StFX SCHOLAR
StFX Scholar is the official repository of St. Francis Xavier University (StFX), offering a secure and free platform to share publications, academic outputs, and other works of StFX faculty, staff, and students.
StFX Scholar is also the hub for exploring our digitized and digital collections. Our mission is to preserve and highlight the intellectual and creative achievements of the StFX community and the broader Antigonish region.
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Communities in StFX Scholar
Select a community to browse its collections.
- StFX-affiliated works, including open-access (aka free) journal articles, books, and more!
- Digitized or born-digital theses and dissertations completed at StFX.
- Materials about StFX.
- The library's digitized and digital collections.
Recent Submissions
Teacher isolation, stress, and attrition during and post COVID-19
(St. Francis Xavier University, 2025-04-08) Leyte, Garry; Young, David
Abstract
This dissertation is unique as it captures the lived, in-the-moment teaching experiences of
eight active teachers and school administrators during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study
explores, investigates, and reports on the effects of COVID-19 on teachers, schooling and
teaching by addressing and answering the following research question: How has the COVID-19
pandemic affected or compounded teacher isolation, stress and attrition? In so doing, the eight
participants involved in this study share their personal and private thoughts, as well as offer their
professional expertise, knowledge, and insights while teaching from inside their garages, homes,
and sheds, as well as from inside their over-crowded and poorly ventilated classrooms and
schools during the height of the pandemic.
Teacher isolation, teacher stress, and attrition are the three main research themes, with
five secondary or supplementary themes arising from the research data. These themes are
identified, triangulated, and analyzed from multiple data sources with findings that offer very
direct, pointed and practical advice, including recommendations and solutions for immediate
improvements in educational delivery now and post-COVID-19. Within the Newfoundland and
Labrador school context specifically, the results indicate a marked increase in teacher isolation,
stress, and attrition attributed to COVID-19 and exacerbated by the Newfoundland and Labrador
government response to the pandemic. Going forward, there must be a reimagining and
reimaging of education at all levels including a comprehensive post-COVID-19 educational
delivery model, plan or strategy that does center on respect and values the opinions and voices of
frontline educators.
Ticking the Boxes: Temporality and Diversity in Disney Animation
(St. Francis Xavier University, 2025) Wainwright, Ciara; Rushton, Cory
Disney Animation is an influential piece of media that shapes global cultural narratives, serving as a reflection and a means for contrasting societal values. Ticking the Boxes: Temporality and Diversity in Disney Animation explores the complex intersection of diversity and temporality within Disney animated films, investigating Disney’s claim of evolution regarding their representations of culture and more closely examining if these representations have improved or if Disney has just become better at hiding their offensive and inaccurate cultural representations.
Focusing on key films from the 1940s-2020s–including Fantasia (1940), Peter Pan (1953), The Lion King (1994), and The Princess and the Frog (2009). This text engages in textual and visual analysis, examining narrative structure, character development, and the framing of cultural identity over time. This thesis analyzes how Disney’s portrayal of race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage has not shifted amid Disney pushing a public narrative of improvement in representations of people of colour and cultural heritage.
Findings reveal that Disney’s trajectory has not been simple: with older films exoticizing people of colour or characters while creating temporally and globally ambiguous settings that continue to partake in the practice of “otherness” of various cultures and people of colour. Whereas the more recent films attempt to situate their narratives with more “conscious effort,” ultimately, these representations, like The Princess and the Frog, still lack cultural specificity and temporal grounding. Media like these animations inform children about societal values, people of colour, and other cultures. Furthermore, suppose these representations are inaccurate, and parents do not educate children on the issues with these representations. In that case, children believe that these depictions are the reality of the cultures they represent, leading children to partake in behaviours towards people of colour and cultures other than their own as different.
The thesis argues that despite Disney’s effort to push the image of their animated films as having advanced in terms of their attention to diverse and temporal elements, ultimately, Disney has not achieved the movement toward inclusivity that the company claims to have achieved. Ultimately, the research emphasizes a need for a call to action of large media corporations like Disney to create genuine improvement in how they represent topics of other cultures and temporal elements to ensure children receive accurate and educational information from these films instead of misleading the social understandings of children.
Building mathematical partnerships: an immigrant father’s perceptions of his child's elementary mathematics learning experiences
(St. Francis Xavier University, 2025-03-31) Little, Matthew; Throop-Robinson, Evan; Husband, Marc
There is widespread agreement among education researchers that establishing partnerships among families, educators, and schools benefits students significantly. However, many families face barriers, such as work schedules or differing communication styles, that prevent full engagement in these partnerships. This is particularly true for immigrant families, especially immigrant fathers, who have historically been excluded from educational partnerships. Research indicates that many parents perceive a stark contrast between the ways they learned mathematics in school and how their children are taught, often contributing to feelings of disconnection between home and school. This study aimed to explore immigrant fathers’ experiences with educational partnerships from a mathematics perspective, specifically examining their perceptions of their child’s elementary mathematics experiences. Two theoretical frameworks guided this investigation: Pirie and Kieren’s (1994a) Theory for the Dynamical Growth of Mathematical Understanding (P-K Theory) and Moll et al.'s (1992) concept of Funds of Knowledge (FoK). These frameworks provided a lens through which to collect, view, and analyze the data. The study involved two interviews with a newcomer father living in an urban setting in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Uncovering the effectiveness of digital literacy in the virtual realm: a case study of Syrian women (in)visibility in art
(St. Francis Xavier University, 2025) Eidmouni, Milia; Roy, Carole
Women artists, in general, have been historically underrepresented and invisible in the art world. Likewise, women artists from the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region encounter gender-specific obstacles, such as self-censorship, sexual harassment, stereotyping, societal backlash, and marginalization, often intensified by government censorship, political and social context. The rise of cyberspace and digital art during the pro-democracy protests in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Yemen in 2011 have been a powerful tool for community development and raising awareness around human rights and socio-political issues. However, the digital divide remains significant for marginalized groups and women. This qualitative case study aimed to explore digital literacy as an enabling factor in reclaiming the agency and visibility of Syrian women artists post-2011, by focusing on the power relation within the Syrian art scene, including the challenges and opportunities artists encountered in the context of ongoing conflict and forced displacement. Moreover, this study explores to what extent utilizing cyberspace accelerated their visibility on the local, regional, and international levels after 2011. From this research, I intended to explore how artists envisioned the future of art and creativity during the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). All participants in this research were publicly known on social media, and they expressed an interest to have their respective artist's name used.
The original wicked witch: empowering wickedness, motherhood, and domesticity in Baba Yaga and modern witches
(St. Francis Xavier University, 2024) Waldron, Sara; Wright, Kailin
Ideas of “good” and “bad” women leave no room for ambiguity. Andrea O’Reilly argues that women who don’t fit into the mould of the “perfect woman,” a concept instilled by the patriarchy, are considered “bad” women. In applying O’Reilly’s feminist scholarship to witches, I argue that Baba Yaga’s ambiguity challenges the patriarchal definition of witches as wicked. Baba Yaga is defined by her ambiguity, which makes her stand out as a witch figure and defies the binary of “good” versus “wicked” witches. The early European witch trials as well as the later American witch trials worked within a patriarchal tradition and cemented the idea of wicked witches. By limiting women to these moral expectations, the complexity of ambiguous representations of women are lost. Yet, Baba Yaga (Slavic, 8th century to present day) challenges this very polarization of good versus bad women. Baba Yaga offers a historical and literary starting point for examining what witches—and women—could be outside of patriarchal definitions of “good” and “bad” women. Unlike other monstrous characters in fairy tales and folklore, Baba Yaga’s role is in constant flux from text to text: she can play the role of villain, donor, trickster, or sage. In “Ivanushka”, she is a wicked witch, whereas in “Finist the Bright Falcon II” she plays a benevolent maternal guide. Speaking to this multiplicity, she sometimes plays as many as three characters in one story. My thesis will gesture towards twenty-first century examples of more ambiguous witches, such as Elphaba in Wicked, who resist the polarization of good and wicked.