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Critical Affects: Laughter As Inquiry In First-Year Writing Courses, Nicholas James Learned

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

CRITICAL AFFECTS: LAUGHTER AS INQUIRY IN FIRST-YEAR WRITING COURSES

by

Nicholas J. Learned

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015

Under the Supervision of Professor Dennis Lynch

In this dissertation, I work to rethink our current approaches to teaching critical thinking and writing in attempt to collapse the distance between the critical/rhetorical methods we teach in Rhetoric and Composition and the ways students interact rhetorically in their everyday lives. I am prompted to this line of inquiry by a problem I note in both theory and practice: the critical methods we teach in our writing courses rarely translate to real-world behaviors, …

Materiality, Craft, Identity, And Embodiment: Reworking Digital Writing Pedagogy, Kristin Prins

Theses and Dissertations

Too often in Rhetoric and Composition, multimodal writing (an expansive practice of opening up the media and modes with which writers might work) is reduced to digital writing. “Reworking Digital Writing” argues that the opportunities and insights of digital writing should encourage us to turn our attention to all kinds of nondigital materials that have not traditionally been considered part of composing—including the materials that are already familiar to crafters and do-it-yourselfers (DIYers). Further, I argue that the material, technical, rhetorical, economic, and social dimensions of DIY craft provide a coherent framework for teaching multimodal writing in ways that encourage …