Theses and Dissertations
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Item Open Access The effects of a hybrid flexible ESL classroom on the perception and production of segmental features of pronunciation(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Hubert, Kale, author; Delahunty, Gerald, advisor; Marques, Luciana, advisor; Miller De Rutté, Alyssia, committee memberHybrid flexible classrooms, when employed deliberately, promise the opportunity to increase student equitable access to educational materials. This study examined changes in segmental perception and production among ESL students enrolled in a hybrid flexible course delivered across two academic terms. A communicative pronunciation curriculum designed in reference to Celce-Murcia et al. (2010) was employed. During the Fall A term, students on average improved in their perception of the /ð/ phoneme but regressed in their perception of the /θ/, /i/, /ɪ/, /u/, and /ʊ/ phonemes. During the Fall B term, students on average improved in their perception of the /ð/, /θ/, /i/, and /ɪ/ phonemes but regressed in their perception of the /u/ and /ʊ/ phonemes. Regarding isolated and sentence embedded production, Fall A students improved with /i/, maintained accuracy with /ð/ and /θ/, and regressed with /ɪ/, /u/, and /ʊ/. Fall B students improved in their isolated production of /ʊ/, maintained /ð/, and regressed with /θ/, /i/, /ɪ/, and /u/. Fall B students also improved in their sentence embedded production of /i/, /ɪ/, and /u/, maintained with /θ/, and regressed with /ð/ and /ʊ/. Also, several data sets initially planned for analysis were deemed unusable, and one third of all students originally involved in the study ultimately attritted, possibly as a result of an inability to build community while engaging with the class in the online modality. These results suggest that phoneme specific instruction varies across class modalities. Future research should be designed with greater feasibility than was present in the current study and should more deliberately include comparison groups to increase the generalizability of claims of the efficacy of the hybrid flexible format for pronunciation instruction.Item Open Access Who gets dominion over us? A Burkian analysis identifying Jesus in the He Gets Us Campaign(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Angelis, Yanni Konstadinos, author; Doe, Sue, advisor; Langstraat, Lisa, committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee memberIn 2024, political scientist Paul Djupe found that 40 percent of American Christian adults believe "God wants Christians to stand atop the '7 mountains of society,' including the government, education, media, and others." Capitalizing on these Christian desires is the Christian Evangelical mass marketing effort, "He Gets Us" (HEGU), which advertises Jesus' narrative to America as a relatable source of values-based practices to endure the current historical moment. It is a privileged instantiation of Christian discourse in the public sphere that provokes questions of 1) Who is the Jesus represented in the campaign, 2) Who is behind it, and 3) What are their motives? In this thesis, I investigate HEGU as a manifestation of a Christian doctrine called Dominionism, which aims in part to control the media landscape in the U.S. I utilize Kenneth Burke's theory of persuasion by identification to examine the campaign's strategic presentation of Jesus as a rhetorical means of moving audiences towards a Christian value system. My analysis looks at a limited set of texts and 13 images used by HEGU related to the loving act of foot washing. This study builds off the work of religious studies scholar Stephen Prothero's 2003 examination of the cultural figure of Jesus throughout American history as a "Rorschach test of ever-changing national sensibilities." I examine how the man from Nazareth is being sold through visual and textual website materials that mirror the marketers' ideological beliefs around social conflict. While HEGU claims to be spreading the authentic word of Jesus, their message privileges the beliefs of the wealthy conservative Christian class. This novel partnership between popular mass marketing and Christian cultural reform politics is a harbinger of future Christianizing media in the public sphere, and in response I suggest a critical need for attending to religious discourse. These discourses shape our students and thus their writing, which demands our attention to those enculturating religious messages.Item Restricted Conversion disorders(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Gordon, Amy, author; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Perry, Sarah, committee member; Romagni, Domenica, committee memberConversion Disorders is a memoir exploring the impact of a debilitating illness on the narrator's conceptions of self. The novel traces the narrator, a lawyer in the U.S. Army, from Iraq to Hawaii to New York, as she suffers from a constellation of physical and cognitive symptoms with no apparent medical cause. She spends weeks in hospitals, including a stay in an in-patient psychiatric facility, where she is scared, lonely, and grappling with questions of identity and with the uncertainty of not knowing what is wrong. Her eventual diagnosis of conversion disorder, a disorder rooted in the mind and the modern-day incarnation of hysteria, forces the narrator to reimagine her understanding of herself and the connection between her mind and body. Questioning if she is the person she thought she was, or at least the person she aspired to be, she contemplates her childhood and family, her itinerant adulthood, and the consequences of a mind that can betray a body. At its core, this is a memoir about frailty and identity, about what happens when you stop knowing yourself.Item Restricted Grafting the cactus(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Harris, Linnea, author; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Candelaria-Fletcher, Harrison, committee member; Bowser, Gillian, committee memberGrafting the Cactus is a book-length work of creative nonfiction that explores the porous boundary between landscape and identity. This collection of personal and environmental essays begins with a cholla cactus, ripped from a landscaped yard in Colorado and left on the side of the road, then recovered and regrown. Many cacti can be grafted, meaning pieces of two different species – perhaps native to two different landscapes – will fuse together into something made up of both. Grafting becomes a structuring metaphor for the collection, and for the speaker who seeks to understand how identity can grow like the grafted cactus, informed by the places she's lived. These essays explore what it means to make home in different places, and what it means to build an identity informed by each – and how, when these landscapes that make us up are altered – by pollution, by climate change, by other human impacts – we too change.Item Open Access What does it take to pass? Critiquing recent ungrading research under a queer lens(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Woody, Oliver Martin, author; Limlamai, Naitnaphit, advisor; Ginsberg, Ricki, committee member; Glaws, Andrea, committee memberIn this critical content analysis of recent ungrading research, 18 papers researching actual ungrading were analyzed through the lens of queer theory for their adherence to or deconstruction of exclusionary structural norms. It was found that while many papers successfully challenge exclusionary structural norms through the use of student-created success criteria, many applications of ungrading upheld structural norms by evaluating student success using participation grading, timeliness grading, and teacher-created success criteria. Applications of ungrading that challenged structural norms and binaries defined student success through demonstration of student learning and had broader boundaries regarding learning behaviors welcomed the classroom. Applications which upheld structural norms were found to have more exclusionary barriers to academic success, with final grades not only reflecting learning but also adherence to behavior expectations. This study points the way forward for future ungrading research to proceed in the direction of greater student agency and broadened boundaries regarding acceptable classroom behaviors.Item Open Access "The stories that meant something": YA fantasy as a tool to improve high school ELA performance and for identity formation in traumatized and marginalized students(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Saldana, Danny, author; Limlamai, Naitnaphit, advisor; Glaws, Andrea, committee member; Burns, Kelly, committee memberThe purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, culturally-responsive curriculum, and the ELA canon to best aid marginalized and traumatized students in motivation, classroom retention, and identity formation. I believe that critically analyzing, selecting, and implementing diverse texts in an ELA curriculum is a hefty and important topic of research that merits a separate, in-depth study amongst multiple districts, which is outside of the realm of this paper. Moreover, I also believe that, insofar as any one instructor has control over their curriculum and text selections, it is important to prevent just creating a "new" literary canon with a few "accepted" diverse texts. Rather, I would encourage instructors to evaluate their individual classes, respond to the interests of their students, and select texts on a more individualized basis. Genre fiction, and specifically fantasy fiction, is a currently untapped resource for ELA teachers to motivate students to become more confident and successful readers, and is a promising tool in the proverbial toolbox of Trauma-Informed Pedagogy. Indeed, fantasy fiction urges students to conceive of a world wherein they are empowered, where they might confront or escape from the often-traumatizing realities they live in, and "will be able to see that those futuristic and fantastical landscapes are actually closer than they first appeared to be" (Toliver, 2021, p. 30).Item Restricted Geometry of the altar(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Cate, Chase, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee memberGeometry of the Altar is a poetry collection that probes the nature of the divine. Through the intricacies of interpersonal relationship, personal history, and spirituality, the poems unfold the experience of recognizing one's conconstitution with other beings. It is through this coconstitution that divinity, that holiness, arises. The poems utilize a variety of forms and voices to explore how one might understand the divine after deconstruction of religious fundamentalism.Item Open Access Constructing stability: IPPC's climate discourse and the challenge of fixity(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Martinez, David, author; Szymanski, Erika, advisor; Amidon, Timothy, committee member; Gallo-Cajiao, Eduardo, committee memberAs climate science circulates across scientific, policy, and public domains, its terminology must strike a delicate balance: stable enough to retain authority, yet flexible enough to be understood and acted upon in diverse contexts. This thesis examines how that tension plays out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6)—a consensus document that synthesizes complex knowledge and makes it communicable across discourse spheres. Using Bruno Latour's concept of immutable mobiles, I analyze how the terms risk, vulnerability, and adaptation are circulated and framed across three AR6 enactments. Through qualitative coding and critical discourse analysis, I trace how these terms shift rhetorically across different sections and uses. The findings show that even when definitions are fixed institutionally, key terms shift in response to political and rhetorical demands. This study calls for a reconfiguration of the tools we use to stabilize knowledge: immutable mobiles should be more narrowly defined, and glossaries must evolve into dynamic, source-linked frameworks that account for context and audience. By identifying where stability fractures and proposing new models for definitional accountability, this research offers a revised understanding of how terminology operates in scientific consensus reports—moving beyond the illusion of immutability toward a more adaptive and transparent model of climate communication.Item Open Access Gender dominant interaction design in the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Lovell, Carrie, author; Amidon, Timothy R., advisor; Szymanski, Erika, committee member; Arthur, Tori, committee memberInteraction Design (IxD) implements rhetorical concerns in the design of digital interfaces, usually used to consider how websites are designed to improve user experience. This thesis applies this concept to the design of interactions in video games, specifically concerning how IxD is engineered to convey gendered experiences. The work with IxD done in this thesis uses Sano-Franchini's concept of Feminist Interaction Design (F-IxD) as a starting point for conceptualizing other ways in which gender impacts IxD and user experience. Specifically, the research question addresses how game design imposes gender and gender ideologies through various interactions and how that impacts player experience through The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (2024). This research was conducted through an exploratory case study, using qualitative coding analysis to identify how the larger community experiences the game within the r/echoesofwisdom subreddit, and using close reading analysis to identify how my positionality impacts my gendered experience through gameplay video capture and field notes. Through this research, it was found that The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom demonstrates shifts in game design that appear to be connected to the implementation of a female protagonist. This thesis (1) problematizes existing research, illustrating that not only is the field viewing gender in video games at a visual surface level, but would also benefit from specific definitions of key terms, such as passive gameplay, and (2) proposes the implementation of Costanza-Chock's existing design justice principles to mitigate existing and future gendered IxD paradigms.Item Restricted To the place of no beginning: poems(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Friedman, Jake, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille T., committee member; Orsi, Jared, committee memberTo The Place of No Beginning: Poems is a collection of documentary poems exploring a critical history of the American West. Ranging from the Spanish Conquistas in the 15th century to the end of the so-called Indian Wars in the end of the 19th, my work seeks to excavate the founding injustices of America's colonial heritance. As documentary poems, each piece is composed of found text from primary historical sources, which is transcribed, broken down, and rearranged to create something new. In doing so, my goal is to turn the words of empire against itself—to enact some kind of critical, literary resistance, to perform a rhetorical analysis or deconstructive reading.Item Restricted Sedimental: a geomemoir(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Tabb, Rebecca Lynn, author; Dungy, Camille T., advisor; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, committee member; Lajarin-Encina, Aitor, committee memberThis Creative Nonfiction MFA Thesis is a book-length work comprised of two essays which are modeled after the process of sandstone formation. The work covers the first two of four sedimentary phases, Erosion and Transportation, using sedimentation to understand the limits and impossibilities of preserving memory. The writer, also a climber and painter, uses the sandstone formations around Horsetooth Reservoir, where they love climbing, as an entry point for grief, eventually exploring what it means to construct a more ecologically-centered life experience. The work is hybrid-genre, including paintings, and photographs from the writer's father, speaking to the aesthetics of geomemoir, visual collage, and, more broadly, the intangibility of grief. The essays, Erosion and Transportation, are the writer's attempt to understand what preserving love and life means, how they got to be where they are, and, principally, who has influenced their journey.Item Restricted To own your name in gold(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Palacios, Ainhoa, author; Altschul, Andrew, advisor; McConigley, Nina, committee member; Quijada, Martin, committee memberTo Own Your Name in Gold is a collection of interconnected stories exploring the intricate relationship between identity, migration, and the pursuit of the American Dream. Through the lens of a mother and daughter navigating their new lives in the United States, this collection examines the emotional and cultural costs of assimilation. The stories trace their evolving relationship as they balance nostalgia for the home they left behind with the pressures of adapting to an unfamiliar world. By centering the experiences of first- and second-generation immigrants, the collection interrogates both the promises and illusions of the American Dream—what it offers and what it demands in return. At its core, this work considers the weight of names, language, and heritage in the process of self-definition. The stories highlight the tensions between survival and belonging, between remembering and reinventing, and between the narratives imposed upon immigrants and the stories they craft for themselves. To Own Your Name in Gold ultimately seeks to illuminate the fractures and resilience found in the immigrant experience, portraying not just what is gained, but also what is lost in the journey toward belonging.Item Restricted The way blood dims: a novel(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Dykstal, Henry Burke, author; McConigley, Nina, advisor; Altschul, Andrew, committee member; Mansfield, Mike, committee memberThe Way Blood Dims is a novel chronicling the early life of Southerncross Kite, from his boyhood raised by an artist collective in Alabama to his teen years as a member of a secret military unit in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. Blessed with an unusual appearance and a talent for violence, Kite begins to interact with the world in a story of how history shapes humanity, and how humanity shapes history.Item Restricted Rupture(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Bucheli Peñafiel, Carolina, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Dungy, Camille, advisor; McConigley, Nina, committee member; Martin Quijada, Carmen, committee memberThis collection of short stories is tied together by the genre known as Andean gothic which fuses the indigenous and mestizo cosmovision, myths, symbols, believes, worldviews, legends, and imaginaries of the Ecuadorian geographic area, with the realities of Ecuadorians' everyday lives. Rupture is a collection of eight short stories that center around these realities in terms of gender, power dynamics, self-discovery, the paranormal, religion, culture, race, politics, gender, loss of innocence, migration, and dislocation. In addition, they circle around mysteries detonated by these intersections, realities, and sometimes even around violence and horror. The title comes from the concept of capturing decisive moments in all the characters in this story collection life, where something about their worldview got disrupted, and they had to move out of their zone of familiarity (not necessarily comfort). All of them are traversing the known into the unknown and are learning lessons from the world that surrounds them. All of the stories border a tangible world, an internal space, and oftentimes a paranormal space as well. I didn't make the distinction of whether or not an otherworld or a paranormal world exists or if it's a product of the character's minds and beliefs, since that is not precisely the point of the stories. The point is on how they shape and intersect with the lives of the characters. I wanted to pay homage to the stories I grew up hearing where all these elements mixed in a natural unquestionable way, where they are not mutually exclusive.Item Embargo Digital network composing practices: digital removal in the Try Guys media ecology(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Banuelos, Mia, author; Amidon, Timothy R., advisor; Doe, Sue, committee member; Elkins, Evan, committee memberWith an increased accessibility and democratization of digital editing tools, recomposition has the potential to occur to any text or artifact circulated in a digital space. One form of recomposition that must further be considered is digital removal practices, including erasure, deletion, deflection, and exclusion of human or non-human objects in a digital composition. These practices have the potential to impact digitally networked composing practices and how we think about rhetoric and writing in media ecologies. This thesis focused on the intersection of digital removal practices and Ridolfo and DeVoss' theorization of rhetorical velocity, which considers composing for recomposition, and its co-influence on digitally network composing practices. Through a case study of The Try Guys, a group of popular YouTube personalities, this thesis explored the influence of a participatory culture in a media ecology and the role recomposition plays in a public scandal. Data was collected from The Try Guys media ecology surrounding the removal and/or revision of a former member, Ned Fulmer, and the larger medial ecology comprising The Try Guys' social media presence. These data illustrated the significant influence of participatory culture, as an influx of users associated with The Try Guys fandom contributed to the rhetorical velocity and recomposition of information and context produced by the Try Guys. Specifically, data illustrated that participatory cultures can and do shape how digital removal unfolds within and beyond digital networks. This thesis (1) emphasized the increased influence of a participatory culture on the curation and circulation of content in a media ecology and (2) explored how digital removal practices have the potential to influence how we theorize rhetorical velocity and how we must be strategic for composing as authors, writers, users, creators, inventors, teachers, and students.Item Restricted Sung ritual(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Culbertson, C., author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee memberSung Ritual is an ecstatic record of the queer, neurodivergent poet's coming-to, as if waking to the present from an oracular dream made up of repeated memories of the past. Part confessional and part self-reckoning, this collection tries to account for the facts of one's life and how those facts come to shape present-day relationships with the world and others. The tradition of the ode after Whitman becomes a ritual in which the poems form a chorus resolved by taking-up of the proper pronoun "I" only in the collection's final pages. The song there formed anticipates future(s) wisdom informs cannot be imagined without the poet's attending to living's antecedents.Item Open Access Impacts of trauma in school environments on ELA teachers: an interpretative phenomenological analysis(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Robinson, Kit M., author; Ginsberg, Ricki, advisor; Nam, Rosa, committee member; Kennedy, Alexis, committee memberThis study was conducted as an interpretative phenomenological analysis of five secondary English Language Arts Development teachers in Colorado. The study aimed to understand the impacts on ELA teachers, specifically their perceptions of their instruction and ability to remain in the classroom, following traumatic experiences or exposure at work. By using an interpretative phenomenological analysis we can see the spectrum of perceptions and insights ELA teachers have into navigating through trauma as professionals charged with supporting the academic and social development of our students. Data was collected in the form of one-on-one interviews with the participants. The interviews were guided by questions designed to investigate the forms of trauma exposure or experience in school environments they had as teachers, the impacts these events had on their instruction and desire to remain in the field as a classroom teacher, and overall observations and perceptions into what supports were provided or desired. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and the data was coded inductively. This study was then organized as a narrative to examine the intersections and revelations found in teachers' various perceptions of shared traumatic events. While not generalizable, this study aims to elevate these insights to further conversations on trauma in school environments and how we comprehensively support those in charge of supporting the students.Item Restricted Love is a series of vaultings(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Grabowski, River, author; Candelaria-Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Payne, Sarah, committee memberThis creative writing MFA thesis, Love is a Series of Vaultings, is a book-length collection of poems and essays that seek transformation by resacralizing the speaker's queer body and metabolizing the violence of white, evangelical Christianity toward a more ethical, ecological ritual consciousness. The writing is hybrid in medium and genre, which speaks to its attempts to defamiliarize easy boundaries of time and space, prose and poetry, text and image, body and world, nature and culture, spiritual and material, and male and female, ultimately disrupting an organizing hegemony of dualism that categorizes, oppresses, and generally tells an uninteresting story of the world. The method of the book's inquiry is an essay, in the old French etymological sense—an assai—an attempt, an experiment, a verb: how might the queer body recover from ecstatic wounds, illness, and isolation? The book is this speaker's attempt to become embodied in the world, to seek an alternate sense of spirituality that will satisfy the highest frequency of their (be)longing.Item Open Access Crossroad of change(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Melendrez Valenzuela, Bianca, author; McConigley, Nina, advisor; Ginsberg, Ricki, committee member; Aragon, Antonette, committee memberCrossroads of Change is a collection of eight short stories. The collection is comprised of characters who are of Latinx/e ancestry and who are, for the most part bilingual in English and Spanish. My goal for this collection was to create something that spoke to me as a reader who grew up in America wishing to see more stories that had characters that lived in similar spaces as I did as a child. Each story represents its own unique setting that represents different aspects of the character's lives, some characters are traveling through the United States and Mexico, others live in the US and others live in Mexico by the US border. This collection represents a culmination of my creative writing effort across the three years I've spent in this program—most of that effort spent in this last year was fine-tuning the language used by these characters, and the different ways I could present these Latinx/e characters while staying true to the medium in which I am writing in. I wanted to see what the limits of translanguaging was when it came to creative writing and the different ways, I could incorporate the language barrier that some of my characters exist in and portraying that to my audience without taking my character's identities as Spanish speakers away. My influence for this was from reading excerpts from author Gloria E. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera. She was a huge inspiration in deciding to write about my culture while also adding in my native Spanish language. Amongst the language aspect of my writing, I also played around with the narrating POVs. This collection hosts stories that range from first person narrator to second and third person narrators, in my attempts of telling a variety of stories with different perspectives, as I wanted these Latinx/e characters to be viewed in varies angles and perspectives that counters the one-sided narratives often portrayed in contemporary writing.Item Open Access Transgressions(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Zero, author; Limlamai, Naitnaphit, advisor; Doe, Sue, committee member; Coffino, Kara, committee memberTransgressions aims to use poetry to explore the intersections of transgender and transitional identities in education spaces through the lenses of queer theory, literature studies, and autoethnography. I address the lack of representation of transgender voices and experiences in historical literature and poetry (the classroom content) in addition to my experiences in the classroom itself. The objective of this study is to use evocative methods that intentionally resist hegemonic expectations to highlight the importance of trans*poetry as an essential tool for self-reflection and identity formation and to point toward new methods for teaching writing that reflect the lived experiences of learners in the margins. The methods used in this study are autoethnographic and involve self-reflexive analysis of my own post-secondary academic experiences and literature-based analysis of my own poetry (written throughout my academic career). My study reveals insights into the nuanced experiences of the learner and educator in post-academic spaces, and the results of my research indicate that trans*poetry has the power to challenge dominant narratives; the power to ground, historicize, and contextualize self-narratives; and the power to create space for marginalized voices to be heard in and out of the classroom. In conclusion, Transgressions offers a new perspective and framework to study identity and history in post-secondary education spaces. It highlights the importance of experience and creative expression as sources of knowledge and understanding and proposes a new historiography that centers the voices and experiences of transgender people. While this study has its limitations, it is hoped that it will inspire further research into the intersections of poetic expression and self-identity in post-secondary classrooms.