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The purpose of this study is to investigate the literacy practices of three members of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and to explore how they use these practices to support and maintain their recovery in their lives. This study also aims to examine how each participant used specialist language, enacted certain identities

The purpose of this study is to investigate the literacy practices of three members of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and to explore how they use these practices to support and maintain their recovery in their lives. This study also aims to examine how each participant used specialist language, enacted certain identities and acquired the secondary Discourse in A.A. through literacy use. This dissertation study is the result of in-depth interviewing in which each participant was interviewed three times for 90-minutes. These interviews were then transcribed and analyzed using discourse analysis. Study results are presented in three chapters, each one designated to one of the participants. Within these chapters is a life history (chronology) of the participant leading up to the point in which they got sober. The chapters also include a thematic discourse analysis of the interview transcripts across themes of literacy practice and topics in A.A. A conclusion is then presented to investigate how literacy was used from a sociocultural perspective in the study. Due to the emotionally charged nature of this dissertation, it has been formatted to present the stories of the participants first, leaving the theoretical framework, literature review and research methods to be included as appendices to the main text.
ContributorsClausen, Jennifer Ann (Author) / Marsh, Josephine (Thesis advisor) / Hayes, Elisabeth (Committee member) / Serafini, Frank (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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The development of literacy abilities in young children has been a major concern for authorities and teachers in the USA for the last two decades. Significant effort has been devoted to ensure that preschool settings allow and motivate children to engage in literacy activities before entering kindergarten. Research has found

The development of literacy abilities in young children has been a major concern for authorities and teachers in the USA for the last two decades. Significant effort has been devoted to ensure that preschool settings allow and motivate children to engage in literacy activities before entering kindergarten. Research has found that a rich classroom environment in preschool settings enables teachers to encourage literacy interest in children at a young age. While a large amount of research has concentrated in testing the effect of prescriptive modifications in the classroom environment, few have focused on studying the design process and tools that teachers follow to design their classrooms. Public policy and research studies in the United States, mention the design of the classroom environment among teacher's responsibilities, but they do not include practical or methodological guides for them to use. The purpose of this research was to study the design process and tools that teachers use to design literacy rich classrooms in preschool settings. A case study was conducted at the ASU Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Preschool at Arizona State University. This setting provides a unique opportunity for an exploratory study of this nature because it is a private child development laboratory with a flexible curriculum. Participant observation sessions and in depth semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore the design process used and experienced by the teachers. Findings revealed an iterative and cyclic design process that is repeated over time adjusting to the influence of numerous factors. Results also suggest that teacher's knowledge and beliefs highly influence the organization of their classrooms. Considering these factors as a standpoint allows for further exploration to determine a design process suitable for teachers when designing their learning environments. The use of a structured yet flexible design process, can be a potential tool for educators to design their classrooms, collaborate, document and transmit their knowledge. Although the findings correspond to a specific site studied, the implications are wide reaching as problems and opportunities expressed by the staff are common to other educational settings with similar characteristics.
ContributorsCortes, Catalina (Author) / Patel, Mookesh (Thesis advisor) / Heywood, William (Committee member) / Christie, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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ABSTRACT This mixed methods study examines 126 community college students enrolled in developmental reading courses at a mid-sized Southwestern community college. These students participated in a survey-based study regarding their reading experiences and practices, social influence upon those practices, reading sponsorship, and reading self-efficacy. The survey featured 33 structured response

ABSTRACT This mixed methods study examines 126 community college students enrolled in developmental reading courses at a mid-sized Southwestern community college. These students participated in a survey-based study regarding their reading experiences and practices, social influence upon those practices, reading sponsorship, and reading self-efficacy. The survey featured 33 structured response prompts and six free response prompts, allowing for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The study¡&brkbar;s results reflected the diverse reading interests and practices of developmental college students, revealing four main themes: -the diversity and complexity of their reading practices; -the diversity in reading genre preferences; -the strong influence of family members and teachers as reading sponsors in the past with that influence shifting to friends and college professors in the present; and, -the possible connection between self-efficacy and social engagement with reading. Findings from this study suggest these college students, often depicted as underprepared or developmental readers, are engaging in diverse and sophisticated reading practices and perceive reading as a means to achieve their success-oriented goals and to learn about the real world.This study adds to the limited field of community college literacy research, provides a more nuanced view of what it means to be an underprepared college reader, and points to ways community college educators can better support their students by acknowledging and building upon their socio-culturally influenced literacy practices. At the same time, educators can advantage students academically in terms of building their cultural capital with overt inculcation into disciplinary literacies and related repertoires of practice. Keywords: college students, reading, sponsorship, multimodal reading practices, developmental education, social networking, and literacy
ContributorsKiefer, Cynthia (Author) / Early, Jessica (Thesis advisor) / Blasingame, James (Committee member) / Marsh, Josephine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Research regarding social competence is growing rapidly, but there remain a few aspects of social development that merit more attention. The presented pair of studies were planned to address two such areas in the social development literature, specifically the longitudinal trajectories of social competence and the role of social competence

Research regarding social competence is growing rapidly, but there remain a few aspects of social development that merit more attention. The presented pair of studies were planned to address two such areas in the social development literature, specifically the longitudinal trajectories of social competence and the role of social competence in second language development in language minority (LM) students. The goal of the first investigation was to examine the developmental trends of interpersonal skills (IS) across the early childhood and elementary school years in a nationally representative, U.S. sample. The goal of the second study was to examine whether differing trajectories of IS development in language minority children in the U.S. were related to their language and literacy (LL) skills at grade 5. Both studies utilized data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 and modeled ratings of children's IS at five time points between fall of kindergarten and spring of fifth grade using latent class growth analyses in Mplus. In study 1, the best model was a quadratic two-class latent class growth analysis. Trajectory class 1 was a higher-level path with a marginally significant non-linear shape and class 2 was a primarily stable, moderate level path with a slight, non-significant increase over time. The same pattern of results emerged for both boys and girls separately as with the combined-sex model, and in all three final models the proportion of the sample in the higher-level class was greater than the moderate-level class. In study 2 a sample of U.S. children whose primary language at home was something other than English was utilized. LL at the start of kindergarten and sex were included as covariates and LL in fifth grade as a distal outcome. The best model for the data was a cubic two-class latent class growth analysis. Class 1 followed a higher-level path with small, incremental change over time and class 2 was a moderate-level path with greater undulation. Both covariates significantly predicted latent class and language and literacy scores at grade 5 differed significantly across classes.
ContributorsDiDonato, Alicia (Author) / Wilcox, M. Jeanne (Thesis advisor) / Bradley, Robert (Committee member) / Wilkens, Natalie (Committee member) / Valiente, Carlos (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Attack of the Fake Geek Girls: Challenging Gendered Harassment and Marginalization in Online Spaces applies feminist, gender, and rhetorical theories and methods, along with critical discourse analysis, to case studies of the popular online social media platforms of Jezebel, Pinterest, and Facebook. This project makes visible the structural inequities that

Attack of the Fake Geek Girls: Challenging Gendered Harassment and Marginalization in Online Spaces applies feminist, gender, and rhetorical theories and methods, along with critical discourse analysis, to case studies of the popular online social media platforms of Jezebel, Pinterest, and Facebook. This project makes visible the structural inequities that underpin the design and development of internet technologies, as well as commonplace assumptions about who is an online user, who is an active maker of internet technologies, and who is a passive consumer of internet technologies. Applying these critical lenses to these inequities and assumptions enables a re-seeing of commonplace understandings of the relationship between gender performativity and digital cultures and practices. Together, these lenses provide a useful set of tools for methodically resisting the mystique of technologies that are, simultaneously, represented as so highly technical as to be opaque to scrutiny, and as ubiquitous to everyday life as to be beneath critical examination.

Through a close reading of the discourses surrounding these popular social media platforms and a rhetorical analysis of their technological affordances, I documented the transference of gender-biased assumptions about women's roles, interests, and competencies, which have historically been found in face-to-face contexts, to these digital spaces. For example, cultural assumptions about the frivolity of women's interests, endeavors, issues, and labors make their way into digital discourse that situates the online practices of women as those of passive consumers who use the internet only to shop and socialize, rather than to go about the serious, masculine business of making original digital content.

This project expands on existing digital identity and performativity research, while applying a sorely needed feminist critique to online discourses and discursive practices that assume maleness and masculinity as the default positionality. These methods are one approach to addressing the pressing problems of online harassment, the gender gap in the technology sector, and the gender gap in digital literacies that have pedagogical, political, and structural implications for the classroom, workplace, economic markets, and civic sphere.
ContributorsTekobbe, Cindy (Author) / Miller, Keith D. (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K. (Committee member) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
South Sudanese refugees are among the most vulnerable immigrants to the U.S.. Many have spent years in refugee camps, experienced trauma, lost members of their families and have had minimal or no schooling or literacy prior to their arrival in the U.S. Although most South Sudanese aspire to become U.S.

South Sudanese refugees are among the most vulnerable immigrants to the U.S.. Many have spent years in refugee camps, experienced trauma, lost members of their families and have had minimal or no schooling or literacy prior to their arrival in the U.S. Although most South Sudanese aspire to become U.S. citizens, finally giving them a sense of belonging and participation in a land they can call their own, they constitute a group that faces great challenges in terms of their educational adaptation and English-language learning skills that would lead them to success on the U.S. citizenship examination. This dissertation reports findings from a qualitative research project involving case studies of South Sudanese students in a citizenship preparation program at a South Sudanese refugee community center in Phoenix, Arizona. It focuses on the links between the motivations of students seeking citizenship and the barriers they face in gaining it. Though the South Sudanese refugee students aspiring to become U.S. citizens face many of the same challenges as other immigrant groups, there are some factors that in combination make the participants in this study different from other groups. These include: long periods spent in refugee camps, advanced ages, war trauma, absence of intact families, no schooling or severe disruption from schooling, no first language literacy, and hybridized forms of second languages (e.g. Juba Arabic). This study reports on the motivations students have for seeking citizenship and the challenges they face in attaining it from the perspective of teachers working with those students, community leaders of the South Sudanese community, and particularly the students enrolled in the citizenship program.
ContributorsJohnson, Erik (Author) / Adams, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Renaud, Claire (Committee member) / James, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
This qualitative study explores the learning experiences of two first-grade teachers in a progressive public elementary school in the southwestern U.S. Participants inquired into their literacy instruction practices within their reading-workshops. Weekly inquiry group conversations between teachers and researcher informed a perspective of learning as participation. During

This qualitative study explores the learning experiences of two first-grade teachers in a progressive public elementary school in the southwestern U.S. Participants inquired into their literacy instruction practices within their reading-workshops. Weekly inquiry group conversations between teachers and researcher informed a perspective of learning as participation. During the semester-long study, two key questions guided design and implementation: 1) What is the nature of teachers' learning experiences related to their literacy instruction practices, contextualized within an inquiry group? 2) How do those learning experiences reflect and/or refract the community, interpersonal, and individual planes of analysis? An ethnographic perspective informed data collection and analysis; data were collected through weekly inquiry-group conversations, bi-weekly classroom observations, and in-depth interviews. A learning framework of community, interpersonal, and individual planes of analysis served as an analytic tool used in conjunction with a modified analytic induction. Teachers' case studies offer unique accounts of their learning, contextualized within their specific classrooms. Findings are discussed through narrative-based vignettes, which illustrate teachers' learning trajectories. On the community plane, apprenticeship relationships were evident in teachers' interactions with students' parents and with one another. Interpersonal interactions between teachers demonstrated patterns of participation wherein each tried to teach the other as they negotiated their professional identities. Analysis of the individual plane revealed that teachers' past experiences and personal identities contributed to ways of participation for both teachers that were highly personal and unique to each. Affective considerations in learning were a significant finding within this study, adding dimensionality to this particular sociocultural theory of learning. The ways teachers felt about themselves, their students, their community, and their work constituted a significant influence on what they said and did, as demonstrated on all three planes of analysis. Implications for practice include the significance of professional development efforts that begin at the site of teachers' questions, and attention to teachers' individual learning trajectories as a means to supporting educators to teach in more confident and connected ways.
ContributorsSteeg, Susanna Mae (Author) / Mccarty, Teresa L. (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo E. (Committee member) / Marsh, Josephine P. (Committee member) / Smith, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the literate practices of women reading and writing in the press during the civil rights movement in the 1950s/60s. Through a textual analysis of literacy events (Heath) in the memoirs of Sarah Patton Boyle (The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition), Anne Braden

ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the literate practices of women reading and writing in the press during the civil rights movement in the 1950s/60s. Through a textual analysis of literacy events (Heath) in the memoirs of Sarah Patton Boyle (The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition), Anne Braden (The Wall Between), Daisy Bates (The Long Shadow of Little Rock) and Melba Pattillo Beals (Warriors Don't Cry), this dissertation highlights the participatory roles women played in the movement, including their ability to act publicly in a movement remembered mostly for its male leaders. Contributing to scholarship focused on the literate lives of women, this study focuses on the uses of literacy in the lives of four women with particular emphasis on the women's experiences with the literacy they practice. Drawing on ideological views of literacy (Gee, Street) and research focused on the social, cultural and economic influences of such practices (Brandt), the women's memoirs served as the site for collecting and analyzing the women's responses and reactions to literacy events with the press. Through an application of Deborah Brandt's notion of sponsor, literacy events between the women and the press were recorded and the data analyzed to understand the relationship the women had with the literacy available and the role the sponsor (the press) played in shaping the practice and the literate identities of the women. Situated in the racist climate of the Jim Crow South in the 1950s/60s and the secondary role women played in the movement, the women's memoirs and the data analyzed revealed the role the women's perception of the practice, shaped by personal history and lived experiences, played in how the women experienced and used their literacy. This dissertation argues that their responses to literacy events and their perceptions of the power of their reading and writing highlight the significant public role women played in the movement and argues that, although the women remain relatively unremembered participants of the movement, their memoirs act as artifacts of that time and proof of the meaningful public contributions women made to the movement.
ContributorsAdams, Kelly R (Author) / Goggin, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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The purpose of this writing is to explore the relationship students have with popular media as well as the call to implement a Critical Media Skills course at the high school level. The research was interested in finding what images from popular media students were taking into their personal lives

The purpose of this writing is to explore the relationship students have with popular media as well as the call to implement a Critical Media Skills course at the high school level. The research was interested in finding what images from popular media students were taking into their personal lives and how implementing a Critical Media Skills course could make positive benefits into their lives. From casual observations, informal student interviews, and the creation of an online survey in which 72 high school students participated I was able to collect data about the extent students were consuming popular media and how they believed that skills teaching them to analyze media would be beneficial. From these findings I was able to build upon Patricia Hill Collins (2009) to develop techniques for a classroom in which critical dialogue would be a focus. This exploratory study takes into account student voices, as well research from others in the field of Education and Media Literacy.
ContributorsGonzales, David (Author) / Ovando, Carlos (Thesis advisor) / Sandlin, Jennifer (Committee member) / Surbeck, Elaine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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The Adult Basic Education/Literacy (ABEL) system in America can suffer critique. In a system that is staffed mostly by volunteers and plagued by funding woes, the experience of adult learners as participants within the institutional structure can be easily overlooked. Adult students are described as transient and difficult to track.

The Adult Basic Education/Literacy (ABEL) system in America can suffer critique. In a system that is staffed mostly by volunteers and plagued by funding woes, the experience of adult learners as participants within the institutional structure can be easily overlooked. Adult students are described as transient and difficult to track. Even so, and maybe because of this characterization, leaders within the local ABEL discourse make it their mission to reach these students in order to assist them to a better quality of life. However, there is more than one discourse circulating within the system. A discourse of outreach and intervention is one strand. The complex relationships education centers engage with more powerful government institutions causes another, more strident political discourse that constrains and influences the discourse within ABEL education centers, down to the classroom level. Within the vortex of motivations and needs created by institutional discourse, an institutional critique may give voice to those who experience the discourse in a way that hinders their education. This paper pursues critique, not through direct reconstruction, but through the encouragement of alternative discourses as additional institutions enter the system. AmeriCorps is presented as an institution that allows for more democratic participation through its distinct organizational features. The features that emerge in AmeriCorps projects offer hope for alternative models of participation within the highly politicized ABEL discourse.
ContributorsFoy, Christine (Author) / Long, Elenore (Thesis advisor) / Daer, Alice (Thesis advisor) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011