Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Listening concerns'

The role that support systems play in new teachers' levels of school commitment has been widely documented. However, veteran teachers' levels of commitment have not been as closely studied. According to the department of education in a Southeastern state, the veteran teacher attrition rate at a Title I school in an urban school district was in the double digits for several years. High veteran teacher attrition rates and low levels of commitment can cause problems such as loss of continuity of instruction for students. The purpose of this study was to identify veteran teachers' perceptions of their levels of school commitment and how the district can support and retain veteran educators. Self-determination theory, as it relates to the satisfaction of teachers' needs and concerns in the context of their work environment, formed the conceptual framework for this study. The study was implemented to explore research questions related to veteran teachers' needs and concerns, working conditions, and supports. A case study research design was utilized. Interview data were collected from a criterion-based, purposeful sample of 10 veteran teachers. These data were analyzed inductively for common themes and patterns and resulted in findings based on veteran teachers' needs and concerns such as greater district and parent support and job-embedded professional development. A project was developed based on the findings to address the problem. The project focused on creating professional learning communities to support veteran teachers and increase their levels of school commitment. Positive social change can result from creating these professional learning communities for veteran teachers in order to address their needs and concerns, such as greater school commitment for veteran teachers and more continuity of instruction for students, which will result in higher academic achievement.

Program note was introduced into the European concert hall in the mid 19th century when instrumental music began to predominate the public concert repertoire. It inculcates the public audience through a specific mode of listening to music. The program notes, largely written in line with the contemporaneous hermeneutical approach, emphasize the importance of the composer’s life and compositional intention, and in turn, stage the work as an expression of the composer’s spirit. This thesis contemplates the way in which program notes encourage a kind of understanding that brings forth the biographical quality of non-programmatic instrumental music, and hence, lead to the construction of certain musical meanings. In cases of symphonies whose contexts connote a great deal of heroic and humanistic struggles in association with the composer’s life, their program notes tend to elicit the personal utterances of the composer. These utterances, when empathized with by a large group of audience, are no longer only perceived as the composers’ personal expressions of heroism and humanistic struggle but also identified as expressions of the community. With the close reading of program notes of Shostakovich’s Symphonies Nos. 5 and 10 written for a selection of American orchestras before and after the publication of Testimony, this thesis shows how program notes contribute to the shift in the meaning of Shostakovich’s music in reliance upon the related historical context. It furthermore aims to discuss the aesthetic dilemma of extra musical association in the listening of “absolute music” and the intricacy of treating history and biography as important agents for understanding music.
published_or_final_version
Music
Master
Master of Philosophy

Mastery of basic concepts is an academic building block for preschool children in early education programs. Research shows that understanding basic concepts (e.g. top, under, fast, now, all, behind, full and short) is important for academic success and higher order thinking. Experts in the field of concept acquisition agree on six strategies for teaching basic concepts. These strategies include: using positive examples and negative examples, highlighting critical features of concepts through continuous conversion, isolating the concept, the order in which the examples are presented, and teaching generalization. This study investigated the extent to which nine preschool teachers of children with hearing loss used four of the six strategies (using examples, non examples, continuous conversion, and isolating the concept) during a 20-minute lesson in which a new basic concept was taught. Results indicated that teachers do well with using examples to teach basic concepts, but they lack sufficient use of the other three strategies for teaching basic concepts.

Drawing on interviews with 60 audience members and two seasons’ participant observation, this thesis provides an ethnographic account of ’still and silent listening’ at the BBC Proms. In doing so, it locates concert going within the everyday lives of listeners and argues that, for some, attending concerts is a resource for what Tia DeNora has called "aesthetic agency". These concert goers appropriate both the norm of still and silent audience behaviour, and the particular institutional conditions of the Proms, in order to cultivate versions of themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, listeners use the concert hall for purposes comparable to the ways in which DeNora and Michael Bull have each shown more malleable and mobile music technologies being employed by music users: to organize experience, and as ’technologies of self. And yet at the same time as individual and potentially individuating practices are taking place, concert listening, and attending the Proms in particular, is a collective activity. The thesis documents and explores the ways in which concert goers experience both enjoyment and discomfort in listening together. Here I show the Proms to be a site of ambivalent pleasures, but also argue that Richard Sennett’s influential characterization of still and silent listening as a symptom of ’t he fall of public man’ is inadequate to the varied modes of collective experience found amongst audiences. Running through the thesis is the argument that many concert goers use the norm of still and silent listening and the institutional provisions of the Proms as a ’holding environment’: a predictable and enduring set of conditions which allows for unpredictable and rich experiences to take place. In this way, the thesis has implications for understanding both the ambivalent enjoyments of concert going, and the purposes to which cultural institutions can be put by their users.

Music ensembles have made a concerted attempt to reach out through social media platforms to the communities surrounding their concert venues in order to attract young adults to replace aging audiences. By observing opera and symphony orchestra audience members’ social media engagement through Twitter and Facebook Live, this dissertation endeavors to better understand how technology has changed the culture of classical music concert attendance. The music organizations utilizing social media considered for this study include the Los Angeles Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Boston Lyric Opera for Tweet Seats, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on Facebook Live. Consideration of live-tweets, Facebook Live concerts and comments, and personal interviews with social media users and music ensemble personnel provides insight to the changing experience of concert attendance. Interviews with online users who are actively participating in Tweet Seats on Twitter and chatrooms on Facebook Live during live-streamed concerts reveal that integrating social media during live performances enhances their sense of community, and their musical and social experiences. Participants indicate that prior classical music experience affects their motivation to participate and engage with other users. For many interviewees, affordability and VIP perks were initial incentives for their online involvement, but the overall experience for these users is complex. Interacting online allowed classical music fans to connect and/or reconnect to the ensembles and their music, and to an existing wired community, while negotiating with changes to the long-standing conventions of classical music culture. These alternative concert-going experiences made possible by social media reconstruct liveness within a digital world, cultivate classical music fandom, and enrich the live listening experience through collective engagement.

This thesis confronts how, in Vincent Moon’s films, experience takes the spotlight in detriment of signification. I formulate that the director, rather than worrying about imbuing his films with an inherited sense, is instead searching that his work may express something unique each time it is encountered. To achieve this, his artistic practice is submitted through a set of procedures that are more in line with the field of sound than that of cinema. By transposing values that are deeply rooted into sound philosophy to film (particularly Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy), Moon’s work criticizes the predominant ocular-centric perspective where meaning and understanding is the ultimate goal. Questioning the implications of such a practice, I relate emerging studies related to sound with Deleuze’s Actual/Virtual circuit and Walter Benjamin’s auratic experience. I conclude by proposing that in Vincent Moon a new form of image surfaces, one that even though in its early stages, should be comprehended through its explosive capacity to deliver an experience and in its intrinsic transient and ephemeral nature—the encounter-image.
Esta tesis se enfrenta a cómo la experiencia es el centro de la atención en detrimento de la significación en las películas de Vincent Moon. Formulo que el director está buscando que su trabajo exprese algo único cada vez que se lo encuentre en vez de preocuparse por imbuir sus películas con un sentido. Para lograr esto, su práctica artística se somete a un conjunto de procedimientos que están más en línea con el campo del sonido que el del cine. Al transponer valores profundamente arraigados en la filosofía del sonido al cine (particularmente A la escucha de Jean-Luc Nancy), el trabajo de Moon critica la perspectiva ocular predominante donde el significado y la comprensión es el objetivo final. Al cuestionar las implicaciones de tal práctica, dialogo con estudios emergentes relacionados con el sonido con lo Actual y lo Virtual de Deleuze, además de la experiencia aurática de Walter Benjamin. Concluyo proponiendo que Vincent Moon propone una nueva forma de imagen, una que debe ser comprendida a través de su capacidad explosiva de ofrecer una experiencia de naturaleza intrínsecamente transitoria y efímera: la imagen-encuentro.

Le XIXe siècle français a été marqué par une pratique extrêmement répandue de la transcription musicale. Cette thèse veut s'attacher à ses usages comme moyen d'accès à l'œuvre, à travers l'apport exceptionnel en ce domaine du compositeur et organiste Alexandre Guilmant, des années 1850 – époque de ses premières activités professionnelles – à 1910, veille de sa mort. Si transcrire n'est pas spécifique au XIXe siècle, cet acte irrigue la création musicale, se place au cœur de la conception esthétique de l'œuvre, au point de concentrer en lui de nombreuses questions liées à l'écoute, à la pratique amateur et professionnelle, à l'émergence d'une littérature spécifique et adaptée, à la propriété intellectuelle, entre autres. Le cas Guilmant, étudié dans son contexte socio-artistique, éclaire l'image du transcripteur qui se nourrit de l'extrême mobilité de la musique, s'imprègne des styles classiques et anciens, actualise des œuvres choisies et contribue ainsi à la construction d'un répertoire exemplaire. La transcription apparaît alors comme médiatrice d'une culture, capable d'accompagner le développement de la conscience historique
Musical transcription was an extremely widespread practice in 19th-Century France. This thesis will focus on its use as a mean of accessing the original artwork, through the outstanding contribution in this field of composer and organist Alexandre Guilmant, between the years of his early professional activities in the 1850s until the eve of his death in 1910. Although transcription is by no means confined to the 19th-Century, it flows through all of musical creation and lies at the heart of the aesthetic design of the artwork – to the point of bringing into focus many issues related, among others, to listening, to amateur and professional practice, to the emergence of a literature both specific and adapted to intellectual property. Guilmant’s case, studied against his socio-artistic background, illuminates the transcriber who, feeding on the extreme mobility of music, is impregnated by classical and antique styles, updates selected works, and so contributes to the development of an exemplary repertoire. Transcription appears as the mediator of a culture and capable of supporting the development of historical consciousness

碩士
國立新竹教育大學
人資處美勞教學碩士班
95
Listening and staring —The Creation Exposition of the Ecological Environment's Concern All the creations are made during 2005-2006. Using acrylic pigment as a main medium, the content concerns for Taiwan’s ecological environment as the principal axis of the exposition. Taiwan's ecological environment is very fragile and has been harmed by decades of rapid developments. It’s especially under a big threat in the last few years. To highlight the seriousness of Taiwan’s ecological crisis and show the urgency of protecting Taiwan’s ecological environment, I choose this topic “Listening and staring” to introspecting human’s destruction on this land. Based on this principal axis, I develop all the creations with imaginative thought related to the academic theories, cultural heritage, artwork styles, and the analysis and discussion of content meaning to build up the integration of the ideas and the reality. It's listed as the following. The purpose of this research is to study esthetic analysis and related topics. The theories foundation of this research includes: the human spirit that realism and post-modernism pay attention to, symbolism thought, usage of surrealism skill and existism’s introspection for the future. The content of this research shows the differences and similarities between “ancient” environment philosophy of the east and the west, the ecological crisis caused by “modern” human-centered thought and the “nowadays” ecology introspection. Chapter 3 describes how I design the creations by personal artistic style, skill method and the usage of medium. I study the styles and skills of different painting parties through choosing, blending, extending , expanding, and join my own painting symbols. By this, I try to build up my own art style. I induce the following three kinds of styles: First, compound multiple-space presenting. Secondly, the getting and loosing of the focus and pursuit of the color atmosphere. Third, presenting of metaphor and symbols. The skill method and medium are also used in three aspects: First, the realistic skill method to strength the emotion moved by the creations, Secondly, the usage of different textures to enrich the contents of the creations. Third, the usage of the existing materials to deepen inside metaphor of the creations. Chapter 4 describes the style analysis of my creations by its content and the forming techniques. In short, my creations for “ Taiwan’s ecological environment’s concern” is to show caring emotions for the land by combining issues of the ecological environment and esthetics of various skill methods. Keywords: the human spirit, ecological environment, realism, post-modernism, symbol Keywords：ecological environment、realism、human spirit

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2506. Adviser: Gregory DeNardo. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 154-167). Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

碩士
淡江大學
英文學系碩士班
95
This study investigated students’ ESP listening difficulties and strategies through their metaphorical expressions. Forty-five students in their fifth year in the applied language department from a five-year junior college were enrolled in this study. Metaphors as an instrument were used to examine student concepts of learning English for specific purposes. Students were required to accomplish five writing assignments. The data were collected from August, 2006 to January, 2007 and examined using Levin & Wagner’s (2006) metaphor model to analyze participants’ concepts and to detect their listening difficulties and strategies. The results showed five kinds of metaphors students used to express their thoughts listening to ESP materials: getting lost, torture, nature, game, and SKILL. Students with different metaphor models had different concepts of listening difficulties and used different listening strategies. However, there were still 42.2% of the participants who did not use metaphors to express their thoughts even after writing five Reflective Assignments. This study pointed out the importance of teaching students to understand and use metaphorical expressions. Pedagogical guidelines were provided for ESP teachers.

In this thesis, I argue two main points concerning the significance and development of Martin Heidegger's concepts of discourse and language. The first is that his concept of discourse, which for the Heidegger of Being and Time is the human practice of articulating meaning or intelligibility, has often been misunderstood as either (a) simply another name for natural languages, or (b) a wholly prelinguistic and precommunicative phenomenon. I attempt to find a middle way between these two interpretations that, on my view, is truer to the text, and argue that although discourse does sometimes manifest itself prelinguistically, it is also an essentially communicative phenomenon. The second point I argue is that contrary to the usual interpretation of his development, Heidegger's "turn" to "language" in his later works does not constitute an embrace of linguistic idealism, i.e. the belief that one can only encounter as meaningful objects that have been named in one's natural language. Instead, I argue that it remains, like discourse, a prelinguistic phenomenon, and I also note several interesting parallels between the two concepts. I conclude by making some suggestions about what is really at stake in the transition from discourse to language, and argue that the key difference lies in the fact that, for the later Heidegger, the articulation of meaning is no longer primarily a communicative phenomenon rooted in human activity.

Tese de doutoramento em Estudos da Criança (especialidade em Infância, Cultura e Sociedade)
This thesis reflects on the Chinese tradition of Filial Piety - ‘Xiào’ - a cultural construction that places the younger generations in a position of respect and submission to elders - and its relationship with the current understanding on the Rights of the Child in contemporary China. Placing its focus on the Rights of Participation, the research adopts a postcolonial approach to Children’s Rights, challenging hegemonic views and contextualizing participation within the cultural traditions it seeks to understand. Designed as a case study, the research aimed at investigating urban Chinese families’ acknowledgment of Xiào and its influence on the possibilities of children having their opinions taken into account in matters concerning their lives. Data collection took place in an international school in urban south China, adopting a qualitative approach. By conducting interviews with parents, grandparents, and focus groups with children, the research was developed within the Sociology of Childhood theoretical framework, involving adults as significant figures in children´s lives and considering children as reliable participants who are capable of providing relevant data about their own experiences. Findings have indicated that cultural constructions that regard Filial Piety as a highly important virtue have not disappeared, but meanings attributed to Filial Piety have been changing in close relation with the participants’ experience of citizenship across time. Children’s participation in home-decision making has been found to happen among patterns of compromise, resistance, negotiation, and the development of a sense of responsibility. Findings also indicate that some topics of family daily life are more open to discussion than others, reinforcing changing patterns of Xiao and the construction of a sense of child participation built around both global and local influences.
Esta tese reflete sobre a tradição chinesa de Piedade Filial - 'Xiào' - uma construção cultural que coloca as gerações mais novas em uma posição de respeito e submissão aos mais velhos - e sua relação com o entendimento atual sobre os Direitos da Criança na China contemporânea. Tendo como foco os Direitos de Participação, a pesquisa adota uma abordagem pós-colonialista dos Direitos da Criança, desafiando as visões hegemônicas e contextualizando a participação dentro das tradições culturais que busca compreender. Concebida como um estudo de caso, a pesquisa teve como objetivo investigar a compreensão da tradição de Xiào por famílias urbanas chinesas e a influência de tal tradição nas possibilidades de as crianças terem suas opiniões levadas em conta em questões que lhe dizem respeito. A coleta de dados ocorreu em uma escola internacional no sul da China urbana, tendo uma abordagem qualitativa. Por meio da realização de entrevistas com pais e avós e grupos focais com crianças, a pesquisa foi desenvolvida dentro do referencial teórico da Sociologia da Infância, envolvendo os adultos como figuras significativas na vida das crianças e considerando as crianças como participantes competentes, capazes de fornecerem dados relevantes sobre suas próprias experiências. Os resultados da pesquisa indicaram que as construções culturais que consideram a Xiao como uma virtude altamente importante não desapareceram, mas os significados atribuídos à tradição têm mudado em estreita relação com a experiência de cidadania dos participantes ao longo do tempo. Indicam, ainda, que a participação das crianças na tomada de decisões em casa ocorre entre padrões de compromisso, resistência, negociação e o desenvolvimento de um senso de responsabilidade. Os resultados também indicam que alguns tópicos do cotidiano familiar são mais abertos à discussão do que outros, reforçando os padrões de mudança de Xiao e a construção de um senso de participação infantil construído em torno de influências, tanto globais quanto locais.

碩士
國立交通大學
音樂研究所
102
While positivistic musicology often limits meaning in the musical text and neglects the context, the so-called New Musicology may be too busy with ideologies and ignore the music itself. In Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (2005), Eric Clarke utilizes James Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception to investigate the perception of musical meaning, as an attempt to balance the extremes of positivism and New Musicology. This thesis aims to “perceive” the meaning of the 2/28 memorial concert “Reborn by Love” in 2008 by Clarke’s approach. Although the date of 228 and the venue of the then briefly renamed National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall carried obvious political implications, the concert itself didn’t emphasize them. By dividing the six pieces on the program into three levels that represent first, the four major ethnic groups, second, the national spirit, and third, universal values, the reconciliatory intention of the concert could be recognized ("reborn by love"); some other arrangements, however, might reveal an opposite intention (in the name of love?). For example, in the first level, music that represents the mainlanders was absent; in the third level, Beethoven's Ode to Joy that represents universalism was sung only in Taiwanese (Hokkien) to the exclusion of other ethnic languages. Yet this thesis is not intended to decide on any one reading of the concert, but tries to "listen" to all the meanings afforded by this concert through Clarke’s ecological approach. In the end, whether the 2/28 Massacre could be "heard" or not depends on the relationship between perception, action and environment. This thesis argues that music's affordance for ambivalent meanings could liberate itself from political manipulation, and it in turn could redeem the 2/28 commemoration from various political appropriations. Keywords: musical meaning; ecological approach to music perception; 2008 "Reborn by Love" Concert; 2/28; Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

"Music in Czech Prison System" is an ethnomusicological study of the functioning of music in prison. The work focuses on the role of music in the everyday life of inmates and during the educational activities. It deals with the relationship of prisoners to music, musical activities in prison, and the approach of Czech Prison Service to musical activities. The aim of this master thesis is to present an image of the state of music and musical activities in the Czech prison system and to map out the forms in which the prison music appears, and to show what functions it has based on testimonies of convicts and prison staff. In prison, the environment of a so called total institution, people find themselves in extreme conditions that affect the wide range of their experiences. While imprisoned an inmate is faced with many changes that negatively affect the quality of his life. Research shows that music is a very important element for some prisoners, which can greatly influence their behavior and experience in prison and can compensate for their negative constraints. This master thesis attempts to capture whether and how convict's perceptions of music is different in an isolated environment as opposed to experiencing it outside the prison. What role does music play in the prison situation? And in what...