Education Commons^™

Content And Context: Objective Formation In Fyc Activity Systems, Peter Brooks

Theses and Dissertations

Context is key. We as First Year Composition (FYC) teachers focus on context when teaching the rhetorical situation as a reading and writing tool. Contexts influence the systems we teach within as well as how and why we teach, and determine students’ experiences and perspectives as writers. A required course, FYC acts as a contextual nexus: we help students bridge high school writing to college writing; we assign more generalized essays and research papers to prepare students for more discipline-specific genres in advanced writing courses; and we have activities that (un)intentionally develop “soft skills” in preparation for upper level courses …

Course Goals And Feedback Workflows: Examining Instructors' Pedagogy In Professional Communication Service Courses, Sara C. Doan

Theses and Dissertations

In Professional and Technical Communication (PTC), feedback has not been studied in proportion to its importance, particularly in service, or introductory, courses. Feedback is a form of assessment; therefore, an empirical study of instructor feedback requires attention to PTC instructors’ pedagogical goals and learning outcomes. This research asked and answered three questions about

1. Instructors’ pedagogical goals and learning outcomes for their PTC service courses,

2. Instructors’ approaches to giving feedback on students’ resumes and cover letters, and

3. The extent to which instructors’ pedagogical goals and feedback aligned.

This research contributes data-driven findings on instructor feedback within PTC service …

"Becoming A Multicultural Teacher: Reflections On Responsibility In First-Year Writing", Ingrid Jayne Nordstrom

Theses and Dissertations

Composition Studies teacher-scholars who are committed to working with multicultural student populations are trained to value writing from marginalized groups, recognize the intelligence that lies within “non-standard” forms, and encourage student writers to find and use their own voices. Too often, however, our thinking and writing focuses on what we teachers assume to be our responsibility: giving voice to the voiceless or empowering student success. This dissertation addresses this situation by re-conceptualizing responsibility itself, proposing that multicultural pedagogies are of limited use unless we examine the self-perceptions and preconceptions influencing our work with students in the classroom. Modeling a research-based …

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, …

Materiality, Craft, Identity, And Embodiment: Reworking Digital Writing Pedagogy, Kristin Prins

Theses and Dissertations

Too often in Rhetoric and Composition, multimodal writing (an expansive practice of opening up the media and modes with which writers might work) is reduced to digital writing. “Reworking Digital Writing” argues that the opportunities and insights of digital writing should encourage us to turn our attention to all kinds of nondigital materials that have not traditionally been considered part of composing—including the materials that are already familiar to crafters and do-it-yourselfers (DIYers). Further, I argue that the material, technical, rhetorical, economic, and social dimensions of DIY craft provide a coherent framework for teaching multimodal writing in ways that encourage …

A Pedagogy Of Persistence: Access Through Arrangement In The Age Of New Media, Jennifer Kontny

Theses and Dissertations

Fostering access in our writing classrooms has been a centrally important goal in the field of rhetoric and composition since the social turn in the 1980s. As a means of creating classroom spaces that help students gain access to new identities and ways of being in the world, those in our discipline have long privileged pedagogies that focus on invention. This dissertation traces the work of those in diverse areas of the field in order to show our wide-spread favoring of invention (or creativity, discovery, and the "new"). Unfortunately, I argue that the attention we have paid to invention has …

Beam Lesson Plan, Kristin M. Woodward, Kate L. Ganski

UWM Libraries Instructional Materials

This creative commons publication provides a lesson plan on writing with sources in an academic context. The plan is designed for use in a higher education setting and is aligned with AAC&U LEAP Value Rubric for Information Literacy and the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education.