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

The impostor phenomenon is “a psychological experience of intellectual fraudulence where one struggles to internalize successes, instead attributing personal accomplishments to chance, luck, or trickery" (Clance, 1985). Through this dissertation study, Guthrie and four co-researchers, Mindy, Bobbie, Rosalie, and Lisa, explored the complicated relationships between the impostor phenomenon, graduate students, and their perceptions of graduate program writing and writing mentorship. In the first phase of the study, Guthrie surveyed 431 graduate students across the disciplines to measure their impostor feelings and learn about their perceptions of graduate-level writing and mentorship. In the second phase, Guthrie operationalized the impostor phenomenon by defining and then constellating 1) Graduate students' disruptive dispositions (individual, internal qualities that impact knowledge transfer) towards writing and mentoring, and 2) Additional factors that influenced students' impostor experiences. Implications for graduate-level writers include propositions that 1) Disruptive dispositions can work together to impact writing and 2) Dispositional knowledge is an important domain for writing expertise. Implications for mentoring graduate-level writers include arguments for 1) The importance of explicitly raising conversation with mentees about the impostor phenomenon and 2) Graduate-level writing and revision should be structured within learning communities where novices and experts learn together and avoid isolated practices as much as possible.

Committee: Neil Baird PhD (Advisor); Andrea Olinger PhD (Committee Member); Sue Carter-Wood PhD (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson PhD (Committee Member); Lynn Darby PhD (Other) Subjects: Curriculum Development; Education; Educational Psychology; Gender Studies; Higher Education; Literacy; Mass Communications; Pedagogy; Personality; Psychology; Social Research

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

Since 2009, approximately 8 million student veterans have used $84 Billion in GI Bill benefits to attend college or university in the United States (U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs, “Annual Benefits Report” 2009-16). Student veterans represent 4% of students nationwide (Molina). Despite these numbers, 92% of composition faculty reported that they had experienced no professional development related to the military or veterans' learning needs (Hart and Thompson, “Ethical Obligation,” 8). Patricia Bizzell wrote, “We in this field want to know who our students are” (442). This project works to help scholars in composition and literacy studies know more about who student veterans are. This project addresses the research questions: • How do student veterans from the same branch of service understand and describe writing, reading, and literacy sponsored by that service? • How do student veterans discuss the connections and relationships between military literacy practices and academic literacy? • What can be learned about transfer of learning and prior knowledge by studying the experiences of student veterans? • When individuals move between the military and higher education how do they recognize and negotiate expectations regarding reading, writing, and literacy? To answer these questions, I conducted a qualitative study of Marines, veterans, and reservists. Through surveys and interviews with current and former Marines, I collected data about their beliefs and memories about their literacy practices, their military service, and their experiences in college classes. I use these data to support a series of claims about the literacy practices of student veterans and how understanding those practices can improve composition instruction. In Chapter 1, I argue that an asset frame may allow composition and literacy studies to better understand student veterans' literacy practices than hero/time-bomb dichotomies. In Chapter 2, I argue that the United States (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jonathan Buehl (Committee Chair); Daniel Keller (Committee Member); Cynthia L. Selfe (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Literacy; Military Studies; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, EDU Teaching and Learning

Second language (L2) writing research has shed light on the important question of whether instructors' feedback (written and/or oral) is beneficial for students' writing (Conrad & Goldstein, 1999; Bitchener, 2008; Ferris, 2006; Truscott, 2007), and yet there are still debates about the efficacy of teacher feedback. One of the reasons why this continues to be a subject of debate is how feedback has been investigated. The research has generally been quantitative in nature and has looked at outcomes (in the form of student writing) as well as teacher practices in terms of the types of feedback they actually provide. What has been missing is qualitative research that looks at feedback dynamics through the eyes of students, especially with regard to how they actually transfer, or attempt to transfer, teacher input to their writing. To address this gap, this qualitative case study explored L2 students' actual feedback experiences through the lens of transfer. The participants for this study were four L2 (second language) graduate students from China enrolled in an academic writing course. The triangulated data source included class observations, field-notes, interviews, questionnaires, self-writing reports, and the actual written products of the participants. Working with such notions as scaffolded feedback (e.g., Donato, 2000; Odo & Yi, 2014; Rassaei, 2014; Weissberg, 2006; Williams, 2002) and situated transfer (e.g., Anson, 2016; Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1993; Rounsaville, 2012; Wardle, 2009) from a socio-cognitive perspective, the foci of the study were: (1) to examine how the L2 students responded to and transferred the teacher's grammar and content feedback; (2) to investigate whether a `transfer climate' emerged as the students moved across the three major writing tasks in the writing course; (3) to determine whether a transfer perspective is useful in understanding the feedback dynamics that place in academic writing courses, and (4) to see whether the transfe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Alan Hirvela (Advisor) Subjects: English As A Second Language; Literacy

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2023, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

This research project aims to answer the following questions: 1) How do the reading strategies students learn in their classes transfer from college to their professional lives, 2) What reading strategies are being taught in college courses that alumni consider to be most beneficial for their careers post-graduation, and what reading practices do they learn outside of college for their careers, and 3) What beliefs do alumni have about reading instruction? To answer these questions, I utilized two different methods of data collection: a mixed-methods survey and one-on-one interviews. The survey was distributed during Summer 2021 to Bowling Green State University alumni who graduated during the last five years. At the end of the survey, participants were asked if they would be willing to continue participation in the research through follow-up interviews to provide further detail on their experiences and context for the answers that were recorded. A total of 319 alumni took the survey, with 55 participants willing to take part in the interviews. From that number, 11 were chosen that reflected diversity among participants, taking into consideration ethnicity, gender, majors, careers, and experiences with reading strategies in both college courses and careers. Of the 11 chosen, six responded to the request for interviews, which took place during Fall 2021. The findings from my research highlight the potential for new avenues of transfer research in relation to the reading strategies of college students as they progress from the classroom to their careers. The diverse experiences of my participants, in relation to reading, illustrate not only the complexity of reading in different disciplines but a need for explicit instruction in reading strategies to engage with materials in those fields. Lastly, while survey data shows that reading instruction is taking place in BGSU courses, interview participants revealed that this instruction is not available to all students.

Committee: Neil Baird Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Jari Willing Ph.D. (Other); Ellen Carillo Ph.D. (Committee Member); Timothy Murnen Ph.D. (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Reading Instruction; Rhetoric

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

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2021, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

With almost no exceptions, scholarship on writing transfer has been situated in face-to-face writing courses; any unique affordances and challenges OWI has for writing transfer are largely unknown. This study addressed that unknown territory through a convergent mixed methods research design involving students and instructors of online first-year writing courses at BGSU. The student-focused portion of the study, examining how students' perceptions of writing and themselves as writers developed during the course, involved a survey, given at the bookends of the Spring 2020 semester, and follow-up interviews with four of the survey participants. The faculty-focused portion involved a series of interviews supplemented with artifact collection in order to learn about how writing faculty practiced transfer-oriented pedagogy in online courses. The student portion of the study revealed a complex response to OWI, certainly complicated by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that had quickly dominated life in the Spring 2020 semester. While data suggested some changes to students' perceptions about writing and writing transfer, the largest shifts occurred in response to questions about their perceptions of themselves as writers and their dispositions toward writing, with both negative and positive results. The faculty portion of the study revealed that faculty, though varied in their approaches toward adapting pedagogy for online courses, included dispositional development within their teaching goals and philosophies and responded, in their varied pedagogies, to the lack of immediacy that characterizes online learning. The alignment of dispositional goals named by faculty and the attitudes toward writing and learning reported by students suggests that OWI may offer positive development of certain learning dispositions toward writing transfer. This research suggests that writing instructors and program administrators should consider intentional alignment of dispositions w (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Neil Baird (Advisor); Neal Jesse (Other); Dan Bommarito (Committee Member); Scott Warnock (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Pedagogy

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, English (Arts and Sciences)

Video games are worthy of and have been the subject of extensive scholarly exploration and pedagogical application in English studies (Alexander; Bogost; Colby and Colby; Gee; Vie; Yee). However, insufficient research has explored connecting the usage of video games in the composition classroom with writing transfer. In this dissertation I explore the position of video game scholarship as a vibrant and fully emerged field (Alexander; Colby, Colby, and Johnson), using the scholarship of Gee and Murray to espouse the potential of video games and multimodality in the classroom, and I highlight the reflective and critical benefits that video games offer as procedural rhetoric (Bogost). Building on this understanding, I apply my video game pedagogy to an enhanced Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curriculum (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak) focusing on the importance of backward-reaching multimodal transfer (Shepherd) while using adaptive transfer (DePalma and Ringer) to use video games to help students facilitate successful high-road transfer. I argue that an important factor in writing transfer theory is the utilization of modern multimodal, interactive, and real tools, such as video games and community writing projects to help bridge the gaps and recontextualize the relationships between student self-sponsored writing, career writing, and academic composition. Video games have the potential to create opportunities for successful transfer in the learner in unique ways through a combination of procedural rhetoric, adaptive transfer, and student engagement. I build upon this argument by presenting a series of five assignments for a first-year composition (FYC) course that takes advantage of video games as a vehicle to help students make connections between their own self-sponsored writing, academic writing, and all future writing environments. I conclude this dissertation with a set of solutions for potential funding and political pitfalls when attempting to institute thi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sherrie Gradin (Committee Chair); Ryan Shepherd (Committee Member); Talinn Phillips (Committee Member); Sarah Wyatt (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Education; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, EDU Teaching and Learning

This dissertation explored the teaching for transfer experiences of two second language (L2) writing teachers who taught an undergraduate-level academic writing course at an American university. Focusing on how the two teachers approached undergraduate source-based writing instruction, with a specific focus on transfer, this study sheds light on the nature and challenges of teaching for transfer in the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) context, an area that is underdeveloped in the current L2 writing scholarship. Guided by theoretical perspectives concerning reading-writing connections, especially reading to write, and learning transfer, a qualitative case study was conducted through a variety of data gathering instruments, such as teacher interviews, teacher stimulated recalls, classroom observation field notes, video recording, instructional artifacts, and focal student interviews. Participants of the study included two teachers and three focal students from the two teachers' classes. A key point regarding the teachers was that they brought different backgrounds concerning formal knowledge of transfer into their teaching. By following the two teachers' instructional practices throughout a full academic term (16 weeks), this study sought to provide an in-depth and holistic picture of how the two teachers handled transfer in their classrooms. The findings of this study revealed that, overall, the two teachers addressed various dimensions of transfer, including: (a) transfer between reading and writing, (b) transfer between L1 and L2, (c) transfer between instruction and major writing assignments, (d) transfer between instruction and in-class writing practices, (e) transfer across major writing tasks, and (f) transfer beyond the 1902 course. However, there were differences between them in terms of how they treated those dimensions of transfer with respect to their approaches and to the amounts of instructional time they allocated to them. Despite these differ (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Alan Hirvela (Advisor); Newell George (Committee Member); Francis Troyan (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; English As A Second Language; Pedagogy

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2019, English

This thesis investigates how writing-related dispositions develop by turning to a theory of accumulative affect while at the same time employing queer and feminist epistemologies to examine the role of emotion in learning. A mixed methods survey of ENG 111 students at Miami University reveals the deeply affective and emotional experiences with writing that students bring to the classroom that impact their writing. Participants' narrative responses show that affective experiences with writing are often attached to specific individuals, processes related to writing, and writing assessment. These associations often impact how they approach the writing process, as well as their self-conceptions of themselves as writers. Implications for classroom instructors are also discussed in order to recommend consideration of accumulative affect in pedagogy, in addition to methodological recommendations for studying emotion and affect.

Committee: Jason Palmeri PhD (Committee Chair); Heidi McKee PhD (Committee Member); Elizabeth Wardle PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Literacy; Pedagogy; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, English

In this project, I set out to develop a rhetorical methodology for learning transfer that better suits the embodied, variable knowledges of rhetoric and writing studies. Current theories of transfer obscure the social and material factors that shape student learning, focusing instead on individual and task-based notions of transfer that provide limited perspectives. By building a theory of transfer that draws from and extends the rhetorical knowledge of the field, I situate transfer within writing studies and center students' embodied experiences within the network of social and institutional pressures they navigate in order to build and communicate meaningful connections in their learning. Further, by foregrounding students' unique experiences, this theory resists normative learning frameworks that contribute to the marginalization of particular identities. To build this rhetorical theory of transfer, I first use Chapter 1 to overview transfer scholarship as it exists, tracing it from its transdisciplinary roots to its adoption into writing studies. I then focus on the important scholarship that has been done to address the complexity of writing transfer, while I also point to some gaps and limitations that still exist in the research. In Chapter 2, I begin to recover and analyze the deep connection between transfer and techne, two concepts that hinge on the movement of rhetorical knowledge across contingent situations, looking to where theories and critiques of techne can inform our understandings of transfer. I close this chapter by pointing to six key, interrelated considerations for a rhetorical reading of transfer: heuristics, invention, power, metis, kairos, and embodiment. In Chapter 3, I build on the ways these concepts can inform transfer and flesh out a rhetorical methodology that works to center the social-material forces that shape transfer. I end the chapter by presenting a thematic code to be used in person-based studies of transfer. In Chapter 4, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Heidi McKee Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Elizabeth Wardle Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); James Porter Dr. (Committee Member); Jason Palmeri Dr. (Committee Member); Christopher Wolfe Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2019, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

Building on the suggestion that "threshold concepts might prove a productive frame through which to consider questions related to writing and transfer;" and the idea that "composition theory has borrowed from feminist pedagogy in such significant ways that it seems imperative to see contemporary composition pedagogy as feminist pedagogy," this research places threshold concepts in writing studies and feminist pedagogy into conversation through a mixed-methods study (Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshnick; Siebler 37). This study employed surveys, interviews, classroom observation, and artifact collection from instructors and included surveys from students enrolled in first year writing at BGSU. An overview of data revealed themes of transfer-focused feminist pedagogy: (1) confronting power and authority; (2) making connections to genre and community; (3) engaging as students and instructors in reflection and metacognition and (4) considering alternate definitions of successful transfer. In addition to the four themes of transfer-focused feminist pedagogy, student and instructor survey data and the instructor case-studies suggest perceptions of engagement with both threshold concepts and feminist pedagogy but lack meaningful adaptation of prior knowledge, where students see value in their first year writing class, but ultimately view transfer and future writing in terms of simplistic metaphors of application rather than adaptation. I further examined these four themes by focusing on two instructor-case studies using an institutional ethnography methodology which allowed me to examine the lived realties and experiences of ways instructors practice transfer-focused feminist pedagogies in the first year writing classroom. Ultimately, this research suggests that instructors, students, and transfer scholars should consider the role of power dynamics within the first year writing classroom and that teaching students to confront issues of power and authority to engage in (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Neil Baird PhD (Advisor); Irina Stakhanova PhD (Other); Sue Carter Wood PhD (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2018, English

First- and second-year required writing courses, typically housed within English departments and taught by English faculty, are valued by various stakeholders as a means of preparing students for future writing contexts. While these courses are intended to impart students with knowledge and skills to equip them for writing beyond the walls of the English classroom, students are often dubious of the value of these required writing courses to their future careers as students and professionals. As research on transfer becomes an increasingly-prominent area of focus within composition studies, the significance of students' own perceptions of the value of required writing courses has emerged as a key factor in determining how successfully they will transfer what they learn in those classes to writing in the disciplines (WID). This case study draws on insights from over 200 survey responses and six interviews to determine students' attitudes at the University of Dayton toward ENG 100 and 200 and the value of these courses to future writing contexts. Findings indicate that many students have misconceptions and questions about the purposes of these courses, which can contribute to distorted views of how transferrable the skills and knowledge gained in these courses will be. In addition to shedding light on students' perceptions of transfer, this research argues for the importance of understanding students' forward-reaching conceptions of the purpose and value of writing instruction in order to ensure that transfer is possible.

Committee: Patrick Thomas Ph.D. (Advisor); Margaret Strain Ph.D. (Committee Member); Stephen Wilhoit Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Education; Higher Education; Pedagogy; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, EDU Teaching and Learning

This dissertation explores seven second language (L2) undergraduates' learning experiences in a First-Year Writing (FYW) course at an American university. While the FYW course is designed from the perspective of first-language (L1) composition scholarship and focuses, broadly speaking, on analytical writing and the related development of critical thinking skills, the English as a Second Language (ESL) writing courses most of the participants had taken are designed from the perspective of second language (L2) writing scholarship and the development of more fundamental writing skills. Thus, employing a qualitative case-study approach, the present study was especially interested in the L2 students' transition from ESL to FYW, as this kind of study is not common in writing scholarship, though many L2 writers participate in both types of courses, thus generating a need for such an investigation. Driven by the theoretical frameworks of knowledge telling versus knowledge transforming, writing to learn, as well as transfer of learning, data was collected through interviews, journals, think-aloud protocols, classroom observations, field notes, and text-based artifacts. Participants included seven L2 undergraduates from Honduras, Bangladesh, and China recruited from three different sections of FYW; two FYW instructors; and the director of the First-Year Writing Program. Five of the L2 students (those from China) had taken one or two ESL writing courses at the university before they took the FYW course, and their experiences were of particular interest during the study. By following the participants throughout a 15-week semester as they engaged the various FYW course assignments, the study produced an in-depth look at their task representations of what they were asked to do and how they responded to the course activities and expectations. The findings reveal, first, that the seven L2 undergraduates used their first languages (L1) in various situations when the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Alan Hirvela (Advisor); DeWitt Scott (Committee Member); Halasek Kay (Committee Member); Selfe Cynthia (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Curriculum Development; Education; English As A Second Language; Higher Education; Literacy

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2017, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

This dissertation explores the ways that teaching assistants (TA) in the Rhetoric and Writing program at Bowling Green State University experience the teacher-development program, including the practicum course, peer mentoring, graduate student orientation, and teaching itself. Primarily I was interested in how writing teachers develop as pedagogues in relation to the efforts designed to foster pedagogical development. Employing survey methods, I inquired about TAs' teaching and teacher-development experiences, teaching philosophies, and classroom practices. In an effort to triangulate data, I conducted observations of online course spaces, textual analysis on teaching materials, and follow-up interviews with two graduate students to add richness to their survey responses. My findings suggest that TAs' classroom practices are largely influenced by requirements of their assistantships, such as the happenings within the practicum course or in mentoring groups; however, although TAs' teaching philosophies are somewhat influenced their direct training, they are also influenced by a wide range of factors, such as their personal beliefs and program courses outside of the teacher-development program. The central claim in this project, then, is that teacher-development programs in rhetoric and composition should be more purposeful in fostering the pedagogical identities of TAs by acknowledging that many pedagogies can exist within the parameters of a single program's curricula. Further, by inviting TAs' pedagogical differences into negotiation with programmatic standards, writing program administrators and other faculty members involved in teacher development foster pedagogical identities in TAs that are more likely to successfully transfer from the role of TA to that of faculty. With this dissertation, I not only seek to contribute to the discipline of rhetoric and composition, but I also seek to build on the teacher-development program already in place for English TAs at (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lee Nickoson PhD (Committee Chair); Sue Carter Wood PhD (Committee Member); Kris Blair PhD (Committee Member); Michael Zickar PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Curriculum Development; Education; Rhetoric; Teacher Education; Teaching

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2017, English (Arts and Sciences)

Composition instructors have investigated how students transfer writing knowledge into contexts beyond composition classrooms in higher education (e.g. Reiff, & Bawarshi, 2011; Wardle, 2012; Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014). These scholars have used studies of transfer in education (e.g. Beach, 1999; Donovan, Bransford, and Pellegrino, 2000) in order to see how composition instructors might teach for the transfer of learning. In this thesis I show how critical pedagogues (Freire, 1978, 1997; Shor, 1987a, 1996; Keating, 2007, 2013) have also been thinking about how to foster students' use of knowledge in new contexts. In this project I develop a framework from the work on transfer from Donovan, Bransford, and Pellegrino (2000). Then, I use this framework to analyze the pedagogies of Freire (1978, 1997), Shor (1987a, 1996), and Keating (2007, 2013), in an attempt to put these pedagogical ideas in conversation with each other, hoping to inspire more interdisciplinary research.

Committee: Ryan P. Shepherd Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Gabriel Hartley Ph.D. (Committee Member); Mara Holt Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Education; Higher Education; Literacy; Pedagogy; Rhetoric; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, EDU Teaching and Learning

Writing from sources is viewed as a fundamental component of academic literacy as well as developing connections between reading and writing. An especially challenging task of source-based writing is synthesizing, which requires careful selection, organization and integration of sources. Given the significance of synthesizing in developing multilingual students' academic literacy in English, this study examined the teaching and learning of synthesis writing in a university L2 composition course. Within a multidimensional view of literacy and discourses of writing, I conducted classroom-based qualitative multiple case studies, in which both the teacher's experience with synthesis instruction and four Chinese undergraduate students' engagement in synthesis writing were examined. Guided by the constructivist model of discourse synthesis–organizing, selecting and connecting (Spivey, 1990, 1997)–from the L1 composition literature, I investigated the teacher's task representation of synthesis, the students' developmental trajectories of learning to write a synthesis, and the individual and contextual factors that contributed to their varied writing abilities while approaching synthesis tasks. Over a five-month period comprising one academic semester, I collected multiple sources of data, including semi-structured interviews, stimulated-recall protocols, writing samples, recordings of teacher-student writing tutorials, classroom observation field notes, course-related documents and artifacts, and surveys. These data were analyzed inductively and triangulated to explore different aspects of the teaching and learning of synthesis writing. The findings of the study revealed that both the teacher's task representation of synthesis and the students' products and processes of synthesis writing involved the three operations–organizing, selecting and connecting–albeit to various degrees among the student participants. Thus, it appears that the constructivist model of discourse (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Alan Hirvela Ph.D. (Advisor); George Newell Ph.D. (Committee Member); Lin Ding Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Education; English As A Second Language; Literacy; Pedagogy; Teaching

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2013, English

This thesis uses qualitative and quantitative research strategies to understand the effectiveness of two classroom activities designed to teach for transfer in first-year composition (FYC). Drawing on students' completed Reflect, Project, Imagine heuristics and their comments on rubrics used to assess their own writing, this project explores students' perceptions of potential transfer between FYC and other writing contexts and the ways writing-related language can be cultivated in the FYC classroom through critical self-reflection and metacognition. Students participating in this study came to the FYC classroom with pre-existing writing vocabularies that both helped and hindered meaning-making, but through collaborative work and reflective activities, students began to adapt their vocabularies to the FYC environment. Implications for classroom instructors, composition programs, university-wide writing initiatives, and further research are also discussed, including ways to adopt reflective self-assessment strategies for the benefit of both students and instructors.

Committee: Jason Palmeri PhD (Committee Chair); Heidi McKee PhD (Committee Member); Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, English

Digital literacy learning has become a fundamental, mainstream concern for teachers and researchers because of the increasingly central roles played by writing in digital environments and multimodal composing in twenty-first century literacy and literacy instruction. Digital composing draws on many of the processes that apply to print composing (planning, drafting, revising, et cetera), but its medium makes additional technical and rhetorical demands on composers which print-based models of the composing process do not fully address. This study describes a process-based approach to group digital composing tasks that accounts for access to digital literacy resources, methods for sharing task responsibilities between group members, and workspaces for digital composing. The material resources (including hardware, software, and physical/virtual workspaces) and intellectual resources (the functional literacy skills to operate these material resources and the rhetorical sensibilities concerning design, mode, and audience according to which composers create digital texts) digital composing relies on recommend approaching digital composing tasks in terms of component parts, while situating these components within complex literacy ecologies. The case studies of student and faculty digital composing groups featured in this study focus on how groups approached and worked through their tasks. I analyze participants' methods of digital literacy resource foraging, task structuring, and workspace selection/structuring to recommend strategies for teaching digital composing. Rather than offering sample assignments or rubrics, this study proposes metacognitive exercises designed to help students draw on the literacy resources present in their literacy ecologies and approach digital composing tasks as learning opportunities. Building on Selfe and Hawisher's work on conditions of access to technology, I offer “foraging” as a metaphor for describing how digital compos (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Beverly J. Moss (Advisor); Harvey J. Graff (Committee Member); Cynthia L. Selfe (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Higher Education; Pedagogy; Technology