English Language and Literature Commons^™

Social Justice Across The Curriculum: Research-Based Course Design, Rebecca Walton, Jared Sterling Colton, Rikki Kae Wheatley-Boxx, Krista Gurko

English Faculty Publications

This Programmatic Showcase describes why and how Utah State University redesigned our Technical Communication and Rhetoric program to incorporate considerations of social justice across the curriculum. After describing our programmatic vision, we describe in detail the design of a pedagogical study informing our curricular redesign and then share strategies for course design and university-community partnerships. The course-design strategies include 1) explicitly framing courses around broad issues of social justice, 2) incorporating hands-on practice to connect conceptions of social justice to professional practices, and 3) facilitating opportunities for both students and clients to reflect upon these connections. The strategies for facilitating …

Lost In Translation: The Immigration To Academia And Implementing Critical Thought, Stacie Denetsosie

Writing Center Analysis Papers

Denetsosie compares her entry-level English students to immigrants. New to the requirements of academia, these students need practice acclimating to academic culture. Denetsosie recommends writing centers and composition classes as low-stakes environments where students can practice their new voice. Tutors and teachers can make this transition easier by asking open-ended questions, encouraging students to use their own words, and teaching students to think critically.

Transformations Of Free Movement: Syrian Refugee Rights Within Neoliberal Signal Territories, Jordan Hayes

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Alongside representations of the fractious civil conflict in Syria, our media frequently depict victims of forced displacement using their smartphones. In October 2015, Time published images of refugees taking selfies after making the journey from the Turkish coast to Lesbos, Greece. These images show refugees using mobile devices to enjoy human rights like the freedoms of expression and movement. Absent is the state sanction implied by UN compacts such as the 1951 Refugee Convention.

This paper situates these representations, recent scholarship, and my own fieldwork with Syrian refugees sheltering in the Kurdish Region of Iraq within an analysis of human …

Indigenous Rights In The Trump Era, Tereza M. Szeghi

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

This paper examines the ways in which the Dakota Access Pipeline and the related protests were divergently covered in mainstream versus alternative news sources and what this divergent coverage suggests about the current status of American Indian affairs and the role of American Indians in the U.S. cultural imaginary. Moreover, the paper will address the status of American Indian tribal sovereignty in the Trump era more broadly, with particular focus on American Indians' treaty-related rights to self-determination in the use of their lands.

Analyzing Wants Versus Needs In The Writing Center, Jessica Griffeth

Writing Center Analysis Papers

Last year, as I was sitting in my living room doing my homework, my sister, Abby, started telling me about her experience in the Writing Center. She was encouraged from her visit because of the praise she had received, and she was excited to implement the advice she was given. However, when Abby got her grade for the paper, she was devastated. The grade she received was unacceptable, and she was confused. She went to the Writing Center, and shouldn’t applying the few suggestions she was given help her get an A? The tutor gave Abby some suggestions laced with …

“Whatever Happened With That Student?”: How To Measure Our Success As A Tutor And Teacher, Rachel Ross

Writing Center Analysis Papers

Through her experience as a peer tutor and teacher, Ross finds success as a tutor and teacher cannot be entirely defined by the student. Ross shares an impactful tutoring session that ultimately led to inaction on the student's part. In reflecting on this tutoring appointment, she chooses to focus on the good that happened during her interaction with the student instead of the end result. Ross ultimately defines success as growth in process.

Engaging In The Drafting Process: The Key To A Student’S Writing Success, Camila Sanabria

Writing Center Analysis Papers

In comparing her tutoring and teaching experiences, Sanabria discovers the value of drafting and editing. She believes success in tutoring comes from engagement early in the writing process. While she as a teacher cannot be heavily involved in every step of her students' writing process, she can allow for more time and focus in the early stages of brainstorming through revision.

Adaption Reaction, Michelle Jones

Writing Center Analysis Papers

Jones identifies adaptability as a fundamental aspect of tutoring and teaching success. Teachers and tutors who are genuinely invested in students find themselves in unconventional discussions. Being adaptable in these off - script situations leads to better listening and understanding.

Cold Turkey Belongs On The Dinner Table: How Tutors Can Warm Up To New Tutoring Sessions, Terri Wesemann

Writing Center Analysis Papers

While tutors may feel anxiety towards the unknown of tutoring sessions, Wesemann suggests they appreciate the training they received before becoming tutors. Tutors bring experiences and resources to the job that help them connect with students and give them good feedback. Wesemann also suggests tutors share tutoring experiences with one another to validate concerns, ask questions, share solutions, and practice new strategies.

Getting To Know You, Emily Withers

Writing Center Analysis Papers

Unless students feel comfortable with their peer tutor and teachers, they rarely open up enough to learn. Withers suggests behavior problems--especially passivity-- can be avoided when teachers, tutors, and students feel respect for one another. She suggests questioning and reflecting as two tools to establish open communication.

A Folklorist's Touch, Daisy Ahlstone

Writing Center Analysis Papers

Ahlstone uses folklorist questioning strategies to make the most of her short time with her students and writing center tutees. She suggests asking open-ended, contextualizing, environmental genre, and specific open-ended questions to help students open up and think critically.

Three Powerful Tools For Teaching And Tutoring, Chris Davis

Writing Center Analysis Papers

Though initially perplexed by the writing center tutor requirements for graduate students, Chris Davis found tutoring beneficial to his teaching. He identifies questioning techniques, the inverted triangle of focus, and reading aloud as three of the most beneficial crossovers between peer tutoring and teaching. His essay gives specific examples of how these techniques have helped him in both tutoring and teaching.

Open Humanities: Strategies For Creating Open Access Course Materials, John Venecek, Christian Beck, John Raible, Sarah A. Norris, Lily Flick

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

As textbook affordability and access to information become important topics on university campuses and within the population more generally, finding ways to decrease book costs in a humanities classroom while providing the best possible resources for students emerges as a multi-disciplinary strategy that requires cooperation across campus. Open Access texts are a way to offer content for free, but humanities assembling this type of text in the humanities is often restricted by copyright and intellectual property. Utilizing materials found in public domain or with a Creative Commons license, however, provides an opportunity to create Open Access texts. In spring 2016, …

Hawthorne: Heavy Handed?, Natalie Dueker

Scholars Week

Abstract

This paper will take a formalist approach and focus on the symbolism in numerous works by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The paper will not only discuss in detail Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, but will also discuss a select few of Hawthorne’s short stories such as “The Birthmark,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “The Minister’s Black Veil.” This paper will cover the symbolism in the short stories and the novel, how those symbols affect or relate to the characters and how they affect or alter the story as a whole. Common symbolism found throughout Hawthorne’s …

I Know You Are, But What Am I? Hawthorne's Projection Within The Minister's Black Veil, Coral Serrano

Scholars Week

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Minister’s Black Veil” has been analyzed from various perspectives, but thus far in the published literature, very few have examined this work using psychoanalytic criticism. It is even more rare to find research over “The Minister’s Black Veil” addressing the use of psychological projection. Through the character of Mr. Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Hawthorne projects his difficulties publicly expressing his criticism and opinion of religion because of the overshadowing actions of his forefathers. Evidence of this is laced within the short story: references to mental illness, the connotations of adjectives and other words …

Emily Dickinson's Funeral And The Paradox Of Literary Fame, Paul Crumbley

English Faculty Publications

In the months preceding her death on May 15, 1886, Emily Dickinson requested that Emily Brontë's poem "No coward soul is mine" be read at her funeral, thereby enlisting Brontë's defiant declaration of immortality in what can be interpreted as Dickinson's own equally defiant final statement on the relation of fame to enduring art. Dickinson expressed the logic behind this request four years earlier in an 1882 letter to Roberts Brothers editor Thomas Niles in which she refused his request for a "volume of poems" (L749b) and instead sent him "How happy is the little Stone" (Fr1570E), a poem in …

Creating A Community Of Writers, Melissa Heaton

The Utah English Journal

An essential focus of English teachers is to help their students read, think, and eventually write like writers. However, these lofty goals are more challenging to reach when students write in isolation. Budding writers need to collaborate with peers who share common goals and purpose. When done correctly, a writing “community has the power to motivate its members to exceptional performance” (Bickford 4.2). Thus, elevating students to become the writers that their teachers hope they will become.

Book Review: Ghosts, Joshlin Sheridan

The Utah English Journal

Adults often use soothing catchphrases to reassure frightened children. The scared child is told, “there is no such thing as ghosts.” The mourning child is reminded that her “grandmother is in a better place,” and the sick child is reassured that she will “get better soon.” How would a child react, however, if she discovered that ghosts were real and living in her town? How would she feel realizing that some illnesses are incurable?

The Utah English Journal, Volume 45, 2017: Full Issue

The Utah English Journal

No abstract provided.

Asking The Tough Questions: Teaching Literature And Nonfiction Through Critical Literacy To Recapture Our Voices, Agency, And Mission, Elsie L. Olan, Wendy Farkas, Kia Jane Richmond

Conference Presentations

Exploding the Myth of Mental Illness