Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Visual Literacies And Young Children’S Writing: Creating Spaces For Young Children’S Voices And Engaging In Authentic Writing Experiences, Elizabeth Presto

Teaching & Learning Theses & Dissertations

Young children engage in multimodal written expression. The research in this study explores the spaces that were created, and the stories created by children in an after-school comic club. The club utilized the Writer’s Workshop model to support the Being a Writer program that is used in the Ocean View School District (Ocean View School District is a pseudonym). I created a supplemental writing program that utilized visual literacy instruction and taught the lessons in the club. The theoretical framework incorporated developmentally appropriate writing instruction, visual literacy elements, and sociocultural theory. This study employed an action research methodology with multiple …

Buried Forensics: A Rhetorical/Material Analysis Of Gendered Death, Sarah Richardson

All Dissertations

My dissertation, titled Buried Forensics: A Rhetorical/Material Analysis of Gendered Death, illustrates how othered women who did not adhere to societal norms have been silenced, excluded, forgotten, and erased in public memory. I examine the rhetorical means through which historical women have been gendered in death. Death rhetorics, I argue, illuminate the relationship between past and present violence in conjunction with memory practices. Depending on the reasons specific women were othered, death rhetorics elucidates how these women became, and continue to be, marginalized. Specifically, my three body chapters examine the lives and deaths of women who participated in sex …

“Difference In/At The Center" A Transnational Approach For Mobilizing International Multilingual Graduate Writers' Writing Assets During Writing Instruction., Olalekan Adepoju

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research project presents an empirical exploration of how the writing assets possessed by international multilingual graduate writers impact the theory and pedagogical practices in writing studies, especially regarding the approaches to teaching writing. Extant scholarship in writing studies, especially on second language research/teaching, translingual writing practices, and asset-based writing pedagogy has engaged issues of difference in language, race, culture, as well as funds of knowledge, highlighting the impacts of these differences on the academic success of non-native English speakers in US schools and colleges. My dissertation builds on these trends and highlights the narratives, perceptions, and experiences of international …

Focused On Freedom: Exploring The Potential Of Grading Contracts To Support Writers In The Secondary English Language Arts Classroom, Margaret Mcgregor Fluharty

English Theses & Dissertations

Drawing on qualitative methods, I engaged in a practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to investigate the use of contract grading to promote educational freedom (hooks, 2009; Love, 2020) in the post-secondary writing classroom. In addition, I explored the potential of this practice in the secondary English language arts setting.

To better understand the perspectives of both post-secondary writing instructors and secondary English teachers on the use of grading contracts, I conducted focus groups and engaged in artifact analysis (Billups, 2019). Results showed that post-secondary instructors who utilized grading contracts in their classroom saw changes primarily in their students’ engagement …

Digitally Rural: Identifying How Technological Inequity Impacts Rural Students In First-Year Writing Courses, Jo Anna M. Nevada

English Language and Literature ETDs

To teach composition in this era means to engage students with technology; it is all but an unspoken requirement at the majority of universities. This dissertation theorizes, however, that the imbricated use of technology in first-year writing (FYW) classrooms places rural students at an inherent disadvantage, with issues of inadequate technological proficiency and inconsistent access causing a substantial learning disparity between this student population and their urban peers. Through mixed-methods data analysis of student survey responses and final FYW course portfolios, this study reveals that the expectation of technological access and presumption of digital literacy is detrimental to rural student …

“Long Live Ear X-Tacy!”: An Oral History Study Of Rhetorics Of Nostalgia And Place., Aubrie Warner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to explore rhetorical placemaking through how people understand and construct narratives around places that no longer exist. In doing so, it examines the relationship between nostalgia and place — how rhetorical construction of place is influenced and/or informed by rhetorics of nostalgia, how our experiences influence our sense of place (past and present), and how we create continuity for ourselves in the construction and maintenance of particular narratives. This study contributes to the emerging field of rhetorics of nostalgia and places it in direct conversation with rhetorics of place and unpacks how these two are more connected …

Unruly Periods: Reproductive Futurities And The Rhetorics Of Menstruation, Hannah Taylor

All Dissertations

“Unruly Periods: Reproductive Temporalities and the Rhetorics of Menstruations” argues that dominant rhetorics of shame and regulation around menstruation work to maintain strict reproductive temporalities that uphold heteropatriarchal norms. Specifically, I draw upon scholarship in queer studies and disability rhetorics to assert that sexual health texts (such as puberty books), menstrual care products (pads and tampons), and technologies of menstruation (period-tracking apps) function as a form of chronobiolitics—a teleological force that seeks to reinforce bodily normalcy. In doing so, these rhetorics of menstruation deny or elide the embodied experiences of diverse, queer, and disabled menstruators, limiting reproductive possibilities. Reproductive justice …

Educator Professional Development As Rhetorical Situation, Bethany Leigh Creswell Wilson

English Theses & Dissertations

Teacher effectiveness is recognized as the most prominent in-school influencer of student learning, and professional development (PD) of in-service educators is seen as vital to improving teachers’ effectiveness throughout their careers. Professional development is often studied atheoretically and with a linear view in which PD providers deliver instruction and teachers receive and apply that instruction as it was delivered to them. By casting them as passive, blank-slate receivers and automatic appliers of the PD, this view obscures the complexities of teachers’ role in PD. Examining educator PD through the lens of rhetoric, and viewing the PD experience as a rhetorical …

Exploring The Principles Applied During The Production Of An Open Writing Textbook, Stacey Corbitt, Dawn Atkinson

Writing

Despite coverage of materials development principles in the applied linguistics literature, principled production of open textbooks has not received attention. To address this gap and demonstrate the interdisciplinary potential of materials development research, the authors drew upon concurrent verbalization and interview data they collected while composing their first coursebook, a freely available open textbook designed for first-year university writing courses that enroll English first-language and second-language learners, to discern how they applied principles. Qualitative content analysis of the data indicated the novice textbook writers focused on learning objectives to negotiate textbook relevancy and currency concerns, tried to create relatable content, …

Women's Interracial Friendships: Cultivating Coalitional Possibilities Across Difference Through Dialogue, Akie Fukushige Wenk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, I thread through the macro-structure as well as micro-operations of hegemonic ideologies, namely white-supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy (hooks, 1995, Valdes, 1996), that has historically plagued the United States, eventually gaining a global reach over time. I center interracial friendship between Black and White cis-women, where I locate coalitional possibilities that begin at the grassroots level. I situate this interracial relationship within the socio-ecological system where the personal meets the social (including racialized backgrounds). I use a series of analogies to equate these ideologies as toxins in the air, water, and soil. Soil is where we can work …

Editors’ Introduction, Aurora Matzke, Louis M. Maraj, Angela Clark-Oates, Anyssa Gonzalez, Sherry Rankins-Robertson

English Faculty Articles and Research

"When we proposed this special issue, we sought to illuminate the conceptual and embodied contact zones we discuss above. Tensions that, for us, were centered by scholars and attendees who participated in any of the three CCCC Feminist Workshop between 2021-2023 when the majority of the editors of this special issue co-chaired. During that time frame, CCCC’s shifted from in-person to fully online to hybrid due to COVID-19 and attempted to move toward more national and international attendance inclusivity. With this organizational backdrop, it was during the 2021 CCCC Feminist Workshop that we grappled with coalition as a commonplace."

“I’M Not A Writer!” Graduate Writers’ Self-Assessment Of Writing Ability And Confidence, Vicki R. Kennell

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Presentations

This presentation shares survey data on graduate writers' self-assessment of their writing ability and confidence. Typical survey respondents had varied confidence in their writing abilities, were concerned about being respected and understood by scholars in their fields, wrote alone and only when they had to, and were anxious and possibly worried about writing.

Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince And Saidiya Hartman, Carolina Hinojosa

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This chapter utilizes Hartman’s methodology of retrieval to create a map1 in StoryMap JS2 (“the map” or “this map”) that analyzes multiple geographic spaces in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. The map is an archive or a witness to some of the geographical spaces Mary Prince lived (and was sold) as an enslaved woman seeking freedom and the places in which Saidiya Hartman has conducted research or visited in Ghana as a “free” woman. Layering the past over present creates a …

Vainuku, T., & Duffy, R. (Directors). (2022). Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’T Exist [Documentary]. Netflix., Ashley P. Ferrell

Feminist Pedagogy

Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist (2022) revisits the complicated fame and misfortune of former college football player Manti Te’o. The documentary traces the arc of Te’o’s athletic career at the University of Notre Dame alongside his relationship with his girlfriend that resulted in intense public scrutiny and gendered ridicule in 2013. Untold offers feminist pedagogues a catalyst for engaging students in critical discourse around the relationships between collegiate sport and race, gender, and sexuality. In this review, I provide a summary of the documentary’s main points and framing, and then discuss at least two ways in which this media …

The Death And Rebirth Of The Feminine Muse: Edgar Allan Poe And Sylvia Plath, Noha Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

While drawing on mythology and a literary history that associated women with death as well as creativity, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath experimented with binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, composition/decomposition, and death/(re)birth. They gained inspiration from the same source, the dead muse, but how do they transform traditions that derive from classical and medieval literary precedent, perhaps in ways that are inherently critical of patriarchal modes of gender dynamics? Why is Poe fixated on a feminine dead muse while Plath is inspired by what she calls her “father-sea-god muse”? How do both authors represent the female body, and how …

Because Of Them, Paige Santise

Cardinal Compositions

No abstract provided.

My Life Has Been Cattywampus, Andy Henderson

Cardinal Compositions

No abstract provided.

Discourse Community Analysis, Norah Langford

Cardinal Compositions

No abstract provided.

Analyzing Scientific Writing: Wild Dog Populations Of South Africa, Kaden Stumpf

Cardinal Compositions

No abstract provided.

The Historical, Cultural, And Anecdotal Importance Of Iberian Ham, Zach Hisle

Cardinal Compositions

No abstract provided.