Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Educational Studies

The purpose of this study was to envision the educational policy structures that premise collective attempts to build new futures and shift the fulcrum of educational policy studies to Black and Indigenous knowledges. Modern educational policy structures, using colonial logics and guided by anti-Black systems, continue to exclude Black and Indigenous voices from policy making spaces. Or, policy actors outright ban justice-oriented and movement-building work in educational spaces. Even if policy actors are self-described allies, there is still a tendency to focus on what white people can do better. These educational policy realities place Black and Indigenous educator activists within structures that either criminalize justice work, or center whiteness. I designed, invited, and co-created a K-12 Black and Indigenous educator activist collective that established the relational research environment needed to explore political and pedagogical activism, or the exploratory theory of diradicalism, in educational spaces. This study explored the question, “How does a K-12 Black and Indigenous educator activist collective theorize the dynamic interaction between pedagogical and political activism (or, engage in dual educational politics—diradicalism)?” The study design involved 12 hours of discussion from a combination of one-on-one conversations and four collective sessions where we storied about our lives, acknowledged the people who inspired us, and named the actions we have taken in the pursuit of justice, thrival, and liberation. Then, the collective entrusted me to thematically code and interpret our transcribed conversations using NVivo software. My data analysis process, via quantified cluster analysis and thematic coding, illuminated four convergent themes that mechanized how Black and Indigenous educators intersect their dual educational politics—Barrier to Diradicalism, Diradical Intergenerational Knowledge Exchanges, Diradical Envisioning & Building New Futur (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Karen Beard (Advisor); Winston Thompson (Committee Member); Timothy San Pedro (Committee Member); Yvonne Goddard (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; Black Studies; Education Policy; Native Americans; Pedagogy

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, English (Arts and Sciences)

Beset with political, social, economic, cultural, and environmental degradation, along with the imminent threat of nuclear war, the world might be at its end. Building upon Richard Miller's inquiry from Writing at the End of the World, this dissertation investigates if it is “possible to produce [and teach] writing that generates a greater connection to the world and its inhabitants.” I take up Paul Lynch's notion of the apocalyptic turn and suggest that when writers Kurt Spellmeyer, Richard Miller, Derek Owens, Robert Yagelski, Lynn Worsham, and Ann Cvetkovich confront disaster, they reach an impasse whereby they begin to question disciplinary assumptions such as critique and pose inventive ways to think about writing and writing pedagogy that emphasize the notion and practice of connecting to the everyday. Questioning the familiar and cultivating what Jane Bennett terms “sensuous enchantment with everyday” are ethical responses to the apocalypse; nonetheless, I argue that disasters and death master narratives will continually resurface if we think that an apocalyptic mindset can fully account for the complexity and irreducibility of lived experience. Drawing upon Zen, new materialism, and Yagelski's theory of writing as a way of being, I call attention to the affective dimensions of capitalism, anti-apocalyptic thinking, and environmental writing pedagogies that run contrary to capitalist-driven environmental disaster.

Committee: Sherrie Gradin (Advisor); Talinn Phillips (Committee Member); Robert Miklitsch (Committee Member); Wolfgang Sützl (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; 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: