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Mindfulness without meditation? Testing a novel web-based mindfulness intervention for counselors-in-training
No full textCounselors-in-training are often encouraged to adopt self-care practices to manage stress and prevent professional burnout. Mindfulness interventions are increasingly incorporated in counselor preparation curricula as means to enhance students’ stress resilience and to cultivate qualities of empathy, presence, and emotional self-regulation. Although counselors-in-training reported meaningful outcomes associated with mindfulness training, they often cited lengthy time investments and formal meditation practice requirements as barriers to consistent program engagement. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness and acceptability of The Mindful Counselor, a novel four-week online “no-meditation” mindfulness intervention with brief content tailored to the personal and professional development needs of counselors-in-training. Further, the study examined whether engagement with program components predicted outcomes. In this randomized controlled trial, 132 master’s-level students in counseling-related programs were randomly assigned to either an immediate start for The Mindful Counselor intervention (n = 74), or to a four-week delay (n = 58). Participants completed measures of mindfulness and burnout at baseline and again four weeks after study enrollment. Thirty-nine participants in the active treatment group competed post-participation program evaluation questionnaires.
Participants in the intervention group showed statistically significant increases in mindful qualities of Observing, Describing, and Non-judging of Inner Experience when compared to the waitlist control group in MANCOVA on an Intention-to-treat basis (n = 131). Additionally, the mindfulness facet of Non-reacting to Inner Experience was significant in the Per-protocol analysis (n = 88). None of the three facets of burnout were significantly affected by the intervention. In the secondary analysis, participants’ self-reported practice frequency, number of modules completed, and comprehension scores did not predict mindfulness in a multiple regression model. Furthermore, there was no relationship between these measures of program compliance and burnout.
An alternative explanation for the intervention’s effects emerged from the qualitative data, suggesting increases in mindful qualities could be attributed to the intervention’s ability to (a) activate and expand upon participants’ prior mindfulness experience, and (b) address common misconceptions about mindfulness to help novices begin developing foundational mindfulness skills and attitudes. Quantitative measures and qualitative feedback suggested participants viewed the intervention as an acceptable method for learning and applying mindfulness skills. Overall, results of this study suggested (a) mindful qualities can be increased through informal practices, (b) brief online intervention models can be effective, (c) even briefer interventions and more flexible delivery formats may be preferred for adult learners in counselor preparation, and (d) online delivery of content tailored to the personal and professional development needs of counselors-in-training can provide an acceptable means of promoting mindfulness traits. The main limitations of this study were reliance on self-selection and a low completion rate
In the Place of Prayer
No full textIn The Place of Prayer is a true story. While categorically my novel falls into the genre of historical fiction, I have approached this project with the intent to include only the instances and situations that I or someone I know has experienced. There are scenes in this book where events and timelines have been reorganized to present a more followable narrative arc, but I have taken great care to uphold the integrity of the story’s truth. I see this commitment as an essential feature that must be respected if this work is to accomplish its goal. Which is this: I want to make the more extreme manifestations of humanity that are displayed in situations like war to be known as just that. Human. Real and understandable. I want the reader to see that the people who are involved are not otherworldly, superhero or supervillian-esque individuals whose motivations, faults, and intrinsic natures are somehow removed from what the rest of humankind is doing their best to be successful with. I want to demonstrate very clearly the realities of this world, and especially how the obstacles that appear to be insurmountable have been constructed in the same fashion as everything else, one decision on top of another. And that there is hope in this. Contained within the fact that we have created these problems for ourselves is an equal and opposite ability to create a new reality. In the face of everything that we are up against, we have within and among us an abundance of the courage and intelligence and love that we need. All that needs to happen is for us as individuals to be making better decisions. Simple as that.
To this aim, my prose employs multiple distinct rhetorical features. On the narrative level, the story is told in the first person, and I have chosen to let each piece of dialogue stand as its own paragraph and to forgo dialogue tags altogether. Rather than remaining exclusively with the narrator as he tells the story, the reader is able to travel back into the time and place where these moments of dialogue actually happened and to experience them as they occurred. My decision to go forward in this was reinforced by seeing something similar done with incredible effect by Yuri Herrera in Signs Preceding the End of the World. In addition to the dialogue-induced time jumps, there is a version of the narrator who is ten years older than his current self that occasionally shows up in the footnotes to comment on what he sees, to clarify a perspective, or to correct what has been said when he feels it to be necessary, bestowing the story with the gained wisdom of his years. The footnotes are also a place where the narrator explains in various levels of detail the jargon, acronyms, sociopolitical nuances, and even the inside joke of the Marine Corps and of his unit. They are comparable to how Junot Dias employed footnotes to explain the history and features of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship in The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. These features allow the story to be simultaneously delivered as a (somewhat) linear succession of events, as well as the culminating experience of them existing within the moment of a memory. Instead of the reader being told the story from across a table, they are being led along through the memories of the narrator while he explains to them what they are witnessing.
There are two linear timelines that the narrative oscillates between. One follows the group of Marines across their deployment to the Helmand Province of Afghanistan, and the other describes the events during the training workup which preceded and the post-deployment period that followed it. With this, I highlight the processes that the Marine Corps uses to prepare a person for the unnatural acts of killing and war, what happens when their training is met with real-world situations, and how these wartime experiences affect an individual’s life going forward. More than that though, I want to show how the happenings of deployment are not isolated events, and I have organized the two timelines to demonstrate this in the way that they communicate with each other, taking most of my inspiration for this kind of storytelling from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
While many of these features can be considered experimental, they were all born as natural parts of a writing process that is centered on a desire to present the most accurate and obtainable representation of the experience that they describe. Following in the path of works such as Left of Boom, Eat the Apple, and The Things They Carried, In The Place of Prayer is an invitation for its readers to expand the range of their empathy by building upon the compassion within their perspective
Linguistic variation across texts: the role of register, intra-register communicative distinctions, social group, and individual differences
Get PDFLanguage variation is attributed to a variety of factors – linguistic and various nonlinguistic or external constraints determining language use. These external factors have been commonly classified as characteristics of language users and factors associated with the situation of use (e.g., Halliday, 1978). User characteristics have been the subject of sociolinguistic research, concerned with variation predicted by group membership on the basis of such factors as age, gender, region, ethnicity, educational or occupational background. Other fields of linguistics, such as idiolectal sociolinguistics, are also concerned with characteristics of the users, but these characteristics are individual rather than indicative of group affiliation.On the other hand, in the research tradition focused on considerations of use, linguistic variation is explained by the fact that language is always produced in response to a particular communicative situation, and linguistic variation corresponds to situational differences. In the text-linguistic school of thought, linguistic variation has been traditionally attributed to the fact that texts belong to ‘registers’, culturally-recognized language varieties “associated with the situation of use” (Biber & Conrad, 2019, p. 6). On the other hand, it has been recognized that registers are not situationally uniform, but rather exhibit substantial internal variation across texts or even within texts. An additional consideration in linguistic variation according to the situation of use has therefore involved granular communicative differences within registers, shown to explain additional linguistic variation, previously unaccounted for by existing register categories. (e.g., Biber, Egbert, & Keller, 2020; Egbert & Gracheva, 2023).
This dissertation examines the interactions that may exist between these distinct approaches to linguistic variation and investigates social group (age and gender), register, and individual speaker characteristics as predictors of functional linguistic variation in the ‘Corpus of 100 Idiolects’, comprised by 7 registers produced by 112 speakers from a range of social backgrounds. The goals of the study include (1) identifying underlying dimensions of functional linguistic variation in the corpus; (2) measuring the contribution of each predictor variable to functional linguistic variation; (3) providing accounts of language use by age and gender groups within and across registers; (4) accounting for possible communicative distinctions within registers; (5) analyzing individual authors across registers.
The study produces several key findings. First, social and individual characteristics do not contribute to explaining functional linguistic variation across texts, while the contribution of register is major. Second, as social groups are examined across registers, it is revealed that register is a significant predictor of variation for all groups, and age and gender groups generally follow the same cross-register patterns. When social groups are examined within registers, it is shown that age and gender do not predict register-internal variation, but each social group varies extensively within its scope. Third, as variation within registers is explored further, the study finds that this linguistic variation is systematically explained by highly granular communicative distinctions across texts. Finally, the study demonstrates how analysis of individual language use is enhanced through an account of authors’ approaches to a range of registers that allow varying degrees of internal linguistic freedom
Degrowth communication: escaping the ivory tower
No full textThis paper reviews public spoken communications of degrowth proponents, evaluating the verbal barriers potentially impeding public acceptance of their theory and offering possible solutions to enhance its adoption by a wider swath of society. Degrowth theory proposes solutions for effectively addressing the climate crisis, social inequality, and environmental injustice. While degrowth as a theory has increased in popularity in recent years, this has been primarily confined to academic circles. It has not seen broad recognition or acceptance from the laity. Degrowth as a movement has therefore remained, after more than half a century since its development, largely unknown and completely untested in real world socioeconomics.
Using the framework of persuasion theory as a lens, this paper examines degrowth proponents’ communication via media platforms, e.g., podcasts and videos. Critical discourse analysis was applied to the evaluation of the degrowth evangelists’ communications with a focus on evaluating the language choices for their accessibility, clarity, and minimization of jargon.
Results of this study reviewed potential hinderances to the persuasive abilities of current degrowth messaging to persuade mainstream audiences in favor of degrowth. Degrowth evangelists are currently emphasizing widely unpopular aspects of degrowth, utilizing excessive jargon, communicating with inaccessible language and offering examples via abstract metaphors thereby convoluting the messaging offered to non-specialized audiences.
This study concludes that given the urgency surrounding the limited amount of time remaining for reducing carbon emissions to avert the worst of climate destabilization, degrowth proponents must alter their messaging to focus on the popular aspects of degrowth, communicate in engaging simple and accessible ways thereby creating a higher likelihood of facilitating acceptance and generating support for degrowth throughout the global populace
Loose lips sink ships: investigating the phenomenon of trauma dumping on Tiktok and its effects
Get PDFThis present study investigated the phenomenon of trauma dumping on TikTok and measured its effects for users who participate in this behavior. Participants were found through social media and on Northern Arizona University’s Mountain Campus, and they were required to be at least 18 years of age. Participants were asked to identify their attitudes towards questions and/or statements regarding their TikTok usage, TikTok and trauma dumping, and the uses and gratifications of trauma dumping on TikTok. Participants reported trauma dumping behavior on TikTok to be associated with therapeutic reasons even if they did not personally experience such feelings when they were trauma dumped on the social media platform. Given its novelty, more research is needed to better understand the impact that trauma dumping has on the sender
Baby talk
No full textIn the summer of 2022 I was caught in a thought pattern I couldn't escape. What would I write a degree-granting thesis about, and how was I going to write it in less than a year? It was then, thinking myself into a spiral, that the idea came to me: I would write a book critiquing the institution which had forced me into the loop in the first place. It felt, after all, almost purposefully designed to ruin the artmaking process to write a thesis on deadline, to write it for class credit, to "defend" it at the end. I hoped to call attention to the design of the system through my work. The project I first wrote—one hundred and twenty pages from scratch—was harshly critical of neoliberal spaces in general, of art spaces in particular, and of the MFA directly. It named experiences (though not people) that were complicit in my multifaceted oppression in the space of the university.
That project was squandered by the space it attempted to name, and by those who perpetuate it still. Negative comments on my project were couched in comments about craft or wasted talent. But I saw that the project was, at least in part, perceived as a threat; that I was the problem child.
And so, my thesis became BABY TALK: a version of those original thoughts, molded into a thesis-shaped box. The narrator of BABY TALK is nervous, depressed, fearful, but also direct, deliberate. She is self-aware and critical. She is the product of one concept squashed, her authority a form of self-preservation. How, I asked myself through the making of this project, could I retain my voice, my power, while also protecting myself from further systematized alienation?
My answer became to write with an attention to narrative voice, to write always from a position of questioning, but to write with authority nonetheless. In BABY TALK, my narrator desires complex challenges, and faces them in order to parse through them. The unsureness with which she approaches topics that are nuanced and difficult to navigate is not just there to make the point—it is the point. A decidedly self-conscious work of documentation, the project functions as a confrontation, melding my thoughts on community, labor, and systematized spaces with cultural critique, personal narrative, and formally unconventional intro- and retrospection.
Among the things documented in the project are cultural objects in the Great Acceleration and my critique of them; labor issues across institutions I’ve existed in for my whole life; and the people and communities who made me who I am, for better or worse (though, usually for better). Together, the narrator and reader move through seemingly disparate yet ever-connected settings—Zoom meeting rooms; the hiding holes of mice on campus; intestinal walls and stomach linings; a strange apartment in New York City; or inside a scene from The Sopranos.
BABY TALK is the culmination of an overthinker; of a writer and narrator alike in their fear of doing the wrong thing, of documenting the wrong way; of a writer who gazes at the world with a critical eye. This work asks: why is the world the way it is? But also: How do we make it better? It is a direct response to systemic oppression, to neoliberal hegemony. But ultimately, I aim not only to call attention to the negative, but also to acknowledge, to document, to appreciate that which exists and functions outside of or despite those things
Graduate student instructor communities of practice: supporting learning and value creation for novice instructors in higher education
Get PDFGraduate Student Instructors (GSIs) are an integral part of the higher education system. Their presence causes a substantial impact on undergraduate student learning, making supporting GSI learning and growth as educators a focus of anyone tasked in supervising their instruction and charged with the success of the undergraduates they teach. Numerous studies have focused on a variety of GSI-related factors in an effort to better understand this unique demographic of educators. This study extends this research by using a situated learning framework (Lave and Wenger, 1991) involving communities of practice (CoPs) and value creation (Wenger et al., 2011) to determine the activities and experiences that most influence GSI professional learning, patterns that exist in these activities and experiences, and how they influence value creation within two GSI CoPs. Twenty-nine GSIs studying mathematics, statistics, or mathematics education participated in the study and provided data through multiple surveys and interviews. The GSIs mentioned 71 activities and experiences that were analyzed. The data suggest that supportive interactions significantly influence the professional learning that occurs within a CoP, the intended purpose of the CoP plays a role in the type of value GSIs place on their professional learning within a CoP, and there are distinctions in how first-and second-year GSIs create value for their professional learning within a CoP. I conclude with recommendations for both practitioners and the research community
Love in the time of Onchocerca
Get PDFThis dissertation investigated the prevalence rate and vector species of the under-studied, vector-borne parasite Onchocerca lupi. It also develops and applies methods that provided the opportunity to conduct whole-genome sequencing (WGS) of this newly emerging cryptic nematode to characterize the genomic diversity in the southwestern United States (U.S.). Chapter One is a review of the literature on elimination campaigns against important and well-studied filarial nematodes infecting humans. It also proposes the necessary steps critical for Onchocerca lupi elimination strategies. Chapter Two details the first large-scale prevalence study of O. lupi in companion animals in an endemic area of the U.S. as well as the discovery and identification of putative vector species in the Southwestern U.S. Chapter Three presents the first complete mitochondrial genome for O. lupi. Chapter Four details the design and validation of a novel, real-time PCR assay for quantifying the host-to-parasite DNA ratio (LupiQuant) from complex onchocercosis samples. This assay utilizes single copy genes from the canine host and O. lupi that were inserted into plasmid constructs, cloned, and serially diluted to serve as gene copy number controls. This chapter also describes the first draft genome of O. lupi. Chapter Five expounds on the methods produced in Chapter Four and provides informed sample selection for WGS of 16 adult worms from the US, Turkey, and Romania. This chapter also defines the genomic diversity of O. lupi and its Wolbachia endosymbiont within the US. More broadly, this dissertation provides the necessary forward momentum toward O. lupi control and eventually, elimination
Changing landscape of alumni engagement: comparative case study of research 1 institutions with changing demographics
Get PDFAlumni demographics are rapidly changing, and alumni associations are looking for new ways to increase alumni engagement. Using Lewin’s (1947) organizational change theory and Homans’s (1958) social exchange theory, this study examines two Research 1 institutions in a comparative case study. By comparing the experiences of two institutions, alumni associations can identify successful practices and adapt them to their own context. One key finding of this study is the importance of creating community among alumni. By fostering a sense of belonging and a shared identity, alumni are more likely to engage with their alumni association and with each other. In addition, by providing value to alumni, alumni associations can build trust and loyalty, leading to increased engagement over time. By celebrating the achievements of alumni and showcasing their successes, alumni associations can inspire other alumni to engage with and become more active in the campus community. Alumni associations can use Lewin’s organizational change theory and Homans’s social exchange theory to develop effective strategies for engaging their alumni. By creating a community, connecting with alumni, and building alumni pride, associations can increase engagement and diversify their alumni base. The comparative case study approach offers a valuable tool for identifying successful practices and adapting them to individual contexts
In the pines: a spatial analysis of ancestral indigenous landscape use and boundary effects on the Coconino plateau in northern Arizona
Get PDFAncestral Indigenous peoples of the Coconino Plateau in northern Arizona used a broad range of resources and environments to survive and thrive. Based on these observations, it is hypothesized that archaeological site density and clustering patterns may accordingly vary in different environments. The purpose of the present study is to examine site location patterns in two adjacent but differing biotic zones—Pinyon-Juniper Woodland and Ponderosa Pine Forest—and to determine whether archaeological sites in these zones display differing density and clustering patterns in relation to the boundary with the other zone, i.e., boundary effects. The study utilizes locational data of 3,743 prehistoric archaeological sites collected on the Williams Ranger District of the Kaibab National Forest from 1978 through 2022. The results of the study support previous research suggesting ancestral Indigenous peoples of the Coconino Plateau, including the Cohonina, utilized Pinyon-Juniper Woodland more intensively and centrally, while pushing into Ponderosa Forest only as far as necessary for seasonally- or biotically- specific purposes. A brief discussion on methodological approaches is also included, concerning spatial analysis of all prehistoric sites in an area versus sites of specific archaeological cultural traditions. Further studies into site type and functionality patterns may further this research, lending more insight into ancestral Indigenous landscape use and aiding the Forest Service in managing its lands and prioritizing cultural resource surveys