Maryland Shared Open Access Repository
MD-SOAR is a shared digital repository platform for twelve colleges and universities in Maryland. It is currently funded by the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) Library Consortium (usmai.org) and other participating partner institutions. MD-SOAR is jointly governed by all participating libraries, who have agreed to share policies and practices that are necessary and appropriate for the shared platform. Within this broad framework, each library provides customized repository services and collections that meet local institutional needs. Please follow the links below to learn more about each library's repository services and collections.
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Recent Submissions
A Spotlight on Sustainability: Creative Action for a Changing Planet
(2025-05) Rozier, Kelsey; Jacobson-Blumenfeld, Hannah; Morgan, Ava; Baker, Ramona; MA in Arts Administration
Scenes at the Stakes: Black Cemetery Citizenship and Grave Matters at Palmetto Cemetery
(2025-05-02) Cory Jevalier France; Dr. Barry Dornfeld; Dr. Betsy Bradley; Dr. Rory Turner; Kelly Elaine Navies, M.S.; MA in Cultural Sustainability
This capstone manuscript explores what it means to practice Black cemetery citizenship at burial grounds established informally through community care, yet burdened by the legacies of structural racism and systemic dispossession. Situated at Palmetto Cemetery, a historic African American burial ground in Columbia, South Carolina, this work moves beyond conventional preservation frameworks to center the radical care work descendants and community members perform to sustain memory, place, and responsibility. It traces the ongoing return of descendants to the cemetery and looks to better understand the threats and challenges impacting its perpetual care. Framed through a series of narrative scenes, it takes readers to the “stakes”—to the physical, emotional, and cultural ground where the living stand in relation to the dead, confronting what has been lost, what remains, and what must be reclaimed.
Building on the theoretical lineages of the break (Moten) and the wake (Sharpe), this work reclaims the stake as the living tension between disappearance and reclamation, between flight and return. A Black cemetery citizenship praxis emerges as a revisionary practice that illuminates the stakes, holding ground, linking generations, and refusing cultural loss—not simply to fix the past, but to create space for Black cultural life to come. Through descendant interviews, fieldwork, and personal narrative, it calls attention to the grave matters that surface when Black burial grounds are treated as invisible and argues for descendant-defined practices of care as a form of truth, justice, and reconciliation practice.
By bringing the interdependent labors of descendants into conversation with Black studies, critical heritage, and cultural sustainability theory, this manuscript positions cemetery citizenship as a critical, regenerative practice—not only for tending the dead but for reclaiming Black presence, place, and futurity.
Literacy Identity and Experiences of College Students Diagnosed with Reading Disabilities
(2020-12-16) MacDonald, Katherine; Franzak, Judith; Kim, Koomi; Porter, Heather; Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) Contemporary Curriculum Theory and Instruction: Literacy; Doctoral Studies in Literacy
As an increasing number of students diagnosed with reading disabilities enter higher education, it is the task of university faculty, staff, and administrators to determine how to best support this diverse group. Understanding the unique literacy identity and experiences of these students can empower and engage educators in creating a more accessible and inclusive academic setting. This qualitative multiple case study explores the literacy identity of five college students diagnosed with reading disabilities and how experiences with Miscue Analysis (Goodman, Watson, & Burke, 2005) contributes to their literacy identity. According to this study, college students with reading disabilities develop complex literacy and disability identities in childhood influenced by their positive and negative experiences in the home and school settings. These experiences affect their beliefs about themselves as readers, learners, and individuals with disabilities into adulthood. However, these students can revalue their literacy identity through engagement with Miscue Analysis. Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) and Collaborative Retrospective Miscue Analysis (CRMA) provide the opportunity for these readers to learn about their meaning making processes and themselves as readers. CRMA provides an avenue for these students to connect with peers through their mutual experiences and develop confidence and agency. Other implications of this study include using a disability interpretive lens and social model of disability in the home and school settings to assist students with reading disabilities in developing a positive literacy identity and development of literacy centers in the college setting to support them in revaluing their literacy identity and learning more about their reading processes.
In-Service Secondary English Teachers' Exploration of Their Reading Identities and How These Identities Manifest Themselves in Their Teaching Practice
(2021-04-06) Sroka, Matthew; Franzak, Judith; Williamson, Thea; Siers, Ron; Doctoral Studies in Literacy; Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) Contemporary Curriculum Theory and Instruction: Literacy
This participatory action research study (Herr and Anderson, 2015) explored the reading lives, reading histories, reading identities and teaching practices of five in-service English teachers involved in a professional learning network (Trust, Krutka, and Carpenter, 2016) in order to deepen our understanding of the reading and teaching lives of these participants. I utilized purposive sampling (Salkin, 2012) in order to recruit English teachers who were interested in their reading lives and the reading lives of their students. Data included seven bi-weekly online group meetings, two individual semi-structured interviews with each participant (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2015), reading journals (Filetti, 2016), a discussion board (Ajayi, 2010), participant generated artifacts, and other teaching artifacts such as lesson plans, class worksheets, and syllabi. Findings reveal that English teachers (a) value and desire to read but personal reading lives tend to become de-prioritized by professional and personal responsibilities, (b) hold beliefs about reading and text selection that are at times in tension with classroom practice, (c) have reading lives that are shaped by current events, and (d) crave communities in which to discuss their reading lives and teaching lives.
Critiquing Source Use as Retrofit: Access, Agency, and Discourse Practice in the First Year Composition Classroom
(2021-05-06) Anderson, Katelin; King, Carolyne; Kerschbaum, Stephanie; English; Master of Arts in English
“Critiquing Source Use as Retrofit: Access, Agency, and Discourse Practice in the First Year Composition Classroom” is a study of how first year writing students understand rhetorical source use and their struggles with learning to use academic discourse conventions as they write with sources in academic research papers. First Year Composition classes seek to help students enculturate into academic discourse communities, and source use is a prominent aspect of academic discourse (Porter; Bartholomae; Howard & Jamieson). Unfortunately, students rely on retrofit source use heuristics like the “source sandwich” rather than rhetorical strategies that are more nuanced and contextualized positionings of the source-text. While students must learn how to appropriately summarize, paraphrase, and quote with proper attribution, these simplified heuristics act as retrofits that merely seem to provide access to academic discourse structures. Disability studies, which critiques structures and assumptions about access, offers a way to refine our understanding of source use instruction, while multilingual and antiracist writing pedagogies offer practical suggestions for how to center students’ right to their own language in meaningful ways. By using these approaches to think through instructional practices, we can help students develop confidence in their writing and to position FYC as a pathway for deeper access, rather than a barred gate to further learning. “Critiquing Source Use as Retrofit” investigates how students think about and experience themselves as writers who use sources after completing a First Year Composition class. This thesis uses a small set of interview-based case studies to provide insight into the often difficult-to-perceive rhetorical and disciplinary growth in students’ writing and source use. In particular, by highlighting discrepancies between students’ intentions and evaluations of their own writing, this thesis offers instructors new insights into students’ source-based writing processes. Bringing together questions of source use instruction, discourse and student language, and access and universal design, “Critiquing Source Use as Retrofit” argues for a more inclusive and accessible introduction to FYC.