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Analog God
No full textMy dissertation consists of fifty poems that create a narrative arc of a woman's life and beyond. The poems consider and reconsider a woman's place and displacement within the family unit, society, and religion, and focus on major events in a woman's life: childhood, marriage, motherhood, divorce, grand-motherhood, and the deaths of children, siblings, and parents. Many of the poems focus on representations of women in art--in particular, religious art. Several poems consider constructions of God inside religion and outside conventional religion, and explore ideas of the soul before and after death.
The majority of the poems are written in free verse, but I have included various other classic forms as well as nonce forms.
My poetry attempts to make sense of my experiences. Much of my past work concerns my son's death, and while I have a number of poems that reference that event in this book as well, the majority of the poems spring from situations I have experienced that I was not able to fully process when they were happening. While these events are particular to me personally (my parent's divorce and my divorces; my son's diagnosis, deteriorating illness, and death; my daughter's marriage and motherhood), I believe that grappling with the significance of these events in my life honestly and crafting art from them is an important endeavor, one that can have meaning and significance for readers.
My aesthetics have been influenced by Leon Stokesbury, Beth Gylys, and David Bottoms through working with me at GSU. Poets I have studied who have influenced my work include Amy Clampitt and Pattiann Rogers, because of their close observations of the natural world and unapologetically feminine perspective on that world. Pattiann Rogers combines natural science and metaphysics in her poetry to great effect and I pursue similar themes in my book.
My interest and curiosity about the world around me is the wellspring for my creative processes and investigating ideas about the world revealed in science and reflected in art helps me put my life’s experiences in a context I can respond to in my poetry.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Simbelmynë
No full textSIMBELMYNË is a collection of poems charting loss, both public and private, and a blended family navigating the domestic sphere. The structure is free verse prose poetry. The author makes use of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Two Towers for the title of the work, as well as the names of the six section headings. The first portion of the book deals with narratives of grief surrounding the first-person speaker, then the shifts into the experience of falling in love. The work cycles over to the unexpected murder of the speaker's childhood friend, which echoes back to days of earlier loss. As the narrator learns to cope with her friend's death, she marries and has another child. The last half of the book concludes that peace, hope, and positivity can follow tragedy.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Screens: A Novel
No full textThere are many versions of Alexandra Marie Howell: there is the profile-picture-less, snarky wit of the Twitter user, @HowellattheMoon85, sending her observations into an unlistening void (having only a few followers, none of whom she actually knows); there is the lurker on Reddit, u/CodswallopToBoot, who observes but rarely interacts, making all her fanfic private; there is the Bumble dating app user, GrangerDanger, who is putting herself out there, only to incur textual abuse the moment she doesn’t respond quickly enough for fragile man-boys on the other end of the interface. And then there is the physical body of Alexandra Marie Howell--Alex--sitting alone in her cramped apartment, face lit by laptop and phone screens in an otherwise darkened room.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Monsoon Season: A Collection of Stories
No full textMonsoon Season is a collection of unlinked stories told in first-person and third-person limited omniscience narration. The stories address issues of exile, memory, troubled relationships, and displacement inspired by my life.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Examining the Influence of Context in Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Training for Teaching Online
No full textOnline learning continues to grow in importance in many countries around the world. However, many teachers do not possess the unique skills needed to teach online. Professional development is a logical way to help in-service teachers gain these skills. Although research exists on features of effective professional development, relatively few studies have examined training specifically designed for developing online teaching skills. A popular framework through which to view these skills is technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). Despite this framework’s dominance in the literature, the role that contextual factors play in the development of TPACK is not well understood. This study addresses these gaps in the literature by investigating how teachers’ unique contextual factors impact their TPACK both before and after a training program and explores the role that different aspects of the training program may have played in teachers’ TPACK development. Using an explanatory sequential mixed methods approach, this study first examined results from a survey completed by primary school teachers in nine Caribbean countries who participated in an 11-week training program for online teaching both before starting the program (N = 505) and after program completion (N = 177). Quantitative analysis found that many factors, including colleague collaboration, access to technology, and level of autonomy in teaching were associated with differences in TPACK scores and subscores. Qualitative data collected through interviews with participating teachers provided context for these findings by exploring how and why some of these phenomena occurred. The role that different aspects of the training program played in the process of TPACK development was also explored through the interviews during this second phase of research, indicating that factors such as support from colleagues and active learning through practical application facilitated learning. However, some participants encountered obstacles such as a lack of access to technology and program content that was not fully compatible with the program duration or participants’ interests. Implications include the need for school leaders to better facilitate collaboration among teachers and build communities within training programs. Additionally, further efforts must be made to equip teachers and students with access to technology.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Learning Technologies Divisio
Physical Activity and Psychological Stress Resilience: Considering Anxiety Vulnerability
No full textHuman literature documenting that PA may confer protective effects on mental health by influencing the stress response offer inconsistent evidence, which may be due to the lack of consideration of whether PA’s protective effects vary according to individual differences in anxiety. Undergraduate student participants (N = 128) completed online measures of PA level, trait anxiety, and self-perceived stress resilience. The interaction between PA and trait anxiety was assessed using multiple hierarchical linear regression analyses. Among individuals with high anxiety vulnerability, there was a significant positive relation between recreational PA and self-perceived stress; however, there was no significant relation between recreational PA and self-perceived stress resilience, among individuals with low and moderate trait anxiety. In conclusion, individuals with high anxiety vulnerability, which may be a risk factor for developing mental health problems, may preferentially benefit from the protective effects of PA on mental health through the stress response.Master of Arts (MA)Psycholog
What You Must Understand
No full textWhat You Must Understand is a collection of poems.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Faulkner's Literary Environment: Assessing the South's Relationship with Land Abuse
No full textThis thesis aims to understand William Faulkner as an environmentally conscious author whose views on land abuse appear throughout his work. The goal is twofold: first, to examine how he criticizes ecological abuse; second, to discover which sources likely influenced him and helped him to form his perspectives on environmental issues.Master of Arts (MA)Englis
Celestial Bodies
No full textThe following is a collection of original lyric, narrative poems written mostly between 2008 and 2014. The introduction discusses the origins of my poetic influences and aesthetics. The title references a metaphor from 1 Corinthians 15 in the Bible where the apostle Paul describes the physical bodies of resurrected individuals. He compares the glory, brightness, and beauty of resurrected bodies to celestial bodies in the firmament (i.e. the sun, moon, and stars).
The title encompasses the arguments of this poetry collection because the poems discuss various aspects of the eternal human soul as mortal or immortal. These poems explore concepts of the body as the instrument through which each of us experiences the world as well as the medium for physical and emotional growth, pleasure, violence, sexuality, knowledge and intelligence, and death and loss. These poems are interested in language, sound, and narrative while focusing on the physical body, particularly how as mortals we’re all affected by the sweeping realities of the human condition such as the desire for perfection, immortality, sexual or metaphorical union, and transcendence.
These poems are heavily informed by my own experience, though it should not be assumed they are always autobiographical. I enjoy fiction in my poetry. Furthermore, once a poem comes into existence, the poet must allow the poem to go where it needs and wants to go. While many of my first drafts begin as autobiography, resemblances to my life experience are often lost. That being said, the poems in this collection concern a boy coming of age as he becomes aware of his self as a physically embodied entity, as he explores his curiosity about his own body and the bodies of others, and as he witnesses cruelty, illness, and death in his world.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis