teachers leaving the profession being higher than what has occurred in the past. Teachers’ sense of belonging at their schools and their professional identities as educators can have an impact on their decisions to stay in or leave the field of education. Participation in a community of practice has been shown to have a positive impact on teachers’ sense of belonging and identities. This qualitative study cultivated a community of practice composed of teachers who were new to their schools but not necessarily new to teaching. Data collected included interviews, recordings of community of practice meetings, participant reflection documents, and a researcher journal. Results suggested that teachers valued getting to know their colleagues, learning unique classroom practices, and that their participation in the community of practice had a positive impact on their sense of belonging at their new schools. The impacts of the community of practice on teachers’ professional identities were inconclusive. The discussion included an analysis of themes that emerged from the data, limitations of the study, and recommendations for researchers and practitioners.
ContributorsTarbutton, Taylor Lane (Author) / Judson, Eugene (Thesis advisor) / Frias, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Weber, Steven (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
In an era of educational transformation, teacher leaders play a pivotal role in facilitating systemic change within schools. This dissertation presents a single-case action research study investigating the support structures provided by a Team Lead Communities of Practice (TL CoP) to nurture teacher leaders. The primary aim of this research is to explore the effectiveness of the TL CoP in supporting teacher leaders at one school site. Utilizing qualitative data from interviews, participant journals, researcher memos, and agendas, this study captures the perspectives of team leads of interdisciplinary teams. The findings emphasize the need for flexible support systems tailored to the unique challenges teacher leaders face. Offering teacher leaders agency in their learning is paramount to their success. Additionally, structured time for collaboration and problem-solving within the TL CoP is crucial. One significant revelation is the importance of role clarity. Team leads need a clear understanding of their responsibilities to effectively lead teams and drive systemic change. This research contributes to the literature on educational leadership by highlighting the vital role of teacher leaders and the potential of TL CoPs in supporting their development. It advocates for the creation of such communities as a promising strategy to empower teacher leaders, providing them with essential support, dedicated collaboration time, and role clarity. As schools evolve to meet the demands of the 21st century, the insights from this study offer guidance for educational stakeholders seeking to cultivate a culture of leadership and foster systemic change through teacher leadership.
ContributorsPreston, Lee Allyne Cox (Author) / Markos, Amy (Thesis advisor) / Corner, Kevin (Committee member) / Fourlis, Andi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
A lack of public trust in governance institutions such as governments, federal agencies, and public health organizations limits national capacities to mitigate climate-related risks. Trustworthy sources of risk information are theorized to be more persuasive and more likely to motivate adaptive behaviors. Accordingly, this dissertation addresses relational and translational challenges of risk communication to support public health and safety by making climate science more accessible to communities at risk from extreme heat. This project developed and applied a theory-driven model of trust determination to understand how United States residents evaluate the trustworthiness of state governments and emergency management agencies. Using confirmatory factor analysis, a two-factor model of trustworthiness as self-reliability and source reliability was strongly empirically supported. This measurement model of trustworthiness was translated into experimental trustworthiness manipulations capable of creating statistically significant differences in perceptions of source reliability. The dissertation then tested the persuasive efficacy of trust-building risk messaging using randomized controlled trials, finding that when controlling for political ideology, message trust condition had a significant effect on attitudes toward extreme heat risk and preparedness as well as intentions to prepare for extreme heat events. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.
ContributorsMattson, LD (Author) / Adame, Bradley (Thesis advisor) / Corman, Steven R (Committee member) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024