Moral Turbulence and the Infusion of Multimodal Character Education Strategies in American Elementary Schools

Pockets of American society are marked by increase in violent crime with concurrent decline in moral character. This phenomenon is infiltrating the nation’s school system as evidenced by growing numbers of aggressive incidents in the classroom. As a result, there is an increasingly accepted need for effective character education programs in the schools as a means to help change the décolleté trajectory of the behavior of the nation’s school children. While more money and growing numbers of legislation have been put forth to support such an endeavor, research is still lacking as to what activities, skills, goals, and approaches would be best incorporated for optimal outcomes. This article makes a case for assessing the effectiveness of a multimodal approach incorporating cognitive, social, and sociocultural learning elements is than a single approach using cognitive elements alone, and considers the complexity of a Christian perspective on character education in schools

Sympathy, empathy, and postmemory : problematic positions in Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter

Critics often discount the television mini-series Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (2013) as bad history, constructed around emotions rather than facts. This article argues, however, that emotional engagement does not necessarily inhibit critical engagement or moral reflection. My argument builds on an analysis of how the drama manipulates the sort of generational and gendered tropes that are central to Marianne Hirsch's theory of postmemory. Exemplifying the aesthetics of postmemory, the mini-series illuminates transformations in contemporary memory culture. It also raises questions overlooked by Hirsch about the ethical imperatives of postmemorial engagements with the history of the perpetrators

Crime Television Viewership and Perceived Vulnerability to Crime among College Students

This study focused on college students’ viewership of the crime drama television shows NCIS, Law and Order, Criminal Minds, and CSI as well as students’ perceived vulnerability to crime. The aim of the study was to determine if there is a relationship between the viewing of crime dramas and perceived vulnerability, based on the theories of mean world syndrome and cultivation. The study also examined the platform viewers used to watch crime dramas, whether that was streaming services or other options such as cable or satellite television. The chosen platform was also compared with perceived vulnerability to crime. To collect this data, a survey was done at The University of Southern Mississippi and was comprised of 99 respondents. Responses were collected over a week’s time. The results indicated that respondents who viewed certain crime dramas had a higher perceived vulnerability to crime than respondents who had never viewed those shows. The results were mixed as to which television platform corresponded with higher perceived vulnerability to crime. Additionally, women were found to perceive themselves as more vulnerable than men do

Media Effects on Attitudes Towards the Criminal Justice System

This study investigated the effect of media on attitudes toward the criminal justice system. A survey was administered to 167 undergraduate students at East Tennesse State University in criminal justice and fine and performing arts classes. Respondents were asked how much television they watch, what their primary news source was, and how accurate crime-related television programs are. Multivariate analysis showed that age and major affected attitudes more than media consumption

Talk shows in Pakistan TV culture: engaging women as cultural citizens

Gendered content that travels through popular TV in Pakistan highlights gender-based crimes and allows women access to the mediated public sphere. This is an unprecedented form of access in a society that defines public/private through Shariah. The boundaries between the two spheres have thus far been immutable. Recent changes in the media landscape have made these boundaries porous. Drawing on theoretical debates on popular culture, cultural citizenship and counter public sphere, the study argues that these popular cultural spaces can be read in terms of an emerging feminist public sphere where women can engage as members of the public and as cultural citizens. To determine engagement patterns of young viewers, focus groups turned out to be effective method. In the sample of university students, there were 42 participants in 10 groups with 4 to 6 members in each group. The study finds that gendered content allows women to act in pro-civic ways. Their engagement with this content allows viewers to revisit their intersecting identities as Muslims, women and Pakistanis

Broadcasting the body: affect, embodiment and bodily excess on contemporary television

In recent years television has seen a notable increase in evocative images of the human body subject to exploration and manipulation.Taking the increasing viscerality of television’s body images as a starting point, the work presented in this thesis asserts the importance of considering television viewing as an embodied experience. Through a focus on displays of the body across a range of television formats this thesis demonstrates the significance and complexity of viewers’ affective and embodied engagements with the medium and offers an alternative to accounts of television which are focussed only on the visual, narrative or semiotic aspects of television aesthetics. This work challenges approaches to television which understand the pleasures of looking at the body as simply an exercise in power by considering the role of the body in fostering the sharing of affect, specifically through feelings of intimacy, shame and erotic pleasure. Additionally, the research presented here accounts for and situates the tendency toward bodily display that I have described in terms of traditional television aesthetics and in relation to conditions within the television industry in the United States and the United Kingdom. Rather than considering the trend toward exposing the body as a divergence from traditional television, this thesis argues that body-oriented television is a distinctly televisual phenomenon, one that implicates the bodies onscreen and the bodies of viewers located in domestic space in its attempts to breach the limitations of the screen, making viewers feel both intimately and viscerally connected to the people, characters and onscreen worlds that television constructs for us. The methodological approach taken in this thesis is based on close textual analysis informed by a focus on affect and embodiment. This thesis relies on the author’s own embodied engagement with televisual texts as well as detailed formal analyses of the programmes themselves. In order to understand the place of explicit body images on television this thesis engages with a broad range of contemporary debates in the field of television studies and with the cannon of television studies. This thesis is also deeply informed by writing about affect developed in film studies and studies of reality television. This thesis is structured around a set of case studies which each explore different dimensions of the trend toward bodily excess across a broad range of genres including reality television, science programming and the drama series. The chapters in this thesis are organised around four tendencies or modes related to traditional television aesthetics: Intimacy, community, public education and melodrama. Each of these case studies examines how the affective body capitalises upon and extends the traditional pleasures of television through an affective appeal to the body

The Effects of Learning about Black History on Racial Identity, Self-efficacy, Self-esteem, and Depression Among Low-Income African American Male Youth

Problem The literature is clear that African American youth receive a shallow account from parents and schools about Black history. More importantly, African American male youth from low-income families rarely receive information about Black history. Youth today watch television for entertainment and through watching television learn about new facts and information. African American youth watch more television than any other ethnic group. The media has a long history of portraying African Americans in a negative light. The negative media portrayals of African Americans have impacted their racial identity, self-esteem, self-efficacy and their mental health. No research has been done on the effects of watching a Black History film since Roots back in the 1970’s. Further research is needed to understand the impact of how watching and learn from a Black history documentary impacts low-income young African American males’ racial identity, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and depression. Method A mix study design was conducted for this study. First a true experimental design was conducted for 20 African Americans males from low-income families. Participants were randomly assigned to a treatment group and a control group. The treatment group (n=10) watched a Black history documentary for six weeks and filled out pretest and posttest measures on their racial identity, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and depression. The control group (n=10) only filled out same measures as the treatment group but did not watch a video. Participants of the treatment group (n=5) continued with the study after the 6 weeks to answer questions on how the documentary impacted their racial identity, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and depression in a form of a case study. Results The MANCOVA and the ANCOVA found that the Black history documentary did not impact participants of the treatment groups’ racial identity, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and depression. Results indicated that the treatment group and the control group had similar racial identity, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and depression scores. However, the case study based found themes that consisted of knowledge of Black history, importance of supporting the Black community, desire to learn about Black history, continuity of African American identity development, higher self-esteem, higher self-efficacy, and mixed emotions. Conclusions Watching Black history documentaries can impact young African American males’ racial identity, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. The documentary helped participants feel pride in their race, accomplish anything they set their mind too, and feel better about themselves. This study also provided implications for mental health professionals who work with African Americans. It suggests that mental health professionals need to learn more about Black history and understand the barriers African Americans face when working with mental health services

Being Jacques Villeneuve: Formula One, 'Agency' and the Fan

DVD disc of supplementary material available with the print copy of this thesis, held at the University of Waikato Library.In this thesis, I analyse my fandom for the Formula One driver, Jacques Villeneuve. Despite its rampant commercialism, innovative mediation, prestige and popular status within global sport, Formula One is surprisingly an under-researched topic in academia. Moreover, 'intense' fandom has often been stigmatised; at worst associating such individuals with pathological and obsessive behaviours or refuting their affections as merely symptomatic of the socio-economic forces that transform fans into duped consumers. This thesis argues against such simplistic disqualifications and reconceptualises fandom in light of how the structure/agency binary has itself been reconceptualised within media and cultural studies. Rather than privileging either the determining social, mediated and commercial structures, or championing the 'active agential' capacities of social individuals, Grossberg's notions of 'affect' and 'structured mobility' are drawn upon to underpin a more flexible explanation of contemporary fandom. In particular, affect offers theoretical purchase for how fans form attachments with selective media objects and why these come to 'matter' for specific individuals. Furthermore, by marrying affect with 'structured mobility', affective investments are recognised for their capacity to 'anchor' individuals in specific and concrete spatial/temporal 'moments' of social reality as they navigate both the mediated apparatus of the sport and the structured social, cultural and economic terrain that shapes their mediated fandom. Such insights are developed through a 'funnelling' approach in this thesis which moves from an examination of collective Formula One fandom to my own, exploring the affective traces of a friction that Villeneuve's maverick status provided within the broader machinery of the sport and to which this fan has responded

Transitioning Publics

TRANSITIONING PUBLICS engages two forms of transitioning simultaneously: the shifting political landscape of transgender media representation in North America, and the technological shifts that impact forms of representation and information dissemination such as movements from film to video and the Internet. Through critical engagement with moving-image work made by and about transgender people outside of and often in spite of the mainstream, each section of the project considers various aesthetic, formal, and political impulses that contribute to the construction of transgender as both identity category and socio-political event. While transgender studies was originally articulated as a movement to locate and legitimize transgender subject matter, identities, authors, and politics in the academic mainstream, TRANSITIONING PUBLICS aligns with the call made by Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore to move beyond discussions of trans- centered exclusively on gender (2008). To that end, the written components of the project are accompanied by a short film, Between You and Me. Employing home video scholarship alongside canonical sexuality studies theory, Between You and Me expands upon the aforementioned theoretical charge in trans studies by critically and creatively interrogating the intersectional relationship between moral panics, desire, and identity through alternative digital modes; namely a 10 minute film with 2 additional video components, scheduled for online release with CBC Short Docs in July 2016.TRANSITIONING PUBLICS engages two forms of transitioning simultaneously: the shifting political landscape of transgender media representation in North America, and the technological shifts that impact forms of representation and information dissemination such as movements from film to video and the Internet. Through critical engagement with moving-image work made by and about transgender people outside of and often in spite of the mainstream, each section of the project considers various aesthetic, formal, and political impulses that contribute to the construction of transgender as both identity category and socio-political event. While transgender studies was originally articulated as a movement to locate and legitimize transgender subject matter, identities, authors, and politics in the academic mainstream, TRANSITIONING PUBLICS aligns with the call made by Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore to move beyond discussions of trans- centered exclusively on gender (2008). To that end, the written components of the project are accompanied by a short film, Between You and Me. Employing home video scholarship alongside canonical sexuality studies theory, Between You and Me expands upon the aforementioned theoretical charge in trans studies by critically and creatively interrogating the intersectional relationship between moral panics, desire, and identity through alternative digital modes; namely a 10 minute film with 2 additional video components, scheduled for online release with CBC Short Docs in July 2016