VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Nelson, Amy"

Browsing by Author "Nelson, Amy"

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Compassion in Professional Counseling: A Delphi Study
Raymond, Karen Denise (Virginia Tech, 2020-03-04)
Compassion is related to the work of counselors, yet scholars have not agreed upon a standard definition of compassion beyond a superficial dictionary explanation. A Delphi study was conducted to discover the opinions of a panel of counseling experts on the subject of compassion. The purpose of the study was to identify and define compassion as it relates to the context of professional counseling, as well as identify associated skills, attributes, and behaviors. The study also explored how experienced counselors distinguish compassion as it is experienced or expressed professionally and personally. Fifteen panelists participated in three rounds of data collection via online survey. Panelists also received feedback from subsequent rounds. Themes emerged on perceptions of compassion, skills and abilities that convey compassion, situations that create compassion obstruction, and support of knowledge, training, and education on compassion. The results indicate that assumptions exist on understanding what compassion is and how to express it in a professional manner. Results further show that compassion is an understudied and unnoticed concept that needs more examination.
"From the smoke of the town, to the fields and the groves": gender, class and the pursuit of leisure in London's eighteenth-century pleasure gardens
Wohlcke, Anne Elizabeth (Virginia Tech, 1996)
Any historian of eighteenth-century England, especially London, examines the emerging "middle ranks", but they often neglect to address how gender shaped the growing middle-class identity. The importance of gender in the formation of a middle-class identity is often not apparent because the arenas in which gender was regularly debated, like pleasure gardens, are not studied. Examining public spaces like pleasure gardens demonstrates the limitations imposed on women's history by "separate spheres” historiography and contributes to our understanding of women's work because it shows that women worked outside a domestic economy. In pleasure gardens, middling and working women encountered each other while they challenged gender expectations and with their behavior, they laid the cultural foundations of a later feminist movement. The ability to pursue leisure was an important facet of middle-class life and in studying places of public democratic leisure like pleasure gardens, we begin to see shared ideas of gender emerging in popular culture.
Getting Comfortable Working in the Open: A Panel Discussion for Authors, Teaching Faculty, and Students
Walz, Anita R.; DeCarlo, Matt; Murphy-Judy, Kathryn; Nelson, Amy; Erickson, Susan; Kidd, Jennifer; Harder, James; Hamilton, Carrie; Aigner, Savannah (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2018-03-19)
Open Educational practices support teaching, learning, and publication in an increasingly diverse faculty and student body. OEP encompass the creation, adaptation, and adoption of open educational resources, open course development, and even the design of renewable, real-world assignments where students are empowered as co-creators of knowledge. These practices leverage learning beyond socio-economic disparities and put engaged, active student (and faculty) learning at the center. These practices champion academic freedom, pedagogical innovation, applied approaches, and innovation. OEP represents learner-centered and learning-together approaches to education that radically enhance both agency and access.
Marshall Plan Films and Americanization
Noble, Evan S. (Virginia Tech, 2006-04-24)
George Marshall's speech to an audience at Harvard University in June of 1947 announced a plan that eventually made its way through the United States congress and took the form of the European Recovery Plan (ERP). The ERP distributed roughly thirteen billion dollars in aid to sixteen European countries. The ECA grew out of this program as the managerial arm of the ERP. The ECA's propaganda campaign included pamphlets, posters, radio broadcasts, traveling puppet shows, and finally 250 films created between 1949-1953. Marshall Plan Films discussed productivity, multilateral trade, and labor unions. For Marshall Planners these issues were the key to both revitalizing the European economy, and creating a self sustaining Europe. In film, Europeans could see not only the modernizing techniques, building projects, and examples of Marshall Plan, but they were treated to visions of the American lifestyle as well. This study is an attempt to explicate the meanings and messages in the Marshall Plan Filmography. The Marshall Plan launched a massive propaganda campaign in an attempt to reformat the ideals of Europeans. The Plan was ostensibly an attempt to combat Communism as well as to re-vamp the economy of Europe. However, the films presented American ideals as something to aspire to: not only in business, but also in living everyday life. By stressing consumption over conservation and massive production over craftsmanship, the films told Europeans what America thought was best for them, and what would be beneficial for their future. Marshall Planners effectively sought to make Europe into a new, more American, place to live.
Models and Their Artists: The Dichotomous Representation of Women in The Unknown Masterpiece, Manette Salomon and The Masterpiece
Donaldson, Sharon Olivia (Virginia Tech, 2000-05-09)
This thesis proposes to analyze the dichotomous representation of the female model as benevolent and malevolent in three 19th-century French novels. Honoré de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece (1834), Jules and Edmond de Goncourt's Manette Salomon (1867), and Émile Zola's The Masterpiece (1886) are all novels set in artist's workshops and all portray the female model as playing an essential role in determining the success, then demise of the male painter. My study of these texts will therefore focus on the juxtaposed presentations of the female models in terms of their relationships to the male artists. It will reveal how as the artists succeed in transforming their models' bodies into aesthetic nudes and containing these representations within the parameters of their canvases as a means of asserting their authority, the models are positively portrayed. On the contrary, when the artists fail to transform and contain their models' bodies, these female characters are negatively depicted as being the source of the painters' ruin. By examining this dichotomous representation of the female models, I will reveal the complex means by which the patriarchal order within the texts oppresses the female characters.
A Multiple-Case Study Exploring the Experiences of International Teaching Assistants in Engineering
Agrawal, Ashish (Virginia Tech, 2018-07-31)
Many international graduate students serve as teaching assistants at US universities. As teaching assistants, they carry out significant responsibilities such as leading lab sessions, grading student work, holding office hours, and proctoring exams. When these international teaching assistants (ITAs) cross national boundaries to teach at US universities, they may experience significant differences in the educational cultures. Teaching in a new educational culture offers ITAs both challenges and opportunities for growth. To better understand the experiences of this population within engineering, data were collected from seven engineering ITAs using a multiple-case study approach with each ITA representing a case. Data were collected in the form of weekly reflections and in-person interviews at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester, at an R1 university representative of national averages in terms of international graduate student population in the US. The participant pool represented diversity in the form of nationality, gender, prior teaching experience with the same course, and engineering discipline. Data were analyzed using both a priori codes and inductive coding emerging from the data, with particular attention given to experiences specific to engineering. Based on data analysis, codebooks were developed that operationalize ITAs' experiences and navigational strategies in the context of engineering. While illuminating the intersections of ITAs' teaching experiences with their international and GTA identities, the results point to the complexity and variations in participants' experiences based on various social and contextual factors such as gender, cultural background, prior exposure to the English language, prior engagement with the course material, and interaction with the teaching team. The results point to several contributions, and implications for engineering departments and universities, faculty, and ITAs to better engage ITAs in the process of undergraduate engineering education. In terms of contributions, this study uses intersectionality, a critical framework, which accounts for the complexity of engineering ITAs' experiences to provide systematic accounts of their experiences and navigational strategies while illuminating the nuances related to social, cultural, and disciplinary identities. Implications for the engineering departments and universities include creating an educational environment that values the cultural and linguistic diversity brought by ITAs, and collaborating with ITAs to organize training programs that help ITAs strengthen their communication, workload management, and intercultural skills; those for faculty include helping ITAs manage their teaching and research requirements by allowing for flexibility in ITAs' schedules, and treating ITAs as budding colleagues by using ITAs' existing pedagogical knowledge and scaffolding them when needed; those for ITAs include resisting the institutional pressure to "fit" into the US educational norms by using the pedagogical and cultural knowledge they bring from their home countries to better support student learning, and develop students' intercultural skills; and those for undergraduate students include engaging with ITAs to learn the engineering course content and simultaneously develop intercultural competence.
'A new tempered spirit to comfort the twenty-first century': individual choices, public policies, and the philanthropic experience in Western Europe
Limoges, Ronald E. (Virginia Tech, 1994-09-11)
This essay examines the persistent and penetrating role of philanthropy in the institutional life of Western Europe. Whatever knowledge has been gained in the collective survival of Homo sapiens, our species derives its authority over history from a purpose more significant than simply the survival of the fittest or the maximization of individual utilities. Our shared history expresses surprisingly consistent levels of organized compassion. Altruism and philanthropy, born of individual need, persist in collectivities. This is a study of public policy outcomes at those interstices where religious, political, and economic forces have taken shape, however transient, as human institutions or collectivities. The analysis yields a more comprehensive understanding of how public policy is made, particularly the unique comparative context of the new European Union. The individual and social choices made within this continuing process tell us a great deal about both the philanthropic impulse and the major institutions which comprise European life at the end of the twentieth century. The description of each important institutional intersection—religion and philanthropy in France, politics and philanthropy in Germany, and economics and philanthropy in England—is framed within the institution of social welfare. The modern European welfare system illustrates the acceptance of public obligations and commitments by the collective institutions of governance has altered over the course of time. Such adjustments, it seems, culminate in our own time in a fuller sense of collective and public responsibility for relationships. The role of altruism, charity, and philanthropy in that institutional shift—from a private to a public conscience—is at the heart of this essay. The "new tempered spirit" which can come to "comfort" the next century may be found in an unexpected intimacy between near and distant obligations as well as in the startling connectedness between ourselves as private individuals and ourselves as an increasingly diminutive portion of national and transnational institutions. The very limited human and institutional possibilities within what we now know as the modern nation-state may well come to an end with this century. The possibilities for new forms of both obligation and commitment to the endless variety of human needs and aspirations are unlimited. In much the same manner that the dissolution of the medieval life of old Europe permitted the discovery and construction of a new spirit of individual human potential, the dissolution of the political boundaries of contemporary Europe should permit the discovery and construction of a new spirit of human interdependence.
Recipes for Citizenship: Women, Cookbooks, and Citizenship in the Kitchen, 1941-1945
Staub, Kimberly Ann (Virginia Tech, 2012-05-02)
This thesis argues that cookbooks and cooking literature prescribed domesticity, specifically linked to the kitchen, as an obligation for American women in World War II. Building on the work of culinary historians and gender scholars, I argue that the government enlisted women as "kitchen citizens." In contrast to the obligations of male military service, government propaganda, commercially-published cookbooks, community cookbooks, and agriculture extension pamphlets used understandings of middle-class femininity to prescribe women's identity and role in the war effort as homemakers. Despite the popular memory of wartime women as Rosie-the-Riveters, this thesis suggests that working outside the home was a temporary and secondary identity. During World War II, cooking literature re-linked women's work inside the home to political significance and defined women's domestic responsibilities as an obligation of American female citizenship.
Reform in the land of Serf and Slave, 1825-1861
Murray, Robert Paul (Virginia Tech, 2008-04-30)
This thesis argues that the significance of pre-Civil War southern opposition to slavery has been largely marginalized and mischaracterized by previous historiography. By contextualizing southern antislavery activism as but a single wing within a broader reformist movement, historians can move beyond simplistic interpretations of these antislavery advocates as fool-hardy and tangential "losers." While opposition to slavery constituted a key goal for these reformers, it was not their only aspiration, and they secured considerable success in other aspects of reform. Nineteenth-century Russians, simultaneously struggling with their own system of bonded labor, offer excellent counterpoints to reorient the role of antebellum southern reformers. Through their shared commitment to reforming liberalism, a preference for gradualism as the vehicle of change, and a shared intellectual framework based upon new theories of political economy, the Russian and southerners' histories highlight a transatlantic intellectual community in which southern reformers were full members. Adapting multiple theories from this transnational exchange of ideas, southern reformers were remarkably liminal figures useful for contemporary scholarly exploration into the nineteenth-century culture of reform. Ultimately, it was this liminality coupled with the inegalitarian nature of their movement that ensured that the southern antislavery movement would fail to secure a gradual demise to slavery.
Sediment Pollution in Sinking Creek from MVP activities
Czuba, Jonathan A.; Pitt, Donna; Nelson, Amy; Malbon, Elizabeth S. (New River Symposium, 2024-04-12)
For over 10 days, sediment from a highly turbid spring, affected by activities for the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), entered into Sinking Creek, a tributary of the New River. This presentation will describe what is known about the incident, to what extent the impact on Sinking Creek can be assessed with available information, and what is unknown that limits a full impact assessment. This presentation will mostly focus on quantifying the transport and fate of sediment delivered to Sinking Creek between January 27th and February 6th prior to sediment control efforts. This presentation will also highlight what is not known and what limits a full impact assessment.
Should Women Vote?
Ewing, E. Thomas; Gumbert, Heather L.; Hicks, David; Lehr, Jane L.; Nelson, Amy; Stephens, Robert P. (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2008)
History Practice: Using Cartoons to Teach the Suffrage Campaign in European History
Soviet History for the Networked Age
Nelson, Amy; Fralin, Scott (Virginia Tech, 2014-02-17)
Series of student made blogs on Soviet history syndicated to a main blog called "Motherblog Central." 2014/02/17 - 2014/03/31
Taking Control, Women of Lorient, France Direct Their Lives Despite the German Occupation (June 1940-May 1945)
Le Corre-Cochran, Victoria Ann (Virginia Tech, 2002-12-09)
This thesis argues that from June 1940 when German soldiers occupied Lorient, France until May 8, 1945 when the Lorient "Pocket" surrendered, although the women of this port city faced drastic changes, they took control of their everyday lives. They did what it took to feed and clothe their families, working, standing in lines, buying on the black market, bartering, demonstrating, and recycling. They developed relationships with German soldiers which ran the gamut. Due to aerial raids in the context of the Battle of the Atlantic, they sought shelter, buried their dead, took care of their wounded, looked for new lodging, and helped each other. They even tried to have some fun. After evacuation in early 1943, scattered to the four winds, in the American held "Lorient Sector," they served as advocates for others and made inquiries to the American 66th Infantry Division Counter-Intelligence Service. At the Liberation women were easy targets for blame, and some from Lorient were punished, notably for "horizontal collaboration" with Germans. When the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Liberation of Lorient was celebrated in 1995, the story of the women of Lorient was essentially left out.
They will not be the same: themes of modernity in Britain during World War I
McCaffery, Susanne Leigh (Virginia Tech, 1994)
Through the framework of three of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels, this study demonstrates some of the social changes which occurred in Britain as the Great War ushered in the modern age. Modern usage of propaganda, the weakening of institutional values, cynicism, and alienation are explored as specific attributes of modernity. Propaganda posters are examined, as are the experiences of British soldiers on the Western Front. Trench warfare will be analyzed both as a birthplace for alienation and irony, and for its role in producing the Live and Let Live system. When this system was practiced on the Western Front, participating parties rejected nationalism in favor of individualism; they cooperated to save both themselves and the individuals in the trench opposing them. When raids were instituted to destroy Live and Let Live, alienation resulted between the soldiers on the front lines and their High Command. These concepts, along with the change in social attitudes toward women, are juxtaposed with the concepts which the modern age replaced: the idea that women had no part in a man’s world, that war was glorious, and that practically anything could be made into a game. This last concept will be demonstrated by one aspect of the British response to Bolshevism. Interwoven throughout this study are both some of the poetry of the Great War and examples from the trilogy of Richard Hannay novels. In this manner it is possible to observe fragments of social change which occurred during World War I; change which led to the modern age.
(Un)Bundling the Black Experience at PWIs: Using Assets-based Frameworks to Explore the Lived Experiences of Black Sub-Saharan African-born Graduate Students in STEM
Woods Jr, Johnny Crayd (Virginia Tech, 2022-05-03)
One of the historically marginalized populations in the United States (US) is the Black population. This marginalization extends into higher education, where Black students are underrepresented and continue to experience challenges, especially at Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs. However, the current constitution of the Black population, including Black students in the US, is inherently culturally and ethnically diverse. The Black student population includes domestic US students and various groups of foreign-born students such as Black Sub-Saharan African (BSSA) students whose educational trajectories, outcomes, and experiences are unique based on their cultural orientations. Given the within-group differences in this population, prior research has demonstrated the need to disaggregate the experiences in research among different groups for precise research outcomes. This dissertation contributes to that effort by explicitly focusing on the lived experiences of BSSA graduate students pursuing STEM degrees at a PWI through two studies from an assets-based approach: 1) the meaning BSSA graduate students in STEM make of their lived experience with the campus climate at a PWI, using community cultural wealth as a conceptual framework; and 2) the role of family and other funds of knowledge in the educational trajectories and persistence of BSSA doctoral students pursuing STEM degrees at a PWI. I used different qualitative methodologies across both studies, including a blended case study with tenets of participatory action research in the first study in the first study and narrative analysis in the second. The results of these studies revealed that BSSA graduate students in STEM and at PWIs possessed a variety of assets that enable them to resist challenges and persist in their education. Second, the educational environments were not holistically supportive of students. Finally, there was a lack of cultural awareness and validation of students' assets and ways of knowing. The results offered implications for the BSSA graduate students in STEM in the US, scholars, practitioners at PWIs and in STEM departments who work with them, especially in creating inclusive and supportive academic environments.
"We Weren't Kidding": Prediction as Ideology in American Pulp Science Fiction, 1938-1949
Forte, Joseph A. (Virginia Tech, 2010-05-03)
In 1971, Isaac Asimov observed in humanity, a science-important society. For this he credited the man who had been his editor in the 1940s during the period known as the golden age of American science fiction, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell was editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, the magazine that launched both Asimov's career and the golden age, from 1938 until his death in 1971. Campbell and his authors set the foundation for the modern sci-fi, cementing genre distinction by the application of plausible technological speculation. Campbell assumed the science-important society that Asimov found thirty years later, attributing sci-fi ascendance during the golden age a particular compatibility with that cultural context. On another level, sci-fi's compatibility with "science-important" tendencies during the first half of the twentieth-century betrayed a deeper agreement with the social structures that fueled those tendencies and reflected an explication of modernity on capitalist terms. Tethered to an imperative of plausibly extrapolated technology within an American context, sci-fi authors retained the social underpinnings of that context. In this thesis, I perform a textual analysis of stories published in Astounding during the 1940s, following the sci-fi as it grew into a mainstream cultural product. In this, I prioritize not the intentions of authors to advance explicit themes or speculations. Rather, I allow the authors' direction of reader sympathy to suggest the way that favored characterizations advanced ideological bias. Sci-fi authors supported a route to success via individualistic, competitive, and private enterprise. They supported an American capitalistic conveyance of modernity.
What the Dogs Did: Animal Agency in the Soviet Manned Spaceflight Program
Nelson, Amy (British Society For The History Of Science, 2017-09-07)
This paper examines the agency of the dogs used to develop the Soviet manned space flight programme by considering what the dogs did as experimental subjects, as dog technologies, and as individual dogs in the context of the historically conditioned practices of Soviet science. Looking at how Soviet space researchers refined Pavlovian behaviourism and integrated it into a complex engineering project helps clarify the conditions under which the dogs worked and the assumptions that guided the human researchers. The paper uses theoretical perspectives that contextualize animal agency in terms of relationships and then looks at those relationships from an ethological perspective. This provides a sense of what the dogs did that distinguishes between how humans understand dogs and what we know about dogs’ cognitive and social capacities. The paper proposes a model of animal agency that looks seriously at the dogs’ relationships with human researchers and suggests that the dogs’ significance as historical subjects depends as much on what they did as dogs as it does on how their contributions to the space race were perceived.

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