Education Commons^™

State Funding Unfair To Traditional Schools, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

The present budget crisis in Pennsylvania has brought many lingering tensions to bear as school districts scramble to pay their bills without any support from the state. Notably, there has been a lot of talk about holding back payments to charter schools, which naturally sparks controversy. In order to make sense of the situation - and in order to understand the passionate debate which surrounds it - it's worthwhile to know something about the history, theory, and funding of charter schools. [excerpt]

Familiar Strangers: International Students In The U.S. Composition Course, Elena Lawrick, Fatima Esseili

English Faculty Publications

This chapter presents selected findings from our study of a well-established ESL writing program at a U.S. university with a large population of international undergraduate students. The study was conducted in all 13 writing sections. The instruments included demographic data from university registrars; one instructor survey, administered at the end of the semester; and two student surveys, one administered at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. The instructor survey response rate was 100% (13 teachers); the student survey response rates were 82.5% (161 students) and 88% (171 students), respectively.

The reported findings inform five areas: an …

Student-Centered, Interactive Teaching Of The Anglo-Saxon Cult Of The Cross, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

Although most Anglo-Saxonists deal with Old English texts and contexts as a matter of course in our research agendas, many of us teach relatively few specialized courses focused on our areas of expertise to highly-trained students; thus, many Old English texts and objects which are commonplace in our research lives can seem arcane and esoteric to a great many of our students. This article proposes to confront this gap, to suggest some ways of teaching a few potentially obscure texts and artifacts to undergrads, to offer some guidance about uses of technology in this endeavor, and to help fellow teachers …

Unwrapping The Comfort Of Sameness With Spanish Immersion Elementary School, Christin N. Taylor

English Faculty Publications

I watched my 6-year-old hover around the periphery of the table, unable to find somewhere to sit. The cafeteria was a cacophony of little voices, Spanish and English, tumbling over each other, her classmates sitting close and waiting to be dismissed to homeroom.

I couldn’t help but notice how different Noelle looked from most of the children, with her liquid blond hair and saucerlike blue eyes. [excerpt]

Extending An Alternative: Writing Centers And Curricular Change, Joe Essid

English Faculty Publications

When our Writing Center staked its reputation and perhaps its survival on a proposal to change our first-year curriculum, we entered territory that would have been unthinkable to those in our field a few decades ago. Writing center directors and peer tutors may not like it, but the climate now is very different from the salad days of the 1980s, when scholars such as Tilly and John Warnock argued “it is probably a mistake for centers to seek integration into the established institution” (22). In both the United States and EU nations, we face curricular change driven by emerging technologies, …

A Practice-Oriented Definition Of Post-Process Second Language Writing Theory, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

ENGLISH:

This article is a synthesis of the scholarly literature on the post-process approach to teaching second language (L2) writing, particularly college and university composition in English as an additional language. This synthesis aims to offer a definition of post-process L2 writing that can readily lend itself to practice and be more accessible to practitioners. All the publications that had either substantially or marginally discussed post-process theory since 1990 were systematically reviewed in order to answer the following question: What is a definition of post-process L2 writing theory that can readily lend itself to pedagogy and actual practice for helping …

Reading Poetry In Standardized Efl Test Preparation To Increase Meaningful Literacy Engagement, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

This article reports the process of an action research project on the impact of reading poetry on student literacy engagement in an EFL standardized test preparation course. This research project was conducted in a class of eight female Iranian adult professionals preparing for the First Certificate of English (FCE) examination, provided by Cambridge English Language Assessment. Standardized tests are believed to narrow the curriculum, to reduce emphasis on complex thinking, and to have “washback” effect on the quality of teaching. In this project, in order to improve the quality of the students’ literacy engagement two particular measures were taken. In …

The Historical Formation Of Academic Identities: Rhetoric And Composition, Discourse And Writing, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) This talk originated in my work as a consultant at the University of Winnipeg, where I spent six weeks on a Fulbright Specialist grant in Spring 2011. I was invited to advise the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Communications on its plans for “program architecture renewal,” which included critically assessing its programs, articulating levels of the curriculum, and charting future directions for the department. The grant had larger goals as well, charging me to study the development of writing and rhetorical studies in Canada as an emerging field seeking both definition and visibility. The Winnipeg faculty hoped that …

Essay Writing Instructional Lexicon And Semantic Confusion, Amir Kalan

English Faculty Publications

“Introduction,” “body,” and “conclusion” are the most accessible words in the instructional lexicon for ESL writing teachers when they want to describe the structure of a typical five-paragraph persuasive or argumentative essay or its shorter variations for standardized tests such as TOEFL and IELTS. They are frequently employed to refer to the three tiers of the hamburger essay in textbooks, on classroom boards, and in YouTube tutorials.

Not surprisingly, English learners also might give you the same words if asked what the main components of an essay are. Like ESL teachers, students usually use the same terms or their equivalents …

The Icelandic Sagas As A Subject For Undergraduate Study, John P. Sexton

English Faculty Publications

While medieval studies has dramatically expanded its scope and the texts taught as part of its subject over the past few decades, the study of Icelandic saga literature is still a fringe discipline, particularly in North American academe. Rarer still is undergraduate exposure to the sagas, despite their appeal as texts and the rich possibilities they offer to students trained in Anglo-Saxon literature (or at least Beowulf) and familiar with Norse myth and legend through Tolkien or Marvel comics. The insular nature of the culture from which the literature springs is a contributing factor, of course—there is the undeniable …

A Primer On Copyright And Fair Use, Ann E. Biswas, Charles J. Russo

English Faculty Publications

One student creates a video for class using a Lady Gaga song. Another puts together a PowerPoint presentation about the Vietnam War using images she found online. A third student adds a link to a YouTube video in a blog post for an English class. One teacher photocopies and distributes articles from a national newspaper. Another teacher records a television documentary at home and shows it to her class.

Did those students and teachers violate copyright law? The complex, evolving laws governing copyright and fair use are muddied by the rapid growth and use of technology in schools, yet it's …

Listening For The Squeaky Wheel: Designing Distance Writing Program Assessment, Virginia M. Tucker

English Faculty Publications

Distance writing programs still struggle with assessment strategies that can evaluate student writing as well as their ability to communicate about that writing with peers at a distance. This article uses Kim, Smith and Maeng's 2008 distance education program assessment scheme to evaluate a single distance writing program at Old Dominion University. The program's specific assessment needs include the ability to determine how well students are developing expert insider prose and working together as a virtual community. Kim, Smith and Maeng's assessment scheme was applied to six courses within the writing program, revealing that programmatic assessment weaknesses included providing varied …

Low-Stakes, Reflective Writing: Moving Students Into Their Professional Fields, Joyce Neff, Garrett J. Mcauliffe, Carl Whithaus, Nial P. Quinlan

English Faculty Publications

This study examines low-stakes, written commentaries from a graduate counseling course to better understand the role writing plays in the transition from being a student to becoming a professional practitioner. The cross disciplinary research team used methods from Grounded Theory to analyze 60 commentaries and found that: (1) low-stakes, reflective writing revealed changes in self-awareness from Situational Self-Knowledge to Pattern Self-Knowledge (Weinstein & Alschuler, 1985); (2) low-stakes writing provided evidence of students connecting personally to learning and then connecting learning to professional practice; and (3) low-stakes writing encouraged the instructor to make mid-course adjustments to his teaching methods. This study …

Education, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

In both Keywords (Williams 1983a) and New Keywords (Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris 2005), "education" (Keywords has "educate") is primarily an institutional practice, which, after the late eighteenth century, is increasingly formalized and universalized in Western countries. Bearing the twin senses of "to lead forth" (from the Latin educare) and "to bring up" (from the Latin educare), "education" appears chiefly as an action practiced by adults on children. The Oxford English Dictionary thus defines the terms as "the systematic instruction, schooling, or training given to the young in preparation for the work of life."

Building A Collaborative Online Literary Experience, Joe Essid, Fran Wilde

English Faculty Publications

Key Takeaways

-Educators and students collaborated in constructing an immersive literary experience at the University of Richmond and then reenacted the narrative as a team.

-Considerable planning goes into such simulations to make them effective collaboration spaces.

-In creating a simulation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, a team of distributed groups negotiated different approaches to believably embody Poe's characters and period.

-Despite limitations in the software and the planning process during and after a beta test, students experienced Poe's story in a new and rewarding way.

Effective virtual simulations can embed participants in imaginary …

Representations Of Self In Reflection Essays Of Philippine University Students, Isabel Pefianco Martin

English Faculty Publications

In the Philippines, there are few, if any, studies of student compositions that investigate the use of language as an effective, efficient, and creative means of expressing the self. This study is an attempt to contribute to knowledge about student writing in the Philippines. In particular, the study aims to describe the various ways freshman students from a private university in Manila represent themselves in their reflection essays, a writing task required in the core humanities courses of the university. Two sets of compositions, one written in the English language and another in the Filipino language, are analyzed for ways …

Liminal Practice In A Maturing Writing Department, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

[First Paragraph]

In Spring 2011 I was awarded a Fulbright Specialist Grant to "consult, collaborate, and inform" on the future of the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg, located in the city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. The Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications department (hereafter, RWC) was a pioneer in writing instruction in Canada, where it became the first unit to establish itself independently as a department with a full-‐time faculty committed to both teaching and scholarship in writing and rhetoric. It remains a rare phenomenon on the Canadian higher education scene, where studies …

Using Facebook To Teach Rhetorical Analysis, Jane Fife

English Faculty Publications

The attraction of Facebook is a puzzle to many people over the age of thirty five, and that includes most college faculty. Yet students confess to spending significant amounts of time on Facebook, sometimes hours a day. If you teach in a computer classroom, you have probably observed students using Facebook when you walk in the room. Literacy practices that fall outside the realm of traditional academic writing, like Facebook, can easily be seen as a threat to print literacy by teachers, especially when they sneak into the classroom uninvited as students check their Facebook profiles instead of participating in …

Making The Case For Disciplinarity In Rhetoric, Composition, And Writing Studies: The Visibility Project, Louise Weatherbee Phelps, John M. Ackerman

English Faculty Publications

In the Visibility Project, professional organizations have worked to gain recognition for the disciplinarity of writing and rhetoric studies through representation of the field in the information codes and databases of higher education. We report success in two important cases: recognition as an "emerging field" in the National Research Council's taxonomy of research disciplines; and the assignment of a code series to rhetoric and composition/writing studies in the federal Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP). We analyze the rhetorical strategies and implications of each case and call for continuing efforts to develop and implement a "digital strategy" for handling data about …

Wiki-Hacking: Opening Up The Academy With Wikipedia, Adrianne Wadewitz, Anne Ellen Geller, Jon Beasley-Murray

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Praise Of The Saints: Introducing Medieval Hagiography Into The British Literature Survey, John P. Sexton

English Faculty Publications

Despite increased interest in hagiographic writing among scholars of early literature in the last few decades, serious study of saints’ lives in the undergraduate classroom remains rare. To some degree, this is a result of poor representation in the leading anthologies,^[1]but another contributing factor has been the perception of a distinction between hagiographic and other medieval writing it terms of genre or of literary value. Such distinctions, however, are modern inventions, and do not accurately reflect the medieval reader or writer’s view. Nor is the inclusion of the literature alongside the expected “great works” difficult or jarring; a …

Learning About Scholarship In Action In Concept And Practice, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph] In her inaugural year (2005), Chancellor Nancy Cantor announced her vision of Syracuse University as a campus that would be deeply engaged with the world, in activities and partnerships with communities that she named "scholarship in action." Recognizing the difficulty of fitting such public or community-engaged scholarship into the traditional framework for defining and evaluating faculty work, she called on the Academic Affairs Committee of the Senate (AAC) to study the issues related to implementing this vision. The Committee responded to this request by undertaking in Spring, 2005 a study of scholarship of action both as a concept …

Teach The Children: Education And Knowledge In Recent Children's Fantasy, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

This essay is an investigation into how learning is portrayed in children's books. It starts from two premises: first, that at least one origin of children's literature is in didacticism, and that learning and pedagogy continue to be important in much of the literature we provide for children today. Thus, for example, David Rudd claims that most histories of children's literature on "the tension between instruction and entertainment," and that the genre as we know it develops within, among other things, "an educational system promoting literacy" (29, 34). Seth Lerer's recent Children's Literature: A Reader's History similarly traces the origins …

Bringing "Abnormal" Discourse Into The Classroom, Virginia M. Tucker

English Faculty Publications

Assuming student discourse is prone to error, teachers have long implemented rules that ensure "safe" discourse, particularly in composition instruction. My fifth grade teacher taught me to place a comma in a sentence whenever I take a breath rather than teaching me the language of comma rules. To my dismay, many of my first-year composition students raise their hands in agreement that they too have been taught to place a comma wherever their lungs suggest. These students learn to call independent clauses a complete sentence, and to them an ellipsis is merely “dot, dot, dot.” In an attempt to reach …

Using The Novel To Teach Multiculturalism, Michelle Loris

English Faculty Publications

Description of a fourteen week course taught by Michelle Loris, professor of English at Sacred Heart University. The course, titled Recent Ethnic American Fictions, introduced students to several concepts from contemporary literary theory. The theories included New Criticism, Deconstruction, Cultural Studies, New Historicism, and Feminist Theory. The assumption was that these concepts would give students the tools to become critical readers, which would then provide them with a deeper understanding of these multicultural novels and their particular cultural contexts. For a semester, reading and thinking about these multicultural novels engaged and challenged the students' assumptions about themselves and the America …

Composing Identity In Online Instructional Contexts, Kevin Eric Depew

English Faculty Publications

As writing instruction moves from the defined spatial and temporal parameters of the traditional classroom to various degrees of online interaction—from explanatory e-mails to courseware mediated distance education—instructors have had to reconceptualize how they identify themselves to their student audience. While many instructors have tried to translate their face-to-face strategies to the digital medium with disparate degrees of success, others understand the different parameters digital media offer and see new opportunities for literally composing their instructional identity. This contribution will examine the strategies instructors have used to compose their identities with computer-mediated communications and propose suggestions for negotiating this process.

These - Are - The "Breaks": A Roundtable Discussion On Teaching The Post-Soul Aesthetic, Bertram D. Ashe, Crystal Anderson, Mark Anthony Neal, Evie Shockley, Alexander Weheliye

English Faculty Publications

We met at Duke University - mid-summer, in the mid Atlantic, at mid-campus - to talk about teaching courses that focused on the post-soul aesthetic. We met outside the John Hope Franklin Center, and soon enough we five youngish black professors were walking a hallway towards a conference room near the African and African American Studies program. Not at all surprisingly, the walls of the hallway were lined with framed photographs of the esteemed John Hope Franklin at various stages throughout his long and storied career. For me, given the topic I was about to raise among these professional colleagues, …

Integrating The Humanities And Sciences: The Human Journey: Sacred Heart University's Common Core, Michelle Loris Ph.D., Nicole Cauvin, Kathryn Lafontana

English Faculty Publications

One way to respond to the crisis in the humanities is to integrate learning for our students. In fact one of higher education's greatest challenges today is for faculty to develop ways to integrate knowledge and learning across the disiciplines. This essay describes a common core curriculum, THE HUMAN JOURNEY, which engages students in an integrated, common, and coherent understanding of the humanities,arts, and sciences, and the Catholic intellectual tradition framed by four enduring questions of human meaning and value. THE HUMAN JOURNEY is a five course sequence including literature, history, the social and natural sciences, and religious studies and …

Working For The Clampdown? Being Crafty At Managed Universities, Joe Essid

English Faculty Publications

Last fall I found myself not only our school’s Writing Center Director but also its Writing Program Administrator. At the same time, a reminder of my wastrel youth appeared: the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Clash’s London Calling.

The two events are connected. On the one hand, it is delightful to hear people again discuss the anthems of the punk-rock era. More than at any time since the 1970s, we need a little more defiance against authority, including the transformation of everything into a saleable commodity. On the other hand, the very way in which London Calling appeared, slickly packaged …

Beyond 'Hot Lips' And 'Big Nurse': Creative Writing And Nursing, Sandra Young

English Faculty Publications

This essay describes a special topics creative writing course designed for nursing students, and argues that creative writing strategies work to improve nurses' compositional skills. Also discussed are other potential benefits from creatively writing patients' lives, notably, the blending of arts and sciences, and the ways in which medical schools are encouraging their students to study the humanities, especially literature and creative writing. The essay includes student creative writing samples.

The essay also discusses the depiction of nurses in popular culture. M*A*S*H*, Richard Hooker’s black comedy about the antics of doctors and nurses during the Korean War, gave us “Hot …