Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Gender studies not elsewhere classified'

Language and literacy, development and acquisition, has fascinated linguists, psychologists and sociologists for decades. The debate on whether thought precedes language, or language precedes thought, continues with the same fervour as the nature/nurture discussions for the development of human intelligence. Parents, teachers and care -givers need appropriate information to provide quality support for language and literacy development in early childhood. State and Commonwealth monies and projects are heavily focussed on improving student literacy outcomes.

The issues of language development and the serious short and long term consequences of language delay on the progression of literacy skills, attitudinal development and interpersonal relationships have provided the impetus for this study into the complexity of language delay in early childhood from a gender perspective. This incorporated the consequential impact for teaching and learning. Most government and non -government providers of educational services have policies to address gender issues. Accommodating that differences between and within genders are real and unique to the individual child, added to the complexity the topic.

This project researched language and literacy development in a study involving five Central Queensland State Schools. Students' attitudes to school (N=973), teachers' perceptions of students' attitudes (N=56), and staff opinions on the human relationships in each respective school were surveyed (N=60). Statistics were collected from ten learning support teachers in the Rockhampton area supporting 726 students who were referred as having some degree of learning difficulty. Screening and retesting of 39 early childhood students across the five schools, using the Bankson Language Test -2, was implemented to ascertain improvements in language acquisition. Teaching staff in the five schools, from Pre School to Year 3, were surveyed as to their opinions on language delay and language learning environments (N=23).

As evidenced throughout this project, language delay can be attributed to a number of genetic and environmental influences. This study strongly advocates for increased support to assist teachers and parents in understanding and meeting the needs of language delayed children and in creating an awareness of the gender implications for emergent language learners. Intervention programs can be effectively implemented.

This dissertation examines Charles Darwin’s major texts together with literary works by turn-of the-century American women writers—Nella Larsen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin—in order to trace how evolutionary theory shaped transatlantic cultural ideas of race, particularly black identity, and gender. I focus on the concept of “descent” as the overarching theme organizing categories of the human in evolutionary terms. My perspective and methods—examining race and gender from a black feminist perspective that draws on biopolitics theory, as well as using close reading, affect theory, and attention to narrative in my textual analysis—comprise my argument’s framework. By bringing these perspectives and methods together in my attention to the interplay between Darwinian discourse and American literature, I shed new light on the turn-of-the-century transatlantic exchange between science and culture. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that descent constitutes a central concept and point of tension in evolutionary theory’s inscription of life’s development. I also show how themes of human-animal kinship, the Western binary of rationality and materiality, and reproduction and maternity circulated within this discourse. I contribute to scholarly work relating evolutionist discourse to literature by focusing on American literature: in the context of turn-of-the-century American anxieties about racial and gender hierarchies, the evolutionist paradigm’s configurations of human difference were especially consequential. Moreover, Larsen, Gilman, and Chopin offer responses that reveal this hierarchy’s varied effects on racialized and gendered bodies. I thus demonstrate the significance of examining Darwinian discourse alongside American literature by women writers, an association in need of deeper scholarly attention, especially from a feminist, theoretical perspective.

This dissertation begins with my application of literary analysis and close reading to Darwin’s major texts in order to uncover how they formed a suggestive foundation for late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century ideologies of race and gender. I use this analysis as the background for my investigation of Larsen’s, Gilman’s, and Chopin’s literary texts. In Chapter 1, I conduct a close reading of Darwin’s articulation of natural selection in The Origin of Speciesand focus on how Darwin’s syntactical and narrative structure imply evolution as an agential force aimed at linear progress. In Chapter 2, I analyze Darwin’s articulation of the development of race and gender differences in The Descent of Man, as well as Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, and argue that Darwin’s and Huxley’s accounts suggest how anxiety over animal-human kinship was alleviated through structuring nonwhite races and women as less developed and hence inferior. In Chapter 3, I argue that Larsen’s novel Quicksand interrogates and complicates aesthetic primitivism and biopolitical racism and sexism, both rooted in evolutionist discourses. Finally, in Chapter 4, I focus on Gilman’s utopian novel Herlandand select short stories by Chopin. While Gilman unambiguously advocates for a desexualized white matriarchy, Chopin’s stories waver between support for, and critique of, racial hierarchy. Reading these authors together against the backdrop of white masculine evolutionist theory reveals how this theory roots women as materially bound reproducers of racial hierarchy.

One of the prevailing traditions in recent physical education theory has been the presentation of science based paradigms to inform physical education practice. Many other worldviews can be constructed, however, that can also contextualise what physical education is about. This study has focused upon the relationship of outdoor recreation and physical education in an attempt to demystify some of the implied assumptions of the debate.

The notion that only knowledge of a scientific nature is worthy of a centralised position in physical education is a focus that this study specifically challenges. Through a review of literature it will be argued that outdoor recreation can offer much to empower physical education practice. The debate in literature is recounted in Chapter 3.

The worldview that has informed this study, has been constructed around an investigaton of Michel Foucaults 'History of Sexuality'. This theoretical framework is supported in chapter 4 by the development of a methodological structure grounded in case study theory The development of this framework has been particularly useful in furthering an understanding of the influencing perceptions of both physical education and outdoor recreation university students. It has allowed the research project to peel back the layers that shroud perceptions of physical education and outdoor recreation. Student responses form the empirical study reported in chapter 5.

The final chapter uses Foucauldian strategies to analyse the finding of this empirical study Suggestions for further research are also made in this concluding chapter.

Reported are the results of a 6 year study of adolescent self-esteem. This study observed a group of students from Year 10 to their third year after leaving the secondary school system. In that 6 year period, the subjects were tested 3 times using the Coopersmith Self -Esteem Inventory (1975). Both the Adult and School Forms were used. The students attended both single sex and coeducational schools in their junior secondary years and then attended a common coeducational college for the Years 11 and 12. Their self-esteem levels showed no gender effect in Year 10, but when tested in Year 12, the self-esteem of the whole group had declined noticeably.

In 1993, the group of 81 students was recontacted for the final testing with the SEI. Only 20 responded. The SEI of those 20 students over the three testings indicated that the group of 20 had not changed its self-esteem level from 1988. It is possible that the use of questionnaires and written surveys as opposed to face to face contact resulted in an atypical group as its self-esteem levels and Tertiary Entrance Score was higher than average.

The group showed no relationship between its academic ability and self-esteem, there was no gender effect in any area including subject choice in Years 11 and 12 and in choice of university course and generally the subjects' estimates of their self-esteem was in accord with the score on the SEI. The question of the reason for the decline of self-esteem of the 81 students in Year 12 remains and may not be observable in the light of significant changes in school environments. It is possible that gender differences if they were significant at any time may have diminished because of programs and general interest in the issue.

Internet use is a necessity for many people, however more than half the world's population has never made a telephone call. The Internet is one of the most significant phenomena in the history of humankind, influencing the future of communication, employment, entertainment and information. Emerging business opportunities and industries will be created while others will change immensely or even cease to exist.

Current debate surrounding Internet use relates to divisions between the information rich and information poor. Many women have not yet ventured on to the Internet for a wide range of reasons and it is these barriers that are the focus of this research. The present research explores the responses, experiences and opinions of 100 women from around the world in relation to perceived barriers to women's Internet use and strategies for increasing women's Internet use. All women volunteered to complete a questionnaire which was posted on two women -only electronic discussion groups on the Internet.

The findings from the data were analysed in relation to a number of areas influencing women's Internet use including the perceived importance of their use, common barriers to their use, social implications for women's Internet use, and strategies for increasing Internet use by women. The main Internet uses identified were for work, information sourcing, communicating with others and networking. The main barriers identified were time, cost and difficulty in understanding the language associated with the medium.

The social implications for women's use and lack of use of the Internet is an extremely important element of this study. It is imperative that the Internet does not serve to promote and compound patriarchal practices and cultures. It is also important that the Internet not serve as a medium to suppress access to information to various socio-cultural groups through enabling greater unequitable access to information by the privileged and 'information elite'.

The study aimed to understand and advance the dynamics that influence psychological aggression. Psychological aggression can be defined as, verbal and non-verbal communication with the intent to harm another person mentally or emotionally, and/or control another person. In our society, the occurrence of psychological aggression in relationships is far more tolerated then physical aggression, but the effects can be more long term and harmful. The study hypothesized that an individual’s level of differentiation of self--a person’s ability to differentiate between feeling and thinking in times of stress--and their gender have a role in the severity of psychological aggression. The study was approved by IRB and using an online survey through MTurk asked participants about experiencing and perpetrating psychological aggression in their romantic relationships. The study had 192 participates in the multiple regression analyses, who provided some support that the level of differentiation of self and severity of psychological aggression, experiencing and perpetrating, have a negative significant relationship. Gender was found to not impact the relationship between differentiation of self and severity of psychological aggression. Clinical implications, limitations, and future directions for research were addressed.

This dissertation aims to create a scholarly space where a seventy-five-year-old “special relationship” (1945-2020) between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States is examined from an interdisciplinary comparativist perspective. I posit that a comparative study of Saudi and American fiction goes beyond the limitedness of global geopolitics and proves to uncover some new literary, sociocultural, and historical dimensions of this long history, while shedding some light on others. Saudi writers creatively challenge the inherently static and monolithic image of Saudi Arabia, its culture and people in the West. They also simultaneously unsettle the notion of homogeneity and enable us to gain new insight into self-perception within the local Saudi context by offering a wide scope of genuine engagements with distinctive themes ranging from spatiality, identity, ethnicity, and gender to slavery, religiosity and (post)modernity. On the other side, American authors still show some signs of ambivalence towards the depiction of the Saudi (Muslim/Arab) Other, but they nonetheless also demonstrate serious effort to emancipate their representations from the confining legacy of (neo)Orientalist discourse and oil politics by tackling the concepts of race, alterity, hegemony, radicalism, nomadism and (un)belonging.

 In this Professional Practicum, I examine the primary school academic results in the semester report cards of both boys and girls in my previous school, my current school and a neighbouring school. 

Examining the academic achievements of boys and girls in English, German, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies at Year 7 in the previous school, a pronounced imbalance was found. Results showed that girls dominated the high achievement ratings (A & B). Whilst boys dominated the low achievement ratings (D & E) on the five point rating scale - A, B, C, D, E. 

Using the ACER TOLA 6 (Testing of Learning Ability), it was shown that the ability levels of the boys and girls were similar, but their academic results were not. The gender of the teacher who taught the students in the three classes was examined and the data showed this had no effect. Past Year 7 results were examined as were students' results in semester report cards for Year 4, 6 and 6. The same imbalance between boys' and girls' academic results was evident in all grades studied; girls were outperforming boys at all year levels 4 to 7. 

A strong awareness and inservice programme was commenced and classroom practices, beliefs and expectations were examined in readiness for another look at the report card achievement levels in 12 month's time.  

The re-examination was, on the surface, very positive with boys showing a marked improvement (especially in Year 7). 

However, further analysis of the data showed that new boy students to the school that year had skewed the result. It showed that an awareness of the imbalance in academic results and a positive attempt to change classroom practices to bring about equity in performance levels of boys and girls was not enough and had brought little change. The Practicum also looks at a beginning school, which opened in 1996, and the attempts of its staff to instil and embed a culture where both boys and girls felt encouraged to achieve at the highest levels. The staff's aim was to create an atmosphere and a tone in the school's culture where students of both sexes felt their successes, failures, efforts and contributions were supported. 

However, an examination of successive years Semester 1 academic results for Year 4, 5, 6 and 7 showed boys and girls were not achieving comparably, but girls were still dominating the high achievement levels and boys were dominating the low achievement levels. There were positive signs when the two -years' Semester 1 results were compared and showed that overall boys had an improved share of the number of students who achieved in the highest achievement level and a reduced share of the number of students in the lowest achievement levels. Examination of the involvement of boys in extra curricular activities was conducted in Semester 1 of the school's second year and it showed 49% of those involved were boys - so much had been achieved. 

Conclusions are made that using academic results as a starting point to bring about equity in boys and girls academic performance is not the correct beginning point.  Rather, those schools interested in creating an environment to bring about equity in academic performance of both sexes should not begin with academic data, but positively examine a whole series of other indicators and their school environment in general before dissecting academic performance. 

The conclusion is made that academic performance is one of the last indicators to 'move' whilst others can be changed overnight with simple decisions, effort, consultation and encouragement. Suggestions are made in Chapter 8 about how educators may go about examining data and student involvement in their school, and involving boys and girls in such examinations, to create an environment that is supportive and encouraging to both boys and girls. All this prior to examining academic results.