Theses and Dissertations

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Iraqi Kurdistan teachers' views and attitudes towards written corrective feedback in EFL writing
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Al-Jaf, Chnur, author; Ehlers-Zavala, Fabiola, advisor; Delahunty, Gerald, committee member; Grim, Frédérique, committee member
Written corrective feedback (WCF) in English as a foreign/second language (EFL/ESL) teaching and learning is one of the most controversial topics among researchers and teachers. Several researchers have debated and investigated its influences and effects on student learning (e.g., Ferris, 1999, 2003, 2004; Truscott, 1996), and different types of feedback have proven to be effective in improving writing skills (Bitchener & Knoch, 2010; Lee, 2004; Lee et al., 2021). Teachers provide WCF to their students in hopes that their students will benefit from it (Bitchener, 2012). Although there is much research on this topic (Brown, 2012; Chandler, 2003; Ferris, 1999, 2003, 2004; Hyland & Hyland, 2006; Lee, 2004; Lee, 2020; Lee et al., 2021) and in different ESL/EFL contexts, there are no studies on Iraqi Kurdistan teachers' views on WCF and its types. This study, therefore, aims to examine the perception and attitudes of 30 EFL teachers in Iraqi Kurdistan to understand their beliefs regarding WCF and the types of feedback they say they use and find important to give to English language learners (ELLs). A survey questionnaire was used to collect data for this investigation. Results showed that the majority of teachers who participated in this survey use WCF and believe it is useful for their students. However, there is some inconsistency in their answers regarding the types of feedback they use. Results show that they use several types of WCF depending on the context and their students' level of proficiency. Teachers' responses align to a large extent with the literature available. The results of this study can be useful for EFL teachers and researchers in Iraqi Kurdistan and other similar contexts to improve their practices related to WCF.
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Musician (lost at sea)
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Kneisley, John, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
In Musician (Lost at Sea), I am trying to understand poetry as a mode of caregiving and companionship for those crossing over from life to death. Inspired by the Ancient Greek role of the psychopomp – a mythic guide accompanying souls to the afterlife – my poems attempt both to show and to traverse the mysterious boundary between life and whatever might follow. In doing so, rather than considering death only as an occasion for grief or loss (yet no less removed from them), my poems allow death the potential to be warm, accompanied, and a space that could give way to new life. Almost all of my poems cannot help but establish themselves in the natural world: a place where death and life are so clear in their conjunction, the way a forest fire's ashes feed new plants, or the way a rabbit's body sustains an owl. Ultimately, these poems might make a seemingly impossible claim, as the Greek philosopher Thales first did, that life and death are strangely the same thing, and that to die might also be an opportunity for the soul, or other forms of life, to continue to live or grow. The speaker of many of these poems bears witness to the transitional space between life and death, observing those close to dying or already dead. From the collection's onset, the poems remain sensitive to this space's mystery, careful not to prescribe death with any one outcome, offering instead companionship and thought to the rich change occurring. In the opening poem/prelude, "Lost Graveyard in the Appalachians," the speaker walks among gravestones made illegible with age, lichen and moss growing over their names, before saying "this place / seems no longer / for my knowing." These lines, rather than simply dismissing a human way of knowing, open up both spiritual and natural possibilities for knowing the dead, which the collection will carry forward. "This place" might not be for "my knowing," but perhaps for the lichen's instead, or perhaps also for the psychopomp guiding those buried underground elsewhere ("each grave that vanishes / vanishes / as if opening / somewhere"). The collection creates space for the speaker, the reader, and even more deeply, each poem, to be just such a psychopomp: a figure that accompanies the dead on this journey elsewhere, and in doing so, gives care. Many of the poems adopt the second person "you," a pronoun that is both self-referential of the speaker and also inviting of the reader to take part in witnessing or walking with the dead. This "you" carries a strange intimacy, allowing empathy for an occasion that is universal and familiar (death) while also one that is completely unknowable to the living. The poems give the reader close access to this occasion and to the imaginative spaces beyond it, guiding them through various beings' deaths while maintaining the same careful and warm presence befitting a caregiver. Grief and loss are no less aspects of death here, as they always are, and yet they are understood more as parts of a larger journeying process, one that affects the dead just as much as the living who feel their absence. In the poem "Planting a Future Elegy in a Holloway," for example, the "you" allows both the speaker and reader to step into an imagined landscape and manner of grieving. The speaker finds themselves in a holloway, a woodland road caved in from its surrounding land, circular in shape, formed from erosion and centuries of travel. In planting a "future elegy," "you" have come to try to "orient a grief / you have not found / a language for / yet hold / and press / in older earth," the holloway providing an ancient space with which to shelter a poem that does not know its specific purpose yet, but does know that it will grieve. To plant a future elegy here, among "an exposure of roots, / moss, and quiet / mushrooms," a "rabbit's / bones," and "a worm / looping in and out / of loam" signals, like "Lost Graveyard in the Appalachians," a passing of understanding to the natural world, the land itself perhaps a more fitting agent for knowing and holding the dead. Further, by appearing at the collection's beginning, this poem suggests that the future elegy, perhaps a metaphor for understanding grief and death in general, bears out as the book progresses: an undeveloped seed that will take root in landscape, silence, and antiquity, as subsequent poems will reflect. In terms of subject matter, these poems, most of which adopt a narrative quality in describing a death or those already dead, range from the ancient to the contemporary. This variance accentuates the collection's larger motion – that of moving across narratives as a psychopomp moves alongside the dead – eventually transcending time and space despite frequently relying on Greek mythology. As the book moves, we move alongside figures like Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple from Ovid's Metamorphoses who turn into trees; a singing fisherman who drowns at sea, two ants carrying the dead body of another ant, Orpheus's head floating down a river, patients at an Alzheimer's unit mourning their daughter, an astronomer buried on another planet, and still others. These deaths, despite being distinct, each demonstrate a continuation of a life in one way or another, the poems acting as psychopomps in carrying the souls they house elsewhere. What happens after death may still be unknowable, but the poems at least hold that death is more a transition than a fixed end point, even if that transition is a human decomposing underground while providing nutrients to grow a flower. A much smaller group of poems, placed throughout the collection, use the first person "I" to speak from the point of view of the dead. These persona poems, most of which are titled "Gravewhisper," allow the reader intimate, albeit imagined, access to voices beyond the grave. The language and syntax of these short poems (the word "whisper" capturing both their quietness and brevity), are purposefully unconventional, suggesting that speech and language, even though decipherable, function differently in the afterlife. These "Gravewhisper" poems each appear directly after more traditional narrative poems featuring a death (from which stems the "I's" identity), the proximity allowing for the living and the dead to be in conversation with one another, even though neither may know they are doing so from their vantage point. Two related poems, each titled "Whispergrave," further accentuate language that might befit the afterlife, each of them adjusted to the right margin rather than the left, formally reflecting a "Gravewhisper" on the opposite page. Together, these poems invite the reader into acts of deep listening, bringing them closer to wherever the dead may now reside, and attuning them to how a being might speak after they have died. Although different from the "Gravewhisper" poems, there is a similar strand of communication to be found in the realm of dreaming and in the unconscious mind throughout the manuscript. In the poems "Experiment in Dreaming" and "The Obsolescent Clocks," for example, the speaker (or a "you") enters dreams in which strangers, both realistic and fantastical, speak about death. In the first case, "you" dream of a fishing village, and meet a peddler selling clay vessels by the sea who mentions a drowned bird. In the second, "you" dream of an abandoned clock shop where clocks can speak, each broken and spinning according to its own, chaotic time, and labeled with the identity of someone who has died ("A grandfather clock is named / 'musician lost at sea' / while a watch, spinning violently / is 'a burned ash tree'"). Both poems suggest, by way of their playfulness in attempting dream-like thought patterns, that there is something about the unconscious mind that bring us closer to death (or to the dead), even while temporarily asleep. The space of a dream might then also be a realm in which the psychopomp can thrive, each dream perhaps a kind of spirit guide in itself, journeying us elsewhere, where language, image, and narrative operate on a level buried below our normal span of thinking. Finally, my collection's title, Musician (Lost at Sea), taken from the line referenced above in "The Obsolescent Clocks," acknowledges these layers of movement between life and death the psychopomp traverses. The title can read like an epitaph thanks to the parentheses, naming a musician and their cause of death, allowing us to conceive of the collection itself as a kind of grave marker for one who has passed into an afterlife. The word "musician," beyond denoting a musical occupation, perhaps more simply alerts us to a role being played, the poetic spirit behind the collection able to function as a musician telling a story (or many stories), adrift in uncharted waters of a kind (the idea of imagining an afterlife). Perhaps the psychopomp, at once book, speaker, and reader, is a kind of musician too (or muse), guiding us toward a poetic, and therefore musical, understanding of the dead, and what it might mean to accompany them elsewhere, a place that cannot help but be "lost" because of its intrinsic unknowability.
Open Access
Multimodality across the curriculum
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Mangialetti, Tony, author; Palmquist, Mike, advisor; Amidon, Tim, committee member; Balgopal, Meena, committee member
This thesis explored the connection between multimodality and writing across the curriculum (WAC) to learn what characteristics of multimodal activities, documents, and pedagogy could be used to increase the effectiveness of a WAC program. The thesis is based on a study during which 46 participants were surveyed and 16 of those participants were interviewed. Two leading WAC programs' websites were analyzed to determine the role multimodality played in each program. The surveys and interviews were analyzed using a grounded approach. The research supporting this study looked at WAC pedagogy—specifically writing to learn, writing engage, and writing in the disciplines—to learn what skills students are being asked to learn. Scholarship from WAC was also used to learn what WAC programs are currently doing with multimodality. From this research and study, seven principles were developed for WAC programs that seek to incorporate and implement multimodality.
Open Access
Training at Colorado community corrections centers: understanding and evaluating varied training approaches in the corrections environment
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Dunlap, Makayla, author; Jacobi, Tobi, advisor; Doe, Sue, advisor; Gingerich, Karla, committee member
Most depictions of the justice system suggest an environment that is strictly punitive. However, Community Corrections, as the last step before individuals reenter their community, is uniquely situated to be responsible for building agency in and actively communicating with those who have been incarcerated. This approach requires staff to be trained differently than others in the Corrections ecosystem so that they might interact with clients in a different, more humanitarian way. The current research aims to examine existing training for Community Corrections employees using the lens of Activity Theory (Engestrom, Vygotsky) and Design Justice (Costanza-Chock, Design Justice Network). To conduct this analysis, in an IRB-approved study, 24 participants, all of whom are practitioners of training or maintain some official role in the training ecosystem, were recruited from nine Community Corrections facilities across the state of Colorado and asked about their experiences with Community Corrections training. After the interviews were conducted, a critical content analysis of the qualitative data from the interviews was done, examining how the current training aligns with the six components of Activity Theory and the ten principles of Design Justice. In doing so, Activity Theory illuminates the complex and rapidly changing Community Corrections environment that staff are being trained in, while alignment with Design Justice principles helps measure the relative success of training. This project found that Community Corrections practitioners are aware of and, to some degree, are effective in applying Design Justice principles to their work even as structural challenges impede full effectiveness. However, current Design Justice principles did not fully capture the complexity of the institution. Activity Theory additionally revealed the complexity of Community Corrections organizationally and further amplified the need for structural changes that might influence overall effectiveness. This study shows that, moving forward, both Community Corrections itself and Design Justice principles can grow and improve.
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A version
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Wesely, Nicolas D., author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Jazz Harvey, Madeline, committee member
At surface level "a version" enacts a poetic exploration of form and its myriad influences on creative intent and execution, with particular interest in that mysterious echo of formal play—the sestina. A deeper investigation of the thesis reveals the intricate movement of how poetic self might be realized through the navigation of these various, highly active, literary lineages, which themselves arrive as echoes of past, present, and future writings, experiences, and hopes, here largely circling military history, myth, family, physical body, and love. This thesis exhibits the movement toward, and simultaneously away from, the constraints of form, asking how it is that creativity enters into free flowing abundance through formal parameters; highlighting those moments when repetition deviates from defined meaning and achieves a polyvocality of authorial lineage; a version of a version that has always been and never been before. Here the sestina is pushed into sprawling forays of liturgical praise and negation. It assumes forms and roles meant for other times and spaces, and by so doing, shows its adaptability (and so too our own) toward an immediate presence of modern poetics.
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Acceleration
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Witthohn, Alec, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
Acceleration is a novel following a week of events in the life of Cameron Noh, a model from New York City who travels to Milan for fashion week as labor tensions among transit workers boil in the background. He meets with his agent, Simone, and a wealth of other characters as he debates whether or not to move to Paris. This work is written in the style of the weak novel, as described by Lucy Ives in her article "The Weak Novel," publish in the Baffler 2022. Its content is, more or less, plotless, filled with symbols such as snails, eyes, clothes, darkness and light as Cameron meanders from fashion shows to after-parties, in a kind of hedonic depression, searching for something that might fulfill him. Acceleration is also a comment on capitalist consumption and the culture that surrounds it, the way it generates this searching in all of us under capitalist rule. Eventually, the situation with the transit workers becomes untenable, resulting in what might be an act of terrorism focused on Milan's La Scala Theater.
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Recurrence: a novel. Book one
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Shrayfer, Lilia, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Levy, E. J., advisor; Yalen, Deborah, committee member; Foskin, Kevin, committee member
Inspired by the disappearances of over a dozen Soviet Jews during the refugee crisis between 1979-1989 in Italy, this novel aims to offer a speculative portal into the crises of identity that may have led to such tragedy. Spanning three generations of one Bukharan-Jewish family, from Stalin's purges of the 1930's, to Khruschev's Sovietization campaign, to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, to the above period of statelessness in Europe, the book explores this family's exile through the lens of Eva Kalandarova's gender and sexual identity. What is transmasculinity for transient lives? What does it mean for someone haunted by the sins of their father? In 1941, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was evacuated to Central Asia, where she and other Russian writers in exile sought to recreate literary life. It is in Central Asia that she wrote—and later burned—her only play of a writer condemned not only by the state, but by her peers. Her contemporaries at the time, such as Nadezhda Mandelstam, write that she saw the future of the Soviet Union. Inspired by her diary entries detailing typhus-induced hallucinations, the novel speculates on the possibility that Akhmatova's relationship with the landscape and its locals may be found in her work. Accordingly, the novel imagines parallel dreams and associations between the Bukharan Jewish families centered in this book and her writing. Similarly, the novel explores Ladispoli as a mirror to the historical anxieties and traumas of the Jews of Rome. I have aimed for a poets' novel; I have aimed for a historical fiction novel, a speculative novel, a trans-national Jewish novel that imagines new Jewish questions. I have aimed to situate my people amidst the Jewish literature that has too long overlooked them, for even in our silence, we have much to say.
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Keepers: a novel
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Carey, Patrick, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Emami, Sanam, committee member
Keepers is a novel told through the rotating first-person perspectives of three lighthouse keepers on an island in northern Lake Michigan around twenty-five years from now, in the midst of the Second Great Depression. It takes place during a weeklong visit by one keeper's son, who forces them to reassess their pasts and return to the present. By foregrounding backstory and digging for the differences within repetitions, the novel traces a gradual accrual of emotional and spiritual mass even as individual events seem to blend like raindrops in a puddle.
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Gutland
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Lear, Megan, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; McConigley, Nina, advisor; Chung, Hye Seung, committee member
Gutland is a novel that explores the narrator's self-reliance and search for identity as she cares for her partner's child and father in an isolated village. This novel is a work made of fifteen chapters, divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the narrator's straining relationship, struggles to integrate herself, and emotionally troubling duties of caring for someone else's child. This part also details the inner workings of closed-practice groups such as the Primitive Baptists, the hivemind mentality that comes from growing up in a secluded area, and the trials of gardening. The second part looks closely at the women around the narrator, who integrate her into their group of friends, the growing tensions between the narrator and her absent partner, and the bond growing between the narrator and the preacher, a dying man she takes care of.
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Bundy girls
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Ash, Summer, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Khrebtan-Horhager, Julia, committee member
Bundy Girls is a novel about dark obsessions, female friendship, and the dangers of adolescence. The story's narrator is a high school girl with a crush on one of the most notorious serial killers of the 20th century, Ted Bundy. Her intense bond with her best friend, who is also a Bundy fanatic, led the pair to found the 'Bundy Girls Club' with a group of peers who also enjoy dressing up as serial killers and publishing zines about Bundy. When a classmate goes missing, the girls see an opportunity to use their true-crime knowledge to start their own investigation. But when the mystery gets too close there is more than just friendship at stake for the Bundy Girls.
Open Access
A fandom framework: critical digital media literacy in first-year composition curriculum
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Wigginton, Brook, author; Amidon, Timothy R., advisor; Szymanski, Erika, committee member; Diffrient, David Scott, committee member
Critical digital media literacy is an important factor in everyday life and in academia, but it has failed to gain momentum in first-year writing studies as a necessary literacy for students to develop. A comparative analysis of two first-year composition programs and the inclusion of autoethnographic examples is done to explore how critical digital media literacy is valued in current curriculum and to showcase its potential. Findings indicate that, while critical digital literacy is, in fact, a major part of first-year composition curriculum, it is not overtly named as such. The power in naming the literacies composition instructors expect students to enact and learn should not be underestimated, and composition scholars must renegotiate how we teach students to navigate our increasingly digitally mediated world. An example of how a fandom framework might name and develop those literacies is offered.
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Anatomic diagnosis: a defense
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Combs, Sunset, author; Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; McConigley, Nina, committee member; Souza, Caridad, committee member
This collection of letters in the form of a defense looks to showcase poor white womanhood and the expectations for violence that are inherent in the systems that teach and protect them. Using personal experience, archival documents, and cultural critique Anatomic Diagnosis: A Defense questions the ways we can reenact the violence that has been to us. Looking specifically at the academy and state-run institutions, this collection exposes the possibility of exploitation when personal trauma becomes a commodity in a capitalist system. It uses the lives of three generations of women who have worked to barely live and learned to make a home out of the injustice that was their everyday reality.
Open Access
Constellations
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Todd, Michael, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, committee member
Constellations is a researched book-length lyric essay concerning notions of faith and belief weighed against science and the bodily experience, of layers of meaning, of personal truth. The piece takes the form of "constellations" of text in place of stars. The text appears on 4x6" cards against a black background with speckled white to indicate "space"; white lines suggest an assembly which corresponds to a map with instructions. However, the same instructions encourage user agency in how to assemble and navigate the work—flipping through the cards in a numbered sequence, or in a random sequence, or assembling them according to the map, or assembling them as they, the audience, see fit.
Open Access
A more-than-human life: rethinking the good life
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Wich, Manda, author; Szymanski, Erika, advisor; Palmquist, Mike, committee member; Schmidt, Jenne, committee member
Recently, within disabled discourses, there have been conversations surrounding who is considered worthy of participating in society and who is not. Additionally, those conversations have included how exhausting it can be to fight for the ability to participate in society. Lauren Berlant's concept of the good life acts as a way to understand why this feeling of exhaustion emerges in these conversations. However, it may not account for all ways of being and participating in the world. Therefore, in this thesis, I examine how a posthuman lens can help us rethink not only the broader normative ways of living a good life, but also the concept of the good life. I do this through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the subreddit r/disability. Additionally, I examine if the discourse of the subreddit employs good life ideals or if cripistemologies emerge in the discourse. In analyzing the subreddit, I find that that while some of the conversations reflects good life ideals and normative ways of being, other conversations challenge normative ways of being and express alternate ways of being in the world. These alternate ways of being align with the posthuman lens I employ in this thesis and allow for ways of rethinking the good life through proposing pluralistic, interdependent ways of being in the world. From the findings of this CDA of r/disability, I aim to bring attention to pluralistic, interdependent, crip ways of knowing/being that can provide alternate ways of being for both disabled and non-disabled people alike, blur the boundaries between disabled/non-disabled, and challenge those normative ways of being.
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Chasing the sound
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) O'Tierney, Bryce M., author; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Pippen, John, committee member
"Chasing the sound" has been a direction in my mind from the moment I first heard a violin played. My primary relationship with the instrument has been fundamental to the shaping of my relationship with my body and with other bodies. I have been humbled by the process of writing these poems, allowing them to arrive, tuning their forms, sequencing and re-sequencing their positions, and identifying guide notes and echoes, toward orchestrating a coherent whole. The MS writes into interwoven questions concerning identity, connection, and belonging, representative of a particular stage of my becoming as woman and artist. These poems have taught me how to better read myself, have shown me ways toward a re-integration of Self, in the context of intergenerational trauma, mental illness, relational complexity, and queer identity. To me, this collection embodies an ecology with a basis in sound and sounding(-out). If asked to describe this poetry collection in two words, I would respond: inheritance, desire. I feel these poems traveling the contours of longing and loss, harmony and dissonance. I find that they reflect a process of healing off-the-page with respect to disentangling the relationship of the body with the instrument from: the relationship of the body with nourishment from: the relationship of the body with a beloved. Perhaps most striking to me is the way these poems have opened me toward a forward-movement of my body, how reaching or "walking" back toward points of origin has offered an embrace of creativity that includes the possibility of future motherhood. An early and abiding intention of the manuscript has been to bring the embodied experience of musicmaking to the page. In my first workshop here, I found myself taking up a work of uncovering/recovering Indigenous heritage on my mother's side, a conversation begun years prior at my grandmother's kitchen table. At the center of my inquiry was the interlinkage of bodies across four generations through the life of an instrument (my great-grandmother Orleta's fiddle). I am the sole violin-player today across both maternal and paternal (Irish American) bloodlines. I have felt drawn to bring musicmaking to the page as a site of intergenerational encounter. I encounter a poetic form as an inheritance of the body, the body in turn an inheritance of the surrounding world/landscape (of dimensions both corporeal and spiritual). Through my time in this program, the field of the page has further opened to me and the poems, allowing for more fully embodied forms, projective of both identity and place. The heightened participation of white space in the musical scoring of a poem has also propelled my coming-into a more intentional gestural logic of punctuation, in particular, use of the colon, with the parenthesis and em dash especially behaving in dynamic relation. The colon feels vital to transformative possibility within and across poems, as threshold, entryway, opening, movement between manifest and unmanifest. Dimensionality and directionality, parataxis and hypotaxis, centrifugal and centripetal motion—sculptural shape has been teaching me how to write narratively without plot, and, to enact a generative tension between feeling and understanding. Composing along multiple axes has expanded my repertoire for enacting multiplicity/multivocality. The forms of these poems feel more authentically aligned with my lifeway as a musician, scored through exchange between nonverbal and verbal, human and greater-than-human, the improvised and composed. Inclinations to speak/not speak or reveal/conceal guide holding of silences and absences relative to inheritance—musicmaking, maternal lineage, epigenetics, human: greater-than-human interactivity. There is variation in the way these poems engage in spatial mapping of the proprioceptive, as well as, and in contrast with, showing a process of thinking on the page, which feels both vulnerable and gratifying. A significant development through this writing process has been diversifying the relationship between syntax and the line, elongating breath and cognitive movement through cumulative sentence structure, experimenting with inversion and the provisional. The prose poems, as well as the series of compressed untitled poems (marked by ~), represent a shift from open field to portraying movement of the mind within bounded form—the need for a kind of structured improvisation. I'm interested in the way form can variously hold content—to protect, expose, declare, recall. I experience form participating in contours of grace and mercy—allowing space or enclosure for processing, healing, dialogue, with self and with others, past, present, and future. The compilation of these poems has charged me with pushing synesthesia within my work, e.g., in the form of rhyming images, in play with aural refrain. Additionally, I have become more conscientious about how section breaks can serve to clarify scene/simultaneity/boundary/ threshold. Each of these aspects feels aligned with an embrace of fluidity, in one sense, a search for relinquishing repressive forms of (self-)control, and in another, a deepening in the queering of erotics in the work. I'm interested in how this collection might articulate those moments of living double, where grief and hope/joy are two sides of one fold, and self a continuum of becoming through interrelation. It has been a fulfilling process to get my arms around these poems as a body entire, puzzling out the sectioning and ordering of the collection, given the number and range of poems. The 83 poems collected here represent a passage across: ground of being in relationship with music/the violin; to origin through my maternal line, writing into questions of Seminole heritage and inheritance; to a navigation of beloved relationships; to an intertwining of these facets in a final section that re-situates the speaker in community. My greatest challenge in bringing these poems together has been to make more legible the interplay between pronouns. I am satisfied in where I've arrived in terms of distinguishing for the reader the meaning of the "she" and "i" with respect to the estrangement from Self I experience when in a depressed state/depressive episode. The "she" in the manuscript also works on the level of engaging the gifts of depression, particularly depression as a threshold of access to ancestral experience and re-connection. Beginning last semester, I have been engaged in an independent study of movement/dance alongside the writing practice, which has deeply re-informed my own bodily understanding of this multiplicity of self. Furthermore, I needed to find a balance in making evident the various beloveds in the "chasing the sound" section, approaching this via gender, while also allowing for fluidity of experience. Finding a three-part movement across this section allowed me to situate a beloved "you" that affirms where I am in my current lived experience as a bisexual woman, affirming attraction and romantic love as being not about the gender, but about the person. Additional valences of "you" include the primacy of relation between myself and the violin, and myself and my twin sister.
Open Access
Perceptions of stakeholders in English language learning: a case study
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Day, Leah K., author; Ginsberg, Ricki, advisor; Nekrasova-Beker, Tatiana, committee member; Basile, Vincent, committee member
This study was conducted as a qualitative narrative inquiry. The purpose of the study was to understand the perceptions of stakeholders on English Language Learners and how this shapes their educational path. By using a qualitative narrative inquiry, we can get a closer look into the life and learning of just one specific student. Data was collected in the form of interviews with the participants. The interviews were guided with a set of questions that were designed to interrogate perceptions and experiences of all stakeholders with regards to language learning in the context of one student. With the exception of WIDA scores that provide information about the language mastery level of the student, all data collected was qualitative. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and the data was coded inductively. This was then compiled in the form of a narrative that described the shaping of the educational pathway of the student. This study does not seek to generalize beyond this context but can provide insight into similar experiences and perceptions of the English Language Learning process. The themes that developed as findings of this study were centered around the disconnects between stakeholders. This presented itself as subthemes like lack of teacher understanding, feelings of isolation, perceptions of English Language Learners, and varying teacher perceptions of their language abilities. There are implications in the teaching of English Language Learners that point to the importance of collaboration between all stakeholders. This includes transparency and clarification of educator roles, parent outreach, and professional development.
Open Access
The corpus, word list, and usability analysis for the corpus of extended reality
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Mangus, Lauren Anne, author; Nekrasova-Beker, Tatiana, advisor; Becker, Anthony, committee member; Ortega, Francisco Raul, committee member
There are multiple uses for word lists and corpora inside of linguistics-based research and studies; however, their primary function is the evaluation of authentic language for pedagogical application. This study presents both current and novel methods of approaching word list curation, word list evaluation by experts before publishing, and a collaborative analysis of pedagogical applications by focus group participants. The curation of the Corpus of Extended Reality (CoXR), a discipline within Computer Science, and its word list, the CoXR Word List, capture the language structures that are specific to the discipline of Extended Reality (XR). The CoXR Word List additionally includes hyphenated word forms that are specific to the discipline of XR. To test the efficacy of the corpus it was evaluated by graduate students in the discipline of XR to gain insight to whether traditional methods of discipline-specific corpus curation actually generate discipline specific words and whether the generated examples are meaningful. Firstly, the study found that verification of a word list is useful for determining the efficacy of the corpus itself and the word list with its coordinating examples. Secondly, the study found that (1) students from XR and outside of XR (English Language studies) found the CoXR Word List to be meaningful. Thirdly, all participants found the CoXR Word List as a tool they might use in the classroom as a teacher or student. Lastly, participants indicated that if they had access to discipline-specific word lists such as the CoXR Word List they would be incentivized to engage in cross-disciplinary research.
Open Access
I kin sea slugs: awkward kin, inhuman horror, and queering encounter in Octavia Butler's Dawn
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Witter, Genevieve, author; Badia, Lynn, advisor; Claycomb, Ryan, committee member; Chatterjee, Sushmita, committee member
Anthropocentrism is rooted in narratives of evolutionary teleology and the human/nonhuman binary which exalts the human, homo sapiens, as the dominant Earth species, and taxonomizes nonhuman species according to human value systems. Octavia Butler's science-fiction novel, Dawn, raises important questions about the human as an identity category, according to anthropocentrism, and as a species. By introducing a multispecies encounter with an extraterrestrial species, Butler troubles our understanding of what it means to be human. Butler queers human-centric notions of ecology and evolutionary teleology through her protagonist, Lilith, as she attempts to adapt to a radically different, and at times hostile, environment. Lilith's horror for both the Oankali, humanity's alien rescuers, and the potential for an inhuman future, prompted by a hybrid-species zygote, introduce an opportunity to dissect human abjection for the non-/in-human and to overcome anthropocentric discomfort with human vulnerability to the nonhuman. Joining the conversation with Lee Edelman's theory of reproductive futurity, Donna J. Haraway's concept of sympoiesis, and Julia Kristeva's essay on abjection, this argument examines Lilith's fear for the inhuman to discuss the ways in which anthropocentric ideology jeopardizes humanity's ability to take action amidst the worsening climate crisis. As nonhuman Earth species' fate becomes increasingly tied to humanity's ability to responsibly address climate change, we need to reevaluate the way that humanity situates itself in multispecies Earth ecologies.
Restricted
The tender organs
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Janecek, Carolyn Eugenia, author; Dungy, Camille T., advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; McShane, Katie, committee member
The Tender Organs is an ecopoetic coming-of-age narrative that explores embodiment and inheritance. Taking on hybrid forms, these poems reach beyond the binaries of male and female, human and animal, history and present, visibility and invisibility. Each section situates itself in a different time of the speaker's life: grappling with puberty and cultural miscommunication as a dual citizen; grieving one's friend and mentor; investigating the medicalizing, patriarchal gaze of U.S. healthcare; and finally, exploring the possibilities of rapture and relationships outside of the societal binaries.
Embargo
An investigation of English language learners' motivation, imagined communities, and identities in an Intensive English Program in the United States
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Howard, Sarah Marie, author; Nekrasova-Beker, Tatiana, advisor; Becker, Tony, advisor; Ehlers-Zavala, Fabiola, committee member; Anderson, Sharon, committee member
This study investigates three aspects of language acquisition that may be influenced by studying abroad at an Intensive English Program (IEP) in the United States: the English Language Learners' (ELL) motivation, imagined communities, and identity. More importantly, this study investigates how the interplay of ELL motivation, imagined communities, and identity factor into Second Language Acquisition (SLA) within the confines of Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory in an IEP. Sociocultural Theory perceives language acquisition as a product of interaction between students' social and cultural environment and academic material which consequently builds upon the development of their higher psychological function (Kozulin, 1998, 2003; as cited in Poehner, 2008). This naturalistic case study aims to investigate the qualities of language learning motivation, imagined communities, and identity. To record the development of these phenomena, a series of interviews, observations, and reflections were administered. The goal of this study is to provide insight to IEP instructors and English instructors within the field of Applied Linguistics on the complexities that students experience during study abroad. In order to bring awareness of these three concepts in relation to language acquisition to inform teaching practices.