The purpose of this thesis was to undertake the creation of a newsgame to create a new teaching tool for journalism schools to better prepare journalism and mass communication majors for covering minority communities. Give It To Me Straight is a drag-and-drop puzzle newsgame that tasks players with completing real headlines from the past about the LGBT community. The written portion of this thesis analyzes the history of news coverage of gays and lesbians illustrating how the journalism industry readily discriminated against or ignored sexual minorities in the United States. The analysis also includes original research about how Cronkite School students view their role in covering minorities. The results revealed shortfalls in the Cronkite Schools curriculum and raised concerns if the school meets the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication's standards.

The death of a parent or sibling for youth under age 18 is life-altering and necessitates support and opportunities for expressing grief. Scholarship from psychology and medical disciplines often equates youthful grieving as a disease to be cured rather than a natural process to be experienced. Stage-based grief models explain adults coping with loss of loved ones by working through a series of discrete phases mostly tied to deficit-based emotions such as anger or depression. Progressive grief models have been emerging throughout the past 20 years in response to stage-based models; however these models tend to highlight deficit-based emotions and are applied to youth as afterthoughts. Thus, there is a noticeable absence of research exploring positive or strength-based emotions in adolescent grief from a communicative, youth-centered perspective. A communicative approach to exploring adolescent grief narratives offers a practical yet pliable theoretical lens for interpreting meaning from mourning. Using qualitative methods, I conducted full participant research as a volunteer with Comfort Zone Camp, a national organization sponsoring weekend-long grief camps for youth. I engaged in participant observation while volunteering to explore the communicative processes of 26 grieving adolescents and also conducted post-camp follow-up interviews with youth, parents, and adult volunteers. Analysis was based on 192 field work hours, 11 interview hours, artifacts, and camp documents. Findings of the dissertation indicate grieving adolescents use communicative processes, including sharing emotional pieces, co-authoring loss, and naming hurt, to perform a range of emotions. Along with deficit-based emotions, grieving adolescents perform strength-based emotions, including confidence, forgiveness, happiness, deservingness, hope, gratitude, resilience, love, and compassion. Evidence also supports that grieving campers performed compassion individually and in groups. Theoretically, this dissertation expands on existing grief theory by demonstrating that adolescents communicate strength-based emotions in grief, captured visually in the Concert of Emotions model. This study expands on compassion theory by exploring implications of collective compassion expressions. Specifically, this dissertation offers the co-performing sub-process to account for collective compassion extending past compassion models that focus on individual expressions. Practically, this research yields new understanding into how grieving adolescents constitute themselves as compassionate, helpful contributors as they face loss.

The purpose of the study is to explore the identity development and organizational culture of a student organization, the National Association of Latino Fraternal Organizations council (NALFO) by implementing a community of practice approach at a large, public university in southwestern United States. The objective is to construct a sustainable camaraderie among the existing Latino fraternal organizations at the university to influence leadership development, work toward a common vision, and a cohesive and systematic approach to collaboration, consequently transforming organizational culture. This study investigates the factors that contribute to and/or inhibit increased communication and collaboration and to describe the experiences of Latino fraternal members who are purposefully engaged in a community of practice. There are 57 fraternal organizations in five umbrella councils at the university, including predominately Caucasian, historically African American, Latino, and Multicultural groups, whose platforms are commonly leadership, scholarship, and philanthropy. This action research examines the experiences of six NALFO members individually and working as a community with the guidance of a mentor (the researcher). The researcher employs use of an anonymous initial and post electronic survey, a participant personal statement, an intentional and purposeful community of practice, a semi-structured individual interview, and focus groups to collect data. Findings suggest that length of membership and fraternal experience influence participant responses; however, the themes remain consistent. Building relationships, perception (by members and outsiders), identity development, organizational management, and challenging perspectives (from outside influences) are factors that influence the organizational culture of the organization. On the post electronic survey all participants indicate that the implementation of an intentional community of practice can benefit the organization by encouraging participation and increasing communication. While participants suggest activities for encouraging member engagement, they determine that actual participation would be dependent on individual motivation.

Bisexuality is a unique kind of sexual identity, as a gray area between heterosexuality and homosexuality. The piece You made up the Story and I Played with all the Parts explores bisexuality as a lived artistic experience based on my sexual journey within a society that advocates heterosexuality. The piece includes movement phrases and text derived from conversations with intimate partners, characters based on former partners, storytelling, a 1950s-style sex education video parody, and audience participation via dialogue. The creation of movement and dialogue manipulated heteronormative social stigmas into a canny social acceptance of bisexuality. The multifaceted nature of the piece provokes viewers to consider how sexuality is constructed socially through my own interpretation. As a result, the work suggests that bisexuality is a legitimate sexual identity and represents a culture within American society.