Living wide-awakeness: high school drama teachers creating opportunities for powerful encounters with the arts

textThis dissertation investigates the ways in which high school drama teachers create opportunities for students to have powerful encounters with the arts. Chapter 1 introduces my research question and important terms, such as arts education, aesthetic education, and the aesthetic experience, and relates terms to powerful encounters with the arts. Why powerful encounters with the arts matter at this educational moment is also addressed. Chapter 2 synthesizes relevant literature in the area of arts education, aesthetic education, and drama education while forwarding the specific conceptual framework for this study. The literature review seeks to highlight the significant attention paid to the instrumental outcomes of arts education, the lack of emphasis given to aesthetic concepts in recent arts education literature, and the breadth of literature addressing drama in education. Within this chapter, the concept of the aesthetic experience, and specifically wide-awakeness, will be explored as the framework for my investigation of powerful encounters with the arts. Chapter 3 details the methodology that guided this investigation. Data gathering within my study centered on participant observation in two high school drama classrooms over a period of 16 weeks (8 weeks per teacher), interviews, and a personal reflective journal. Data analysis focused on open coding of data in an effort to identify emergent themes with respect to the ways in which high school drama teachers create opportunities for powerful encounters with the arts. Chapters 4 and 5 are case studies of two high school drama teachers. Each case study articulates the specific ways in which each teacher creates opportunities for students to have powerful encounters with the arts. In discussing these methods and moments, I identify themes present in their teaching. In looking at their teaching philosophies and practices, I highlight the variety of ways in which these teachers create opportunities for students to have powerful encounters with the arts. Chapter 6 responds to the original research question. Included in my response is a cross-case analysis of the two teachers involved in the study and a presentation of overarching themes present in the ways in which they create opportunities for students to have powerful encounters with the arts. This dissertation concludes with a discussion of implication for various members of the education community, suggestions with respect to future research, and the specific implications of this study.Curriculum and Instructio

Statistical Analysis Of True And Extraneous Mode Estimates For The TLS-Prony Algorithm

In this paper we present a statistical analysis of the poles and amplitude coefficients estimated using a TLS-Prony method where signals consist of arbitrary damped exponential terms in noise. Both the true and extraneous modes are considered in the analysis. The derivation for this procedure is based on a first order perturbation analysis; thus the analysis assumes high SNR. We derive the complete covariance matrix for the estimated pole and amplitude coefficient parameters. We also develop the statistics of the mode energies for both the true and extraneous modes. To first order the distributions of the true mode energies are well approximated by Gaussian distributions, and the energies of the extraneous modes are central Ø 2 distributed. We verify the theory with Monte-Carlo simulations. 1. INTRODUCTION The problem of estimating model parameters of noisy exponential signals has been an area of considerable attention in the past few years. This problem has applications in a number..

Statistical Analysis of TLS-Based Prony Techniques

This paper presents an extension of the above works to treat a general exponential case. We introduce a complete statistical derivation for the poles and amplitude coefficients estimated using a TLS-Prony scheme where signals consist of arbitrary damped exponential terms in noise. We provide complete statistics for the individual pole parameters for an exponential model in which the poles may lie on, inside, or outside the unit circle. In addition, we derive the statistical properties of the amplitude coefficients associated with these exponential modes. The results of this paper provide a sound basis for performance analyses of the TLSProny estimation method. We extend previous works by considering the general damped case, as well as by including amplitude coefficient parameters in addition to pole parameters. These results provide the tools to analyze various situations and evaluate the potential success of applying the TLS-Prony estimation algorithm. The TLS-Prony estimation procedure is a multi-snapshot extension of the algorithm presented in (Kumaresan and Tufts, 1982a; Rahman and Yu, 1987). The advantage of singular value decomposition (SVD) in noise cleaning of the Toeplitz data matrix is well-known. The multiple snapshot incorporation is a straightforward one in which more than one set of amplitude coefficients corresponds to the set of poles. The procedure is discussed in Section II. The statistical derivation for this procedure is based on a first order perturbation analysis; thus the analysis assumes high SNR. We derive the complete covariance matrix of the estimated parameters for this case. The parameters include the magnitudes and angles of the poles, and the magnitudes and angles of the amplitude coefficients. Using these expressions, several general pr..

Accuracy and computational comparisons of TLS-Prony, Burg, and FFT-based scattering center extraction algorithms

Scattering centers extracted from radar returns are features that can be used for automatic target recognition (ATR). Many different algorithms exist which can extract scattering centers from a radar return. They all, however, fall into one of two large classes: model and FFT-based techniques. In this paper, we consider one FFT and two model based techniques: 1) FFT with peak extraction, 2) the Burg autoregressive method, and 3) the TLS-Prony method. We present experiments that compare the algorithms for three test scenarios. We show how the model-based techniques are more accurate than the FFT-based technique for simple test cases but that theFFT-based technique to out-perform the model-based techniques in terms of computation. 1. INTRODUCTION The automatic target recognition (ATR) problem is a current area of interest in signal processing. At present, most radar systems are limited to detecting a target's position and velocity. 1 An ATR system will expand the radar's abilities to i..

Introduction: spiritual landscapes of Southeast Asia

This Introduction foreshadows the main themes of this special issue on spiritual landscapes of Southeast Asia. Throughout Southeast Asia, links exist between spirit beings or potent energies and particular sites in the landscape, including trees, mountains and rivers. These are highlighted in this collection of papers via the notion of 'spiritual landscapes'. This concept also broadens anthropological approaches to the religious significance of the landscape, by problematising the separation of 'natural' and 'cultural' environments while sidestepping the implication that something called 'sacred geography' can be separated from the pragmatic activities of daily life. Following an ethnographic overview of spirit-places and environmental forces in the region, I discuss our need to take more seriously the claims of many Southeast Asian people that their landscapes have agency. In the context of religious conversion, the agency of the landscape often becomes a central concern, as reformers and missionaries seek to 'purify' the environment of such spiritual power. However, in addition to 'purification', ongoing conversion may also involve new forms of conversation with the landscape, including re-enchantments, religious syntheses or reassertions of the landscape's potency