No One is an Island: Student Experiences of a Catholic High School Curriculum Response to Bullying, Based on Themes from the Writings of Thomas Merton

This dissertation was an explorative study of student experiences of a first-iteration Catholic curriculum created to respond to the epidemic of adolescent bullying, from an expansive and holistic perspective (Huggins, 2016). The curriculum used in this study was inspired by themes from the writings of Thomas Merton (1915-1968) a Catholic monk, Civil Rights activist, inter-religious bridge, and non-violent resistor (Merton, 1975; Merton, 1983; Merton, 1989). This qualitative study utilized the methodology of educational criticism and connoisseurship (Uhrmacher, Moroye, & Flinders, 2017) using the Christian Humanistic ethic as a lens to examine and explain the emergent theological themes of the students’ engagement and shared interpretations of the first iteration 10-day curriculum. The curriculum utilized activities surrounding the themes of order, balance, rhythm, and harmony as the path to happiness, as stated in No Man Is an Island(Merton, 1983). Through the use of reflective dialogues, meditation, and kinesthetic learning opportunities such as a drum circle and a collaborative game, the students explored the importance of self-discovery, unity, group dynamics, and healthy communication skills as a positive response to bullying, stigmatization, and peer isolation. Through the activities and open-ended reflections four overarching themes emerged from the students’ shared experiences of the curriculum: a) all humanity has worth and value; b) it is essential to develop common ground with others; c) peace and calm are better avenues to resolve conflict than aggression and anger; and d) happiness is found beyond mere material possessions

Living solidarity: Helping students with learning differences develop dignity for all humanity

Through Evangelii Gaudium (2013) and Laudato si’ (2015) Pope Francis has approached contemporary culture head-on with a call for Catholics to engage, and not retreat from, the changes and challenges of the 21st century. Traditional expectations and norms of society such as education, occupations, communication, and relationship have been shifting to new horizons through the influence of the recent technological boom. The purpose of this lesson was to target the essential 21st century skills of analysis and synthesis in adolescent boys identified as struggling readers. These skills were targeted through the use of the multimodalities available via the iPad. A secondary purpose of the lesson was to increase social awareness and empathy for the marginalized, a group among which the participants could count themselves due to their delayed literacy skills. The theoretical frameworks applied to this lesson included Brain-Based Learning Theory, Systems Theory, and Social Justice. Participants were members of a reading class in a large, Midwestern parochial high school who fell below the 28th percentile in reading on the National High Schools Entrance Exam. A total of 24 freshman students in an all male environment were taught a lesson aimed at helping students identify stereotypes and then, through systems theory, identify the flaws in the system that allowed these stereotypes to continue. The lesson was taught over the course of one week, and the themes in the lesson were extended over the course of the school year. The lesson focused on the events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri, in November of 2014 involving the police shooting of an unarmed African American teenager. Technology was employed as articles were accessed through the interactive technology forum Newsela. This forum allows students to read current events articles at a level comfortable to them due to its flexible lexile level controls. Students may also take quizzes after reading and respond to teacher questions on the site. Students were also invited to use the Text-to-Speech function of the iPad for multisensory reading opportunities. A Padlet board was created for an active dialogue to take place, and kinesthetic learning opportunities were provided. Students also watched the movie Freedom Writers in order to learn more about the effects of marginalization on those in poor communities in the United States. The desired results were to develop an interest in reading by providing information of interest to the targeted population and then using this to suggest and encourage further reading on the topic. Additionally, the hope was to provide a greater empathy for the marginalized and to, through increased awareness, encourage active community involvement

Narrative Disruption as Animal Agency in Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing

This paper asks whether animals can ever break out of anthropocentric value systems in literary narratives and, if so, what critical methods might be enlisted to reveal a literary animal’s independent agency. Examining the representation of a gray wolf in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing, it concludes that the animal’s agency (and, by extension, the agency of all literary animals) emerges when its behavior temporarily exhausts, confuses, or transforms the human use to which it has been put

Tolkien’s Allegory: Using Peter Jackson’s Vision of Fellowship to Illuminate Male Adolescent Catholic Education

With many of the Catholic student population disengaged from regular ritual experiences their working vocabulary of the prayers and knowledge of the Church is limited. A beneficial bridge for many of these disconnected students, specifically male adolescents has been the use of storytelling in connection to Catholic themes to lay the foundations of ritual and deeper concepts through a more familiar setting. Through media literary, multi-modal instruction and Scripture exegesis adolescents can begin to recognize, understand, and feel a connection with the severity of the sacrifice of the Apostles in following Jesus of Nazareth. This article will offer some insights that have proven to be beneficial to help male adolescents to engage the complicated and foreign concepts and topics of the new curriculum framework, in association with Peter Jackson’s vision of Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring

Climate-Change Infrastructure and the Volatilizing of American Regionalism

This essay argues that changes in American energy infrastructure from carbon-based power plants to distributed, renewable energy networks precipitate changes in American literary regionalism. Examining recent regional fiction including Jay Tyrell’s Wind Army, Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Tamarisk Hunter,” and Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, I argue that stories of climate-change infrastructure replace models of geographical difference based in enduring biomarkers with a more volatile regionalism that foregrounds the relationships among local, national, and global networks and that is distinguishable from the country’s cultural centers by its even more rapid pace of change.This is the publisher’s final pdf. The article is copyrighted by the Purdue ResearchFoundation and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. It can be found at: http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/index.htm

Regeneration through Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture

This essay charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” in contemporary American culture: skilled laborers who confront the disappearance of manufacturing jobs during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the accompanying sense of labor’s marginality in American society. Although they are alienated from sites of industrial productivity, rugged consumers find alternative means of practicing their skills by creatively misusing, repairing, and repurposing the commodities in their environments. At the same time, they ennoble such actions by modeling them on the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism. Whether in literature or in the broader culture, American rugged consumers thus mediate between the mythic models of self-sufficiency celebrated by the country’s older, frontier capitalism and the postindustrial realities of the present. The essay posits four provisional categories of rugged consumerism, ranging from the hypermasculine weaponization of unlikely objects to the (re)creation of environmentally sustainable interior designs.This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by Modern Language Association of America and can be found at: http://www.mla.org/

Attitudes toward hydraulic fracturing: The opposing forces of political conservatism and basic knowledge about fracking

publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Attitudes toward hydraulic fracturing: The opposing forces of political conservatism and basic knowledge about fracking journaltitle: Global Environmental Change articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2016.03.004 content_type: article copyright: © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved