Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Countering Online Misinformation In The First-Year Composition Classroom, Samantha Sparrow Williams

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis encourages the intentional and explicit integration of the best practices in media literacy education within the first-year composition classroom. The nature of FYC, which incorporates such content as research skills and source evaluation, provides an ideal opportunity to address the online misinformation and disinformation that have resulted in growing political polarization and cynicism. Recent findings suggest that these trends can be countered with the teaching of practices like lateral reading to verify a source’s veracity. After first demonstrating the challenges that university freshmen may bring with them to campus, this project makes suggestions for simple, consistent practices that …

The Matter And (Mostly) Manner Of Mere Christianity, Gary L. Tandy

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Presented to a meeting of the Inkling Folk Fellowship (IFF), July 23rd, 2021.

Zoom Session Link: https://youtu.be/F2ZKEPD0YFg

Research Question•Why does Lewis’s work of popular apologetics continue to find a wide readership while other excellent books in the same genre—e.g., Sayers’s Creed or Chaos—do not?

Christianity Today Survey (2000): Most influential Christian books

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1942-44; 1952) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937) Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (1932-67) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1968) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908) Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) Richard Foster, …

Core Advanced Writing: Rhetoric Of Storytelling, Cruz Medina

English

On September 23, 2020, the New York Post reported that “President Trump had signed an executive order expanding a ban on government agencies receiving sensitivity training involving critical race theory to federal contractors” (Moore). By the time this executive order passed, I had already planned to teach a course titled “Rhetoric of Storytelling” that included a Critical Race Theory (CRT) reading from Aja Martinez advocating for counterstory. In response to the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests during the summer of 2020, my academic department, like many institutions nationwide, issued a statement in support of Black Lives Matter. In …

Writing Inside And Outside The Rhetoric Of Containment: An Analysis Of Writing Strategies In First Semester Students Transitioning To The First Year College Composition Classroom, Brenda R. Gallardo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Based on Bowden’s (1993) notion of containment, this study analyzes how containment—as well as other pedagogical restrictions and limitations—was manifested in the high-school-to-college transition of first year student writers. This study addresses the following questions of inquiry: How do participants’ experiences in high school affect them as writers in college?; What practices and strategies do students in the first year composition classroom apply to overcome containment in the college writing classroom?; and, How can instructors use pedagogy to overcome containment? This dissertation applies a qualitative design to gather data via interviews, questionnaires, and classroom observations. Via grounded theory, data gathered …

Cold Mother, Cold Case: Memoirs Of An Abandoned Daughter, Tasha Marie Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

“Cold Mother, Cold Case: Memoirs of an Abandoned Daughter,” is a collection of stories that many young girls and women can relate to. These are stories of solitude, abandonment, abuse, resentment, determination, and survival. These emotions stemmed from the relationship with the one person that is supposed to love unconditionally, our mothers. The main purpose for the author writing the memoir was to use it as a way to heal from and to reflect on her childhood. The author’s hope is that the story will inspire young girls and women to strive for greatness from life, even when dealt an …

Designing Life: A Socio-Cultural Analysis Of Ikea Kitchen Planner And Ux, Yunye Yu

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

The design process of a kitchen, like design tasks in other areas, requires specific domain knowledge and skills. However, kitchen design has its unique requirements and constraints due to the limited flexibility in appliance selection and work layout. While planning and designing a kitchen, users face complicated situations where they need to consider many technical factors such as the structure and floor plan of the house, lighting and heating system, interfering traffic in the kitchen, geographic locations of the house, temperature and humidity, and clean technology to name a few. The kitchen is also highly sensitive to local culture. For …

Making Culture Relevant In Technical Translation With Dynamic Equivalence: The Case Of Bilingual Instructions, Massimo Verzella

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

One of the central tenets of technical communication research and pedagogy is user-analysis (Redish, 2010; Barnum & Redish, 2011). Technical documents conceived to be used by individuals from different backgrounds should be the product of cycles of negotiations between authors and audiences. Similarly, the idea of participatory design (Ehn, 1993; Courage & Baxter, 2005; Simonsen & Robertson, 2012) revolves around a rhetoric of collaboration and shared-authoring that involves users at all stages of product or content development. User-centered and user-participatory approaches emphasize the importance of user feedback to identify not only problems, but also possibilities that writers and designers might …

What Can Asian Eyelids Teach Us About User Experience Design? A Culturally Reflexive Framework For Ux/I Design, Jennifer Sano-Franchini

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

The proliferation of web applications in recent years has brought about conversations among technology designers about user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design’s role in propagating and reaffirming cultural bias, and in facilitating race-based discrimination. At times, such conversations have demonstrated how taking stock of racialized and cultural bias during the design process can challenge widely held design assumptions. For example, in 2015, Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social network, was reported to have facilitated racial profiling when users began posting to the application’s Crime and Safety section reports of “suspicious” persons on the basis of racialized appearance, as opposed to …

Testing In Translation: Conducting Usability Studies With Transnational Users, Emma J. Rose, Robert Racadio

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

What do we mean by usability in everyday life? For us, everyday life implies the series of choices and decisions that happen each day as people are trying to get things done. These things are often taken for granted, they might seem mundane, they may be overlooked. Usability inhabits everyday life in the documents used by a Vietnamese mother of two young children, having recently moved to the United States, and navigating the healthcare system in a new country for the first time. Usability shows up again as a Chinese couple considers whether or not to move out of their …

Designing For Everyday Life In Global Contexts, Guiseppe Getto, Huatong Sun

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

This special issue is a situated response in this discourse context, to investigate research issues surrounding the mundaneness and messiness of “Designing for Everyday Life in Global Contexts.” For the past two decades, a steadily growing body of work on the intersections of intercultural communication and information design has been developing within the field of Technical and Professional Communication (e.g., Kostelnick,1995; Chu, 1999; Fukuoka, 1999; Honold, 1999; Thatcher, 1999; Zahed, Van Pelt, & Song, 2001; St. Amant, 2002, 2005; Sun, 2006, 2012; Agboka, 2013; Breuch, 2015; Gustav, 2015; St. Amant & Rice, 2015; Maher & Getto, 2016; Sun & Getto, …

Digitally Mapping The Buddhist Holy Land: Intercultural Communication, Religious History, And Networked Rhetoric, Derek F. Maher, Guiseppe Getto

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Intercultural communication presents an array of well-known and much-discussed challenges, including the difficulties of engaging in productive dialogues regarding cultural assumptions, the problems of translation, tensions between macro-level value systems and the uniqueness of individual cultures, and challenges to developing communication technologies that are culturally appropriate (Kostelnick, 1995; Maylath, 1997; Thatcher, 2006; Sun, 2012). When addressing the diverse dimensions of religious culture, there is the added obstacle that understanding another’s religion can sometimes become entwined with how people feel about their own deeply held religious values and assumptions (Jackson, 2004). Special obstacles to understanding can arise in relation to religion …

Beyond Biography: Using Technical And Professional Documentation To Historically Contextualize Women’S Agency, Emily January Petersen

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

1908, Harriet Barraclough—Relief Society president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS; a.k.a. “Mormon”) Halifax Ward, Leeds, England—taught the women in her religious community to be “lifters and not leaners” (Halifax Ward, Folder 1, p. 58). This communication, documented in a handwritten minute book, falls within various definitions of technical and professional communication (TPC), as the practice of TPC “creates both knowledge and value [which]...comprehends the good of the community in which the practice has a history” (Miller, 1989, p. 69). TPC occurs within communities, and “forges connections between new and existing knowledge” (Durack, 1998, p. 181). …

The Death List Of Sandarmokh: Mayme Sevander's Work As Emancipatory International And Intercultural Professional Communication, Kyle Mattson

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Professional communicators work on international and intercultural projects in dynamic assemblages. Recent scholarship has defined assemblages as powerful institutional, cultural, and material configurations that affect life and work in diverse situational contexts or geographies. For example, Stephen J. Collier (2006) described global assemblages as "actual configurations through which global forms of techno-science, economic rationalism, and other expert systems gain significance" (p. 400). Likewise, about the instrumentalist logic behind such systems, Dale L. Sullivan (1990) asked us to critique "the technological mindset" and allow critical action to inform technical and professional communication practice (pp. 375-377). In international and intercultural professional communication …

Religion And The Professional Ethos: The Ymca, Dale Carnegie, And The “Business Man”, Lance Cummings

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Despite predictions of religion’s demise in the first decade of this century (Krattenmaker 2010; Meacham 2009), religion and spirituality have come front and center in many public arenas like pop culture, health and well-being, and politics. Whether it be the power of the religious right and left in politics, anxiety over Islamic terrorism, or simply the use of meditation within large corporations, religious issues play an important role in how we view and participate in secular society. This is no less true in the world of business and professional communication. Considering the role religion has played in rhetorical thought and …

World Religions And Professional Communication: Theories And Practices Of The Discipline, David Alan Sapp, Carroll Ferguson Nardone, Barry Thatcher

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Scholarly conversations about the influence of religion on professional communication have largely been absent in our discipline’s published literature, yet religion often intersects with the work of teachers, researchers, and practitioners. It intersects with rhetorical patterns at many levels and contexts, including the organizations in which we work and volunteer, the sites where we conduct research and solve problems, and our teaching/training practices with students, clients, co-workers, community partners, and the many other populations we regularly serve in our professional lives. To explore the intersections of religion, globalization, and professional communication, this special edition of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization …

Understanding International And Domestic Student Expectations Of Peers, Faculty, And University: Implications For Professional Communication Pedagogy, Linda R. Macdonald, Binod Sundararajan

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Increasing populations of international students are entering Canadian universities, and instructors of Professional Communication must rapidly adapt to a changing student population. At the studied Maritime Canadian university, numbers of international students increased by 300% between 2009 and 2013. These numbers necessitate a review of our pedagogical approach to ensure student learning, success, and satisfaction in Professional Communication classrooms. Student expectations are linked to their satisfaction and, therefore, retention. We know little about the expectations incoming international students have of the university, their Canadian peers, and their instructors. We also know little about the reciprocal expectations held by domestic students …

Intercultural Connectivism And Personal Learning Networks In Course Redesign, Joseph Moses, Ann Hill Duin

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

As the call for proposals to this special issue states, “the need to share our pedagogical knowledge is paramount.” We agree that “the assumptions underlying much of contemporary communication pedagogy are oversimplified and fraught with groundless stereotypes” and that pedagogical change amid the increasingly globalized and networked classroom has been too slow. Participants need multiple means to understand and increase their capacity for working interculturally and in global virtual teams. One such means is through the pedagogical deployment of personal learning networks.

Teaching Professional Communication In A Global Context: Using A Three-Phase Approach Of Theory Exploration, Self-Assessment, And Virtual Simulation, Kelly A. Grant, Timo Lainema, Elizabeth A. Tuleja, Jeffrey Younger

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

In today's globally diverse society, standard theoretical instruction is not able to expose our students to the realities of international communication, multicultural collaboration, and dispersed global work. Abstract text-based cases are limited in delivering a realistic view of the challenges of working virtually and globally within international teams. In addition to cases, we believe that hands-on experiential, collaborative exercises – combined with the metacognitive exercise of reflective practice – offer greater learning potential. While international collaboration and exercises may take extra time, effort, and cost, the benefits to students can be substantial.

Editors' Introduction, James R. Barker, David A. Victor, Linda R. Macdonald

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Our special issue of the Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization investigates the changing character of professional communication pedagogy in an increasingly integrated world economy. To that end, the articles in this special issue explore how to adapt the teaching of professional communication in a way that meets the demands of an increasingly globalized student body. We hope, too, that this special issue promotes RPCG as a channel for future streams of research and thought for scholars to engage the interculturally-shaped pedagogical issues emerging from our present globalized classrooms.

Achieving Cultural Community Through Rhetorical Means: A Study Of Culture In The Bologna Process Documentation, Diane Martinez

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

An interesting point to consider when studying the Bologna Process, Europe’s contemporary initiative to reform the higher education systems among the 47 member countries, is how culture is represented in the official Process documentation. The official documentation contains layered definitions of culture that become problematic when determining the progress or the success or failure of this reform effort. For example, in the Sorbonne Joint Declaration (1998), the originating document of the Bologna Process, education ministers emphasized a large, overarching, definition of culture—a European culture—when they wrote that the Bologna Process is an opportunity “where national identities and common interests can …