Education Commons^™

Defining And Transferring Digital Literacies: What Does This Mean For High School And College Educators?, Jocelyn Spoor

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis aims to create a digital literacies transfer framework through a discussion regarding current conversations on transfer and digital literacies in the English field, including synthesizing the two ideas to think about the transfer of digital literacies as a concept. This digital literacies framework is made up of five components: the functional skills, critical skills, and rhetorical skills found in digital literacies scholarship and the genre awareness and meta-cognitive ideas found in transfer literature. This digital literacies transfer framework is then used to analyze information gleaned from four college and five high school English educators. The key findings from …

High School Scholastic Journalism: An Empowering Force In Our Polarized Democracy And Democratic Empowerment - Scholastic Journalism Curriculum, Shelby Schmidt

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Consisting of two parts, this thesis explores the way a journalism classroom can create a democratic space for students that allows them to practice social life while developing more skills in tolerance and more confidence in their agency. The second portion consists of a sample curriculum to allow more democratic empowerment in our classrooms.

Advisor: Stacey Waite

Civil Discourse In The Classroom: Preparing Students For Academic And Civic Participation, Melissa Legate

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis will explore the importance of civil discourse education. I assert that there is a tremendous need for productive means of disagreement in today’s society, and I propose that the classroom is an ideal setting in which to foster the skills needed for civil discourse. This document features arguments for the need for civil discourse, a detailed definition of it, multiple pedagogical approaches to civil discourse education, and an explanation of the ways in which civil discourse aligns with national- and state-level educational standards. Among this research are also examples of the work of Pierce High School’s English 9 …

Tilting At Windmills: Refiguring Graduate Education In English To Prepare Future Two-Year College Professionals, Darin L. Jensen

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation makes recommendations for the reform of graduate education to better serve current and future two-year college English instructors. The author undertakes historical and archival research to write a history of how English instructors have been prepared for the distinct profession of two-year college teaching. In addition, the author interviews two-year college English instructors from around the United States to chronicle their preparation narratively and how said preparation has affected their working experience. Drawing on the historical, narrative and current practices found in the research, the author details specific interventions, in the form of equity-centered partnerships, to improve preparation …

Rhetoric As Inquiry: Personal Writing And Academic Success In The English Classroom, Erica E. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Holistic and critical pedagogy, an approach to learning and teaching, integrates the everyday realities students live, with the systemic and institutional objectives of education itself. Working with theories from composition, rhetoric, feminist studies, and cognitive psychology from a teacher-researcher perspective, this dissertation explores and theorizes holistic, critical pedagogy within the composition classroom while outlining the use of personal writing as a means to develop critical consciousness. Student study participants kept “Inquiry Notebooks,” semester-long personal writing projects that served as receptacles for practical and theoretical engagement with a variety of texts and ideas, then interviewed after the course to discuss their …

Cultivating A Learner’S Stance For Engagement In Teacher-Inquiry: An Aim For Writing Pedagogy Education, Jessica Rivera-Mueller

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation argues that writing teacher educators (WTEs) can more purposefully advance their commitment to sponsoring inquiry-oriented teacher development by helping pre-service and practicing writing teachers examine how they are developing as inquirers. Building from scholarship in Composition and English Education and the findings from a narrative-based qualitative study that included four secondary and post-secondary teachers of writing, I have named this attention to how teachers learn and grow their inquiry processes a learner’s stance for engagement in teacher-inquiry. This stance is a readiness to see and engage professional work with an eye toward growing one’s ability to engage …

Using Embedded Institutes As Professional Development To Create A Culture Of Writing Excellence, Melanie K. Farber

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following thesis addresses the problem of creating a culture of writing excellence at a large, urban school. I will show how the Embedded Institute model helped our school to reconsider our professional development model and to create writing leaders across the content areas. The thesis will make the argument for something larger than test scores through qualitative feedback from teacher participants.

Adviser: Robert Brooke

The Writing Process: Using Peer Review To Develop Student Writing, Jennifer M. Troester

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The following thesis will explore how peer review through an online writing exchange influences student writers during the writing process. I propose that when students participate in this online writing exchange to peer review, it will assure that they will have a better understanding of the writing process, and more confidence in analyzing their own writing and in themselves as writers. It also makes these students more conscientious of the writing they share with peers because they have a wider audience than just their teacher, and this motivates them to improve their writing. The last part of the document features …

Student Engagement And Action In Classroom And Community: Place-Based Education And Social Action For The High-Achieving Student, Rachel M. Jank

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This paper briefly discusses the work done in a college-preparatory, Senior English class to combat the disengagement present in many educational institutions. This disconnect does not allow for learning retention and, therefore, does not allow for students to apply the moment of learning to life outside of the secondary classroom. The work I do is based off of Jessica Singer Early, Bruce Bigelow, Linda Christensen, and many other master teachers who work with the educational designs of Place Consciousness and Social Action within their respective classrooms. The theories of John Dewey and Paulo Freire suggest that a non-traditional style of …

Teaching Self: The Ambiguity Of Lived Experience In Classroom Discourse, Scott V. Gealy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Inspired by Paul Heilker’s notion of the essay as a form of exploration over argument, embodying an anti-scholastic and chrono-logical approach, and Candace Spigelman’s endorsement of experience as evidence in academic discourse, this thesis weaves memoir into more traditional scholarship in an effort to complicate the archetype of the effective teacher. Furthermore, the essay seeks to deconstruct conventional student, teacher, and cultural binaries with the help of the theoretical work of Deborah Britzman, Parker Palmer, Mikhail Bakhtin, Joy Ritchie and David Wilson and others, while using Scott Russell Sanders’ narrative essay “Under the Influence” as a mentor text for …

Living Well: The Value Of Teaching Place, Catherine M. English

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation is a teaching memoir that examines the implementation of a place conscious pedagogy as a means to teach sustainable living practices into a secondary English classroom in a rural Nebraska school. It is framed upon the premise of instilling five senses of place consciousness into students as defined by Haas and Nachtigal (1998) including living well in community or a sense of belonging; living well spiritually or a sense of connection; living well economically or a sense of worth; living well politically or a sense of civic involvement; and living well ecologically or a sense of place. I …

At Risk In The Writing Classroom: Negotiating A Lesbian Teacher Identity, Irene G. Meaker

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

"Education is a fearful enterprise," says teacher and philosopher, Parker Palmer. Student-centered/ processoriented pedagogy asks teachers to step out from behind the relative safety of the teacher mask and to enter the risky arena of learning. For the writing teacher, a special challenge is to help students negotiate the risks inherent in the act of writing and in sharing writing with the "Other."

To prevent fears from dominating our students, teachers must model risk-taking and risk negotiation. In my own teaching, my fears around students' reactions to learning my sexual identity meant that I more often reinforced fears than dispelled …