Digital Commons Network^™

Writing With Risk: Dangerous Discourses And Event-Based Pedagogies, Ben Harley

Theses and Dissertations

“Writing with Risk: Dangerous Discourses and Event-Based Pedagogies,” responds to the pedagogical work of scholars such as Susan Wells, Nancy Welch, and Linda Flower by arguing that the risks associated with public writing pedagogies stem from the transformative nature of the rhetorical event that implicates and rearticulates actors through co-production, subverting their assumed autonomy. I argue that each of the three primary vantages of publics scholarship is particularly vulnerable to a certain type of risk aligned to a specific element of the rhetorical situation: idealist scholarship to unintended consequences in which the meaning of the text transforms, activist scholarship to …

“As The Occasion Demands”: Constraint-Based Practice In Rhetoric And Composition, Erica Kerstin Fischer

Theses and Dissertations

In their 2010 Composition Studies article, Laurie Gries and Collin Brooke observe, “constrained writing has been underappreciated” in the composition classroom (21). Taking seriously the potential value of constraints in pedagogical practice, this project executes a cross-disciplinary examination (drawing from design theory, experimental poetry, literary theory, composition, and rhetorical theory) of the various occurrences of, and approaches to, constraints and their influences on the ways we think and write. This investigation reveals that constraints create the conditions under which students can become productively defamiliarized to their thinking and writing habits, encouraging them to encounter alternatives otherwise left unnoticed.

I suggest …

‘Held By Thy Voice’: Navigating Time In John Milton’S Poetry, Jessica Junqueira

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation, “‘Held by Thy Voice’: Navigating Time in John Milton’s Poetry” explores how and to what extent John Milton uses the formal device of suspension in “Lycidas,” Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. I argue that by using suspension, Milton negotiates between multiple categories of time. These moments are important because they highlight characters’ perspectives and expose the limitations of their viewpoints. Milton also employs suspension to introduce potential scenarios that reveal characters to be out of step with a providential framework. He uses suspension to connect two or more temporal categories and to reveal an individual’s position in relation …

Reading Engagement: The Impact On Student Identities And Achievement, Tara Lyn Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

Across one school year, in which I coached a fourth-grade teacher, she and I took an inquiry stance investigating how we could come to understand the reading identities kids held relative to Stephens’ (2013) list of characteristics of effective and efficient readers. We also sought to understand how we could help kids develop, sustain, or extend their reading identities and how those identities relate to a generative theory of reading. What impact would our actions have on the kids? What shift, if any, would there be in their ability to comprehend grade level text? There were 11 students in the …

Rhetoric And Plants, Alana Hatley

Theses and Dissertations

Rhetoric and Plants asks what happens when we add plants to the various discussions currently developing within rhetorical theory. By taking up current botanical research and some of the rhetorical debates surrounding that research, I posit that plants are creatures and that the botanic engagement with the world has much to teach us about persuasion, communication, and encountering alterity. Specifically, I argue that the sessility of plants makes visible a tendency in our language to privilege the language of going elsewhere, which I term ambulocentrism. Further, the fact that plants engage in behaviors that we have previously thought only conscious …