Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

Syllabus For Writing For The Social Sciences, Brenna E. Crowe

Open Educational Resources

A writing class designed for students pursuing degrees in the social sciences—the major assignments are a "career builder" where student practice rhetoric with professional writing on job searches, a literature review, a public awareness campaign, an informational interview, and a portfolio.

John O'Malley As A Guide For Eloquentia Perfecta, Community-Engaged Work, And Graduate Education, Allen Brizee, Stephanie Hurter Brizee, Colten Biro, Meha Gupta

Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal

John O’Malley, S.J., was primarily a Jesuit and Catholic historian. But to scholars in writing studies, his work is illuminative due to his rhetorical analysis of church documents and his discussion of eloquentia perfecta when examining Jesuit education. More recently, in works like “’Not for Ourselves Alone,” he stresses the importance of Jesuit education focusing on the betterment of others inside and outside of the academy. During an interview conducted four months before his death, O’Malley restated the necessity of Jesuit education including writing and vita activa, that is, active civic life. In this article, we pay tribute to …

Rhetorical Conversations: Race, Class, And Gender In The Works Of Jacqueline Jones Royster And Shirley Wilson Logan, Tanya Robertson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This project is an examination of Jacqueline Jones Royster and Shirley Wilson Logan as knowledge-makers in the field of rhetoric and composition. There is a large gap in research on the contemporary African American women scholars who act as knowledge makers of rhetorical theory and rhetorical pedagogy. There is circularity in the notion that as Royster and Logan examine the history of the fieldâ??African American rhetorical practices, feministic rhetorical practices, English language studies and literacy, and classroom practicesâ??they are, themselves, having an impact on the field.

Writing In Film Studies: Poetics And Pedagogy, Bryan Mead

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The focus of this dissertation is writing instruction inside undergraduate film courses. While the existence of textbooks devoted to teaching students how to write about film highlights the need for such instruction, evidence suggests many courses underuse or neglect such texts. Instead, most instructors focus their efforts on content instruction, expecting students to translate an increased content knowledge into written argumentation. Yet, as is the case across the disciplines, students struggle to write successfully in these disciplinary courses. One of the main reasons for this disparity between instructor expectation and student success is the notion of disciplinarity, and how influential …

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 …

Writing And Rhetoric Along The U.S.-Mexico Border, Barry Thatcher, Kelly Medina-López, Omar Montoya

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

Recently, our field has seen a strong surge in the interest in writing across borders, multilingual and ESL writing, and globalization and rhetoric (see, for example, the 2010 Penn State Conference on Border Rhetorics; 2014 Border Rhetorics, Rhetoric Society of America). This surge parallels, in many ways, the growing enrollment of international student populations and second-language writers in U.S. writing programs, which is widely documented (Roberge, Siegal, & Harlau, 2009; Matsuda, 2009). Given this development, it would seem appropriate or even natural that writing programs would be developing curriculum to meet the needs of these multilingual students. In fact, that …

Writing In Crisis: Rhetorical Considerations In Child Advocate Reports, Melody Bowdon, Melissa Pompos, Anna C. Turner

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization

One aspect of human rights often overlooked in and beyond professional communication involves the rights of minor children whose parents or guardians are accused of abusing, abandoning, or neglecting them. Children in the United States who enter the dependency court system, where such matters are adjudicated, have few legal protections because of their status as minors, and parents or legal guardians under investigation are seldom appropriate advocates for such children due to real, potential, or perceived conflicts of interest (Litzelfelner & Petr, 1997; Minow, 1995; Reynaert, Bouverne-de-Bie, & Vandevelde, 2009). Many state and county governments have established programs designed to …

Motivation And The Young Writer: Reimagining John Dewey's Theory Of Experience, Billy Cryer

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Issues of motivation remain a perennial topic among teachers of English Language Arts and first-year college composition courses. While modern evidence-based research in educational psychology has yielded fruitful avenues for harnessing motivation in writing instruction, in recent decades, industrious composition scholars have also turned to history for insights on composition pedagogy. In this study, I also embark on a historical excavation to glean from our composition forebears regarding motivation in writing instruction. In particular, I examine how the educational writings of John Dewey were translated into the English classroom during the Progressive Era. More specifically, I seek to recover how …

A Culture Of Civic Action: Deliberative Pedagogy For Composition, Trevor Colin Sprague

Theses and Dissertations

Despite rhetoric and composition maintaining a role as a producer of democracy, democratic deliberation has not appeared widely as a pedagogical practice, outside of reinforcing traditional modes of argumentative writing. This dissertation articulates the dispositions and practices for a deliberative pedagogy in composition that supports students’ development of rhetorical understandings of social-political life, actively redresses exclusions and inequities in dominant understandings of democracy, and engages the discipline with a progressive vision of social change. Agency and citizenship are re-theorized as a grounding to this pedagogy, making clear how a wide variety of communicative acts support the processes and aims of …

Named But Not Known: Teaching And Assessing The Research-Writing Process, Ruth Boeder

Wayne State University Dissertations

In lived experience, the two processes of secondary research and writing overlap and intertwine interminably, creating an overarching complex system as research becomes expressed in writing and writing generates new research. This classroom study explores the two processes as one—the research-writing process—through coding of student journal responses and assessment of student research papers. Analysis reveals students to be thoughtful but not yet as nuanced in their descriptions of their research process as much be desired. They more frequently discuss writing with weaknesses in their research process than with research strengths. Further findings indicate that although it is difficult to assess …

When Process Becomes Processing: Managing Instructor Response To Student Disclosure Of Trauma In The Composition Classroom, Kelci Barton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In first-year composition courses, there are three aspects of teaching that are researched well so far: disclosure of trauma in student writing, instructor feedback, and emotional labor. The disclosure of trauma is almost completely unavoidable in first-year composition. We encounter an issue with instructor feedback; how do we provide feedback to student writing, like grammar and mechanics, when the student has disclosed trauma in the writing? Additionally, we can build off this with emotional labor, which already occurs consistently in teaching but is heightened in this instance. When providing feedback to a student who has disclosed trauma, this can be …

Being Retained: Perspective Of The Online First-Year Composition Student, Catrina Marie Mitchum

English Theses & Dissertations

Keeping students in college classrooms can be a struggle, but keeping them in an online classroom is an even more difficult feat. While the field of retention research has expanded its focus beyond traditional four-year students to include a variety of non-traditional student situations, including online, it has yet to focus efforts on online first-year composition at the community college. The first-year of college has been shown to be the most critical in student retention at the institutional level, which puts first-year composition in a potentially influential position. The fact that fewer students are retained in online courses than face-to-face …

Reimagining The Stacks: Classroom Technology And Library Collaboration For Writing In The Disciplines, Jossalyn Larson, Daniel C. Reardon

The Journal of Student Success in Writing

This article details the process by which one university redesigned a first year writing course to better promote discipline-specific and best-practice research techniques. The program offers experiential learning activities through scholarly collaboration, using library staff as mentors, producing an open-access peer-reviewed student journal, and emphasizing face-to-face interaction of peer research communities. It has the potential to establish for students in high school, community colleges and universities that research writing is fundamentally about joining and contributing to a conversation.

On The Same Page: Theory, Practice & The Ela Common Core State Standards, Jessica Lauer

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This research sought to examine how writing was happening in high schools. States across the country, including Michigan, began implementing the Common Core State Standards in 2010. The standards place a heavy focus on informational texts particularly as a student reaches high school. The standards also suggest that writing should be a shared responsibility among teachers, acknowledging the importance of cross-disciplinary writing skills. Using a grounded theory approach to analyze the semi-structured interviews conducted with eight English teachers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this research revealed a disconnect between theory and practice when it comes to how educational standards …

Troubles At Coal Creek: Rhetorics Of Writing, Research, And The Archive, Sumner Stevenson Brown

Masters Theses

Digging through the past can uncover painful truths. As such, historiography that does not acknowledge negotiated spaces, cultural erasures, and flexible frameworks may fall short. It may limit both breadth and depth of the past, thereby (re)producing erasures, whereas a reflexive theoretical framework delivers not only depth and breadth, but it also adds texture and dimension to historical writing and research processes. It is for these purposes that the value of alternative methodologies is not situated at the margins of the rhetorical canons. Instead, it is embedded in the very core of the canons, defined as an element that works …

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 …

Ignoring Ethics With Style: Writing Sentences For "Non U.S. Persons", Ryan Smith Madan

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Ignoring Ethics with Style: Writing Sentences for "Non U.S. Persons" argues for the importance of understanding the ethical dimensions of sentence writing. To illustrate, I cite the stylistic features of a recent public exchange about the legality of government surveillance between Director of Intelligence James Clapper and U.S. Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. I also discuss my own experience teaching writing to college students in order to reflect on need for a new generation of writers to recognize the relationship between clarity and ethics.

Leveraging Digital Communities Of Practice: How Asynchronous Digital Collaboration Afforded A Complex Reading/Writing Dialogue For Secondary School Students, Susanne Lee Nobles

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines a case study of a research unit taught to secondary school students with the inclusion of an asynchronous digital collaboration with college students. Over consecutive school years, two classes of high school seniors and two classes of college students, despite being geographically separated by more than 90 miles, worked together in multiple reading and writing exchanges within an online community as they read a primary text and as the secondary school students wrote research papers. This study seeks to understand the effects of this unit on the secondary school students’ thinking, reading, and writing skills, focusing specifically …

The Role Of Enculturation In Student Writing-Related Beliefs, Values, And The Potential For Transfer, Joseph Paszek

Wayne State University Dissertations

This qualitative research project examines the relationship between students’ perception of their disciplinary identities, epistemologies, and writing and learning to write in an Intermediate Composition course. More specifically, this study investigates the impact of these “enculturative influences” on students’ perception of the writing classroom, uptake of writing studies skills and strategies, and eventual transfer of these skills and strategies to future writing contexts.

Exploring The Institutional And Programmatic Support Systems In Writing Studies For The Non-Traditional Student In California State Universities, Cassandra Dulin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study surveys the learning characteristics of non-traditional students aged 24 years and older. Since the California State University (CSU) system enrolls a significant non-traditional student demographic, understanding the needs of this student base is a critical component to its success. This Dissertation seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the CSU system: its history in the state of California, the context of its students and their needs, the policies and support structures it has in place to support the non-traditional student, how it defines the non-traditional student and how this definition is manifested in its goals and outcomes for …

Rewriting, Recapturing, Reenvisioning: Writing Assessment Revisited In The Hermeneutic Sphere, Judith Ann Fourzan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation explores the use of hermeneutics in reconsidering the role of writing assessment in composition. The traditional view of writing assessment is negative. In order to change this traditional view and enable composition faculty to utilize writing assessment and a valuable and necessary tool, a hermeneutic sphere offers the best framework upon which to recast writing assessment as part of composition and writing. A hermeneutic sphere is an interpretive methodology that allows for the investigation of any and all aspects of the subject at hand - in this case, writing assessment. The hermeneutic sphere works much like a heuristic …

Critical Affects: Laughter As Inquiry In First-Year Writing Courses, Nicholas James Learned

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

CRITICAL AFFECTS: LAUGHTER AS INQUIRY IN FIRST-YEAR WRITING COURSES

by

Nicholas J. Learned

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015

Under the Supervision of Professor Dennis Lynch

In this dissertation, I work to rethink our current approaches to teaching critical thinking and writing in attempt to collapse the distance between the critical/rhetorical methods we teach in Rhetoric and Composition and the ways students interact rhetorically in their everyday lives. I am prompted to this line of inquiry by a problem I note in both theory and practice: the critical methods we teach in our writing courses rarely translate to real-world behaviors, …

Radical Reflection: Toward The Transformation Of Everyday Teaching And Learning In English Composition, Royal Brevvaxling

Theses and Dissertations

Education is a necessary component in the emancipatory transformation of current capitalist society, with its exploitative social relationships, to one which is based on promoting and supporting human growth and potential. A libertarian education, as Paulo Freire writes of it, "must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed 59).

An additional impediment to developing education useful for this transformation is the separation of thought from action in educational theory and practice. The field of composition studies similarly operates according to …

Responsive Classroom Ecologies: Supporting Student Inquiry And Rhetorical Awareness In College Writing Courses, Adrienne Jankens

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation describes and analyzes the work of a semester-long teacher research study of inquiry-based and reflective teaching and learning strategies and their impact on students' preparation for future learning. I explore relevant scholarship on knowledge transfer, classroom ecologies, and student agency to set the stage for a discussion of several pedagogical strategies implemented to support students' development of inquiry and responsible rhetorical agency. Data analysis highlights three major arguments: first, that alternative pedagogical approaches like an inquiry approach take careful classroom construction and explicit teacher feedback, though it may seem counterintuitive to the politics behind these progressive approaches, which …

Sisyphus Rolls On: Reframing Women's Ways Of “Making It” In Rhetoric And Composition, Kristin Bivens, Martha Mckay Canter, Kirsti Cole, Violet Dutcher, Morgan Gresham, Luisa Rodriguez-Connal, Eileen Schell

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This is a multi-vocal, multi-institutional piece that examines ways women "make it" in rhetoric and composition. It is in the spirit of being more inclusive that we present our ideas about women's ways of making it in rhetoric and composition. This inclusiveness includes a written transcript of our audio narratives. Humbly, we present our work in this piece after four years of writing and revising in the work spaces we all know so well and offer several glimpses of the work women do as writing teachers. We honor all of the women who teach writing -- those who have made …

The Service-Learning Writing Classroom: A Safe Haven For Articulating Difficult Stories About Whiteness And Race, Adam Webb

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Service-learning is an educational method that is usually examined for its practical applications and outcomes, and can help instructors and students to realize the connective aspect of classroom discussions, assignments, activities and discourses that occur within the community. In this respect, "connective" refers to more than just bridging the distance between the classroom and community using service-learning. Instead, it acts like the "connective human tissue" that unites individuals together. Individuals as biological beings themselves are the connective tissue that unites them linguistically, physically and emotionally. In essence, the connective human tissue that unites individuals together creates an intertwined community through …

Disciplinary Permeations: Complicating The "Public" And The "Private" Dualism In Composition And Rhetoric, Erica E. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As Composition and Rhetoric rose in disciplinary status and academic legitimacy the discourse practice of negation, the positioning of texts in oppositional binaries that set the “new” over the “old,” the “novel” over the “familiar,” became embedded in academic tradition, seeming to be an inherited part of scholarship instead of an individual’s rhetorical choice and deliberate ethos strategy. Negation, when one idea or set of ideas constructed by another is critiqued, advocated, and/or redeveloped by another scholar, is a discourse practice firmly established in the Rhetorical Tradition as part of Socratic dialogues, reappears in “modern rhetoric”, and remains today as …

Cooking School, Allison Carr

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

As a writer and educator, I'm interested in the parts of our creative processes that aren't necessarily recognized as integral or valuable --the cleaning, cooking, organizing, exercising, screwing around on the internet... All the stuff we do around creation. I created this video, which splices together a double-blind interview between myself and my mother, to show how two totally different people (a scholar and a chef) talk about their creative processes. My contention is that studying the processes of people who do things OTHER than what we do can lend some insight into how we might think about or go …

Putting Words On Paper: A Technoautobiography, Andrew Treneer Pitman

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

This project was originally created for a class called "Multimedia Authoring," which is sort of a whirlwind tour through graphic design, web design, and digital filmmaking from both a practical and theoretical perspective. Although the class as a whole is inherently very optimistic about new technologies, because it teaches students how to understand the exciting rhetorical possibilities afforded by them, I wanted to examine a specific case where I had found technological progress to be problematic. This piece explores my personal history with technologies that enable writing.