Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Humanist Approach to Feminism (open access)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Humanist Approach to Feminism

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), writer and lecturer, provided philosophical guidance to the feminist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, During a career spanning the years 1890 to 1935 she published eleven books, wrote articles for popular magazines, and lectured throughout the United States and Europe. Between 1909 and 1916 she wrote, edited, and published a monthly magazine entitled The Forerunner. Gilman's efforts dealt primarily with the status of women, but she described herself as a humanist rather than a feminist. She explained that her interest in women arose from a concern that, as one-half of humanity, their restricted role in society retarded human progress. Thus, Gilman's contribution to feminism must be viewed within the context of her humanist philosophy. Gilman's contribution to feminism lies in her diagnosis of woman's predicament as ideological rather than political and, hence, subject to self-resolution. The uniqueness of Gilman's approach is in the autonomous nature of her solution: Woman, through the full use of her human powers, could achieve the equality that decades of political agitation had failed to accomplish. The rationale for this dissertation lies in the premise that Gilman's humanist approach to feminism made a significant contribution in her own …
Date: December 1976
Creator: Potts, Helen Jo
System: The UNT Digital Library
The concept of vision in American school reform: a study of visions of 21st century schooling (open access)

The concept of vision in American school reform: a study of visions of 21st century schooling

The primary objective of this study was to describe and analyze visions of 21st century education articulated by prominent individuals involved with current school reform and restructuring efforts. A second objective was to describe and analyze those images of the most likely educational scenario in the 21st century and the perceived barriers that would prevent realization of those idealized visions.
Date: December 1991
Creator: Holmes, Kathleen Mary
System: The UNT Digital Library
Fashioning Society in Eighteenth-century British Jamaica (open access)

Fashioning Society in Eighteenth-century British Jamaica

White women who inhabited the West Indies in the eighteenth century fascinated the metropole. In popular prints, novels, and serial publications, these women appeared to stray from “proper” British societal norms. Inhabiting a space dominated by a tropical climate and the presence of a large enslaved African population opened white women to censure. Almost from the moment of colonial encounter, they were perceived not as proper British women but as an imperial “other,” inhabiting a middle space between the ideal woman and the supposed indigenous “savage.” Furthermore, white women seemed to be lacking the sensibility prized in eighteenth-century England. However, the correspondence that survives from white women in Jamaica reveals the language of sensibility. “Creolized” in this imperial landscape, sensibility extended beyond written words to the material objects exchanged during their tenure on these sugar plantations. Although many women who lived in the Caribbean island of Jamaica might have fit the model, extant writings from Ann Brodbelt, Sarah Dwarris, Margaret and Mary Cowper, Lady Maria Nugent, and Ann Appleton Storrow, show a longing to remain connected with metropolitan society and their loved ones separated by the Atlantic. This sensibility and awareness of metropolitan material culture masked a lack of empathy …
Date: December 2015
Creator: Northrop, Chloe Aubra
System: The UNT Digital Library
Outer Edges of the Middle Kingdom (open access)

Outer Edges of the Middle Kingdom

Outer Edges of the Middle Kingdom is a narrative by the author about his two years as a teacher in the People's Republic of China. Organized chronologically, the account begins in August, 1985, and ends in June, 1987. The narrator describes meeting students at Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, designing English classes for English majors, daily episodes in the classroom, and interaction with Chinese colleagues. The narrative alternates between life on a university campus and extensive trips the narrator made to various cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, Guilin, Harbin, Hohot, and Guangzhou. Also recounted are the narrator's reactions to the student demonstrations of December, 1986, and the resulting anti-bourgeois liberation campaign of January-April, 1987.
Date: December 1987
Creator: Lilly, Charles N.
System: The UNT Digital Library
"Mahala" by Chris Barnard, Translated from the Afrikaans (open access)

"Mahala" by Chris Barnard, Translated from the Afrikaans

Afrikaans, the world's youngest language, is not known to many outside South Africa. Mahala, a novel in that language by a major writer, has been translated as an example of South African literary resources yet to be made accessible to English readers. Chapter One (the Foreword) contains historical notes on the Afrikaans language and on Barnard's biography, including his publications and literary awards. Chapter Two is a complete translation (currently the only one) of Chris Barnard' s Mahala. Analysis of and comment on Mahala are reserved for Chapter Three (the Afterword), wherein the structure of the novel is discussed, selected characteristics of the book compared with those of recognized English writers, and commentary upon translation supplied. The Bibliography contains reviews of Mahala, backgrounds of South African literature, the history of Afrikaans, aspects of translation, and dictionaries.
Date: December 1976
Creator: Bond, Desmond H.
System: The UNT Digital Library
George I. Sanchez: Don Quixote of the Southwest (open access)

George I. Sanchez: Don Quixote of the Southwest

This historical study examines the career of George I. Sanchez, New Mexican educator, who led many political and educational battles in New Mexico and Texas to improve educational opportunities for Spanish-speaking children. Archival materials from the State Records' Center of New Mexico, the papers of Senator Bronson M. Cutting, the Rockefeller Foundation Archives, the papers of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Sanchez's private papers, unpublished materials at the University of Texas in Austin, oral history, and published materials were used in this study. The author used oral history and archival materials to gather much of the information for this work. The author extends special thanks and appreciation to Mrs. George I. Sanchez for making Sanchez's private papers available for study. The author also wishes to thank Dr. Hector Garcia, Senator Ralph Yarborough, Judge Carlos Cadena, Tom Sutherland, Arthur Campa, J. W. Edgar, Ed Idar, Jr., John Silber, and Connie Sprague, Sanchez's daughter, for their help.
Date: December 1976
Creator: Leff, Gladys R.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Toward a Framework for a New Philosophy of Music Education:  Løgstrup  as Synergy Between the Platonic and the Aristotelian Perspectives in the Music Education Philosophies of Bennett Reimer and David Elliott (open access)

Toward a Framework for a New Philosophy of Music Education: Løgstrup as Synergy Between the Platonic and the Aristotelian Perspectives in the Music Education Philosophies of Bennett Reimer and David Elliott

In the domain of music education philosophy there are, at present, two foundational systems that purport to be self-contained philosophies of music education. These are music education as aesthetic education, often referred to as MEAE, espoused by Bennett Reimer, and the praxial philosophy of music education posited by David Elliott. The debate between these two philosophies has been contentious and has had the effect of fracturing the philosophical underpinning of the music profession in an irreconcilable way. It is the purpose of this dissertation to introduce a third voice, that of the Danish philosopher Knut Løgstrup, to serve as a synergy between the philosophies of Reimer and Elliott and lead toward a framework of thinking for music education philosophy. I assert that the philosophies of Reimer and Elliott represent a modern articulation of an ancient dialectic between Platonic and Aristotelian ideals. Thus, the Reimer philosophy has its foundation in Platonic thought and Elliott has embraced an Aristotelian philosophical perspective. Løgstrup's position provides a third fundamental viewpoint that includes both Platonic and Aristotelian thinking and can therefore provide a synergy for these two music education philosophies. He refers to his philosophy as an ontological ethics. As a methodological approach, I utilize …
Date: December 2006
Creator: Wheeler, T. Ray
System: The UNT Digital Library
Eating from the Tree of Knowledge: The Impact of Visual Culture on the Perception and Construction of Ethnic, Sexual, and Gender Identity (open access)

Eating from the Tree of Knowledge: The Impact of Visual Culture on the Perception and Construction of Ethnic, Sexual, and Gender Identity

This study explores the way that visual culture and identity creates understanding about how the women in my family interact and teach each other. In the study issues of identity, liminality, border culture, are explored. The study examines how underrepresented groups, such as those represented by Latinas, can enter into and add to the discourses of art education because the women who participated have learned to maneuver through the world, passing what they have learned to one another, from one generation to the next. Furthermore, the study investigates ways in which visual cues offer a way for the women in my family to negotiate their identity. In the study the women see themselves in signs, magazines, television, dolls, clothing patterns, advertisements, and use these to find ways in which to negotiate the borderlands of the places in which they live. Although the education that occurred was informal, its importance is in creating a portal through which to self reflect on the cultural work of educating.
Date: December 2010
Creator: Peralta, Andrés
System: The UNT Digital Library
Humanism in the Middle Ages: Peter Abailard and the Breakdown of Medieval Theology (open access)

Humanism in the Middle Ages: Peter Abailard and the Breakdown of Medieval Theology

Abailard expanded Anselm's sola ratione methodology, and in so doing he anticipated Renaissance humanism. His theory of abstraction justified the use of dialectic in theology, and was the basis for his entire theological system. He distinguished faith from mere belief by the application of dialectic, and created a theology which focused on the individual. The Renaissance humanists emphasized individual moral edification, which was evident in their interest in rhetoric. Abailard anticipated these rhetorical concerns, focusing on the individual's moral life rather than on metaphysical arguments. His logical treatises developed a theory of language as a mediator between reality and the conceptual order, and this argument was further developed in Sic et non. Sic et non was more than a collection of contradictions; it was a comprehensive theory of language as an inexact picture of reality, which forced the individual to reach his own understanding of scripture. Abailard's development of the power of reason anticipated developments in the Renaissance.
Date: December 1991
Creator: Vess, Deborah L. (Deborah Lynn)
System: The UNT Digital Library
Shaping Hagiography through Liturgy: Music for the Patron Saints of Three Cathedrals in Medieval Aquitaine (open access)

Shaping Hagiography through Liturgy: Music for the Patron Saints of Three Cathedrals in Medieval Aquitaine

While the development of hagiography over time has long attracted the attention of medievalists, scholars have not fully explored the critical role of the liturgy in prompting and transmitting these changes. This dissertation examines the liturgies for the patron saints of three musical and ecclesiastical centers in medieval Aquitaine: the cathedrals of Saint-Trophime in Arles, Saint-Just-et-Saint-Pasteur in Narbonne, and Saint-Étienne in Toulouse. Through the music, texts, and ritual actions of the liturgy, the clerical communities of these three institutions reinforced some aspects of their patron saint's legendary biography and modified others. Yet the process unfolded differently at each cathedral, revealing the particular preferences of the canons of each community as well as their changing circumstances during the Middle Ages. In Arles, the office for St. Trophime, which was likely composed at the cathedral, shows dramatic changes in the saint's hagiography. The clerics in Narbonne also composed an office for their patron saints but did not substantially change the details of Justus and Pastor's legendary biography. In Toulouse, the canons selected from among the preexisting repertoire of chants and texts available for St. Stephen, crafting liturgies that were particular to Saint-Étienne within a clearly Aquitanian context. By revealing the ways in …
Date: December 2018
Creator: Recek, Andrea
System: The UNT Digital Library
A qualitative analysis of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia interfering with academic and social success, and the exacerbators and diminishers of those symptoms. (open access)

A qualitative analysis of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia interfering with academic and social success, and the exacerbators and diminishers of those symptoms.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandates that public schools provide appropriate school programs and transition services for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (E/BD), and the law specifically names schizophrenia as a disability for which services are to be provided. To date, little, if any, research has been conducted on schizophrenia in the field of special education. New antipsychotic medications for schizophrenia are controlling the positive symptoms of hallucinations, illusions, and the severest of delusions, thus enabling these students to remain in school. However, many interfering negative symptoms remain (e.g., loss of goals, loss of former interests, cognitive regression). The purpose of this qualitative research study was to identify the negative symptoms of schizophrenia that interfere with a student's academic and social success, primarily within a school setting, but also as they affect functioning within the family and the student's transition into the community. In addition, specific factors that act as exacerbators or diminishers of these symptoms were identified through this study. Research participants included 5 students who developed schizophrenia from the ages of 12 to 22, their parents, and their teachers. They were interviewed using a semi-structured approach resulting in over 30 hours of taped interview data. …
Date: December 2003
Creator: Flint, Paula J.
System: The UNT Digital Library