This qualitative dissertation conducted a critical discourse analysis of youth and adult discourses about the transition to high school. Despite being a well-researched field, studies of the transition to high school and interventions in the transition to high school do not prioritize youth perspectives. To remedy this shortcoming and examine…

While contemporary mathematics education literature argues that curricular resources, such as textbooks, play a significant role guiding mathematics teachers in what and how they teach, it also shows that these resources often do not do what they say they will do, nor adhere to the standards they claim to further. When it comes to the most…

College students with disabilities are an overlooked minority population. However, they comprise an ever-increasing student population in postsecondary institutions. Yet students with disabilities do not persist or graduate at rates similar to their able-bodied peers. People with disabilities have historically been viewed as a low-status group and…

The purpose of this study was to conduct a critical discourse analysis of media produced by higher education institutions. The study aimed to uncover how universities manifest diversity, social justice, and neoliberal discourses in their marketing efforts. Diversity discourses differentiate from social justice discourses in that they do not…

Colleges and universities use language (i.e., talk and text) to represent diversity and inclusion in community engagement. Diversity refers to individual and social or group differences (e.g., race, ethnicity, national origin, social class, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability), while inclusion is the intentional and ongoing…

Adults learn and develop in various contexts, which affect how they construct and reconstruct aspects of their identities. Such identity construction and reconstruction can occur through mediated or unmediated means. Within the context of this study, adult identity development through unmediated learning within digital spaces is analyzed. Specific…

For young woman, the issue of self-expression is important to consider because there are many contexts where their voices and experiences are discounted, silenced, and suppressed. Venues for self-expression can provide a way for those voices and experiences that have been ignored in classrooms and other social outlets to be recognized. This…

Media literacy is touted as a necessary life skill for cultural citizenship, yet as it is generally practiced there is little engagement with sustainability issues. In order to gain insights into why this is the case, this research investigated how media literacy practitioners use metaphors to frame both the role of media education in the world…

In the first case study, a piece of recent BBC news reported on Chinese netizens leaving random but funny comments on a Western website attracted people's attention. A closer look at those comments reveals that understanding the Chinese netizens' comments requires metaphorical and cultural knowledge. This study starts with theoretical explanations…

Drawing on and reexamining theories on gender and literacy, derived from research performed between 1974 and 2002, this qualitative study explored the gender assumptions and expectations of 19 preservice and practicing secondary language arts teachers in a graduate level adolescent literature course. The theoretical framework was structured around…

As enrollment in postsecondary education increases, colleges and universities increasingly rely heavily on the use of the Internet as a means of communication with their students. Upon students' admission, institutional webpage messaging shifts to messages about students' new affiliation with the institution in their situated identity--a college…

A growing number of researchers claim that web-based communication tools, such as weblogs (blogs for short), have the potential to transform teaching and learning in schools across grade levels. Yet, much of this research lacks evidence of what instructors and students are actually doing with the technology, including the circumstances under which…

Blogs, specifically special-interest blogs, generate in-depth discussions. These discussions offer a new window for researching emerging trends in both consumer behavior and social-political attitudes. Many people try to influence these discussions and trends via participation, but making an impact is not guaranteed. Not all comments have the same…

Over the past few years, content developers searching for new markets have found a potentially lucrative consumer base in local and location-based services as new media platforms have begun to "expand" their focus to hyper-local place-based communities. This shift to "local 2.0" has given birth to "local listing sites," an emerging social medium…

This study examined the effects of four post-crisis responses on five different variables using a blog tool. The four post-crisis responses are information only, compensation, apology, and sympathy. The five dependent variables are reputation, anger (negative emotion), negative word-of-mouth, account acceptance and state of the publics based on…