Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

This dissertation reviews major WAC scholarship from the four-year university/college level and extrapolates salient WAC protocols that impact sustainability. It constructs a series of eight heuristics based on Michelle Cox, Jeffrey Galin, and Dan Melzer's “Building Sustainable WAC Programs.” Deploying these heuristics within a systems theory matrix, it conducts a forensic analysis of data from two, two-year college WAC programs, one dormant and one active, and ultimately isolates WAC protocols that either enhance or reduce sustainability. The foreword presents a brief history of the two-year college movement. Chapter one thoroughly discusses the lack of scholarship at two-year institutions, reviews the history, theory and praxis of WAC at four-year colleges, develops a list of WAC protocols from the history, theory, and praxis, and presents an overview of this project. Chapter two discusses the types of data collection methods, the data types, their relevance to this project, collection procedures, and constructs eight data analysis heuristics from the protocols listed in chapter one and the sustainability scholarship developed by Cox et. al. Chapters three and four separately discuss the history and development of both campuses, presents the findings from both sites and briefly analyzes them within the context of their specific exigencies. Chapter five thoroughly analyzes the data from both sites at the local level and the field level and hypothesizes on the presence and absence of sustainability protocols developed in chapters one and two. The findings take note of three salient aspects of the protocols which the analysis heuristics revealed as most relevant to sustainability within these two programs: consensus on the concept of good writing, the degree of autonomy teaching faculty exercised over their respective programs, and the level of participation among faculty outside of the liberal arts/general education departments. The implications thus (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lee Nickoson Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Kerri Knippen Ph.D. (Other); Neil Baird Ph.D. (Committee Member); Sue Carter-Wood Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Community College Education; Community Colleges; Composition; Education Philosophy; Sustainability

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

Since ITAs teach many first-year writing classes, finding the best way to support them is crucial to their success as instructors and the students they teach. Many go on to teach classes in the United States, so preparing them to teach has far-reaching professional implications for their work in the U.S. (Mihut, 2020). In this dissertation, I investigate the experiences of ITAs learning about teaching writing in the US. In the first phase of research, I distributed a survey to discover more about the general experiences of ITAs, including questions about the format of their writing pedagogy education (WPE), the content, opportunities for mentoring, and experience with resistance. In the second phase, I conducted a series of interviews with ITAs in three groups: a focus group, a dyadic interview, and an interview. The results indicated room for improvement in mentoring and resistance. Mentors need good training that enables them to empathize with ITAs. WPE classes need to recognize obstacles to resistance for ITAs and create access to resistance in classes.

Committee: Neil Baird Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Meridith Reed Ph.D (Committee Member); Kimberly Spallinger M.A. (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Pedagogy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

This project responds to disciplinary calls from within Composition Studies to take up socially just, linguistically just (Baker-Bell) pedagogies of “languaging” (Inoue). Specifically, it examines the potential for one integral, yet largely unaddressed pedagogical site for furthering such goals: grammar instruction. Through a two-stage, mixed methods study, I first analyze generalizable trends in contemporary grammar pedagogy and training practices through a national survey. I second evaluate receptivity to and potentials for developing and circulating anti-racist, liberatory grammar curriculum and training through a college-wide case study. Overall, my project seeks to examine the ways that Composition instructors and writing program administrators might understand, develop, and circulate grammar pedagogies in ways consistent with contemporary disciplinary ideologies on languaging. After articulating the exigency for the project in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 reports on a nationwide survey that was completed by over 130 Composition instructors across the U.S. on their grammar pedagogy training, attitudes, perspectives, goals, and practices. Out of findings that revealed the presence of both historically established pedagogies and an emergent, grassroots grammar pedagogy responsive to anti-racist perspectives, this chapter proffers an ideological framework for categorizing and understanding grammar pedagogies. This frames Stage Two of the project, which applies the framework as an administrative and analytical tool for localized curriculum development and training. Chapter 3 situates Stage Two's case study, which was a collaborative project between me and Linn-Benton Community College English faculty member Dionisia Morales. Chapter 4 discusses the results of our Feminist Writing Program Administration and critically pedagogies-based participatory action research, which supported Morales' project by surveying over 200 students, faculty, and staff, conducting 14 indi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Beverly Moss (Advisor); Jonathan Buehl (Committee Member); Evonne Kay Halasek (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Curricula; Higher Education; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2023, English

In this project, I set out to investigate how Writing Program Administrators (WPA) can draw on theories, research findings, and best practices of transfer from both composition and second language writing studies in order to develop curricula and pedagogical practices to support multilingual writers in First-Year Composition (FYC). Research from the two separate fields of writing studies around genre and transfer shows that facilitating genre knowledge, genre awareness, genre uptake, discourse community enculturation, and generative dispositions can encourage learners to transfer what they know to new contexts. A transfer-encouraging curriculum needs to recognize and teach the social and learner-based aspects of writing and learning. This is even more important when working with first-year multilingual writers who were enculturated in different cultures other than American culture and have achieved high proficiency in languages other than English before they are enrolled in FYC courses. Drawing on scholarship in rhetorical genre studies, English for specific purposes, and systemic functional linguistics genre studies, this dissertation uses a methodology on genre transferability to understand what FYC programs across the US do (and can do) to support multilingual writers and what theories are guiding programs' curriculum development, pedagogical practices, and professional development activities. I argue that if our goal is to help novice multilingual students effectively respond to the cultural, discoursal, and linguistic challenges they face, then WPAs across institution types must work to develop FYC initiatives that draw on transfer scholarship from both composition studies and second language writing studies. In Chapter 1, I propose a conceptual framework that draws on both fields of writing transfer studies and discuss pedagogical implications for curriculum development and writing instruction for teaching first-year multilingual writers. In Chapter 2, I ou (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth Wardle (Committee Chair); Sara Webb-Sunderhaus (Advisor); Tony Cimasko (Advisor); Elizabeth Hutton (Advisor); Thomas Poetter (Advisor) Subjects: Composition; Education; English As A Second Language; Linguistics; Multicultural Education; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

As a common touchstone for millions of college students annually, First-Year Writing (FYW) is an important site of research activity that seeks to determine high-impact teaching practices that serve this increasingly diverse student population. Many teacher-scholars have turned to principles of Learning Transfer as a solution for promoting student learning in the writing classroom. Learning transfer, the repurposing or generalization of knowledge between contexts, is an incredibly complex process. Discussions of transfer often lack critical attention to what prior knowledges, skills, dispositions, or literacies we expect students might bring into writing courses, as well as what we hope they will take with them. Writing studies scholarship needs a model that defines prior knowledges and transfer in ways that explicitly attend to sociocultural and linguistic diversity to establish practices for cultural accountability in teaching for writing transfer. To address this need, I designed a mixed-method study that was guided by four research questions: 1. What prior knowledges, if any, do First-Year Writing instructors expect students to possess? 2. To what degree do those expectations account for sociocultural and linguistic knowledges from home, school, and other contexts? 3. How are students' prior knowledges valued or mobilized by instructors? 4. What patterns, if any, exist across instructors' beliefs about teaching and learning, assumptions about student prior knowledges, and instructional practices? Through a framework of writing studies transfer scholarship and asset-based, multicultural education pedagogies, my mixed-methods analysis of participating instructors' survey, interview, and teaching document data offers two contributions to writing studies and transfer scholarship. The first is a systematic Typology of Prior Knowledges, makes it possible to account for the various expectations instructors have about students' prior knowledges. When used as a re (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kay Halasek (Advisor); Scott L. DeWitt (Committee Member); Beverly J. Moss (Committee Member); Timothy San Pedro (Committee Member) Subjects: Curriculum Development; Education; Literacy; Rhetoric; Teacher Education

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2018, English

This thesis examines civic engagement in undergraduate writing and rhetoric major programs, considering the rhetorical situations and rhetorical contexts of two degree programs: the BA degrees in Writing and Rhetoric at Oakland University and the University of Central Florida. Ultimately, the author proposes that undergraduate writing major programs should carefully consider their definitions of civic engagement, curricular location of civic engagement, sustainability of civic engagement initiatives, faculty identities and roles in such initiatives, and student conceptions of and experiences with civic engagement.

Committee: James Porter (Committee Chair); Heidi McKee (Committee Member); Emily Legg (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Curricula; Higher Education; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2017, English

My research in affect theory and composition teacher development is grounded in the belief that lived experience is a foundational way of knowing, of making sense of the world. This dissertation project makes the argument that through research on affect specifically, we can develop a greater awareness and familiarity with our social and embodied emotional processes, which will ultimately help composition instructors reframe their complicated affective experiences in generative and meaningful ways. In Chapter One, I explore previous investigations into emotion and affect from a variety of disciplines while also illuminating the dearth of research that currently exists on instructor affect, especially within the field of composition and rhetoric. I then draw from neuroscience, philosophy, and cultural studies to develop a definition of affect as “the capacity to change and be changed,” and I use this theoretical framework to help identify locations for generative intervention for composition teacher development practices. In Chapter Two, I turn to the methodologies and methods I enacted while collecting my data, focusing on how feminist and queer understandings of social-science research helped me embrace the messiness of affect theory. At the heart project is a case study with eight first-year composition instructors at two different universities. After conducting classroom observations, I engaged in two interviews with each of my participants. In Chapters Three and Four, I include moments from these conversations in which my participants and I talked about their affective experiences—how they feel about teaching, what influences their affective responses, how they negotiate their emotions, and how they might come to better understand the nature of these affective experiences. In Chapter Five, I use these interactions to offer practical interventions for composition instructors and writing program administrators to help these instructors negotiate their affective res (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jason Palmeri PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Michele Simmons PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Kate Ronald PhD (Committee Member); Lisa Weems PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Pedagogy; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2005, English (Arts and Sciences)

This qualitative, participant-observation study examines the political dynamics that affect the preparation of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) by writing program administrators (WPAs) at a mid-sized public research institution, “Ridge University.” As my primary source of data, I recorded, observed, and participated in a teaching assistant preparation (TAP) seminar that prepared new teachers to teach college composition and that met twice weekly during the fall term of 2000. I also rely on data gathered in participant interviews and during GTA orientation, department meetings, graduate program colloquia, and public functions throughout the twelve-week data collection phase of this study. Building most centrally on the scholarship of James Berlin, Bruce Horner, Margaret Himley, and Laura Micciche, I represent the experiences of graduate teaching assistants and writing program administrators and analyze their material, local, political, and emotional contexts. Examining formative events that took place in the teaching assistant preparation seminar I studied, I not only interpret the different ways GTAs and WPAs responded to political approaches to writing instruction, I explore how GTAs' and WPAs' respective institutional political locations affected their work. Through an investigation of research data and pertinent scholarship, I argue that GTAs' lack of institutional authority, teaching experience, and familiarity with political discourse negatively influenced their perceptions about their work. I also demonstrate the ways WPAs inhabited a split subjectivity, one that positioned them to be both disciplinary-activists and manager-disciplinarians and, as a result, caused tensions in their work. In order to combat the disaffection associated with teaching assistant preparation, I suggest that preparation initiatives proactively surface the pressures that erupt in work surrounding the teaching of writing by historicizing relationships among cultural, institutional (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sherrie Gradin (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2006, English/Rhetoric and Writing

Although previous studies on teaching anxiety have clarified the general characteristics and manifestations of this phenomenon and established the need for more effective teacher preparation programs, most do not reflect the practices or concerns of writing instructors or indicate how or why they experience anxiety. The purpose of this dissertation, therefore, was to determine how the rhetorical and situational elements of writing instruction contribute to teaching anxiety and to what extent composition instructors attempt to resolve or minimize the effects of potential triggers and symptoms. Over a period of sixteen weeks, five first-year composition instructors completed a series of interviews and surveys related to their teaching and met periodically in small groups to discuss instructional matters and strategies for handling them. Data yielded from interview and group session transcripts and survey responses indicated that a) general teaching anxiety triggers (that is, triggers found in any discipline and at any level) are often compounded by discipline- and/or program-specific anxiety triggers, b) the potential anxiety triggers instructors reported or exhibited seem to interfere with their abilities to successfully impart student learning, and c) instructors' behavioral responses to such anxiety triggers are influenced by what they consider to be the likeliest and/or most addressable sources of their anxiety. These findings provide several starting points for a much needed in-depth look into the causes and manifestations of and possible remedies for teaching anxiety as well as the long-term effects of teacher preparation and faculty development programs on anxiety and job performance.

Committee: Sue Carter Wood (Advisor) Subjects: