Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"I Think There Is A Place For Small Programs:" Advocating, Implementing, And Sustaining Tpc Programs In Small Us Institutions, Martha Lynn Russell

English Theses & Dissertations

Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) programs in small institutions compose of over a third of all programs in the US, yet this space has been understudied by most scholars. To fill this gap, this dissertation presents findings from one-hour interviews with twenty-six TPC program directors in small US institutions with undergraduate populations of less than six thousand. The results of this dissertation include the ways that small institutions are advocating, implementing, and sustaining their TPC program in unique ways with implications for how any TPC programs regardless of size can learn from these findings.

Seeking Sabbath In Annie Dillard's Holy The Firm, Olivia Grace Dycus

English Theses & Dissertations

Annie Dillard’s third-ever publication, Holy the Firm, asks why an omniscient God allows natural evil to occur. In this deeply poetic and mystical series of essays, Dillard explores the relationship between time, artistry, and God in the face of devastating chaos. This thesis argues that Dillard’s emphasis on the importance of time reflects a Jewish notion of Sabbath as defined by Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel. Dillard offers time and creation as medium through which to commune with God just as Heschel does in his book, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. Heschel defines Sabbath as the coming …

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

Multisensory Virtual Reality Artists And Media Dimensions Toward Immersion: A Framework Of Mediology For Understanding Professional Communication Rhetorics, D’An Knowles Ball

English Theses & Dissertations

Multisensory elements are increasingly being added to virtual reality (VR) environments, allowing for higher levels of immersion for users as well as expanded creative media opportunities for multisensory VR artists. Recognizing multisensory VR as a networked ecology between the designer, the system, and the user, this dissertation addresses a distinct absence of resources on design principles and artistic professional practices specifically for composing multisensory VR environments. In investigating processes of invention, choices, tools, and methods on the parts of the artists, this dissertation fills scholarly gaps across disciplines that tend to focus on systems and tools or the user’s experiences …

Focused On Freedom: Exploring The Potential Of Grading Contracts To Support Writers In The Secondary English Language Arts Classroom, Margaret Mcgregor Fluharty

English Theses & Dissertations

Drawing on qualitative methods, I engaged in a practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to investigate the use of contract grading to promote educational freedom (hooks, 2009; Love, 2020) in the post-secondary writing classroom. In addition, I explored the potential of this practice in the secondary English language arts setting.

To better understand the perspectives of both post-secondary writing instructors and secondary English teachers on the use of grading contracts, I conducted focus groups and engaged in artifact analysis (Billups, 2019). Results showed that post-secondary instructors who utilized grading contracts in their classroom saw changes primarily in their students’ engagement …

Silently Correcting Your Grammar: Responses To Feedback And Adult Learners' Rural Writing Ecosystems, Jessica Marie Kubiak

English Theses & Dissertations

Over a century ago, rhetoricians called on writing instructors in the U.S. to accept and even encourage language diversity among learners. Yet scholars of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies are still advocating for this via arguments for linguistic justice and translingualism, even referring to strict adherence to a single, mainstream standard for language use as a kind of violence. This disconnect between scholarship and practice is evident in the silences surrounding first-year composition language instruction. This dissertation charts that disciplinary disconnect and then describes how adult students at a rural, open-access community college experience first-year composition feedback, with special attention …

Educator Professional Development As Rhetorical Situation, Bethany Leigh Creswell Wilson

English Theses & Dissertations

Teacher effectiveness is recognized as the most prominent in-school influencer of student learning, and professional development (PD) of in-service educators is seen as vital to improving teachers’ effectiveness throughout their careers. Professional development is often studied atheoretically and with a linear view in which PD providers deliver instruction and teachers receive and apply that instruction as it was delivered to them. By casting them as passive, blank-slate receivers and automatic appliers of the PD, this view obscures the complexities of teachers’ role in PD. Examining educator PD through the lens of rhetoric, and viewing the PD experience as a rhetorical …

Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes

English Theses & Dissertations

The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement …

The Human That Is Not Human: Examining The Doppelganger Through David Hume, Brittnea Anne Holland

English Theses & Dissertations

The roots of horror are deeply entangled with the concepts presented through Enlightenment thinkers, especially in terms of the self and what makes a human truly a human; David Hume's essays and discussions on human nature lend themselves easily to the analysis of horror throughout the ages, particularly both in terms of what makes humanity human and in terms of metaphysical and theological concepts--and the rejection of them. This, coupled with Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank’s concepts of the uncanny, allows for the ability to perceive what makes creatures like the Doppelganger everlasting throughout humanity. Though horror as a concept …

The Strong Black Woman ≠ Superwoman: Shattering Stereotypes Of Strength In Black Literature, Tricia Inez Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

That the Black woman must be strong in order to endure the oppression she has been forced to withstand is a double-edged sword that equally contributes to both her dehumanization and willpower to survive. This project interrogates the patterns and characteristics that contribute to the schema of the strong Black woman through the examination of cultural texts foregrounded in biblical scriptures against literature written by prominent Black women through Beyoncé. Specific tropes explored include the jezebel, the mammy, and the sapphire with a conclusion that these harmful and dehumanizing stereotypes have cultivated a fallacious assumption of supernatural strength and resiliency …

Esl To Composition Transitions: Investigating The Differences In Disciplinary Values Among Two-Year College Faculty, Amy M. Flessert

English Theses & Dissertations

In this qualitative methods study, I draw on Paul Kei Matsuda’s 1999 article “Composition Studies and ESL Writing: A Disciplinary Division of Labor” to examine if, more than 20 years after its publication, there is still a significant disciplinary division between ESL writing and first-year college composition. I surveyed writing instructors from both ESL and ENG at Mid-Atlantic Community College (MACC) regarding what they value as “good” writing. I also worked with three faculty members – one in ENG, one in ESL, and a third who teaches in both departments, serving, in this study and the department, as a “bridge” …

Natural History Of Discourse Of Missouri House Bill 1042: Bringing A Critical Perspective To Policy Engagement In Two-Year Contexts, Mary Casey Reid

English Theses & Dissertations

In this autoethnographically-infused natural history of discourse (NHD) (Silverstein and Urban, 1996; Slembrouck, 2001), I use methods from critical discourse studies (CDS) to trace 10 years of changes in “remediation” discourses within a corpus of texts associated with Missouri HB 1042, a piece of legislation passed in 2012 that requires higher education institutions to “replicate best practices in remediation” (CBHE, 2013). After providing national and state context related to HB 1042 and the discourses circulating within the HB 1042 corpus of texts, I describe what I call the “higher ed’s remediation problem” discourse, focusing on three discourse features that I …

Centering Community College Students' Experiences: A Multiple Methods Study Of Multiple Measures For Writing Placement, Nicole L. Hancock

English Theses & Dissertations

Community colleges are trying to reform their placement procedures from use of a single placement test score to a system that collects multiple measures to be used either as a replacement solitary measure or in conjunction with other measures for more accurate placement into writing courses than what occurred with the placement test, which often resulted in disparate impact for students of color. In this study of multiple measures placement assessment for writing courses, I critique several large studies of community college multiple measures assessment for the lack of a community college perspective. The studies largely supported use of high …

A Nexus Of Literate Activity: The Design Of Writing Assignments In The Disciplines, Lauriellen Stankavich

English Theses & Dissertations

Writing plays a critical role in higher education as students are inducted into disciplinary practices through different genres, methodological repertoires and argumentation strategies. In Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives, the instructor serves as an embodied reservoir of disciplinary knowledge and an arbiter of literate practices but most crucially employs the mediating capacities of the writing assignment as a potent pedagogical nexus. In this practice space, the instructor acts as designer of the pedagogical experience—the course as a whole and writing assignments in particular. This study used interviews, survey, and the collection of syllabi and other instructional artifacts to examine …

Fragmentation In The Dual Enrollment Experience: The Importance Of Students’ Self-Perceptions In Dual Enrollment First-Year Composition Students, Sarah Crystal Johnson

English Theses & Dissertations

Dual enrollment has become an embedded aspect of our writing programs yet is still an under-researched area within rhetoric and composition. One reason for this research gap is that many DE students experience their FYC courses on secondary campuses, liminal spaces that are more difficult to access for research. DE students within these spaces experience daily tensions between the collegiate expectations of FYC curriculum and the secondary social contexts in which their DE FYC courses are taught. These unique contextual experiences impact their perceptions of themselves as writers. This research is an attempt to step into this DE research gap …

Reading With Social, Digital Annotation: Encouraging Engaged Critical Reading In A Challenging Age, Miranda L. Egger

English Theses & Dissertations

This design-based research study examines the pedagogical role of social, digital annotation in teaching reading as rhetorical invention, particularly the kind of invention necessary for thoughtful democratic participation in the contemporary discursive era, often described as troubled. In this dissertation study, I deployed a classroom-based intervention meant to challenge how educators in rhetoric and composition/writing studies might directly address the acute and exigent discursive struggle in the first-year composition classroom. This study ultimately finds that social, digital annotation invites significant shifts in students’ reading habits, in that Hypothes.is-based annotations yielded a far more complex, multifaceted set of reading skills, behaviors, …

“Finding A Balance”: User, Reader, And Learner Functions In First-Year Composition Textbook Engagement, Travis Vincent Holt

English Theses & Dissertations

This qualitative, multiple participant case study investigates the phenomenon of student textbook engagement in a First-Year Composition course at a private, evangelical four-year university. Shifting away from a dominant history where textbooks served as the primary object of study (Besser et al., 1999; Carr, Carr, & Schultz, 2005; Colby, 2013; Connors, 1987; Edwards, 1984; Faigley, 1992; Gale & Gale, 1999; Hawhee, 1999; Issitt, 2004; Miles, 2000; Ohmann, 1979; Rendleman, 2009, 2011; Welch, 1987), I answered calls (Colby, 2013; Harris, 2012; Rendleman, 2009, 2011) to examine engagement with textbooks in context. Additionally, scholars have dominated discussions of textbooks; thus, the student …

Addressing Public Perceptions About Cell-Based Meat And Cellular Agriculture Through Metaphors, Yvette Emma Hubbard

English Theses & Dissertations

Today’s food movement places organic, holistic, and natural foods as priority. The idea aims for better human health, a farm-to-table community, and environmental sustainability. Soon a new meat alternative will become part of the ongoing food movement. What is it? Cell-based protein. It is a protein alternative to livestock protein. It is real protein from a real breathing animal. Cell-based beef for example is grown in a lab with cells from a living cow that does not have to die or be slaughtered. It is destined to become the new protein architecture on the horizon. Parts of this paper are …

The Spooky Vein: The Reparative Gothic-Modern In The Works Of Richard A.W. Hughes, Corwin R. Baden

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dual nature of Richard A.W. Hughes as a marginalized Gothicist and modernist. This duality facilitated the development of the author’s reparative vision for a 20th-century world traumatized by planetary war. The present study utilizes close readings—both surface and symptomatic—combined with archival research to assert that Hughes fashions this reparative imperative consistently across his corpus: in his short stories, poems, novels, stage plays, and screenplays. In his short stories, this vision includes an embrace of the Stranger, a shadowy Gothic figure whose possessions, power, difference, and familiarity lead the human subject from contestation, through representation, and toward …

Building Bridges In First-Year Composition: Investigating The Support Of Threshold Concepts In Writing-Related Transfer Across The Curriculum, Elise Antoinette Green

English Theses & Dissertations

Drawing on a multiple-case, embedded design (Yin, 2018), I highlight the in-depth differences and similarities that exist across students’ experiences in first-year composition (FYC), looking specifically at whether learners used genre and rhetorical situation as threshold concepts to transfer writing-related knowledge and skills across the curriculum. I designed and conducted this research by drawing on theories of learning transfer (Perkins & Salomon, 1988; 1989; 1992; Salomon & Perkins, 1989), writing-related transfer (Moore, 2017; Nowacek, 2011; Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014; Yancey et al., 2019), and threshold concepts (Meyer & Land, 2006). Across this study, I collected data as I facilitated …

On Being Seen Or For Those Who Break Like Me, Shanisha K. Branch

English Theses & Dissertations

The nature of truly seeing is something I’ve had a hard time grappling with. If you understand the difficultly of seeing and wanting others to see you that same, then these pages are for you.

Rescripting Father-Daughter Dynamics: New Masculinities And Relational Possibilities In Post-Apocalyptic Video Games, Sarah Mortazavi Brooks

English Theses & Dissertations

The Last of Us and The Walking Dead video games deploy father-daughter relationship pairings between their main characters in ways that disrupt the hegemonic patriarchal understandings of those very roles, though in different ways. The Last of Us and The Walking Dead utilize paternal mentorship in ways that subvert patriarchal ideology’s established patterns for gendered behavior through role-switching and alternative models of masculine care respectively. Where video games too often still cater to an audience that is heterosexual, white, and male, these games feature narratives that challenge the heteropatriarchal messaging common to this medium. The Last of Us does this …

Concept Maps As Sites Of Rhetorical Invention: Teaching The Creative Act Of Synthesis As A Cognitive Process, Amy Lee Marie Locklear

English Theses & Dissertations

Synthesis is one of the most cognitively demanding practices novice writers must undertake, and research demonstrates that first-year students’ synthesis writing practices result in more knowledge telling rather than knowledge creation and transforming. Pedagogies used to teach synthesis often focus on developing text-building strategies but lack explicit instruction on the more cognitively demanding conceptualizing behavior. To explore alternative pedagogies and heuristics, this study looks beyond composition scholarship to incorporate studies in neuroeducation and rhetoric to define synthesis as an ongoing, generative act of cognitive invention, effectively shifting pedagogical focus from text-centered product to student-centered cognitive processes that inform development of …

Holy Stitches Batman, Or, Performative Villainy In Gothic/Am, A. Luxx Mishou

English Theses & Dissertations

Holy Stitches, Batman, or, Performative Villainy in Gothic/am is an interdisciplinary examination of gothic affect and deviant fashion in the narrative construction of villainy. It asks not just what a villain looks like, but what it means to look like a villain. A villain is a character who consciously and purposefully deviates from standards of normativity in order to pursue their own, often criminal, interests. The signifier of “villain” articulates a different purpose – an adversarial relationship with normativity that guides personal identification. Not exceptional to a gendered cultural system, they are informed by the societies in which they operate, …

Climate Change Games As Boundary Objects: Fostering Dialogic Communication Within Stakeholder Engagement, Megan L. Mckittrick

English Theses & Dissertations

Rising waters and the increasing devastation of flood events make coastal resilience a significant issue in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, particularly in the city of Norfolk. Enhancing resilience requires ongoing stakeholder engagement designed to invite dialogue while encouraging cross-jurisdictional collaboration and comprehensive problem-solving. Climate change games have been employed to support these endeavors. This dissertation provides a response to the following research questions: 1) What is the origin of the climate change game genre? 2) Why are key stakeholders in coastal resilience using climate change games? And 3) how do these games operate for these key stakeholders? To …

Critical Language Awareness Pedagogy In First-Year Composition: A Design-Based Research Study, Megan Michelle Weaver

English Theses & Dissertations

In this design-based research (DBR) study, I collaborated with two first-year composition (FYC) instructors in designing and implementing Critical Language Awareness (CLA) pedagogy to promote students’ linguistic consciousness while strengthening and enhancing their postsecondary writing skills. I designed and implemented this study by drawing on a critical theory of language, informed by literature on language ideologies (Silverstein, 1979; Irvine & Gal, 2000; Kroskrity, 2010) and raciolinguistics (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Alim, 2016), and a critical theory of pedagogy, informed by literature on critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970, 1973; Giroux, 2011) and critical race pedagogy (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Lynn, 1999). After …

A Rhetorical Frame Analysis Of Palestinian-Led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (Bds) Movement Discourse, Jennifer Megan Hitchcock

English Theses & Dissertations

This rhetorical frame analysis uses a combination of rhetorical theory and frame analysis to examine the rhetorical framing strategies of the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. This project investigates how both official and vernacular BDS activist-rhetors frame the movement and their goals, how they frame their responses to evolving rhetorical situations and challenges, how they tailor these frames for different audiences, and how resonant these frames are likely to be for targeted audiences. The results of this study suggest that BDS activist-rhetors typically frame the BDS movement as a nonviolent movement to achieve Palestinian rights and hold Israel …

Terrorists, Zombies, And Robots: The Political Unconscious, Thematics, And Affectual Structures Of The Post-9/11 American Fear Narrative, Nathanael J. Cloyd

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines the post-9/11 American fear narrative across media and genre. First, it proposes the concepts of the fear narrative, the primary fear theme, and the secondary fear theme. Second, it proposes that the fear narrative has a long tradition in American culture, in which its themes have adapted and evolved in historically sedimented layers of development. Third, it proposes that American fear themes change depending on its historical context of production, its cultural regime, its genre, and the form of media in which it is expressed. To help uncover the political unconsciousness of the American fear narrative, it …

Students At A Crossroads: Ta Development Across Pedagogical And Curricular Contexts, Cassandra Ann Book

English Theses & Dissertations

A longstanding question in rhetoric and composition has been how to best educate composition graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs). Although many assume that writing centers are useful spaces for TAs to practice pedagogy and learn about writing processes in preparation for classroom teaching, recent scholarship complicates the claim that transfer from writing centers and/or practicums into composition classrooms is straightforward. Moreover, no study fully considers how the role of the writing center and teaching writing in English MA programs intersects with students’ development as teachers, writers, and scholars. This project brings together several strands of scholarship—the transferability of writing center experience …

What We Do Not Perceive When We Perceive It, Hannah Jane Trammell

English Theses & Dissertations

The thesis herein attempts to traverse, overcome, and, ultimately subsume back into the conventions of such genres as science-fiction, fabulism, surrealism, romance, horror, and speculative fiction. The primary tool used for this purpose is a great bag of hot, sparking meat caught between two ears and a thick skull. A few notebooks, pens, and a laptop might also have helped in this pursuit. The stories and poems contained herein are works of fiction inspired by non-fictional systems of feeling. Using all the tools given to me by my professors and the craft and theory books I read during my coursework …