Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Positive Effects Of Sustainability In Buisness, Matt Westman

Undergraduate Voices

This study aims to look at various businesses and address how they view and deal with the idea of making their practice more environmentally friendly and sustainable. More specifically, it will focus on how businesses spend money to make sure they are “green.” It will show whether or not businesses are more focused on earning money and making profit or about making the transition to being more environmentally concerned even if that includes spending more money to do so. This study also explores the benefits for businesses that choose to “go green” to see if the investment of being more …

Editor's Page, Volume 1, Amir Kalan

Undergraduate Voices

First-year undergraduate composition is often dominated by pedagogical practices that focus on persuasive writing and the rhetoric of assertion. Rooted in Anglo-American essayist literacy, college writing is traditionally treated as reporting facts in order to argue cases. In my writing seminars, my students and I decided to resist this dominant approach by employing writing to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. I invited the students to use writing as an epistemological medium in which students could think about their intended majors to comprehend the complexities involved in the disciplines and professions that they were about to enter. …

Formal And Informal Undergraduate Ethics Education In Engineering, Grace Ports

Undergraduate Voices

This literature review attempts to answer the question of whether formal education or informal education of ethics within civil engineering is more beneficial. If there is a lack of structured education of ethics in civil engineering, then another area of interest is to discover where engineers are being informally educated. Another area of inquiry is whether it is more beneficial to teach engineers ethics prior to the time when they are required to study the code of ethics for their certification exam, or should engineers wait until moments before the exam to study the code. This article examines the potential …

Sustainability In Chemical Engineering, Alec T. Raber

Undergraduate Voices

For much of the past century, the world has seen industrial and technological progress that has helped make life better for humans but hurt the environment while doing so. Once people realized the damage that was being done, it was observed that this kind of development was not sustainable, meaning it did not “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland, 1987, p. 3). While different experts may define the term “sustainability” (or “sustainable development”), differently, they will all share the substance of Brundtland’s definition. Ever since the light …

Ethics Education In Engineering: Practices On And Off The Campus, Katherine Theis

Undergraduate Voices

This paper will focus on two major methods for educating engineers in ethics. It is important to realize that two sets of standards exist within the field of engineering, both from the professional standards set within industries and from the personal moral standards held by engineers themselves. This article first examines the education of ethics within the workplace as some engineers have no previous training in ethics. Second, it discusses how ethics is introduced to engineers through university undergraduate and graduate courses. It will also evaluate whether ethics courses are more effective than the real-world application found through the professional …

Engineering's Effects On Communities Through An Ethical Framework, Bailey A. Reid

Undergraduate Voices

Engineering is at the forefront of innovation and progression in our society, but often has various impacts on the communities in which projects take place. This article focuses on several ethical guidelines established through education and engineering’s effects on surrounding communities. Ethics inside of community actions and approach will also be explored.

Undergraduate Voices, Volume 1 (2018), Amir Kalan

Undergraduate Voices

In this volume, Grace Ports explores ethics education in engineering. She explains why engineering students need to engage with ethics and examines possibilities offered by formal and experiential learning of ethics for engineering students. Julia Weber asks why the field of engineering is male-dominated and why this condition should change. She discusses the proportion of men in the field in comparison with women and focuses on discrimination against women in the workplace. Alec Raber presents his thoughts about sustainability in chemical engineering by highlighting concepts such as industrial ecology and green engineering. Seth Adams advocates for more experiential learning in …

Advocating For More Experiential Learning Strategies In Medical School, Seth D. Adams

Undergraduate Voices

When it comes to learning and teaching, there are many ways for teachers and students to maximize the amount of learning that happens in the schooling environment. The focus of this paper is the effects of experiential learning in medical education. This pedagogy is very common in many teaching strategies and is widely used, debated, and studied throughout academia. This paper will introduce experiential learning as it is seen broadly throughout all fields of study and practice, but will then specifically focus on experiential learning and its effects on medical education. Using two different types of experiential learning, community-based learning …

The People And Purpose Of Business: The Philosophical View Of The Workings Of A Corporation From A First-Year Business Student, Jared Beach

Undergraduate Voices

A person with a goal needs careful and thoughtful planning and execution if he or she is to attain success. There exist multiple layers of decision making, management, and maintenance to provide continuity, growth, and prosperity (McCormack, 1990). While in theory everything should run smoothly, the real may not function to the sights we envision. In the instance of running businesses, the process of turning thoughts on paper into profit will never be as easy as inhaling and exhaling. It takes a large investment of time and resources to guide a company towards achieving what one sets out to accomplish. …

Bursting The Filter Bubble: Information Literacy And Questions Of Valuation, Navigation, And Control In A Digital Landscape, Komysha Hassan

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The evolution of social media platforms and other public forums in the digital realm has created an explosion of user-generated content and data as a component of the already content-saturated digital landscape. The distributed, horizontal nature of the internet as a platform makes it difficult to ascertain value and differentiate between texts of varying validity, bias, and purpose. In addition, the internet is not an inanimate interface. As Pariser (2011) argues, content aggregators, such as Google, actively filter, personalize, and therefore limit each individual's access to information, in both range and type. This has created a crisis of information valuation …

American Studies + Computational Humanities, Lauren Tilton

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

While often commonly positioned at the intersection of computer science and digital humanities, computational humanities engages with other fields including data science, (computational) linguistics, and statistics.Such a transdisciplinary approach creates "a digital ecology of data, algorithms, metadata, analytical and visualization tools, and new forms of scholarly expression that result from this research," as Christa Williford and Charles Henry, of the Council on Library and Information Resources, write. Text analysis, particularly the method of topic modeling, has enjoyed broad exposure within computational humanities. Given the scale of the corpus, computational methods were used to identify reprinted texts in 41,829 issues.The goal …

Designing For Human-Machine Collaboration: Smart Hearing Aids As Wearable Technologies, Krista Kennedy

Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition - All Scholarship

This study examines design aspects that shape human/machine collaboration between wearers of smart hearing aids and their networked aids. The Starkey Halo hearing aid and the TruLink iPhone app that facilitates real-time adjustments by the wearer offer a case study in designing for this sort of collaboration and for the wearer’s rhetorical management of disability disclosure in social contexts. Through close textual analysis of the company’s promotional materials for patient and professional audiences as well as interface analysis and autoethnography, I examine the ways that close integration between the wearer, onboard algorithms and hardware, and geolocative telemetry shape everyday interactions …

Apologies For Cross-Posting: Composing Disciplinary Affects And Conflicts On The Wpa Listserv, Zachary Beare

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Drawing on theories of counterpublics, online communication, and affect, this dissertation argues that the Writing Program Administrators Listserv (WPA-L) functions as an important site of disciplinary knowledge-making and theory-building for the field of Composition and Rhetoric. The dissertation examines the WPA-L as a discursive space in which members of the discipline build community, debate pressing issues, and strategize how best to advocate for their individual and collective interests. At the same time that these qualities reveal how the listserv functions as counterpublic space for the discipline at large, the dissertation argues that sub-disciplinary counterpublics made up of individuals marginalized within …

As If By Magic: Unleashing Critical And Expressive Voices Through A Rhetoric Of "This/And" In First-Year Composition, Nolan Chessman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation engages academic, creative, and student genres in conversation in order to challenge the strict discursive and stylistic boundaries placed around college writing, particularly in first-year composition. Because this project aims to thrust first-year writing pedagogy beyond the confines of fixed genre forms, its inquiry is multimodal, intermingling writing styles and research modes so that, in scholar-teacher Wendy Bishop’s words, “I can think in and through them all” (“Places to Stand” 17). The particulars—or “data”—informing this study are primarily archival, textual (often a combination of the two), experimental, and experiential. Broadly speaking, this inquiry consists of seven chapters, which …

Racialized Slacktivism: Social Media Performances Of White Antiracism, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

This chapter is an analysis of common white netizens' responses to the killing of Trayvon Martin and to the viral video, "Kony 2012." It argues that such responses are a form of "racialized slacktivism," that is, an effort to return to a sense of oneself as a good, happy white person by going through the motions of demonstrating an antiracist online version of oneself.

Multimodal Pedagogies, Processes And Projects: Writing Teachers Know More Than We May Think About Teaching Multimodal Composition, Jessica B. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

Multimodal writing refers to texts that use more than one communicative mode to convey information. While there is much scholarship that examines the history of alphabetic writing instruction and the alphabetic composing processes of students, little research explores the historical origins of multimodal composition and the processes in which students engage as they compose multimodal texts. This two-part project takes a fresh approach to studying multimodal writing by exploring the multimodal pedagogies of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric and writing teachers, analyzing the role of mental and physical images in modern writers’ composing practices, and investigating contemporary students’ processes for …

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

Journal of Student Success in Writing (Archived)

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.

Play This Paper: Forms Of Time In The Open World, Branching Narrative, Roleplaying Game, Jimmy Evans

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper is an analysis of chronotopes in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that reveals how the procedurality of video games might suggest a refined heteroglossic form. Synthesizing contemporary american philosopher Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric with the materialist linguistic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, this ultimately hypertextual and interactive article reflects on language as Bakhtin once did: as "agent and agency” (MPL 146). After detailing how the three major processes of the game coordinate spacetime, it is necessary to conclude that its kaleidoscopic nature provides new opportunities for the rendering of the geometry of thought in what is a …

Excavating Eportfolios: What Student-Driven Data Reveals About Multimodal Composition And Instruction, Amanda M. Licastro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The pedagogical practice of asking students to compose in open, online spaces has grown rapidly in recent years along with an increase in institutional and financial support. In fact, in July 2013, the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) announced the “coming of age” of ePortfolios as the percentage of higher education students using ePortfolios rose above the 50% mark in the U.S. (“About”). There are a host of constituent assertions that support the use of open online writing platforms in college-level courses. These claims include that writing publically cultivates digital literacy through broader audience awareness, facilitates interactivity …

Embodied Narratives In Video Games: The Stories We Write As We Play, Patrick John Harrington Sichter

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This article explores the nature of narrative in video games, and how it can be applied to the contemporary classroom to help teach literature and composition. Specifically, it is concerned with the idea of embodiment in video games. First proposed by theorist James Gee, embodiment is a word describing the phenomenon wherein a player inhabits the character that s/he plays. This article takes the idea of embodiment a step further, by introducing the idea of the embodied narrative, the idea that players do not only embody their characters, but those characters’ stories as well, and are composing unique, personal …

The Digital Badge Initiative And Its Implications For First-Year Writing, Rena Tillinghast

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

College students seek degrees to obtain employment in their field of interest, however, as the 21st century progresses, employers are often requiring specific skills in addition to degrees and transcripts. As students graduate with their Associates, Bachelors, and Graduate degrees, they plan to present these degrees as sufficient evidence of their qualifications. However, there is recent criticism of college degrees as evidence of qualifications. A beneficial alternative for students would be digital badges. A digital badge is a visual representation that signifies a specific achievement with detailed metadata attached. Digital badges in first-year writing courses would benefit students as they …

Isis Rhetoric: A War Of Online Videos, Kathryn Mcdearis

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In an attempt to combat ISIS recruitment videos, the United States Department of State (USDS) developed the Think Again, Turn Away social media campaign featuring videos attempting to persuade viewers to resist the message of ISIS. In the article “U.S. government: A war of online video propaganda,” authors William Allendorfer and Susan Herring (2015) analyze the textual rhetoric of the ISIS video series Flames of War in comparison to eight Think Again, Turn Away videos. To add to Allendorfer and Herring’s (2015) textual analysis, this study uses the framework of scholar David Blakesley’s (2004) four elements of film rhetoric ( …

Getting The Picture: Engaging Student Learning Using Pinterest, Jo Koster

Winthrop Conference on Teaching and Learning

In a digital environment, teachers and students have access to a wide variety of material that can be used to create discussion, spark inquiry, and prompt critical thinking. One of the social media tools that can be used for this is Pinterest, a free online visual discovery, collection, sharing, and storage tool that allows users to curate and share information through the creation of visual bookmarks called “boards.” Users can “pin” material to their boards either by linking to other online sites or by uploading materials of their own; boards can be grouped by similar characteristics, themes, events, questions, ideas, …

Personas: A Strategy For More Inclusive And Usable Reproductive Health Tracking Technologies, Anna R. Paul

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this report, I argue for the inclusion of personas in the development process of technologies that are designed to allow users to collect and track their health information. Personas provide a profile of a user and their needs, goals, and contexts. This tool can help designers to better understand their users, in order to create better, more usable end products. I examine one particular self-tracking technology, smartphone applications that allow users to record information about their menstrual cycles. Many of the most popular period tracking applications available today only meet the needs of a narrow user group, resulting in …

Magic At The Crossroads: The Rise Of The Video Essay, Morganne Tinsley August

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the birth, rise in popularity, and evolution of the video essay, a subgenre of the essay found recently in online literary journals. Chapter one provides a brief history of the alphabetic essay as it expands to include photo essays, audio essays, and essay-films. The second chapter outlines the history of the online literary journal and John Bresland’s role in the introduction of the video essay as it appears in online journals. Chapter three contains an examination of the way image, text, and sound function in video essays and the tools and strategies essayists are using to create …

The Half-Life & After-Life Of New Media, Nancy Austin

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

It is fitting to think of the half-life of new media using the time-based metaphor of radioactive decay. As a metaphor, an object’s half-life can be a useful way to talk about the potent technological modernity of new media and, like Walter Benjamin’s well-known notion of the aura, call attention to an object’s performativity. However, Benjamin’s aura remains a constant reminder of irrevocable originality whereas remarking on half-life references a quality that changes over time. But what happens after the rhetorical impact of being new has run its course? What is the life expectancy of once-new media and what of …

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: A Metaphorical Look At Life, The Universe, And Everything, Thomas David Thompson

Communication Studies

A look at the integral use of metaphor as a heuristic in the process of human learning.

Occupy The Future: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Dystopian Film And The Occupy Movement, Justin J. Grandinetti

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The anarchic Occupy Wall Street protests, which began in 2011, had an immediate impact on politics and the global lexicon. By introducing the terms “the one percent” and “the 99%” into the public sphere, Occupy was able to draw attention to growing global income inequality. This revolutionary spirit was not lost on popular culture, as a number of films that followed the protests were linked to Occupy. The Hunger Games (2012), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Elysium (2013) represent films that were not only extremely successful in the box office, but were also connected to the Occupy Movement because …

Introduction To New Work On Electronic Literature And Cyberculture, Maya Zalbidea, Mark C. Marino, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Metalanguage In Carroll's "Jabberwocky" And Biggs's Reread, Asunción López-Varela

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Metalanguage in Carroll's 'Jabberwocky' and Biggs's reRead" Asunción López-Varela discusses Simon Biggs's installation reRead <http://www.littlepig.org.uk/reRead/reRead.htm> in relation to Lewis Carroll's poem. López-Varela posits that both works draw attention to the functioning of self-reflexive semiotic mechanisms present in human discourse and gestures. Based on the examples of the poem and the installation, López-Varela discusses how the human mind creates narratological coherence out of random and recursive patterns and argues that it does so by including other media which enable formats beyond the textual and the iconic. Further, López-Varela discusses how we are pre-disposed to process any semiotic …