Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Supporting Emotion Work In The Writing Center: Harnessing Shared Investments Between Consultants And Therapeutic Counselors, Nora Harris

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Because of the affective nature of writing pedagogy, writing center consultants regularly perform emotional labor to navigate writers’ emotions as well as their own. This labor is deeply generative in writers’ development. But it also takes an intellectual and emotional toll on writing consultants that often goes unnoticed and therefore undervalued and unsupported. The first step toward properly valuing consultants’ emotional labor is to name the ways it manifests in writing center work. In this thesis, I present a study in which I analyze writing consultants’ narratives of their emotional labor and start to map out the emotional dimensions of …

Critical Introduction: Responsibility And Representation & Introduction To All My Mother’S Lovers, Ilana Masad

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This critical component of the creative thesis All My Mother’s Lovers explores the question of fiction writers’ responsibility to themselves, their work, and their readers in the age of social media and easy access of readers to writers and vice versa. Using two examples of recent online controversies, this piece explores the varying ways in which readers respond to writers and writers to readers and rhetorically analyzes the responses of those in positions of power (writers, publishers) as well as the cultural contexts from within which they respond. It then draws conclusions as to the trajectory of these two controversies, …

Rhetoric As Inquiry: Personal Writing And Academic Success In The English Classroom, Erica E. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Holistic and critical pedagogy, an approach to learning and teaching, integrates the everyday realities students live, with the systemic and institutional objectives of education itself. Working with theories from composition, rhetoric, feminist studies, and cognitive psychology from a teacher-researcher perspective, this dissertation explores and theorizes holistic, critical pedagogy within the composition classroom while outlining the use of personal writing as a means to develop critical consciousness. Student study participants kept “Inquiry Notebooks,” semester-long personal writing projects that served as receptacles for practical and theoretical engagement with a variety of texts and ideas, then interviewed after the course to discuss their …

Using Embedded Institutes As Professional Development To Create A Culture Of Writing Excellence, Melanie K. Farber

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following thesis addresses the problem of creating a culture of writing excellence at a large, urban school. I will show how the Embedded Institute model helped our school to reconsider our professional development model and to create writing leaders across the content areas. The thesis will make the argument for something larger than test scores through qualitative feedback from teacher participants.

Adviser: Robert Brooke

Disciplinary Permeations: Complicating The "Public" And The "Private" Dualism In Composition And Rhetoric, Erica E. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As Composition and Rhetoric rose in disciplinary status and academic legitimacy the discourse practice of negation, the positioning of texts in oppositional binaries that set the “new” over the “old,” the “novel” over the “familiar,” became embedded in academic tradition, seeming to be an inherited part of scholarship instead of an individual’s rhetorical choice and deliberate ethos strategy. Negation, when one idea or set of ideas constructed by another is critiqued, advocated, and/or redeveloped by another scholar, is a discourse practice firmly established in the Rhetorical Tradition as part of Socratic dialogues, reappears in “modern rhetoric”, and remains today as …