Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2024, Educational Leadership

In this self-study, I propose a curriculum fragment methodology to work toward a greater understanding of the boundaries (Herdandez-Saca et al., 2023) between special education and disability studies that strengthens both teacher education and disability studies in education (DSE). Specifically, I engage in critical reflection on my teaching practices (Freire, 1998) to explore the possibilities for an educator working in the field of special education with a DSE disposition to engage boundary work as a teacher educator in the tensions between special education and disability studies. In this study, I use curriculum fragments (Poetter & Googins, 2015) to frame a methodology as supported by the curriculum studies traditions of currere (Pinar, 1975), Teacher Lore (Schubert, 1989), and narrative points-of-entry (Schultz et al., 2010). My aim is to excavate my experiences as an educator and professional working with disabled students and adults labeled with multiple and intellectual disabilities and my current experiences as a teacher educator by leveraging curriculum fragments that flow freely through Pinar's (1975) four stages of currere and Martin Heidegger's hermeneutic circle (2008) to facilitate my journey for a narrative. The culmination of this curriculum fragment methodology leads to reimagined possibilities in the boundaries that ultimately culminate with Pinar's (1975) synthetical stage presented in curriculum fragments that interlace the past, present, and future to enhance my teaching practices.

Committee: Thomas Poetter (Committee Chair); Amity Noltemeyer (Committee Member); Joe Malin (Committee Member); Brian Schultz (Committee Member) Subjects: Curriculum Development; Education; Special Education; Teacher Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

Classroom-based simulations act as both reflections and deflections of reality. Nonetheless, their purpose is to enculturate students into a professional community through an experiential learning activity that asks students to adopt the mindset, mannerisms, and expertise of a professional. As such, students are molded into professionals through these experiences, and once they enter the workplace, they take part in shaping it, helping to subsequently craft the reality mirrored in future simulations. In other words, simulations create a feedback loop between the simulation and reality, each always shaping and reflecting a version of each other. Because of this, instructors and researchers need to take seriously not only the pedagogical implications of simulations, but also the sociopolitical. Guided by the methodological approach of abductive analysis (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014), this dissertation, through a mixed-methods case study of the pseudonymous Simulation for Raising Interprofessional Aptitude (STRIA) Program, examines how interprofessional healthcare students—social work students, in particular—are trained, through simulation, to provide patient-centered care in a simulated hospital setting. Specifically, building upon rhetorical theory, technical and professional communication, and critical disability studies, this study asks: How do interprofessional healthcare students work across divisions (in knowledge, experience, and language), together and with patients, to enact patient-centered care? How can rhetorical theory be put into practice to help interprofessional healthcare students prepare for working in unpredictable environments? How might pre-professional healthcare training, specifically simulation-based learning, respond to humanistic critiques about the efficacy and ethics of simulations? And what can rhetoricians learn from conducting in-situ research in complex workplace simulations? Key findings from this project offer rhetoric resea (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christa Teston (Advisor); Lauren McInroy (Committee Member); Margaret Price (Committee Member) Subjects: Health Care; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

Afrophantasm is both a rhetorical framework and a lens considering how the invisibility of black disability can be used and understood in both positive and/or negative ways. As a reconsideration of W.E.B. Du Bois's seminal idea of double conscious “two-ness” in The Souls of Black Folk, Afrophantasm instead represents a “threeness” by positioning a person's self-state in a trifecta of Blackness, American status, and embodiment through the lens of ability. Further, it theorizes how an environment can produce or amplify a black disabled spectral state created through stigma and ignorance, either by erasing the acknowledgment of this multi-marginalization or refocusing it to leverage its perceived disadvantages into a state of empowerment or self-recognition. By considering the idea of the rhetorical in relation to this theory, its application is expanded through a variety of examples, including cultural rhetoric (via nommo or West African oral stylistic practice), visual rhetoric (and the question of photographic disabled representations), as well as in embodied rhetoric (through the interrogation of black genetics or cybernetics), to name a few. When he coined Afrofuturism in 1993, Mark Dery wrote that "African Americans…inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies" (181). Through a complex nexus of art, music, literature, and more, the genre exists as a universe progressively centered on black lives and experiences juxtaposed against a world built to erase them. Yet, when it comes to the subaltern realm of Blackness and disability woven together, those most in need of a reprieve are instead assaulted with a litany of new shiny digital tools of discrimination, as the famed “digital divide” (highlighting an assumed lesser black digital literacy vs. white internet competence) turns corporeal (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Jones (Committee Chair); Nick White (Committee Member); Amrita Dhar (Committee Member); Kishonna Gray (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Comparative Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

This dissertation and research study is dedicated to the exploration of critical posthuman educational technology. Research in this study determines, evaluates, and considers educational technology in U.S. art museums through a wide-reaching survey and case study evaluations of the implementation of digital content creation in museums during the COVID-19 era. Critical posthumanism provides a way to understand and restructure expectations of the educational goals of museums that are aligned with the experiences and expectations of digital learning as well as incorporate a multitude of ontological considerations through Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Disability Studies. Beyond simply assessing what has happened in museums, this study seeks to find opportunities for greater change within the system of museum practice and education.

Committee: Dana Carlisle Kletchka (Advisor); Joni Boyd Acuff (Committee Member); J.T. Eisenhauer Richardson (Committee Member); Mindi Rhoades (Committee Member); Clayton Funk (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education; Museum Studies

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, History of Art

In a 1960 article entitled “Younger American Painters,” William Rubin accused Rauschenberg's Combines of rendering the “inherently biographical style of Abstract Expressionism… even more personal, more particular, and sometimes almost embarrassingly private.” Rubin's choice of the word “embarrassingly” is telling; the Combines are not just private, but embarrassingly so; that is, the problem the Combines present is that they are not private when good sense/taste tells us they should be. This spilling over of the supposed-to-be-private into the embarrassingly deviant public has been read as an insistence on the work of art as both in its environment and in communication with it, as a valorization of the femininity associated with the interior/personal and relatedly, as a refusal of heteronormative subjectivity as dictated in the Cold War era. This paper suggests another reading—not as an alternative, but as a supplement to these: a reading of Rauschenberg's Combines through the lens of disability theory. If Rauschenberg's Combines are debased (and there seems to be some agreement that they are), and if one's experience of them is bodily (and this experience seems if not universal, then nearly so), then their association with the debased/abject body demands inquiry. Made up of disparate parts that insist upon their discrete, adjunctive identities and former lives, the Combines might be best understood as Frankensteins—disabled bodies that refuse to comply and in so doing inscribe new ways of being (corporeally) in the world.

Committee: Lisa Florman (Advisor); Erica Levin (Committee Member); J.T. Richardson Eisenhauer (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Art History; Ethics; Fine Arts; Minority and Ethnic Groups

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Social Work

Racial disproportions in discipline within the U.S. public school system have been documented since the 1970s and continue to grow despite decades of research and intervention. A solid base of research ruling out individual student- and family-level factors as main causes of the racial disproportions has amassed, however, deficit narratives, stereotypes, and biases about students and families of color continue to be documented throughout the literature. Likewise, interventions directing change toward student and family behaviors and claiming to be “race neutral” by applying the same behavioral expectations and discipline decisions across all students, continue to fail at reducing disproportionate discipline outcomes for students from marginalized groups. A large portion of the literature about teachers' perceptions of students also does not accurately account for the intersectional nature of students' multidimensional identities. Further, many studies fail to use analysis methods that accommodate the complexity of school data. Through the lenses of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Disability Studies (DisCrit), the current study aimed to test relationships between various dimensions of student identity (race, gender, disability, and socioeconomic status) and U.S. public elementary school teachers' perceptions of students in areas vulnerable to systemic identity-based stereotypes (student academic capability, effort, oppositionality, aggression, and parent involvement). Specifically, the current study used structural equation modeling with secondary data collected from 1,251 elementary school students and their teachers in a southeastern U.S. state, to test structural relationships between student identities and teacher perceptions across areas vulnerable to stereotypes. Relational patterns between student identities and areas of teacher perception in the study largely mimicked patterns of identity-based stereotypes in society. For example, Black stude (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Natasha Bowen (Advisor) Subjects: Education; Elementary Education; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Multicultural Education; Social Research; Social Work; Special Education; Teacher Education; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, EDU Teaching and Learning

This three-fold dissertation examines the semiotic and textual ways that childrens literature is mediated by fifth-grade student conceptualizations of normal childhoods. Through a nested case study, I examined the discourses of a small group of fifth-grade girls, narrowed to the specific interactions of three focal students who have a personal connection to disability, to answer the following question: How does critical literacy mediate the reception of texts/covers that include characters with disabilities? Critical literacy theory provided a platform for conversations with students about the representation of childhood on the covers of books and in the books themselves. Students were encouraged to critique texts and participate in redesigning them in favor of a more accurate depiction of disability. Across the course of a year, I collected information about student interactions with the literature using ethnographic methods through audio/video recordings, semi-structured interviews, field notes and artifact collection (i.e. drawings and writings in student sketchbooks). Using discourse analysis, I analyzed this data to uncover the indexical methods that students utilized to index normal childhoods in relation to their discussions of middle grade novels. These findings were partnered with a content analysis and visual social semiotic/visual rhetoric analysis of book covers of the inclusion of disability in three middle grade novels (Rules, Waiting for Normal, and Short) read by the girls across the course of the year-long study. I found that the book covers consistently portray either a normal childhood or an overemphasized abnormal representation that both hide the reality of disability. In conversation with students, images were often rejected in favor of personal understandings of the disability. They did this by redesigning the covers to use semiotic resources that they connected to personally. Additionally, these students used their own experiences to aid in t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michelle Abate (Advisor); Michiko Hikida (Committee Member); Margaret Price (Committee Member); Mindi Rhoades (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Education; Elementary Education; Literacy; Literature; Multicultural Education; Pedagogy; Reading Instruction; Social Research

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2008, English

The vagina has metaphorically and metonymically been the body part that stands in for the category “woman” and it is this emphatic and fabricated link that imposes itself on bodies, psyches, and lives with often horrifying consequences. My goals in exploring performative and performing vaginas are many. I not only lay out how, why, and in what ways the “normal” and “abled” female body established in both dominant and mainstream discourses is, simply put, one with a specific type of vagina, but I also confront the “truth” that vaginas purport to tell about women and femininity. Ultimately, I maintain that representations of vaginas and the debates and discourses that surround them tell us something about our culture's fears, anxieties, and hopes. Living life as abject can be painful, even unbearable, yet as individuals negotiate this life they can experience pleasure, assert agency, and express ethical and just visions of the world. The artists, writers, and performers explored in this dissertation strategically perform vaginas in multiple and disparate ways. As they trouble, resist, and negotiate “normative” understandings of vaginas, they simultaneously declare that the problem is not about bodies at all. The problem is not the vagina. Instead, the problem concerns our cultural attitudes that regard non-normative bodies and identities as abnormal, perverse, disabled, pathological, and incomplete. As performing vaginas disarticulate, disrupt, and reconceptualize the assumed connections between anatomy and identity, a world that could be, a future not so far away, begins to open up. As a result, we might imagine an alternative future where queer, raced, and/or disabled bodies are not named, categorized, fixed, shunned, shamed, and/or punished. One cannot merely counter “negative” representations of the vagina, nor can the vagina solely be embraced as a woman's center or her connection to all women. Instead of determining and limiting just how one should live out he (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Stefanie K. Dunning PhD (Advisor); Dr. Madelyn M. Detloff PhD (Committee Member); Dr. Kathleen N. Johnson PhD (Committee Member); Dr. Emily A. Zakin PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Womens Studies