TCU Digital Repository
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Publication Intersection and inflection points: Exploring the lived experience of advanced placement calculus students using narrative inquiry(2024-11-13)This dissertation uses narrative inquiry, a qualitative methodology, to explore the lived experience of two Advanced Placement Calculus BC students. The research questions are as follows: What are the lived experiences of advanced placement calculus students? What do those experiences tell us about secondary mathematics education in the 21st century? What relationship do students experience between their coursework and their daily lives? In this study, the participants are in the process of navigating the challenges of a high-level mathematics course while in the final year of their secondary education. The personal narratives of the participants and their teacher are communicated through the use of interview excerpts, journal entries, correspondence, and classroom artifacts. These stories intersect with broader educational, social, and institutional frameworks, including high-stakes testing, the role of family in education, and the U.S. education system’s “senior year” phenomenon. While Advanced Placement coursework provides an intersection point for the participants and their teacher, the study also explores the role of mentorship, support services, and the importance of prior knowledge. The findings offer insight into how narrative inquiry can play a role in understanding student learning in rigorous science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses. Additionally, the study contributes to broader discussions of pedagogy, curriculum design, and Advanced Placement programs.Publication Andean cosmology and charging the universe: Colonial concepts of power, healing, and transformation in the Andes(2023-08-03)This dissertation focuses on Andean cosmology and colonial concepts of healing in the Andes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This dissertation provides evidence that redefines aspects and understandings of Andean cosmology that pertain to health and well-being and the causes for illness. In the Andes, Native healers accessed the basis of power for healing that resided in a life-giving and life-animating essence called camac that continually renews and recharges the cosmos. Camac flows through focal areas or objects called huacas, which early colonial Andeans revered and honored. Andean notions of reciprocity (ayni) and shared resources (sapsi) required Natives to engage the living world to maintain the flow of energy for health and vitality. Andean healers utilized camac of spaces, huacas, plants, animals, minerals, and objects of power in their rites and rituals to affect change in people, livestock and crops, land, and relationships. This purpose of this dissertation is to offer an alternative framework for Andean cosmology that centers on the flow of camac as the central concept for power in the Andes, whereby huacas serve as focal points of vitalizing energies. Huacas, like the sun and moon, are focal points of power that adhere to the cosmological order that were accessible to Andean healing specialists. Utilizing church documents, government documents, colonial reports and histories, early Quechua-Spanish dictionaries, and cultural remnants, I mitigate religious and ethnic biases by scrutinizing key terminology and phrases against attitudes, actions, and misunderstandings of early encounters between Andean ethnic groups and European colonizing agents. Redefining Andean cosmology in the early colonial period alters the Spanish-Catholic narrative of Native healers and their beliefs that currently permeate into the 21st century.Publication Smoke and fire showing: Fire, fraternity, and social order in post frontier Fort Worth 1873-1919(2021-03-03)This thesis paper explores the development of a post frontier area township along the original 1849 military outpost line and the co-evolution of integral social groups of firemen within an established Fort Worth, Texas, 1873. It explores the social order, city services, commercial economic enterprise, and the fire departments formation which played significant roles in Fort Worth’s existence and eventual survival. Fire events themselves created reasons for change within the budding region and created an unceasing morphing of the fire department institution and how it dovetailed into the city structure. Within this thesis is a focus on symbolic events intended to show a group of men and a city coevolving to support their community – that specific group are the volunteer firemen of Fort Worth.Publication Sugar, slaves, and revolutionary waves: The origins and legacy of the 1811 German Coast uprising(2023-05-23)This paper highlights an incredibly understudied yet vitally important event in Louisiana’s history—the 1811 German Coast Uprising. Before January 1811, slave rebellion weighed heavily on the minds of Louisiana citizens. The diverse and complex social environment led to racial and ethnic divisions. Louisianans avoided major slave uprisings for quite some time, but racialized tensions heightened significantly after 1791 with the success of the Haitian Revolution. The territory finally succumbed to slave revolution when Charles Deslondes, a slave on the Manuel Andre´ plantation, called upon his fellow enslaved Africans to overthrow their masters and demand their freedom. This paper analyzes the environment in present-day Louisiana and beyond in the years preceding 1811, the factors that contributed to the outbreak of rebellion, the suppression of the rebellion in popular history and memory, and the overall ramifications of the slaves’ efforts to obtain autonomy and basic human rights.Publication "A pioneer editress": Frieda Cassin's complex contributions to the 19th century Caribbean Creole literary world(2023-04-28)This project is a large-scale recovery of Frieda Cassin’s (1870-1915) life and work. Cassin is the earliest Antiguan novelist, founder of the first Antiguan literary periodical, and one of the earliest female literary periodical editors in the Caribbean. This project includes both literary analysis of her work and historical recovery of her life and periodical, as well as a scholarly edition of all six issues of her periodical, none of which have been published in this century or recovered. In this project, I argue for the importance of recovering Cassin’s life and work; as an author, editor, and Antiguan citizen, she offered a critical intervention in the Caribbean literature marketplace of her day and was successful by numerous measures, including international recognition in both the Americas and England. I examine the importance of the transatlantic connections between Antigua, the United States, and England, and through doing so, demonstrate how Cassin responded to cultural forces at play in the nineteenth century – participating in some (e.g., racist language and its ideological underpinnings) while resisting others (e.g., gender and racial hierarchies). It is my hope that this project will provide an adaptable model for dealing with the authorial history of a figure whose work and life contain both problematic and admirable features, especially in a place like the Caribbean, with its hybrid culture and complex social hierarchies.
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