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Quickwrites And The Quest To Reverse Writing Reluctance, Jenna Dunn

Honors Projects

Current research suggests that students’ enjoyment of writing will positively impact their writing achievement (Graham, 2007; Bulut, 2017). Given this trend, the following study explores the extent to which quickwriting, a teaching strategy developed extensively by Linda Rief (2003, 2018) as well as Donald Graves & Penny Kittle (2005), impacts the attitudes of reluctant writers. A total of nineteen eleventh-grade students were interviewed in three focus groups. All of the students within the study experienced three weeks of regular classroom quickwriting along with one week of a quickwriting extension workshop prior to participation in the focus groups. Students were asked …

Criticism, Praise, And The Red Pen: The Role Of Elementary School Teachers On The Enduring Efficacy Of Writing Instructors, Julie Kimble

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

A teacher’s own early experiences with writing, whether positive or negative, have a significant effect on the students that they teach, especially those who go on to become teachers. In a graduate education and reading program at a public university in the southern United States, we ask our teachers through a writing biography assignment to explore these memories of their earliest writing experiences and determine how those experiences fit into their current teaching careers. For this qualitative project, the researcher analyzed essays that were submitted for a “Writing Autobiography” assignment for this graduate level writing class for educators. This study …

Critical Pedagogy And Accountability: An Autoethnographic Analysis Of Race And Embodiment In Tennessee's Teacher Evaluations, Rebecca C. Napreyeva

Masters Theses

The current social climate within the United States has pushed antiracist pedagogies to the forefront of educational discourse in primary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions. Given the fact that the vast majority of public school teachers in primary and secondary schools are white females, the particular ways they approach the instruction of their minority students is of significant importance, as their cultural perspectives are disproportionately represented in classrooms across the country.

This study uses an autoethnographic approach combined with scholarship in critical pedagogy and critical race theory to examine 1) the particular ways that cultural conflict manifests between white female teachers …

“Can I Write About What Happened To Me?”: A Narrative Inquiry Into The Audience And Purpose Of Students’ And Their Teachers’ Writing In An Age Of Accountability And Unrest, Kate Sjostrom

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Many teachers and administrators, feeling the pressure to produce high standardized test scores and meet state standards, have narrowed the variety of genres taught and resorted to prescriptive writing formulas, effectively stunting the writing and thinking development of students and future teachers, and foreclosing the opportunity for writing to do important personal and interpersonal work in a time of racial reckoning, alienation, and violence. In this context, the study’s author and a pre-service teacher participating in the author’s research study on writing teacher identity development grapple with just what the audience and purpose of students’—and teachers’—writing should and could be. …

Teachers Who Collaborate With A Professional Writing Organization: The Importance Of Critical Stance, Paul A. Viskanta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A wide body of research finds teacher preparation programs fail to address the complexity of writing instruction, especially for secondary English-language Arts teachers (Coker & Lewis, 2008; Graham, 2019; Wahleithner, 2018). Beliefs and knowledge about writing determine how teachers approach pedagogical practices (McCarthey & Mkhize, 2013). One of many contextualized social literacy practices, writing is always ideological (Gee, 2105; Moje & Lewis, 2007). Competing research philosophies complicate development of teachers' practices and impedes research dissemination (Coker & Lewis, 2008; Hillocks, 2008; National Writing Project & Nagin, 2006). Structures informing school-based writing limit the types of writing practices (Bazerman, 2016). Using …

Mining For Gold: Reimagining The Role Of Curricular Texts In Writing Instruction, Carrigan Price

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Secondary schools in northern Utah frequently combine literature and composition studies into a single English Language Arts course, limiting the time English teachers have to teach the skills and content important to both. Literature and reading often overshadow writing instruction in this situation, leading to concentrated writing instruction dependent on pre-made writing curriculum and texts. The way curricular materials used during writing instruction in ELA courses present the purpose of writing, the process of writing, and the identity of writers can impact student learning and academic identity in the short- and long-term. A rhetorical analysis, looking specifically at the writing …

Poets In The Classroom: What We Do When We Teach Writing, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Sabrina San Miguel, Cecilia A. Macias

English Faculty Publications

About the Poets:

Laurie Ann Guerrero is the author of Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press 2013) and A Crown for Gumecindo (Aztlan Libre Press 2015). Her latest collection, I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Texas Christian University Press. She has held consecutive positions as Poet Laureate of the city of San Antonio (2014-2016) and the State of Texas (2016-2017). Guerrero holds a B.A. in English Language & Literature from Smith College, an MFA in poetry from Drew University, and is the Writer-in-Residence at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. …

Writing Instruction In China: Challenges And Efforts, Rongrong Dong, Danling Fu, Xiaodi Zhou, Buyi Wang

Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This qualitative study examined the current writing instruction in 1-12 level education with the data collected in three Chinese cities. The data from the Interviews of teachers and teacher-educators at different levels and from classroom observations at upper elementary to high schools in three metropolitan cities across China provide insights into 1-12 writing instruction in contemporary China. To further reveal the efforts taken by writing teacher under China’s high-stakes testing culture, this paper also presented a case study of an exemplary 10th grade writing teacher, who took tremendous efforts in nurturing true readers and writers in his classroom under the …

Nailing Jell-O To A Tree, Jayson Lozier

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio contains papers addressing writing instruction, women's studies, queer theory, and literary analysis. “Mr. L 2.0 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love English Composition” details the implementation of more effective techniques to teach writing in the secondary English classroom. “Educating Women in Afghanistan: Power, Revolution, and Rebellion” examines the feminist struggles around education and the efforts of the Afghan Institute of Learning to bring about change. “Out of the Closet and into the Classroom: Introducing Queer Reading Strategies to the Secondary English Classroom” examines the importance of queer theory and queer reading techniques in high school …

Frameworks For Collaboration: Articulating Information Literacy, And Rhetoric And Writing Goals In The Archives, Amy J. Lueck, Nadia Nasr

Staff publications, research, and presentations

Rhetoric and composition scholars have recently called our attention to the value of archival research in the undergraduate classroom, leading to rich collaborations with archivists and librarians at many institutions. As we engaged our own pedagogical collaboration as a university archivist and English faculty member, we realized that, though we might use slightly different language to articulate them or cite different sources in support of them, many of our learning goals overlapped. As we explored these goals together, we realized that they evidenced a correspondence in our disciplines that we had not explored—one that is reflected in our fields’ recent …

Rhetorics Of Functionally Applicative Game Design: Designing And Testing The Project Management Game Scrummage, Matthew Carson Beale

English Theses & Dissertations

In this project, I designed and tested Scrummage, a tabletop game to teach the scrum project management system to undergraduate students. The project grew from the gaps in both academic literature and pedagogical tools for project management and collaboration in the technical communication classroom. Although the field of technical communication places significance on project management, research shows that many employers find the project management skills and knowledge of recent graduates to be under-developed. Situated in the fields of game design, game studies, project management, and technical communication, this project asks how we as educators can improve the project management learning …

The Rhetoric Of Academic Discourse: A Qualitative, Phenomenological Study Of Students' Self-Investigation Of The Acquisition Of Academic Discourse In First-Year Writing Courses, Barbara E. Morgan

English Dissertations

Whether at a four-year university or a two-year community college, students who choose to pursue higher education will likely be required to demonstrate their eligibility to enroll in college-level writing courses. At a vast majority of colleges and universities in the United States, such eligibility is determined through various means that include college placement tests, like AccuPlacer®, or other standardized assessments and determinants. Once students are deemed prepared or eligible to enroll in college-level writing courses, their academic journeys often include some form of the compulsory first-year English classes. These courses, also known as freshman writing or composition courses, have …

Bad Ideas About Writing, Cheryl E. Ball, Drew M. Loewe

Open Access Textbooks

Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of and antidotes to major myths in writing instruction. This collection is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute at WVU Libraries and in part by Inside Higher Ed.

Supplemental files feature archived episodes of the Bad Ideas About Writing Podcast …

Audiovisual Commentary As A Way To Reduce Transactional Distance And Increase Teaching Presence In Online Writing Instruction: Student Perceptions And Preferences, Anna Grigoryan

Journal of Response to Writing

The rapid increase in online learning programs has led to an increase in the number of students taking composition courses online. As a result, there is a need to develop teaching practices and approaches to feedback designed specifically for online learning environments, which serve a largely nontraditional student population. Addressing a current gap in the literature regarding approaches to feedback that meet the needs of nontraditional students, this quasi-experimental study used a process model of composition and post-positivist and social constructivist epistemological orientations to measure student perceptions and preferences when provided with text-only feedback or a combination of textual and …

Developing Preservice Writing Teachers’ Professional Judgment: Design Conjectures For Supporting Equitable And Rigorous Writing Instruction, Britnie Delinger Kane

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

To meet the composition demands of the future, secondary students in the United States will need more rigorous and more equitable writing instruction. They will need opportunities to inquire into and frame authentic problems. They will need to communicate for a variety of audiences and purposes, and they will need access to a variety of linguistic and literary forms. In turn, secondary teachers will need improved preparation for teaching writing. This conceptual review outlines what intellectually rigorous and equitable writing instruction looks like, arguing that teaching writing in these ways requires that teachers deploy substantial professional judgment. I then rely …

Producing An Online Undergraduate Literary Magazine: A Guide To Using Problem-Based Learning In The Writing And Publishing Classroom, Amy L. Persichetti

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

This article will illustrate how a problem-based learning (PBL) course (Savery, 2006) can be used in a writing program as a vehicle for both creative and preprofessional learning. English 420: Writing, Publishing, and Editing is offered every fall, and its counterpart, English 423: Writing, Publishing, and Editing is offered each spring. The courses, positioned at the end of a sequenced series of prerequisite writing courses, provide a creative, applied writing experience that offers students professional practice through producing the digital version of Cabrini College’s literary magazine, Woodcrest. In the 2012–2013 school year, the English Department ran its first cycle of …

The Negotiation And Development Of Writing Teacher Identities In Elementary Education, Shartriya M. Collier, Suzanne Scheld, Ian Barnard, Jackie Stallcup

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Identity development in writing is a unique process. While many studies have explored the process of developing a professional identity among future teachers, few studies have investigated how teacher candidates develop a writing teacher’s identity. This study explores the development and negotiation of writing teacher identity among 21 pre-service multiple-subject teacher candidates at a large public institution in California. More specifically, the study examines the students’ journeys as they transformed from students of writing in a university methods course to student teachers of writing in a local school district. Our findings indicate that the use of a sociocultural-based approach to …

Using Stories As The Landscape Of Writing: A Case Study Of Mentor Texts In The Elementary Classroom, Christine Mcdowell

Dissertations

In this dissertation, I investigate the way in which mentor texts are defined and implemented by four elementary classroom teachers within one school district, and how this mode of instruction allows for an increase in teacher autonomy while still addressing Common Core State Standards. This project focuses on each participant as they share a common goal in writing instruction while maintaining their teaching identity and curricular freedom.

One goal of this study is to provide the educational theory that supports mentor text instruction that is missing from the movement. Many teaching guides exist that explain the concept of mentor texts, …

Foundational Practices Of Online Writing Instruction, Beth L. Hewitt (Editor), Kevin Eric Depew (Editor)

English Faculty Bookshelf

This is an Open Textbook available through the Open Textbook Library: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/foundational-practices-of-online-writing-instruction. Reviews are available there.

Foundational Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) addresses the questions and decisions that administrators and instructors most need to consider when developing online writing programs and courses. Written by experts in the field (members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee for Effective Practices in OWI and other experts and stakeholders).... The editors believe that the field of writing studies is on a trajectory in which most courses will be mediated online to various degrees; therefore the principles detailed in this …

The Wrong Way To Teach Grammar, Michelle Navarre Cleary

Michelle Navarre Cleary

A century of research shows that traditional grammar lessons—those hours spent diagramming sentences and memorizing parts of speech—don’t help and may even hinder students’ efforts to become better writers. Yes, they need to learn grammar, but the old-fashioned way does not work.

Re-Thinking Personal Narrative In The Pedagogy Of Writing Teacher Preparation, Mary M. Juzwik, Anne Whitney, April Baker Bell, Amanda Smith

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

How can teacher educators mobilize contemporary understandings of personal narrative -- as socially and dialogically shaped in the context of culture and as instrumental to sociocultural processes of self-authoring -- in the teaching of narrative writing and, more specifically, in the work of teaching teachers to teach narrative writing? Rarely do teachers teach strategies that might result in good narratives. Rarely do narrative texts written in school (or any other kinds of texts written in school, for that matter) actually go anywhere beyond the teacher, thus failing to offer students experience in negotiating meanings with readers, working out the versions …

Using Iannotate To Enhance Feedback On Written Work, Kristi Upson-Saia, Suzanne Scott

Kristi Upson-Saia

This paper discusses an iAnnotate feedback model used by the authors to comment on written work in first-year writing courses. We aim to show that the use of iAnnotate, like other emergent technologies, mitigated a number of issues that regularly undermine high-quality feedback (such as the time it takes for instructors to write detailed comments and the challenge for students to read illegible handwriting or to keep track of hard copies of their papers). Yet, we contend that our feedback model goes beyond these practical benefits and, more importantly, enhances student learning. Specifically, we argue that it aligns instructor and …

The Knowing/Doing Gap: Challenges Of Effective Writing Instruction In High School, Sylvia Read, Melanie M. Landon-Hays

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This study explores the challenges of effective writing instruction in high school, specifically examining the perceptions of five new high school English teachers regarding their own experiences learning to write as students, their preparation to become teachers of writing, and how they teach and assess writing in their classrooms. In order to more fully understand their view of writing instruction, we interviewed and observed them. The findings are organized into two strands: teacher beliefs about their own formative opportunities with writing, both as students and in preparation to become teachers, and teacher reflections on best practices in writing instruction and …

Comparing Grades In Online And Face-To-Face Writing Courses: Interpersonal Accountability And Institutional Commitment, David Alan Sapp, James L. Simon

David Alan Sapp

In spite of benefits surrounding distance education programs, many online writing courses suffer from low student completion rates. Student retention has been identified as a concern in a number of studies of online education. We extend this discussion by examining the relationship of assessment of student work to retention, and comparing the grades students receive in online and face-to-face undergraduate writing courses. Our data point to what we call the “thrive or dive” phenomenon for student performance in online writing courses, which describes the disproportionately high percentage of students who fail or do not complete online courses compared to conventional, …

When The Virtual Meets The Real: An Assessment Of The Benefits And "Costs" Of Open Access Texts For First Year Writing Courses At Cuny, Johannah Rodgers

Publications and Research

An assessment of the advantages, drawbacks, and costs of Open Access / OER texts for First Year Writing courses at CUNY.

Metaphoric Competence As A Means To Meta-Cognitive Awareness In First-Year Composition, David T. Dadurka

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A growing body of writing research suggests college students’ and teachers’ conceptualizations of writing play an important role in learning to write and making the transition from secondary to post-secondary academic composition. First-year college writers are not blank slates; rather, they bring many assumptions and beliefs about academic writing to the first-year writing classroom from exposure to a wide range of literate practices throughout their lives. Metaphor acts as a way for scholars to trace students’ as well as their instructors’ assumptions and beliefs about writing. In this study, I contend that metaphor is a pathway to meta-cognitive awareness, mindfulness, …

Listening For The Squeaky Wheel: Designing Distance Writing Program Assessment, Virginia M. Tucker

English Faculty Publications

Distance writing programs still struggle with assessment strategies that can evaluate student writing as well as their ability to communicate about that writing with peers at a distance. This article uses Kim, Smith and Maeng's 2008 distance education program assessment scheme to evaluate a single distance writing program at Old Dominion University. The program's specific assessment needs include the ability to determine how well students are developing expert insider prose and working together as a virtual community. Kim, Smith and Maeng's assessment scheme was applied to six courses within the writing program, revealing that programmatic assessment weaknesses included providing varied …

Supporting Good Writing Instruction: The Hoosier Writing Project, Susan Adams, Steve Fox, Herb Budden

Susan Adams

Presentation at the 2012 Indiana Student Achievement Institute (InSAI) Conference.

Liminal Practice In A Maturing Writing Department, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

[First Paragraph]

In Spring 2011 I was awarded a Fulbright Specialist Grant to "consult, collaborate, and inform" on the future of the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg, located in the city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. The Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications department (hereafter, RWC) was a pioneer in writing instruction in Canada, where it became the first unit to establish itself independently as a department with a full-‐time faculty committed to both teaching and scholarship in writing and rhetoric. It remains a rare phenomenon on the Canadian higher education scene, where studies …

Proposing A Purpose: Rhetorical Paideia Goals For First Year Composition, Lauren Everett Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

First Year Composition (FYC) instructors are often left to puzzle out the larger meaning of the most ubiquitous course in our field for themselves; consequently, goals for the course are frequently selected by the instructor, and are not always most effective for laying a groundwork of lifelong learning and education, or paideia. This lack of clear and unifying goals for the course is illustrated by a piece of 2005 scholarship that points to multiple focuses for FYC, each different in its values and aims. FYC is an important course for students, not only because it is one of only …