PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Educational Studies

The narrowing English language arts (ELA) curriculum in American public schools has negatively impacted students. Creative writing, specifically fictional narrative writing, has nearly vanished from ELA curriculum in the United States. This study focused on the literacies involved in creative writing to critically examine what is lost with a narrowing ELA curriculum. As an intermediate grade-level teacher and literacy researcher, I conducted this qualitative case study to better understand how 14 fifth-grade students experienced an after-school creative writing club while writing fictional narratives. By using process writing theory and expressivism as a conceptual framework, this study focused primarily on the writing processes and overall experiences that students had throughout the duration of the club. The analysis highlighted the literacies that students had access to, as well as the wide array of experiences they had within a creative writing club context. Findings showed that students must balance opposing experiences, broadly conceived as positive and negative, during all parts of the writing process so that they can make continued progress on their fictional narratives. These oppositions were grouped into three categories: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and environmental. This act of balance was defined as “author equilibrium.” This writing experience provided students with a creative outlet, allowed students to participate in the writing process in an engaging way, provided students the opportunity to work alongside others, and showed students that writing can be enjoyable. While the narrowing of ELA curricula has prevented students from writing creatively in the classroom, this study highlighted the benefits of allowing space for creative writing within the ELA classroom.

Committee: Mark Sulzer Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Constance Kendall Theado Ph.D. (Committee Member); Lauren Colley Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Education

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 1998, Department of Languages

As an educator of first and second language learners, I have implemented an expressivistic approach to the writing of composition. Expressivism is one manifestation of the process theory of writing. While the research on first language learners and second language learners, or L1 and L2, remains a bit uneven, I have considered what has been researched and have attempted to draw connections from there. After implementing some of these expressivistic approaches in both classrooms, I have dedicated a section of my thesis where these responses are included. These responses represent my willingness as an educator to show rather than just tell readers about my research. The first chapter of my thesis contains existing research on both L1 and L2 learners. I outline four principles of expressivism in the introductory section. These principles are short-circuiting; embracing the authentic, personal voice; the physicality of writing; and showing not telling. It is important to note that these four principles only represent some of the many principles lying underneath the umbrella of expressivism. This section chronicles what has been tested and found to be true of both first language learning and second language learning. The second chapter of my thesis contains student responses from L1 and L2 learners illustrating their written reactions to these four principles of expressivism. The last section of the second chapter provides an arena where conclusions are drawn and introspection occurs.

Committee: Steven Brown (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, English

Challenging composition's tendency to focus exclusively on alphabetic literacy, numerous composition scholars have called for a turn to teaching students to produce texts that explicitly blend words, images, and sounds. In calling for this multimodal turn, compositionists have argued that multimodal texts are becoming increasingly central in workplace and civic realms and that students are increasingly arriving in our classrooms with strong visual / multimodal literacies. In making these persuasive arguments for the need to move beyond alphabetic literacy in composition, scholars have understandably emphasized composition's historical lack of engagement with visual and multimodal textual production. I contend, however, that if we look closely at expressivist, cognitivist, and social composition theories of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, we can uncover a rich heritage of compositionists engaging issues of multimodality. In recovering composition's multimodal heritage, I ultimately seek to elucidate the unique disciplinary perspective that compositionists bring to multimodality as well as to articulate ways in which teaching multimodal composing can contribute to the development of students' alphabetic writing skills. In the conclusion of the dissertation, I offer five macro-principles (culled from a blend of past expressivist, cognitive, and social approaches) that can productively inform our contemporary attempts to integrate multimodal composing into our courses, our curricular/institutional structures, and our scholarly work: 1) Alphabetic writing entails a profoundly multimodal process; 2) Some rhetorical and composing process theories can transfer across modalities; 3) Multimodal composing need not necessarily be digital; 4) Disability offers insights into multimodal composing pedagogy; 5) Analysis and production are interconnected activities.

Committee: Cynthia Selfe (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, Philosophy

In order to have genuine disagreement, interlocutors must share terms, meanings, and concepts. Without this, their dispute is merely verbal; it rests on linguistic confusion. This is true of all conversation, but many philosophers have thought that moral discourse poses special problems. Moral discourse seems to contain intractable disagreements and lacks the sorts of authority and deference relations that are typical in straightforward empirical disagreement. This yields a potent philosophical puzzle: how is it that moral evaluators can share a subject matter while thinking such different things? I argue that noncognitivist attempts to make sense of disagreement fail. The noncognitivist is obliged to provide an account of the mental states at work in moral discourse. These accounts either fail to identify a distinct species of moral evaluation, or to provide for genuine incompatibility between competing moral judgments, or to avoid circularity. Thus one of the most important motivations for noncognitivist accounts is undermined. I show how naturalistic moral realism can be defended against popular arguments against its ability to make sense of univocity. This criticism has been revived in recent work by Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons. I develop three objections to their so-called ‘Moral Twin Earth' argument, and conclude that it has no force against moral realism. I then show that naturalistic realism faces a different problem accounting for univocity. This problem results from the fact that the path of moral inquiry is underdetermined: there is no fact of the matter about the referents of speakers' terms. I argue that common realistic appeals to the resolution of moral dispute are not sufficient, because they fail to note a distinction between different readings of the convergence claim. The most plausible ways of understanding that claim are of no help to the realist's semantic requirements. Finally, I consider a rejoinder suggested by recent work in the philoso (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Justin D'Arms (Advisor) Subjects: Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2012, Philosophy, Applied

Broadly and somewhat roughly speaking, metanormative theorists who maintain that there is normative truth fall into one of three camps: non-naturalist, naturalist and expressivist. I am interested in the prospects for normative truth, and thus in which, if any, of these positions offers hope for the discovery of such truth. In each of three chapters, I address one of these views. I conclude that our best hope is a view most closely related to naturalism (though I reject this classification for one that I believe better captures what is at stake in the literature I focus on). In Chapter 1, I target expressivism, according to which normative thought and language express non-cognitive attitudes. I explain why it will be difficult, if not impossible, for expressivists to account for a kind of commonplace nihilistic doubt that, I argue, is a symptom of the widely accepted “objective” nature of normativity. I conclude that an inability to account for such doubt should be considered a serious problem for expressivism. In Chapter 2, I address a prominent form of non-naturalism, according to which the normative is “metaphysically autonomous”—neither identical with, nor constituted by, nor constitutive of anything non-normative. I examine several important explanatory challenges non-naturalists face in normative epistemology, metaphysics and semantics. I argue that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to develop their view such that it meets these challenges while remaining plausible. The Open Question Argument and its contemporary cousin, Normative Twin Earth, are the most prominent objections to naturalism. In Chapter 3, I argue that because these arguments rely on semantic rather than metaphysical intuitions, they should be understood as targeting semantic rather than metaphysical views (e.g., not naturalism). I propose that the appropriate targets are views committed to a particular class of reference-fixing relations for normative terms. I then examine the prospects (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Shoemaker Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Christian Coons Ph.D. (Committee Member); David Copp Ph.D. (Committee Member); Anne Gordon Ph.D. (Committee Member); Tristram McPherson Ph.D. (Committee Member); Sara Worley Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethics; Philosophy