Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Unraveling Identity Signifier Literacy: A Case Study Of First-Year Composition Students' Communication Practices, Bailey Mcalister

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Identity signifier literacy is defined as one’s ability to accurately read – via personal interactions or via visual, verbal, written, or digital communication – the signifiers others display in direct and indirect ways and interpret these signifiers to gain understanding of others’ identities. In this study, 22 first-year composition students were surveyed about their communication practices in order to see how their identity signifier literacies influence and are influenced by digital environments and composition. These results are meant to improve first-year composition pedagogy by making connections between students’ informal composition practices and their academic composition courses.

Best Practice: Bringing The Elements Of Effective Practice To The College Writing Classroom, Jonathan Montgomery Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Studies of college writing students suggest that many students associate writing ability with innate talent rather than sustained, deliberate practice. As a result, these students may lack the motivation to improve their writing abilities, leading to a vicious cycle in which they come to increasingly resent writing as a curricular and extracurricular activity. This dissertation argues that the elements of effective practice as outlined by cognitive psychology are equally applicable to writing as they are to skills such as music and that convincing students of the “practice-ability” of writing may improve their motivation to improve their writing abilities.

The dissertation …

A Matter Of Value: Creative Writing Strategies And Their Transference To Composition, Brandy Dawn Clark

MSU Graduate Theses

Creative writing and composition seem to be taken, at least in the academic world, as separate and unequal entities. While there are many questions in the research and answers in the research as to why creativity is important, its practical application in the composition classroom is not readily discussed because there is not unanimous agreement as to if creative writing even belongs in the composition classroom. Practical application of creative writing in the composition classroom gives teachers the opportunity to see why it is important, to see why it is valuable, and to incorporate it into already meticulous class standards. …

Teaching College Writing To High School Students: A Mixed Methods Investigation Of Dual Enrollment Composition Students' Writing Curriculum And Writing Self-Efficacy, Erin Dena Scott-Stewart

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to use a quantitative survey to assess the relationships between the credit pathways students choose to earn first-year, first-semester (FYFS) university writing credit (i.e. dual enrollment, Advanced Placement, university courses, and ACT/SAT exemptions) and several writing experiences and outcomes, including writing curriculum, self-efficacy, self-regulatory strategy use, and course performance. The same survey was also used to explore relationships between these writing experiences and outcomes and preexisting student characteristics (i.e. race/ethnicity, gender, and parents’ education). For dual enrollment (DE) students only, the following aspects of the participants’ writing experiences were also investigated using …

Community College Writing Program Administrators: Implementing Change Through Advocacy, Lizbett Tinoco

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation, Community College WPAs: Implementing Change Through Advocacy, examines the work and role of Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) at community colleges. Defining the role and the work of WPAs is very complex, and even more so at community colleges since these institutions are very diverse places in regards to programmatic structure and student population. The scholarship of writing program administration has typically excluded community colleges; as a result, my research focuses on including these narratives. Unlike a lot of WPA narratives that often describe WPAs as "composition wives" (Schuster, 1991; Hesse, 1999) who do much of the dirty work …

Writing Gets Personal: Listening At The Intersections Of Creative Writing And Writing Tutoring, Zoe Nicole Mcdonald

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

In this thesis, I investigate the extent to which creative writing impacts the ways writing tutors work with student writers on their academic writing. In doing so, I interview five writing tutors with creative writing experiences for their personal definitions of creative writing, and the extent to which drawing on, or ignoring, creative writing impacts their writing tutoring.

Through combining the interviews with reflections into my writer identities, I find creative writing focuses on self-expression and narrative features which strengthen disciplinarity and conventions. Additionally, focusing on creative writing’s influence in the writing center allows tutors to engage as fellow writers …

Designing The Teacher: Applying 'Design Thinking' To Improve Composition Pedagogy And Practice, Jordan Nicole Newman

Online Theses and Dissertations

College composition courses have conventionally relied on alphabetic, print writing as the primary method for constructing meaning, but contemporary communication practices are increasingly multimodal and media-based (Palmeri, 2012; Yancey, 2011). While many teachers and scholars advocate that students benefit from engaging in the production of multimodal texts, fewer educators create digital and new media products themselves. Through a meta-analytical approach, this project explores the potentials that the act of design offers teacher-scholars for improving their pedagogy and practice. Utilizing a design thinking framework, the generative analysis of established scholarship, primary research, and authentic experiences provided significant insights into the cognitive, …