Education Commons^™

A Qualitative Study Of Rural School Returners' Journeys To Secondary Credential Completion, Brenda Elaine Swan Gammon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dropping out of school has a negative impact on an individual’s life and a person’s ability to contribute to the country’s society and economy. Returning to schooling and obtaining a diploma or equivalent is fraught with obstacles. Many people try several times to complete the degree; fewer succeed. The plight of rural students including rural school returners is often overlooked because their problems are overshadowed by the problems of urban areas.

The purpose of this qualitative study, involving three extensive interviews of five rural school returners, was to build upon existing research on high school dropouts through the exploration of …

A Promising Candidate: An Exploration Of Graduate Matriculation Genres, Megan D. Bishop Gervais

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study emerges from the author’s personal experience of interacting with unfamiliar genres as she prepared her application for a graduate program in English. In a liminal space between graduating from her undergraduate program and applying for admission to a graduate program, her interaction with graduate admission genres was fraught with tension and a lack of the assumed knowledge that would inform her on how to strategically interact with these genres. This lack of tacit knowledge and absence of scaffolding lead her to compose a “statement of purpose” that did not adequately demonstrate that she was a “promising” graduate student, …