Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

A Convenient Myopia: Seek, Shaughnessy, And The Rise Of High-Stakes Testing At Cuny, Sean Molloy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A great struggle for racial justice was fought at City College and CUNY from 1964 to 1978. In this archival history, supplemented with thirteen oral histories of students and teachers, and grounded in the larger context of racial segregation and exclusion within American public education and American higher education through 1970, I argue that this larger struggle for justice should be seen as two distinct but intertwined struggles that had very different results. Throughout this history, I focus on individual teachers and students who either played key roles or whose experiences illustrate aspects of the larger issues. Some of their …

Circus As Idée Fixe And Hunger, Anna-Sophie Jürgens

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Circus as idée fixe and Hunger" Anna-Sophie Jürgens discusses circus fiction in which characters often display extreme, intense psychological traits. They are for example irascible, pyromaniac, sadistic, or megalomaniac. Particularly striking are protagonists with alternative psychological attitudes in fictional circus texts of the twentieth century such as Franz Kafka's hunger artist, Michael Raleigh's ringmaster Lewis Tully or Richard Schmitt's aerialist Garry, who can be seen as incubators of circus-related idées fixes. These literary circus characters develop fixations on circus that manifest themselves as a physical sensation of desiring circus like food, in other words: in circus …

Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Genre Categorization in Contemporary British and US-American Novels" Carlos Ceia discusses a certain type of resistance to genre categorization in many novels in contemporary literature. Many British and US-American contemporary novels show patterns in narrative creativity where novel-writing techniques are sometimes more important than the traditional subject matter driven work of fiction. Ceia reviews experimental/metafictional novels which do not show intent to fulfil an aesthetic role pre-determined in a certain moment in history. Not having this kind of burden before them, many contemporary British and US-American novelists devote their artistic imagination more to the "potential" of the …

Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, And Literary Modernism By Christina Walter, Megan Poole

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Extended Instruction On Passive Voice, Reduced Relative Clauses, And Modal Would In The Academic Writing Of Advanced English Language Learners, Audrey Bailey

Dissertations and Theses

As more international students who are not expert users of English come to the United States to study at university, the field of teaching English for Academic Purposes grows. There are many important skills these international students must learn to become successful university students in America, but writing for academic purposes is of particular importance for these students to join the academic conversation in their respective disciplines. Corpus research has identified the grammatical features which are frequently found in different registers, and from this work it is known which structures are important in different types of academic writing. Grammatical structures …

Thou And It: Personhood Actualized Through Water Rights, Kierra M. Powell

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

While issues of racial and gendered discrimination are more visible and widely discussed, poverty and water based discrimination is often a silent fact of life for the many. As one of the most critical elemental resources required for the sustainability of human life, safe water has been designated a human right, but the current global distribution of water does not mirror this sentiment. The divide in quality water distribution provokes the question: whose life is intrinsically valued? This study seeks to determine the status of personhood as displayed by the movement of water in relation to the underprivileged. I first …

Wayfinding Localized Research Practices Through Mobile Technology, Adam W. Strantz

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation presents wayfinding—the process of orienting oneself amid the myriad users, technologies, and digital spaces impacting any writing work—as a research methodology for contextualizing writing in mobile environments. Central to web design and non-web service design, wayfinding is an important addition to rhetoric and writing studies. First, it is descriptive: it observes and records first, showing how people go about tasks, and revealing relationships among people and their environments. Second, it helps when people get lost and then found. It records traces of the mental work people do to get unlost. Finding themselves, peoples’ maps help them both narrate …

Superheroes And Social Action: Reproduction, Recurrence, And Recognition In The Superhero Genre, Max M. Renner

Open Access Theses

Rhetorical genre analysis examines genre as social action and is primarily concerned with the experiences of individual users (Miller, 1984). The genres that rhetorical genre scholarship takes up are typically functional genres or genres in which individuals have direct means of utilizing and modifying a genre. This focus on functional genres makes sense in terms of the tradition’s interest in user experience and reciprocity. This project seeks to examine the potential implications rhetorical genre analysis has for vernacular genres which, for the most part, have remained the domain of literary scholarship due to their focus on structural, formal elements.

This …

To See In A Mirror Dimly: An Ecology Of Ritual Transmission, Rebekah Elizabeth Sims

Open Access Theses

I examine ritual transmission through three practices: Sacred Harp hymnody, Montessori Sunday School, and Celtic thin place, all practices meant to provide the participant with a tangible sense of transcendence. Ritual transmission in not linear exchange, but is instead a complex system involving pedagogy, praxis, and persuasion: an ecology. Ritual ecology provides a way to think about rituals as both preserving practices and as consistently evolving. The composition of a ritual – that which makes it possible to transmit – requires the development of technical praxis. Ritual praxis is a blend of procedural and exegetical knowledge; it is the link …

Listening To Our Stories In Dusty Boxes: Indigenous Storytelling Methodology, Archival Practice, And The Cherokee Female Seminary, Emily M. Legg

Open Access Dissertations

Influenced by a drive to seek out interdisciplinary connections within Rhetoric and Composition and to put these intersections into practice, this dissertation seeks out the ways indigenous ways of knowing, such as storytelling, can provide a heuristic to understand the ways our dappled discipline works to create community-based knowledges, and how these knowledges sustained through storytelling can recover the histories in our discipline by opening up our boundaries framed by dominant origin stories. Building on the work of decolonial and indigenous scholars, this dissertation asserts that indigenous storytelling encourages researchers to re-tool dominant methods in existing colonial structures in order …

Encounters Beyond The Interface: Data Structures, Material Feminisms, And Composition, Christine L. Masters

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation argues that data literacy should be taught in college writing classes along with other new media literacies. Drawing from several areas of study, this dissertation establishes a definition of data literacy, introduces a feminist methodological approach to Big Data and data studies, and makes a case for teaching data literacy in first year composition and professional writing courses as a foundational writing-related literacy. Information written into and read from databases supports research activities in any number of fields from STEM to the humanities; while different disciplines approach databases and data structures from diverse perspectives, all students need foundational …

Decentering The Writing Program Archive: How Composition Instructors Save And Share Their Teaching Materials, Stacy Olivia Nall

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation decenters the writing program archive through research on instructors’ digital archives. Artifacts of composition instruction are no longer saved to print archives alone; rather, digital technologies expand the locations where artifacts of writing pedagogy can be archived and accessed. The following archival ethnography, focused on a community engagement writing course in the Introductory Composition at Purdue (ICaP) program, finds that many digital archives of composition are hidden to outside researchers or not sustained (which are theorized as either “abandoned” or “pop-up” archives). At the same time, some pedagogical materials are publicly visible by virtue of personal web spaces …

Pick Yourself Up By Your Broadband: Access, The Digital Divide, And Migrant Workers, Enrique Reynoso Jr.

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a process called pizarron borrado: reorienting “failure” as a productive part of the research process. Using the backdrop of research on migrant workers’ technological access, I argue that classrooms can become much more accessible by moving from failure and looking at points where writing and research have moved in unexpected ways. As scholars such as Grabill have pointed out, access to computers and the Internet is an issue of public policy, and technical communicators are strategically positioned to contribute to, “policy making, research, and teaching” in ways that can help expand these services to underserved and underrepresented …

Emerging Genres, Dangerous Classifications: The Kairos Of Digital Composing Policy, Ellery Sills

Open Access Dissertations

Emerging Genres, Dangerous Classifications: The Kairos of Digital Composing Policy argues that writing policy infrastructure plays a significant (if often invisible) role in affording emerging digital genres in rhetoric and composition. Within the last few decades, the accelerating transformations and instabilities of emerging genres have posed a challenge for contemporary writing programs, which demonstrate a persistent wariness over incorporating digital composing into their mission. In response to this challenge, national educational associations have issued a growing number of policy statements meant to encourage a broader understanding of composing in the classroom. Curiously, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to …

Revision And Re-Writing As Adaptation: Using Adaptation Theory To Encourage Student Recognition Of Rhetorical Situations, Alicia Claire Troby

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many students don’t want to revise their writing, or do so in small, surface-level ways. This has been an issue many composition instructors have faced over the years, and there is a large body of scholarship about revision and the writing process by many in writing studies. From Nancy Sommers, Janet Emig, Donald Murray, and others, to more recent publications “post-process,” composition instructors and writing studies scholars are concerned about revision and the role it plays in students’ learning to write. As a strategy for teaching bigger-level revision, I implemented the use of adaptation theory (reading/watching and doing adaptation) as …

Formulating An Intentional Curriculum For Spiritual Leadership Development At The West University Church Of Christ, Daniel A. Mcgraw

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This project addresses the lack of a formal curriculum for spiritual leadership formation in the West University Church of Christ in Houston, Texas. While the West University Church of Christ has been blessed by strong congregational leaders in both the past and present, recent conversations revealed the need for a deeper connection to God and a better understanding of spiritual leadership on the part of the congregation’s leaders. The problem I identified was a lack of understanding about spiritual leadership in contrast to secular understandings of leadership and the lack of a formal curriculum to help address this problem.

This …

Resources Preservice Teachers Use To Think About Student Writing, Leah A. Zuidema, James E. Fredricksen

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

This article identifies five categories of resources that preservice teachers drew on as they considered student writing and planned their own approaches to assessing and teaching writing. Identifying these resources helps us better understand how beginning writing teachers think about student writing—and better understand mismatches that commonly occur between what teacher educators teach and what new teachers actually do. Our study builds on literature that considers how writing teachers are prepared, extends research about how preservice teachers use what they learn,and adds layers of detail to literature about the resources that beginning teachers draw upon to aid and support them …

"This Machine Kills Fascists" : The Public Pedagogy Of The American Folk Singer., Harley Ferris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the figure of the American folk singer as a public pedagogue engaged in rhetorical action for social change. Through four case studies—Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Ani DiFranco, and Tom Morello—the dissertation examines nearly a century of folk music as a form of activism through these four figures. Each folksinger occupies a unique role in a unique era, requiring each musician to revise the work of their musical forebears to accommodate new cultural and technological environments. Drawing on theories of public pedagogy, rhetorical framing, and media, I argue that an effective use of music in social change depends …

Amused Teachers And Public Readers : Empathy And Derision In "Student Blooper" Collections., Jessica Winck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the long-standing tradition in education of sharing and publishing students’ unintentionally amusing mistakes. Often called “bloopers,” “boners,” and “howlers,” students’ writing mistakes have been published in print since at least the early 20^th century and more recently online. Using theories of reading student writing, academic discourse, ethics, and humor, this project analyzes the misconceptions that teachers and public audiences have of students, re-reads student writing for its potential, and explores the ethical implications of sharing student work with public audiences. The first two chapters ground the reader in the historical, social, and cultural contexts in which …

The Available Means Of Imagination : Personal Narrative, Public Rhetoric, And Circulation., Stephanie D. Weaver

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the digital circulation of personal narratives by non-celebrity individuals that become part of larger public and political debates. I posit the “available means of imagination” to describe the ways that narratives – cultural, fictional, and personal – influence our ability to understand the many facets of a given public debate before tracing the interactions among narrative, emotion, and circulation in a series of case studies using new materialist methods. I argue that emotion plays a key role in structures of participation of social media and in how we subsequently engage with contemporary political issues, especially with regards …