Solid and resilient democracies rest upon an informed citizenry capable of critiquing societal issues and reimagining alternative scenarios. Traditional school-based civic and social justice education, however, often falls short of addressing the diverse needs of today's youth, often relying on instructionist pedagogies focused on factual…

This study investigates the ways in which emotions and emotionality are managed as topics and resources in second language (L2) research interviews. A continued challenge for researchers is how to define and operationalize emotions and other putative psychological phenomena. One popular research methodology that treats emotions as the object and…

This project is situated within the interpretive tradition in organizational communication research, focusing on organizational discourse. It goes further by bringing the discussion into the 21st century through examining how communication technology--specifically e-mail--plays a role in the linguistic practices that help create, maintain and…

This study offers a rhetorical analysis of the 2002 South Korean Candlelight Vigils ["ch'otpul siwi"] with a focus on the role of the Internet in public opinion building, the rise in anti-American sentiment in South Korea, and rhetorical agency residing in the collective. In 2002, two South Korean schoolgirls walking along a rural road…

This dissertation provides a comprehensive critical analysis of six main arguments for religious accommodation, with a specific focus on fundamentalist religious groups and the accommodation of their practices within liberal democratic societies. This analysis reveals that the types of practices that these arguments aim to accommodate primarily…

This study concerns itself with the conflict in mathematics education--popularly known as "math wars"--in the United States. More specifically, it investigates the "terms of debate" in this conflict to develop insights into the varied, and sometimes conflicting, relationships between the perceived nature of mathematics and its…

The significance of media literacy pedagogy in American public schools is crucial in helping teenagers comprehend the visual media world in which they live. The world is currently a place where our youth are inundated with visual messages that must be received, interpreted and critically analyzed. The dilemma is not so much in the reception of the…

This study focused upon the infamous "Wall of Separation" between church and state--its cornerstones, apparently eternal construction process, and current structural integrity. Within the context of providing truly caring learning environments for all students, a critical analysis was completed in order to help determine whether or not…