Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Expanding Composition Pedagogies: A New Rhetoric From Social Media, Ashley Evans

Theses and Dissertations

Traditionally, the field of rhetoric and composition has valued long-form essay writing, which requires students to engage patiently and at length with revision. In contrast, students today spend much time outside of school producing fast-paced and short posts for social media. This dissertation argues that students’ social media interactions provide them nuanced, dialogic, and complex rhetorical understandings about writing—but that students need help developing discursive processes to support transfer of their social media knowledge to other writing contexts, including long-form academic writing. Drawing from two semesters of in-class study, I construct for first-year composition classrooms a pedagogy that embraces and …

"Already Writers": A Case Study In Assessment And Visual Rhetoric Connections In Digital Multimodal Composition, Fawn Elise Canady

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

English language arts must respond to shifts in literacy practices that reflect changes in ‘college and career ready’ that are more than technologically mediated, but also emphasize creative and social skills. The case study in this dissertation is a small part of a larger, ongoing formative experiment in digital multimodal composition (DMC). A formative experiment is a methodological approach that favors a collaborative, iterative research process that is centered on an instructional goal in authentic classroom settings (Reinking & Bradley, 2008). The intention of the larger research study was to support students’ learning through DMC. This dissertation explored one of …

Don't Rock The Boat: Curricular Choices Of Contingent And Permanent Composition Faculty, Amy Lynch-Biniek

Academic Labor: Research and Artistry

No abstract provided.

Writing The World: Ten Strategies For Internationalizing The Writing Classroom, Stefanie Frigo

The Journal of Student Success in Writing

In an increasingly global educational and professional environment, it is essential that new graduates are able to communicate across international and local cultural borders and barriers. Given the reach of composition classes, touching almost every undergraduate, first year writing is uniquely positioned to deliver classes that teach written, verbal, and visual communication and enhance intercultural understanding and global competency. One of the greatest challenges that departments face is delivering this content in an innovative and engaging manner, and without requiring an international experience – something beyond the reach of many students. This article offers solutions via ten practical classroom strategies …

Enabling Pain, Enabling Insight: Opening Up Possibilities For Chronic Pain In Disability Rhetoric And Rhetoric And Composition, Hilary Selznick

Theses and Dissertations

In the dissertation “Enabling Pain, Enabling Insight: Opening up Possibilities for Chronic Pain in Disability Rhetoric and Rhetoric and Composition,” Hilary Selznick argues that pain is rhetorical, accessible, and communicable to those without the lived experience of chronic pain. Additionally, she argues for the necessity of considering chronic pain as a disability and not merely as a symptom of a disability. In order to make these arguments possible, Selznick crafts a political-relational-rhetorical methodology that challenges restrictive models of disability and theoretical and commonplace assumptions that pain is resistant to language. Specifically, Selznick’s methodology, which combines disability scholar and activist Alison …

Repositioning The I-Search: An Assignment For Negotiating Prior Writing Knowledge In Fyc, Adrienne Jankens

English Faculty Research Publications

This article describes the outcomes of a teacher-research study on inquiry-based assignments and near transfer of writing-related knowledge that led to the revision of the I-Search assignment (which Macrorie [1988, The I-Search Paper] describes as a paper that “tell[s] the story of what you did in your search, in the order in which everything happened”) for integration into an argument and research-centered First Year Composition curriculum.

Final Ma Portfolio, Mary O'Hara

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio contains four essays primarily focused upon composition and rhetoric.

Apologies For Cross-Posting: Composing Disciplinary Affects And Conflicts On The Wpa Listserv, Zachary Beare

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Drawing on theories of counterpublics, online communication, and affect, this dissertation argues that the Writing Program Administrators Listserv (WPA-L) functions as an important site of disciplinary knowledge-making and theory-building for the field of Composition and Rhetoric. The dissertation examines the WPA-L as a discursive space in which members of the discipline build community, debate pressing issues, and strategize how best to advocate for their individual and collective interests. At the same time that these qualities reveal how the listserv functions as counterpublic space for the discipline at large, the dissertation argues that sub-disciplinary counterpublics made up of individuals marginalized within …

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

OER Main

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 major myths about writing instruction in these essays. This collection is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute and in part by Inside Higher Ed.

Reimagining The Stacks: Classroom Technology And Library Collaboration For Writing In The Disciplines, Jossalyn Larson, Daniel C. Reardon

The Journal of Student Success in Writing

This article details the process by which one university redesigned a first year writing course to better promote discipline-specific and best-practice research techniques. The program offers experiential learning activities through scholarly collaboration, using library staff as mentors, producing an open-access peer-reviewed student journal, and emphasizing face-to-face interaction of peer research communities. It has the potential to establish for students in high school, community colleges and universities that research writing is fundamentally about joining and contributing to a conversation.

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 …

Engl 254: Writing And Communities—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Rachael Wendler Shah

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This course portfolio analyzes a section of English 254: Writing and Communities, exploring how well the course met individual teaching goals and the departmental course goals for English 254, with a particular focus on how the new English Department mission statement priorities are actualized in the class and how well the class supported learning to communicate across difference. The portfolio includes an outline of institutional context, course outcomes, and student background, as well as a backwards planning chart that demonstrates alignment between outcomes, activities, and assessment strategy. Then, the portfolio examines student data from each of the three major assignments, …

Multimodal Pedagogies, Processes And Projects: Writing Teachers Know More Than We May Think About Teaching Multimodal Composition, Jessica B. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

Multimodal writing refers to texts that use more than one communicative mode to convey information. While there is much scholarship that examines the history of alphabetic writing instruction and the alphabetic composing processes of students, little research explores the historical origins of multimodal composition and the processes in which students engage as they compose multimodal texts. This two-part project takes a fresh approach to studying multimodal writing by exploring the multimodal pedagogies of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric and writing teachers, analyzing the role of mental and physical images in modern writers’ composing practices, and investigating contemporary students’ processes for …

On The Same Page: Theory, Practice & The Ela Common Core State Standards, Jessica Lauer

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This research sought to examine how writing was happening in high schools. States across the country, including Michigan, began implementing the Common Core State Standards in 2010. The standards place a heavy focus on informational texts particularly as a student reaches high school. The standards also suggest that writing should be a shared responsibility among teachers, acknowledging the importance of cross-disciplinary writing skills. Using a grounded theory approach to analyze the semi-structured interviews conducted with eight English teachers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this research revealed a disconnect between theory and practice when it comes to how educational standards …