Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Female Superheroes, Rhetorical Reading, And Feminist Imagination : A Study Of College-Aged Readers And Comic Book Reading Practices Using Eye Tracking And Cued Retrospective Interviews, Aimee Vincent

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation uses feminist analysis and rhetorical genre studies to analyze the strategies used by college-aged students to read female superhero comic books. The dissertation responds to the growing trend of literature and writing instructors assigning comic books and graphic novels under the untested assumption that these texts are readily accessible to college students. This assumption contradicts what we have learned from studies of rhetorical reading strategies that found that readers analyze texts most effectively when readers are familiar with the text’s genre. In addition, the assumption ignores the specific rhetorical contexts of comics, including a problematic but powerful narrative …

This Ain't Yo' Mama's Composition Class: Addressing Anti-Blackness By Implementing Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Sharanna B. Brown

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

Kyoko Kishimoto writes that those who practice anti-racist pedagogical practices are not only required to teach about race, but instead "teach about race and racism in a way that fosters critical analytical skills, which reveal the power relations behind racism and how race has been institutionalized in U.S. society to create and justify inequalities" (541). This is the work. And I have chosen to do it.

Steeped in anti-racist pedagogy “This Ain’t Yo’ Mama’s Composition Course” aims to explore the ways that writing classrooms can affirm students’ autonomy while simultaneously equipping them with skills that equate to “cultural capital.” Anti-racist …

Writing Priorities Across Academic Disciplines, Ashley Conway

Summer Scholarship, Creative Arts and Research Projects (SCARP)

This project examines the writing priorities of varied disciplines at Elizabethtown College to better understand what they value in student writing. A survey sent to faculty collected discipline-specific writing concerns and information about writing requirements beyond foundational courses. It also gathered thoughts on how EN100, Etown’s introductory English composition course, supports or fails upper-level writing. Follow-up interviews were conducted with select faculty. Faculty responded that sentence mechanics errors, paragraphs that lack unity or feel disorganized, failure to find effective sources when needed, and lack of clarity at the word or sentence level were the most problematic common writing errors when …

Global Language Variation In Online Writing Instructional Spaces: English As A Lingua Franca Among Global Participants In A Massive Open Online Course, Angela May Dadak

English Theses & Dissertations

Two vectors of the internationalization of US higher education—online courses and student diversity—intersect at a point where a broad mix of culturally and linguistically diverse students enroll in online courses, including writing courses. This study applies an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) lens to examine language in an online writing environment in order to understand how the participants use their linguistic resources to communicate in English across varieties and around the world. This study employs discourse analysis to two discussion forums from a US-based composition MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). More than three quarters of the MOOC participants came …

Problem-Based Learning Pedagogy Fosters Students’ Critical Thinking About Writing, Rita Kumar, Brenda Refaei

Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning

Convinced of the power of PBL to promote students’ critical thinking as demonstrated by its application across disciplines, we designed a series of problems for students in a second-year writing course. We collected samples of their writing before and after implementation of the problems. We were concerned about whether PBL pedagogy would negatively influence second-year students’ writing. However, our preliminary findings suggest that students’ critical thinking about writing improved with the use of PBL pedagogy.

A Theory Of Text As Action:Why Delivery Through Publication Improves Student Writers And Their Writing, Lisa Kae Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

Students in required writing courses often fail to see the purpose of their writing and invest themselves in their writing. Many composition pedagogues have noticed that one solution to this problem is to help students publish their writing, and have reported the positive outcomes of their publication-focused courses. However, this practice has not been grounded in theory. My project connects the practice of publishing student writing to theory. I draw on Kenneth Burke's and other's ideas of text as action and show how the ancient cannon of delivery is a necessary means of experiencing and understanding text as action with …

Literacy Crisis, Technology, And The Radical Reversal Of Power, Erin Michelle Cromer

Theses and Dissertations

As new media is changing the way individuals communicate, efforts have already been made within universities to, once again, construct new literacy standards in the digital age, producing the appearance of a literacy crisis. I argue that rather than producing another literacy crisis, the fundamental reversal of the power structure concerning who dominates standard literacy places greater expectations on composition scholars and practitioners--rather than students--ultimately providing the conditions of possibility for using power productively to imagine a new pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity that reverses the role of expectations from standards to invention. Such a pedagogy offers rhetoric and composition a …

Early Modern Evil Genius: Hyperconformity And Objectivity In Sixteenth And Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Christine Hoffmann

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the response among early modern and postmodern audiences to the experience of information overload, and suggests that the most appealing response to living in a communications network that appears both systematic and random is to use a rhetoric of struggle that is ambiguous in the same way. >The reasons for this appeal are twofold: firstly, the rhetoric of struggle is a way to cope with the difficulty of situating oneself within a system of circulating information that operates according to its own arbitrary rules. Mimicking that arbitrariness is a way of finding aesthetic synchronicity between how one's …

Do We Teach Disciplines Or Do We Teach Students?—What Difference Does It Make?, Marshall W. Gregory

Marshall W. Gregory

The single most difficult notion for graduate students and new professors to grasp about teaching--and, indeed, many experienced teachers never grasp this point either--is that successful teaching to undergraduates has little to do with the degree of one's mastery of disciplinary knowledge.

Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies Of Collective Resistance, Jessica Ketcham Weber

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In Ephemeral Media, Persistent Action: Public Pedagogies of Collective Resistance, I argue that representations of contemporary activism against corporate globalization, as analyzed in three different sites of commercially-driven media texts—newspapers, film, and websites—teach people to move away from public forms of collective activism and towards privatized and institutionally-sponsored forms as part of the larger project of neoliberalism. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on the representations of, and responses to the representations of, two events—the protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington in 1999 and the protests during the Republican National Convention in 2004 in New York City—as …

Picturing Writing For Ndow 2010, Jenn Fishman

Jenn Fishman

These are my reasons for hosting a photo contest for NDOW. I hope my rationale along with the sources I site can contribute to an ongoing conversation about what writing and writing instruction are—and should be—in the twenty-first century.

Tenn Tlc Creative Teaching Grant Application, Jenn Fishman

Jenn Fishman

No abstract provided.

Overview: Rwl Speaker Series, Jenn Fishman

Jenn Fishman

Itc Faculty Fellows Application, Jenn Fishman

Jenn Fishman

No abstract provided.

Do We Teach Disciplines Or Do We Teach Students?—What Difference Does It Make?, Marshall W. Gregory

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The single most difficult notion for graduate students and new professors to grasp about teaching--and, indeed, many experienced teachers never grasp this point either--is that successful teaching to undergraduates has little to do with the degree of one's mastery of disciplinary knowledge.

Who Speaks And Who Listens? Genre, Gender, And Memory In Holocaust Discourses, Lisa A. Costello

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Holocaust discourses examined in Who Speaks and Who Listens? Genre, Gender and Memory in Holocaust Discourses perform writing that does something through the presentation of meaningful content and its interaction with the process of the writing act. These discourses are utterances necessarily wedged between the past and the future—between the fear that the traumatic past of the Holocaust recedes too much and the concern with what might become of this past for the generations that follow. The theory of performative memorialization describes how multiple discourses of the Holocaust engage with each other and with the audiences that receive and …

Embodied Literacies Project, Ii, Jenn Fishman

Jenn Fishman

Qep Grant Proposal, Jenn Fishman

Jenn Fishman

Itc Faculty First Grant Application, Jenn Fishman

Jenn Fishman

No abstract provided.

Summer Gra Application (2005), Jenn Fishman

Jenn Fishman