Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Multimodal Mondays: Wrapping It Up: From Digital Badges To E-Dentities, Jeanne Bohannon

Jeanne Law Bohannon

No abstract provided.

Radical Reflection: Toward The Transformation Of Everyday Teaching And Learning In English Composition, Royal Brevvaxling

Theses and Dissertations

Education is a necessary component in the emancipatory transformation of current capitalist society, with its exploitative social relationships, to one which is based on promoting and supporting human growth and potential. A libertarian education, as Paulo Freire writes of it, "must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed 59).

An additional impediment to developing education useful for this transformation is the separation of thought from action in educational theory and practice. The field of composition studies similarly operates according to …

Impact Of A Grade Contract Model In A College Composition Course: A Multiple Case Study, Nayelee Villanueva

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Due to the complex nature of assessment in critical pedagogy practices, continued research is necessary in order to investigate the constantly evolving nature of education and the way we come to know how people learn. To research assessment in the critical classroom requires both instructor and students. This qualitative multiple case study investigated impacts of a grading contract as a form of assessment on student writing in a Basic Writing composition course. This study examined the impacts of a grade contract on students' writing, motivation for writing, revision practices, authorship and expectations of a Basic Writing composition course. Through a …

Student And Instructor Responses To E-Feedback, Julia Reidy

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This empirical study provides further insight into how instructors decide on the methods used to respond to student writing and whether these criteria match what students want from this feedback. What are instructors' considerations when they adopt e-feedback practices? Do these considerations align or conflict with student preferences for how they receive feedback? How does the rhetorical content of these technologies (visual presentation and choices offered to users) affect the ways both teachers and students use them? To address a research gap, this study focuses on e-feedback, which is in-document feedback from instructors distributed via the Web to students (also …

"You Can't Be Creative Anymore": Students Reflect On The Lingering Effects Of The Five-Paragraph Essay, Jennifer P. Gray

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

The five-paragraph essay continues to make headlines in composition and pedagogy journals and on teacher listservs. This long-cherished genre has been touted for teaching the basics to writers in college, and teachers often claim that it is the best foundation for solid essay writing. In contrast, there are numerous five-paragraph essay critics who claim that the essay is a “school-created thing” that has no real-world value and persists due to an enshrinement in textbooks as preparation for objective standardized testing. Regardless of the debate, one thing remains: there is little research on the essay from the students’ perspective. This essay …

Interactive Audience And The Internet, John R. Gallagher

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation takes up a question posed by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford in 2009: “In a world of participatory media—of Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Del.icio.us—what relevance does the term audience hold?” Using a case study methodology (e.g., Dyson and Genishi; Stake; Yin), I examine how three popular internet writers—all writers who engage with political issues in different venues—conceptualize their audiences and respond to audience feedback. Using established scholarship about audience, including Ede and Lunsford’s work, as well as newer digital scholarship (e.g., Arola, Carnegie, Edbauer Rice), I extend the existing conversation on audience to the context of digital …

Forum: Teacher-Writers: Then, Now, And Next, Anne Elrod Whitney, Troy Hicks, Leah A. Zuidema, James E. Fredricksen, Robert P. Yagelski

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

In this article, the authors reflect upon “the teacher as writer” and describe how they see this concept and movement developing. They articulate a view of the teacher-writer as empowered advocate. Using examples from their scholarship, they illustrate how this powerful idea can transform research conducted about and with teachers. Finally, they draw attention to the potential of the teacher-writer stance as a means of resistance to current reform efforts that disempower teachers.

Tweet Me, Tweet You: Using Twitter And Storify To Build Classroom Community In A Flipped, First-Year Composition Classroom, Jeanne Bohannon

Jeanne Law Bohannon

No abstract provided.

Newbs R Us: A New Year And New Multimodal Opportunities, Jeanne Bohannon, Kim Haimes-Korn

Jeanne Law Bohannon

No abstract provided.

A Pedagogy Of Persistence: Access Through Arrangement In The Age Of New Media, Jennifer Kontny

Theses and Dissertations

Fostering access in our writing classrooms has been a centrally important goal in the field of rhetoric and composition since the social turn in the 1980s. As a means of creating classroom spaces that help students gain access to new identities and ways of being in the world, those in our discipline have long privileged pedagogies that focus on invention. This dissertation traces the work of those in diverse areas of the field in order to show our wide-spread favoring of invention (or creativity, discovery, and the "new"). Unfortunately, I argue that the attention we have paid to invention has …

The Writing Is The Wall: Expanding The Means Of Communication With Multimodal Approaches To Teaching Composition, Matthew Williams Schering

All Student Theses

As the paradigm of communication shifts into the digital realm, it seems only logical that instructors’ pedagogical approaches to teaching writing should shift as well. Though there is still much merit to teaching tradition approaches to composition, are there more modern methods that could be employed to teach communication in a contemporary setting? This thesis shall examine the role that new media can play in a multimodal composition course, as new media seems to be the most effective way to teach rhetorical communication skills in a modern setting. By looking at new media elements, such as podcasts, wikis, and images, …

Pedagogy In Action: Teaching And Writing As Rhetorical Performance, Lesley E. Bartlett

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Drawing from work in composition studies, rhetorical theory, and feminist theory, this project builds on questions of identity, embodiment, and privilege to enrich conversations about writing pedagogy and teacher development in Composition and Rhetoric. I begin with the assumption that all acts of writing and teaching are performances, whether they are marked as such or not. I engage rhetorical and feminist theories to critically read classroom moments, student writing, and composition scholarship as I urge writing teachers to reflect on the extent to which their embodied pedagogical performances align with their theoretical commitments regarding student learning and teacher development. My …

Of Thresholds And Springboards: Teaching Them, Teaching Each Other, Erin Williams, Frank Farmer

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

In the fall of 2010, the authors were given the task of co-teaching the practicum for new graduate teaching assistants at the University of Kansas. One of the authors was, at the time, a doctoral student in rhetoric and composition. The other author was a senior faculty member in the same field. While such pairings are not uncommon, they are rarely addressed in the vast literature on the writing practicum.

In this article—written as a dialogue focusing on the themes of locations and tensions—the authors conclude that such teaching arrangements as theirs offered valuable insights into student resistance, and encouraged …

Writers Who Care: Advocacy Blogging As Teachers - Professors - Parents, Leah A. Zuidema, Sarah Hochstetler, Mark Letcher, Kristen Hawley Turner

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Because we believe strongly that writers develop through authentic writing instruction - and because we see policies that drive practices away from these goals - we have decided to speak up and to speak out through advocacy blogging. Teachers, Profs, Parents: Writers Who Care (writerswhocare.wordpress.com) was born from our frustration with current mandates that limit teachers and students to reductive writing. We know what good writing instruction looks like, and we want to share that knowledge with an audience beyond academia. In doing so, we hope to redefine what it means to be an academic writer and to encourage others …

Let Me Tell You About Homestuck: The Online Production Of Place, Jennifer Short

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the potential for the online production of place, specifically as it applies to the host site for the Homestuck web comic, MS Paint Adventures, and its attendant fandom. The proliferation of digital environments such as video games, web sites, and chat rooms has led to numerous opportunities for the study of online spaces and the numerous practices that take place within them. The lack of physical location in online spaces can, however, make it difficult to conceptualize of a web site as real, a problem that has often led researchers to develop new theories of space that …

Rhetorical Genre Theory And The Enactment Of Faith In The Composition Classroom, Heather N. Hill

Faculty Integration Papers

In James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 he argues that “every rhetorical system is based on epistemological assumptions about the nature of reality, the nature of the knower, and the rules governing the discovery and communication of the known” (4). Beginning with the debates between Plato and the sophists and running through the history of rhetoric to the likes of Wayne Booth on one side and William Covino on the other, rhetorical theorists have always been interested in debating the nature of reality, knowledge, morality, ethics, and T/truth. How one defines the status of these, …

Students’ Rhetorical Strategies In Translingual Encounters On Campus, Laura Moeller

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

This thesis examines the ways in which linguistic minority students assert themselves as rhetorical agents when faced with the expectation of impromptu verbal responses. Based on a study that aims at identifying specific rhetorical strategies these students employ, the goal of this thesis is to theorize ways in which linguistic minorities deal with the challenges of fast-paced, high-stakes interactions. The practices that emerge from data analysis suggest that such strategies tend to be reactive rather than proactive and highly dependent on context. While they are valuable ways for linguistic minorities to navigate their ways in specific moments, the thesis argues …

Rereading Romanticism, Rereading Expressivism: Revising "Voice" Through Wordsworth's Prefaces, Hannah J. Rule

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Re-Imagining Invention (Post)Pedagogy From Ulmer's Electracy To Design, Ruth Elaine Clayman

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is a historical project that traces the development of notable strands of composition pedagogy first crafted by Gregory Ulmer in his 1984 Applied Grammatology that continue to the present day, and groups them together in how they are incorporating multimodal tools in writing instruction that demand innovation in composition instruction. This will demonstrate how the work of certain contemporary composition scholars can be seen as creatively re-working the invention model that was devised and promoted by Ulmer in 1984. Through this history of invention in composition, Ulmer's invention model of writing instruction is clearly seen as both situated …

Using Games To Make Something: Of Our Students, Our Pedagogies, Our Field. A Review Essay Of Gee & Hayes (2011), Squire (2011), Steinkuehler Et Al (2012), And Thomas & Brown (2011), Carly Finseth

Carly Finseth

If there’s one thing that writing instructors are known for it’s innovation. Compositionists, because of our connection between academia and industry, the humanistic and the technical, the creative and the practical, are often some of the first to explore and adopt new technologies. In this review essay, I introduce how games and digital technologies can help our students “make” new thing. Understanding how games can link with literary practices, multimodal composition, creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, and more can help researchers in rhetoric and composition make important contributions to our field: Make games with the knowledge of what actually works …