Higher Education Commons^™

Challenging Dominant Ideologies In Order To Center Marginalized Voices And Enrich Learning: Theorizing Social Justice In English Studies Teaching, Heather Holliger

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio explores the reproduction of and challenges to dominant ideologies in popular culture and scholarly contexts and examines pedagogies for advancing social justice in the field of English studies through three distinct but interconnected projects. The first project considers pedagogy in the public sphere, examining the power of the meme genre to serve as “critical public pedagogy” within movements for social change. The second project focuses on the role of dominant norms in reproducing social injustices through classroom writing assessment, offering insights from antiracist, queer, feminist, decolonial, translingual, and disability justice scholars. The paper also reviews composition scholars’ strategies …

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 …

Final Report: Oer Textbook For Core A2 Courses, Cathy Gabor, Leigh Meredith

USF OER Faculty Grant

This report provides an overview of the project completed with OER grant funds received from USF’s Gleeson Library in 2021. Our OER project was to create a textbook that would reduce costs for students in USF’s current Core A2 classes, including RHET 120, 250, 295 and HONC 132. It was also intended to provide a “multimodal” (writing, speaking, digital) approach to composition to reflect best practices and pedagogical innovations in the teaching of composition and communication. This report will cover the specific plan for the OER, what was accomplished, what assessment efforts were undertaken, and areas for further development. Findings …

Reading With Social, Digital Annotation: Encouraging Engaged Critical Reading In A Challenging Age, Miranda L. Egger

English Theses & Dissertations

This design-based research study examines the pedagogical role of social, digital annotation in teaching reading as rhetorical invention, particularly the kind of invention necessary for thoughtful democratic participation in the contemporary discursive era, often described as troubled. In this dissertation study, I deployed a classroom-based intervention meant to challenge how educators in rhetoric and composition/writing studies might directly address the acute and exigent discursive struggle in the first-year composition classroom. This study ultimately finds that social, digital annotation invites significant shifts in students’ reading habits, in that Hypothes.is-based annotations yielded a far more complex, multifaceted set of reading skills, behaviors, …

Developing Critical Thinking With Rhetorical Pedagogy, Elizabeth Ismail

OSSA Conference Archive

The development of critical thinking skills is emphasized as a fundamental attribute of successful graduates (Ritchhart & Perkins, 2005; Willingham, 2008). Some critical thinking textbooks inform students to “see beyond the rhetoric to the core idea being stated” (Moore and Parker, 2009, p. 21); however, other scholars have begun to suggest that rhetoric is intrinsically interrelated to critical thinking and plays a pivotal role in everyday interactions (Saki, 2016). This paper explores the later.

Introduction: The Politics, Praxis, And Performativity Of Teacher Neutrality, Daniel P. Richards

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Full Disclosure / Now What?, Daniel P. Richards

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Remaking Identities, Reworking Graduate Study : Stories From First-Generation-To-College Rhetoric And Composition Phd Students On Navigating The Doctorate., Ashanka Kumari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation responds to the decreasing number of first-generation-to-college doctorates in the humanities and the limited scholarship on graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition. Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have long been invested in discussions of academic and/or disciplinary enculturation, yet these discussions primarily focus on undergraduate students, with few studies on graduate students and far fewer on the doctoral students training to become the next wave of a profession. In this dissertation, I argue that if we engage intersectional identities as assets in the design of doctoral programs, access to higher education and academic enculturation can become more manageable …

Delivery, Facilitas, And Copia : Job Market Preparation And The Revival Of The Fifth Canon., Joseph Turner

Faculty Scholarship

This essay argues that English Studies departments should implement training programs in oral delivery strategies for graduate students seeking tenure track employment. A sample a 13-week training program, modeled on elements of classical rhetorical pedagogy, can help students develop and refine stills in oral delivery necessary for academic job interviews.

Unraveling Identity Signifier Literacy: A Case Study Of First-Year Composition Students' Communication Practices, Bailey Mcalister

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Identity signifier literacy is defined as one’s ability to accurately read – via personal interactions or via visual, verbal, written, or digital communication – the signifiers others display in direct and indirect ways and interpret these signifiers to gain understanding of others’ identities. In this study, 22 first-year composition students were surveyed about their communication practices in order to see how their identity signifier literacies influence and are influenced by digital environments and composition. These results are meant to improve first-year composition pedagogy by making connections between students’ informal composition practices and their academic composition courses.

Fiqws Fall 2018: Phase 2 Assignment Prompt The Exploratory Essay, Sabina Pringle, Missy Watson

Open Educational Resources

This phase two writing assignment prompt for FIQWS 10003 - HA1 WCGI History & Culture and FIQWS 10103 - HA1 Composition for WCGI History & Culture (fall 2018) provides guidelines for writing an Exploratory Essay in which students will consider the ideas of course readings and compose an essay that demonstrates their engagement with those ideas. The rhetorical purpose of this assignment is for students to demonstrate the ways in which their thinking about language and literacy has developed so far in the course, using evidence based on interpretations, ideas, and examples as well as passages from four or five …

Delivery, Facilitas, And Copia : Job Market Preparation And The Revival Of The Fifth Canon., Joseph Turner

Joseph Turner

This essay argues that English Studies departments should implement training programs in oral delivery strategies for graduate students seeking tenure track employment. A sample a 13-week training program, modeled on elements of classical rhetorical pedagogy, can help students develop and refine stills in oral delivery necessary for academic job interviews.

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.

Engl 254: Writing And Communities—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Rachael Wendler Shah

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

This course portfolio analyzes a section of English 254: Writing and Communities, exploring how well the course met individual teaching goals and the departmental course goals for English 254, with a particular focus on how the new English Department mission statement priorities are actualized in the class and how well the class supported learning to communicate across difference. The portfolio includes an outline of institutional context, course outcomes, and student background, as well as a backwards planning chart that demonstrates alignment between outcomes, activities, and assessment strategy. Then, the portfolio examines student data from each of the three major assignments, …

Digital Literacies And Visual Rhetoric: Scaffolding A Meme-Based Assignment Sequence For Introductory Composition Classes, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

Introducing students to the practice of academic writing ideally goes beyond teaching strategies like drafting, outlining, and revising in order to encourage deeper skills such as critical thinking and metacognition. This post discusses an assignment series focusing on reflection, genre analysis, and multiliteracies leading up to the design of original memes.

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 …

Traditions Of Eloquence: The Jesuits And Modern Rhetorical Studies [Appendix], Cinthia Gannett, John Brereton

Religion

This groundbreaking collection explores the important ways Jesuits have employed rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion and the current art of communications, from the sixteenth century to the present. Much of the history of how Jesuit traditions contributed to the development of rhetorical theory and pedagogy has been lost, effaced, or dispersed. As a result, those interested in Jesuit education and higher education in the United States, as well as scholars and teachers of rhetoric, are often unaware of this living 450-year-old tradition. Written by highly regarded scholars of rhetoric, composition, education, philosophy, and history, many based at Jesuit colleges …

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

Truth, Rhetoric, And Critical Thinking, Lajos L. Brons

Lajos Brons

Despite the extraordinary amount of attention critical thinking has received in the last few decades, the teaching and fostering of critical thinking in higher education is largely failing, and critical thinking has become an empty buzzword. However, given its importance as an aim of education, it needs to be “refilled”, but that is possible only after identifying the causes of the current failure, i.e. the obstacles to fostering critical thinking. Three such obstacles are identified in this paper, two actual and one hypothetical: (1) the lack of clarity and agreement about what critical thinking is, (2) current teaching practice, and …

Preliminary Report To The Purdue Writing Lab: Assessing Usability Of The "New" Online Writing Lab (Owl) Design And Contents, Michael Salvo, H. Allen Brizee, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Morgan Sousa

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Research Reports

This report is submitted June 16, 2006 to the Purdue University Writing Lab, specifically to Linda Bergmann, Director; Tammy Conard-Salvo, Associate Director; and Karl Stolley, Lead Web Designer. Intended to inform the ongoing redesign of the Online Writing Lab (OWL), it is written to maintain the highest level of usability and user-centered design of a unique, globally-utilized information resource. This document is a preliminary report limited to initial findings from a five-step usability testing protocol conducted February 25 through March 3, 2006. This testing plan was submitted to Purdue’s Institutional Review Board’s Committee on the Use of Human Subjects (IRB) …

Purdue Online Writing Lab (Owl) Research Report, Michael Salvo, H. Allen Brizee, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Morgan Sousa

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Research Reports

This report outlines the history of the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) and details the OWL Usability Project through the summer of 2006. The paper also discusses test methodologies, describes test methods, provides participant demographics, and presents findings and recommendations of the tests. The purpose of this report is to provide researchers, administrators, and pedagogues interested in usability and Writing Labs access to information on the Purdue OWL Usability Project. We hope our findings—and this open source approach to our research—will contribute positively to the corpus on usability and Writing Lab studies.

The Knowledge And Skills Of Freshman Writers, Aram Paul Sarkisian

Theses Digitization Project

This research identifies what proficient writers know and do by the end of their freshman year in college and raises the kind of questions that improve the articulation of English instruction.