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This dissertation envisions the writing workshop as a space where we do essential political and social work—where we can reimagine writing, and the teaching of writing, in more interdependent and inclusive ways. This research responds to the work of BIPOC writers and scholars who have urged those of us in Writing Studies to address the homogeneity of the workshop’s history, and to revise its exclusionary logics. Drawing on interviews and observations of teachers in undergraduate creative writing and composition classrooms across the United States, the author examines what actually happens when students talk together about their in-progress writing. This dissertation reveals how workshop pedagogies are shaped by our pasts as students, and considers the ways we might resist or reimagine those pasts. It considers the ways that workshops, which are often framed as a liberatory pedagogy, always involve negotiations between control and freedom, both for educators and for students. And it shows that writing workshops depend upon deeply vulnerable, relational work—work that has radical potential to change the way we think about teaching writing.

Inspired by Kenneth Burke’s call to understand even the most distasteful rhetorics, this project directly explores arguments imagined by contemporary conspiracy theorists within the modern QAnon movement. After careful analysis of the rhetorical questions posed within “Q drops,” this project understands conspiracy theories to be a rhetorical act that narrates a socially constructed reality in opposition to an imagined or real “other,” recognizing the narratives to be the articulation of an inquisitive and collective positionality that attempts to provide answers to difficult questions. This definition guides my empathetic reading of the conspiracy theory’s origins, but also provides critique of the act as the creation of an often harmful narrative of division. The first chapter of this project analyzes the term “conspiracy theory” from multiple disciplines, including rhetorical studies. Next, I provide a detailed literature review of the scholars who have studied Q drops before me, finding that few scholars have taken on the task of directly analyzing the rhetoric. The third chapter details the methods and methodology of my study of Q’s drops, defining more precisely how Burke’s work on identification and dialectic informs the project. From there, I explain my findings, focusing much of my analysis on questions that begin with “how” or “why,” which represent the most common kind of question Q poses. The concluding chapter initiates a conversation regarding the role of questions in composition studies–especially relating to the way instructors generate writing prompts. I suggest that instructors of First-Year Writing pay careful attention not just to teaching students how to ask questions, but also to countering the impulse to generate narratives of division by facilitating acts of rhetorical listening, a method of deliberately considering arguments made by others rather than harping on the creation of one’s own, individualized claims.

This is an autoethnographic case study about the value of storytelling through digital family narratives in composition studies and critical culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy. Using the Diné Educational Philosophy, Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’éh Hozhoo, and the four learning areas Nitsáhákees (Thinking), Nahat’á (Planning), Iiná (Living), and Siihasin (Reflection), as my conceptual framework, I create an assignment prompt for an all Diné composition classroom that asks students to collect family stories as a way to explore their cultural and academic identities, and to create digital family narratives to be housed on a website. I also complete the assignment myself and reflect on my choices in creating and completing the assignment, using Western academic scholarship and my own experiences as a Diné woman to validate my decisions in completing and creating the assignment. I argue for the centering of storytelling and cultural/personal identities/experiences in the composition classroom and pedagogical practice.

The writing advice offered by college writing instructors and textbooks is often grounded in appeals to readers. Writing advice that discourages the use of language varieties other than Standardized English, for example, might appeal to certain readers’ lack of familiarity with such varieties. Though this advice reinforces the basic rhetorical concept of audience awareness, it can also perpetuate discriminatory ideas about language. Recent scholarship in composition studies has explored the effects of language-based discrimination in the writing classroom, including how assessment standards that appeal to Standardized English can disadvantage students of color and students from lower socioeconomic class backgrounds. While composition scholars have given much attention to the ways in which preferences for Standardized English are perpetuated in the writing classroom, this attention has not yet extended to the role played by writing instructors’ and writing textbooks’ characterizations of readers. This dissertation reports on two studies that examine how college writing instructors and textbooks characterize readers and the role that these characterizations play in perpetuating standard language ideologies. The first study draws on methods from systemic functional linguistics to analyze a corpus of college writing textbooks. The second study uses constructivist grounded theory methods to analyze interviews with college writing instructors. The first study reveals that textbooks characterize readers and writers differently and that these differences are used to place a larger portion of responsibility for the communicative act onto the writer. As a result, writers are tasked with conforming to the language prejudices of readers who prefer Standardized English while readers’ language prejudices are left unchallenged. The second study finds that many instructors appeal to various readers’ understanding of a text when judging whether a particular language feature in a student’s writing is appropriate. This move risks perpetuating standard language ideologies by introducing a vaguely defined reader who prefers Standardized English and dictates the appropriate conventions of the discourse community, despite these judgments relying not on an actual reader but rather on instructors’ untested conjectures about those readers. This study also finds that when instructors are asked to consider the accuracy of conjectures about readers that inform writing advice, those instructors tend to be more critical of writing advice that perpetuates standard language ideologies. Three major implications emerge from these studies. First, because uncritical reliance on conjectures about readers can perpetuate language prejudices, composition studies researchers should conduct more audience research in order to minimize the need for conjectures and develop a greater understanding of how readers actually interact with written texts. Second, writing teachers should focus on fostering students’ critical language awareness, encouraging both writing instructors and writing students to critically engage with conjectures about readers, which can combat the harmful results of standard language ideologies. Finally, textbooks should offer more accurate depictions of readers, which would add needed depth to the current depiction of readers and act as a counterbalance to characterizations of readers that perpetuate preferences for Standardized English.

What are the effects of a paced workshop (defined as a slower writing approach rooted in a scaffolded three-day process working toward a completed rough draft) and how can teachers and students alike benefit from these effects within the scope and situations of a composition classroom and potentially those beyond it? This I.R.B approved study aims to discover how my version of a scaffolded workshop fits into the larger picture of rhetoric and composition and how a paced workshop design can not only offer potential to reframe how scholars structure writing within a composition classroom, but also if it can encourage students’ personal growth and writing development as a byproduct. To understand the role that a slower, paced approach toward completing projects has in students’ personal and academic lives, I analyzed students’ workshop reflections and observed the students in their workshops, which were conducted on Zoom using the breakout room feature. Likewise, interviews were also conducted with willing participants to understand the efficacy of the paced workshop design more clearly. Ultimately, this study explores the opportunities that a paced design welcomes in its slower approach and its potential benefits to students’ comfort, personal growth, and writing approaches while easing students’ anxieties about their abilities to create as composition students.

This project is a series of essays aiming to develop inclusive creative writing curricula by utilizing resources from the areas of creative writing studies, writing & composition studies, and critical identity studies, to address avenues toward developing a “culturally competent” curricula for student authors involved in creative writing.The project investigates how creative writing practices might be examined for their ethical, linguistic, political, and pedagogical potential; how 21st-century writing practices affect the production and consumption of literary works for culturally diverse audiences; and, finally, how the imminent social issues in creative writing theory and pedagogy might be adapted for graduate student instructors (GSIs) and teacher-practitioners involved in bridging creative writing and composition instruction.

This dissertation investigates the writing practices of disability service transcribers, professional speech-to-text writers who translate sound into written text as a form of communication access. Scholars across the fields of disability studies, digital media studies, and communication studies have documented transcription as a complex rhetorical practice; however, the strategies speech-to-text writers use when composing in real-time environments, and the composing methodologies and technologies that underlie them, remain severely understudied. This lack of knowledge is significant because it constrains advocacy for disabled people and their allies in naming and understanding specific forms of real-time transcription that best increase access to spaces that depend upon sound to convey meaning. This lack also puts educators and their institutions at a disadvantage when working to make classrooms more accessible for disabled students, faculty, and staff. I intervene by applying a disability-studies lens to original composition-based research to ask: “How do different speech-to-text writers write, and why do they write the way they do?” To answer this question, this study is divided into two phases of qualitative and quantitative data collection: (1) a survey of speech-to-text writers working at a large, Midwestern university; and (2) a comparative survey of English-speaking speech-to-text writers across the United States and Canada. Collected qualitative data are coded and analyzed following Adele Clarke’s (2005) methods for situational analysis, and qualitative data are analyzed following Cindy Johanek’s (2000) adapted methodological model for mixed-methods research, also known as the “contextualist research paradigm” (p. 27).This study’s most important findings reveal several major methodologies of transcription are currently in practice among professionals, and their differences tend to be hotly contested. Data show a speech-to-text writer’s chosen methodology directly influences (1) significant changes in attunement to disabled people who rely on real-time transcription as a form of access, (2) a transcriber’s perceived professional and social value as someone who provides quality access to transcript readers, and (3) fierce social and material rifts among speech-to-text writers practicing one form of transcription over another. These findings are of significance to those who advocate for transcription as a form of access, as well as to professionals who practice transcription. For example, the Association of Transcribers and Speech-to-text Providers—an international organization of speech-to-text writers who practice an emergent form of transcription known as meaning-for-meaning transcription—has actively expressed interest in this study’s findings to help codify descriptive and performative standards for meaning-for-meaning transcription, which currently do not exist. This study also supports teachers, administrators, and institutions that seek to better support disabled people who use transcription as a form of communication access when learning and working in educational environments.

This project investigates the complementary and contradictory ways that Black women graduate teaching assistants’ (GTAs) lived experiences inform their teaching efficacy (i.e. preparedness and confidence) and pedagogical approaches in first- and/or second-level composition courses. Through survey, focus group, and individual interviews, and using Black feminist frameworks, this project documents how Black women’s bodies and practices have traditionally been read as disruptive, and I argue noisy in quiet academic spaces (re: spaces governed by legacies of inequity and racism). Similar to intersectional frameworks, I suggest that noise is a multivocal representation of belonging that challenges legacies of mislabeling, dehumanizing, and silencing Black women GTAs and their bodies within institutional spaces. In order to centralize a discussion of Black women GTAs’ noise, I turn to the contributions of Black feminist rhetorical scholars, literacy scholars, and Hip Hop scholars and ground my research in the noise itself--a multiplicitous and polyvocal understanding of Black women GTAs’ lived experiences and practices as teachers of composition. In this sense, I highlight how and when Black women GTAs utilize intersectional instruction to retool their noise by relating their pedagogies to their epistemologies, pedagogical approaches, and networks of support inside and outside of their current home institutions. I suggest this retooling reflects what I refer to as Black women GTAs’ “pedagogies of noise”—teaching approaches that acknowledge their confrontations with oppression and cultivate cultural knowledge production on a historical continuum through composition instruction and curriculum development. Ultimately, Pedagogies of Noise helps to challenge some of the gaps in the ways the fields of Composition Studies and Writing Program Administration (WPA) talk about composition teacher training, and who those current approaches to training do or do not serve.

This dissertation examines Gulf Coast-centered environmental nonfiction narratives in texts across multiple genres, including nonfiction books, documentary films, and web-based interactives. These texts construct the region at the nexus of the negative geological, ecological, and human health impacts of oil extraction and petrochemical production. In the first body chapter, I analyze three nonfiction texts by journalists and academics who travel to south Louisiana and offer an outsiders’ perspective on the place, all of which I argue represent an emerging genre of elegiac travelogue. I then rhetorically analyze three documentaries on the BP spill, reading them rhetorically for oil’s visibility and invisibility, and arguing that all three films audiovisually construct, sometimes through the invocation of other senses, petroleum’s social-material impacts on the Gulf Coast through representations of sickness and toxicity, in alignment with environmental justice concerns. The final chapter begins with an analysis of two interactive maps focused on petrochemical industry-related environmental impacts along the Gulf Coast. I then place these maps within the context of scholarship and pedagogy in Writing Studies and Environmental and Energy Humanities, and conclude with teaching materials that aim to address these issues presented throughout this dissertation in an advanced undergraduate classroom, placing the issues faced by the Gulf Coast in broader national and international contexts.

At a time when state-sponsored policies for tuition-free two-year college education are on the rise, this dissertation examines the place of two-year colleges within the primary discourses circulated within Composition Studies. Specifically, through its investigation of the professional practices and identities of two-year college writing faculty—who work in institutions that are often mistakenly seen as “devoid” of scholarship—this dissertation interrogates disciplinary conceptions of scholarship. This study was comprised of two modes of data collection: an examination of publication trends in prominent Composition Studies journals, and interviews with seven community college writing teachers in the Southeast. This dissertation finds that, in contrast to some of the common narratives surrounding this particular institutional setting, upheld by publication trends in Composition Studies journals (Chapter Three), the teachers interviewed are actively engaged in inquiry and knowledge-making. However, their work is not always identified as such, and, consequently, is not always exchanged with nor recognized by the wider discipline of Composition Studies. Given the large portion of the work of teaching college writing that takes place in two-year colleges, this dissertation argues for a more capacious understanding of scholarship, and posits the scholarly lives enacted by participants as an alternate model of inquiry and knowledge-making. This model is shaped by the institutional settings in which participants work (Chapter Two), and is premised on professional spaces institutionally understood as sites of other professional activities—the classroom (Chapter Three) and conferences and faculty reading groups (Chapter Four), as well as collaboration, local applications of new knowledge, and the complex and overlapping relationships between faculty’s different position responsibilities (Chapters Three and Four). Ultimately, this dissertation argues that wider acceptance of such alternate models of scholarship would allow for clearer recognition of the contributions of teacher-scholars (such as those interviewed for this study) to Composition Studies, and would pave the way for disciplinary unity through the increased exchange of innovative ideas and practices across institutional settings—thus improving writing instruction for all college students (Chapter Five).

This project is situated in scholarship surrounding the rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription of historical women rhetors, particularly those within religious spaces. It places a lens on the rhetorical practices of two religious women: Jessie Penn-Lewis and Margaret E. Barber. I argue that it is important to investigate these women, for doing so reveals not only an area that has not received extensive critical attention, but also informs how scholars look at pedagogy, particularly in religious spaces. The project and methods are grounded in feminist research practices. This project is historical in nature and will thus draw upon feminist historical and archival research methods as my primary methods of investigation. Further, this project is framed as two case studies, which examine closely through textual analysis surviving work produced by these women to begin to extend our knowledge of pedagogical and rhetorical practices in religious spaces. The heuristic used to investigate these texts and women bring forward key themes for study and application such as: how space is used, whether rhetorical or physical; what kind of tools can be used or appropriated for teaching practices; how texts and women circulate and under what conditions and intentions. Finally, I argue for their inclusion within the rhetorical canon as well as rewriting histories of women’s rhetoric; for their work is not only worthy of recognition from the past but more importantly for future scholarship that acknowledges the ways in which institutions of power are still over girls and women. This dissertation points further to the need to research literate practices of “ordinary” people and the barriers of public and private still existing today.

Composition studies has failed to offer any field-wide conversation acknowledging global warming or the part that our normalized pedagogical and theoretical orientations play in propping up the status quo. To be sure, composition studies did not create the United States' (or the world's) energy, manufacturing, or economic infrastructures. The field does, however, participate and benefit from these structures, and our disciplinary goal to exist at the forefront of composing—which includes both technological and cultural practices—means that we have a level of complicity that we have yet to acknowledge meaningfully.Composition studies’ history is littered with aspirational forays into epistemologies that expand our thinking toward ecology (Coe, 1974; Cooper, 1986; Dobrin and Weisser, 2002), the environment (Herndl and Brown, 1996; Killingsworth and Palmer, 1991), and sustainability (Owens, 2001). These respective offerings did not necessarily compel different theoretical or pedagogical paths, nor were they necessarily directly responding to resource consumption, environmental degradation, or global warming. Our field needs a more robust, resource-conscious line of inquiry that theorizes the relationship between texts and resource consumption, recognizes that sustainable composition is concerned about production (of texts), understands that sustainability should be considered situationally, not as a God term, and rethinks the resource cost of composing.Shifting composition studies’ framework from its dominant epistemological orientation (specifically social-epistemology) toward an ontological line of inquiry that emphasizes writing’s material and resource choices can provide a path forward for compositionists who want to contribute to global warming amelioration side-by-side with disciplinary goals. Applying ontological lenses around the concepts of material lifecycles, coexistence, and our interconnected world can allow composition to contribute to global warming discussions without sacrificing disciplinary objectives.While a shift in composition’s research, theory, and pedagogy can reorient the field toward a more active participation in global warming conversations, important disciplinary structures and hierarchies also need scrutiny. While cultural conversations around race, gender, sexuality, economic class, and disability (among others) have been addressed by leading disciplinary organizations like the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication, there has been no leadership on questions of resource consumption or the environment. Applying these inquiry-based pressures simultaneously from the individual teacher/scholar up and from leadership down can improve our contribution to global warming amelioration across the board.

This dissertation contributes to a better understanding of Post-9/11 student veterans’ academic experiences in the college composition classroom. I interviewed twenty-four student veteran informants enrolled at one four-year institution about their experiences as college writers, using hospitality as a conceptual framework to interpret their narratives. Hospitality is an orientation of openness to others and the practice of hosts receiving and welcoming guests. Viewing the classroom as a space where diverse individuals temporarily gather together, I outline the possibilities and limitations of hospitality as a guiding pedagogical framework in the composition classroom. Based on informant narratives, I theorize teachers as "hosts," students as "guests," and teachers and students as "strangers" who can mutually influence one another. I offer a model of the college composition classroom as a hospitable space, alternative to other models such as a "community of peers" or a "contact zone," arguing that hospitality draws necessary attention to axes of difference operating among classroom participants and to the temporary nature of any specific class. Study findings reveal that student veteran informants develop a strong professional ethos in the military, which they bring with them into the classroom. “Professionalism” serves as a category that participants use to mark their difference from other students and as a framework for orienting themselves to their schooling. Student veteran informants are focused on their future professional goals, and some struggle to find a connection between those goals and the curriculum in their college composition courses. I argue that dialogue between teachers and students about their respective teaching and learning goals and an explicit focus on transfer of learning in the composition curriculum can help students to invest in and learn more from their college composition courses. Study findings also show that informants do not view themselves as "peers" with other students, suggesting the need to revise current theorizations of collaborative learning and activities, such as peer review, for all students, not just student veterans. I contend that conceptualizing students as "strangers" to one another, rather than "peers," highlights how central the recognition and negotiation of difference is to a truly collaborative and hospitable classroom.

I examine the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), an open-access archives of personal stories about literacy. Examining the DALN’s structure, implicit values, and contents, I argue that the DALN is both a queer and queering resource for composition studies, and may help expand understandings of literacy, expertise, and the relevancy of the personal and openness in composition classrooms and research. In this context, queerness is not about sexuality or gender but a heuristic: a way to critically question the traditional frameworks and epistemologies used to interpret and explore the world. My overarching research questions are: 1. What might the DALN (as a classroom and research resource) and queerness (as an epistemological and ontological concept) offer to the discipline of composition studies?2. To what degree does the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives reflect and/or push against the epistemology and ontology of different conceptions of archives? 3. How have composition teacher-scholars positioned/used the personal, literacy narratives, and archives within composition scholarship, and how might they use the DALN to push against conventional approaches/understandings of archives and personal narratives in classrooms? 4. Does the queer nature of the DALN shape or manifest itself in teachers’ perceptions of the DALN and how teachers use and discuss the DALN in their classrooms? If so, how and why, and if not, why? I argue that the DALN simultaneously embraces and resists dominant binary values (restriction/openness; academic/personal; expert-direction/self-direction) that shape the fields of archival and composition studies and may be used to queer and expand composition classrooms, providing richer understandings of archives, personal literacy narratives, and queerness. The DALN both reflects and resists archival values and practices originating in archival studies, queering understandings of what an archives can be, look like, and who and what are appropriate for inclusion in and access to archives. Though the DALN may not have been consciously developed with queerness in mind, its archival structures, practices, and implicit values queer conventional archival values and structures. Because the DALN is an archives of personal literacy narratives, I explore it within composition studies’ scholarship about archives and literacy narratives. I contend that composition teacher-scholars may use the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives to expand relatively narrow conceptions and uses of archives and personal narratives found in composition scholarship, which may mean greater inclusion in composition scholarship and theorizations. In order to understand how the DALN is already perceived and used by composition instructors, I developed an open-ended questionnaire to ask instructors (n=9) about their experiences with the DALN as a classroom and research resource. Though findings reveal practical and philosophical challenges of incorporating the DALN (e.g. issues of technological access; curriculum mandates; resistance to openness), I argue instructors may use the DALN to meet and challenge the goals of composition courses (e.g. teach about literacy; bridge between discursive and material understandings of sociocultural identity; meet research mandate of undergraduate education). Future studies would include larger sample sizes and a wider range of DALN stakeholders such as students, administrators, and community members to gain a more holistic understanding of the DALN-in-context.

Much of the existing research on how to make the intellectual contributions of writing centers more visible looks to models found in Rhetoric and Composition programs. By examining the parallel tensions surrounding the histories of naming practices, research agendas, and intellectual trajectories that can be found in scholarly accounts of Women’s Studies, Composition Studies, and Writing Center Studies, this dissertation illustrates how, contrary to received wisdom, Women’s Studies is a more appropriate model for Writing Center Studies because the interdisciplinary objectives and rebranding efforts that Women’s Studies has undertaken to confirm its scholarly significance provide a more apt interdisciplinary identity and institutional location for writing centers.

This study explores the following research questions: What expectations do writing instructors at two-year colleges identify for their roles as teaching professionals at these colleges? How do instructors negotiate tensions that emerge as a result of these expectations and those expectations they perceive from their professional community, preparation, and scholarship? I applied Sarfatti-Larson’s conceptualization of professional autonomy as an interpretive lens to understand instructors’ teaching choices. Sarfatti-Larson defines two different kinds of control: control over technique and control over scope of service. A failure to demonstrate control over scope of service ultimately contributes to deprofessionalization. Drawing on identity theory and positioning theory as frameworks to analyze how instructors’ perceptions of their roles as instructors and others’ expectations, this study describes how social interactions make some choices seem more acceptable than others. I collected qualitative data at three points in the semester. Specifically, I worked with 10 faculty members to conduct 7 observations, and 25 interviews, and to collect and analyze 112 papers. I analyzed these data using constant comparative analysis, developing code categories across the three stages of data collection. My analysis identified two kinds of instructional roles. Independent contractors exerted control over the techniques of their teaching within their classrooms. Semi-autonomous professionals exerted control over their classrooms and also drew on scholarship to exert control over their scope of service, advancing teaching at the department and institutional levels. In most cases where instructors performed roles as semi-autonomous professionals, administrators positioned them to do so. Additionally, independent contractors typically avoided discussing differences in teaching approaches, preferring to perform “as if” they agreed with teaching expectations to protect classroom independence. This oversight contributed to their poor positioning, because it limited their control to classrooms These findings suggest that administrators have an important role in shaping how instructors conceive of teaching. They also suggest instructors’ disengagement from institutional knowledge-making may contribute to decreased autonomy and devaluing of disciplinary knowledge. In order for English instructors at community colleges to assert professional autonomy over their scope of service they must see themselves and be seen by others as professionals with specialized knowledge.

This study examines the experiences of five Egyptian undergraduate students at the American University in Cairo (AUC) from different educational, class and geographic backgrounds. This study finds that students from public schooling and lower socioeconomic backgrounds arrive at AUC with significant language, literacy and social deficits compared to counterparts from private schooling and high socioeconomic backgrounds. The study considers how participants, based on the backgrounds, become involved with transnational literacy practices in university writing assignments. The study draws upon scholarship in transnational literacy studies, to inflect how New Literacy Studies considers global and local literacies with concepts of capital and positionality drawn from Pierre Bourdieu. The study conceptualizes student educational and class backgrounds as forms of cultural and social capital which, when deployed at AUC, result in differing participant positionality along educational and class lines. Although this distribution creates challenges for students from public schooling backgrounds, the study also finds that a student from a public schooling background exhibited unusually adaptive qualities, resulting in novel approaches to completing a complex literacy task. The study concludes by arguing that transnational literacy studies be extended to account for intranational movements within uniquely configured embedded, hybrid and permeable transnational spaces that serve local interests.

This dissertation examines the feminist intersections of composition studies, visual rhetoric, and comics studies in order to identify a rhetorically interdisciplinary approach to composition that moves beyond composition studies’ persistent separation of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, rhetoric and ideology, and analysis and composition. Chapter one transgresses the qualitative/quantitative divide using keyword analysis and visualization of 2,573 dissertation and thesis abstracts published between 1979 – 2012 to engage in what composition studies scholar Derek Mueller terms a “distant reading” of the extent and contexts of composition studies’ self-identified interdisciplinarity. Complementing my more traditional literature review, the results of this analysis validate the necessity of my analytical and pedagogical interventions by suggesting that composition studies has not yet addressed comics through the feminist intersections of visual rhetoric and critical pedagogy. Chapters two and three develop a rhetorical analytical approach to comics that moves beyond comics studies’ persistent separation of rhetoric and ideology by positing conflict as an identifiable form of rhetorical persuasion in the Martha Washington comics. These comics were collaboratively created by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons between 1989 – 2007. Following feminist rhetorician Susan Jarratt’s case for rhetorical conflict as a pedagogical tool and extending Chicana feminist Chela Sandoval’s conceptualization of meta-ideologizing in which oppressive ideologies are re-signified via recontextualizations that juxtapose ‘old’ and ‘new’ signs of ideological meaning, I explore the rhetorically persuasive conflict arising from visual, conceptual, and embodied juxtapositions of race, class, and gender made visible in these comics. Chapter four outlines a feminist, critical, visual rhetorical – what I call prismatic – approach to composition pedagogy that requires (1) contexts in which differences and conflicts can be identified and engaged, (2) explicable sites of intersection between ideological perspectives and rhetorical construction, and (3) models for the transition from ideological critique to (re)composition. This is not an add-pop-genre-and-stir approach to composition pedagogy; rather, it intentionally deploys comics’ inherent multimodality as a challenge to students’ often narrow definitions of rhetoric and composition.

A look at how artists in the grunge and Riot Grrrl movements constructed public identities that typically appealed to the economic, cultural, and social conditions of the early 1990s. These public personas -- perceived as “honest” -- were defined by negotiation with mainstream culture, the notion of the “confessional,” and gender construction. By examining how these identities were constructed, composition students can see how cultural influences mediate their own identity construction. A “grunge/Riot Grrrl” pedagogy is proposed that encourages students to look at how identities are constructed across a multimedia landscape, reflecting the way grunge and Riot Grrrl artists built public personas using music, lyrics, interviews, album covers, photo shoots, and videos. An online assignment is suggested that would allow students to “profile” their public selves and the cultural conditions that influence them so that students can use multimedia to show their public identities.

As multimodal composing plays more prominent roles in academic, professional, and public life, writing centers are challenged to take on multiliteracy work, and some have even gone so far as to redefined themselves as multiliteracy centers. However, writing centers that take on this work will find process theory, which has dominated writing consulting since the 1970s, inadequate for the task. A study of the history of the higher- and lower-order concern prioritizing strategy demonstrates the shortcomings of process pedagogy-based tenets of writing center practice. They represent historical vestiges of the field’s struggle for disciplinary legitimacy rather than a response to exigencies of composing. Teaching multiliteracies instead demands a rhetoric-based approach. This project explores what such an approach would mean for the writer/consultant interaction, consulting staffs, the writing center’s institutional identity, and centers' role in the public sphere. I redefine the role of writing consultant as rhetoric consultant and propose a writing/multiliteracy center-specific pedagogy of multimodal design. The focus then turns to finding definitions of centers that can shape their evolving identities and construct multiliteracy work as integral rather than an add-on. Drawing upon Kenneth Burke’s frames of acceptance, I examine the limitations of the field’s defining mythologies and propose a way forward in identity formation, shaping definitions of writing/multiliteracy centers that are at once stable and flexible. Finally, this project argues for a fresh interpretation of the center’s core identity as a democratizing force. John Dewey's definition of publics helps to define the field's democratizing mission as a project of extending access to education to diverse groups of people. Projected growth in the number and diversity of higher education enrollments offers writing/multiliteracy centers important opportunities to shepherd underrepresented groups through college. However, a more ambitious democratizing mission stands within reach: the changing landscape of composing challenges centers to support composers who want to take active roles in the public sphere. This project proposes pedagogical shifts that make public work possible.

My dissertation examines the ways in which composition pedagogies have, both in theory and in practice, systematically worked to exclude individuals with disabilities. Persisting in composition studies is the ideological belief that traditional writing and intelligence are somehow inherently linked, that traditional literacy is central to defining one’s intellectual worth. This privileging of composing as print-based, I contend, masks the notion that writing is simply one among many systems of making and conveying meaning, that among our readers are those who cannot always access the messages delivered within print-based texts.I argue that disability studies can enable us to reconceive the rhetorical triangle and what it means to compose. Disability studies allows us to perceive the ways in which traditional writing—and composition studies’ investment in traditional writing—normalizes and has been normalized by our understanding of “the” rhetorical triangle. But disability studies also allows us to regard the ways in which multimodal composing normalizes and has been normalized by our understanding of “the” rhetorical triangle. In order to create the inclusive, radically welcoming pedagogy that so many teacher-scholars strive for, I suggest that we disable composition studies—what we think we know about composers, composing, and composition(s).Disabling Composition presents three case studies in which we can re/vision this disabling move. In the first case study, I interrogate new media conceptions of synaesthesia, which, in current scholarly literature, has become synonymous with multimodal composing and has been separated from its original, pathological position as a sensory impairment. This configuration of synaesthesia as a non-severe, non-pathological heuristic, I argue, embodies what I term the “rhetoric of shininess”—a concept that sounds wonderfully robust and inclusive in theory, but is often empty and exclusionary in practice. In the second case study, I use critical discourse analysis to explore how two recent usability-centric articles from Technical Communication Quarterly and Computers and Composition assume an able-bodied audience and segregate disabled users into “accessibility” clusters. In the final case study, I analyze literacy narratives of three autistic writer-activists. These individuals, I argue, serve as one example of disabling composition at work, and they have much to teach us about our conceptions of audience.In my final chapter, I consider universal design and how its principles of flexibility and equitability work in service of disabling composition. Here I emphasize the importance of accessibility to composition studies, of the ways in which our choices—at conferences, in our syllabi, in our scholarly work—reflect who it is we value as audience members.Finally, my dissertation is a born digital project. Though it is by no means fully accessible, it experiments with universal design and accessibility in its very form. I recognize that my audience likely contains individuals who work best with print-based texts, as well as individuals who work best with other modes of expression. Individuals who in other contexts might be considered able-bodied may, at many points, feel disabled as they encounter this dissertation.

This pilot study investigates the current state of Latino/a students in higher education andfirst-year writing (FYW) programs in the United States. This project explores if and how FYWprograms address the literacy skills of second generation Latino/as who speak either Spanish orvariations of Spanish and English, or who speak only English. I hypothesized in the beginning ofthis project that the contributing factors to Latino/as' poor academic performance may stem fromsome educators, policy makers, and political leaders overlooking students' cultural differences.This hypothesis led me to explore the following research questions: (RQ #1) How and why areLatino/as struggling in higher education? (RQ #2) How do Latino/as confront the problems thatthey encounter in higher education? (RQ #3) What happens to Latino/as' identities when theyrealize that their family or home culture differs from the academic or school culture? (RQ #4) Dowriting programs show awareness of diverse populations? For instance, do they emphasizelanguage diversity in their curricula and policies? (RQ #5) Do writing programs address theneeds of minorities and Latino/a students? For instance, do they offer a support group forminorities and/or Latino/a students? (RQ #6) Do WPAs know how successful their writingprograms are for minorities and Latino/a students? For instance, do they know if minorities andLatino/a students are doing well in their writing courses? An examination of published researchfocusing on academic, linguistic, and cultural issues in higher education and FYW helpedidentify specific problems that Latino/a students encounter in U.S. colleges/universities. Additionally, I developed 13 survey questions for Writing Program Administrators (WPA)intended to provide evidence of Research Questions 4, 5, and 6. The final chapter of this projectdetails conclusions from the study, discusses implications for FYW programs based on thescholarship and data gathered, and provides recommendations for future research. The findingssuggest that a high percentage of FYW programs show awareness of diverse student populations,although there is room for improvement in specifically addressing Latino/a students' needs bytaking an “accommodation without assimilation” approach.

This dissertation explores the indexicality (the ideological process that links language and identity) of “standard” edited American English (SEAE), revealing common patterns that associate privileged, white students with standardness and disassociate marginalized—especially African American—students from SEAE. Importantly, this project argues that SEAE both signals identity and is rhetorically constructed as linguistically neutral. Throughout this project, I examine the presence, perpetuation, and production of ideologies related to language, standardness, and privilege—specifically standard language ideology (SLI) and whiteness—in instructors’ talk about student writing. These ideologies simultaneously justify the indexicality of SEAE and work to position SEAE as linguistically neutral, a positioning that masks the troubling indexical patterns described in this dissertation. Drawing on interviews with composition instructors about their readings of anonymous student texts, this project suggests that indexicality and standardness are mutually informative: the non/standard features of student texts operate as indexicals for student-author identities just as perceived student-author identities influence the reading of a text as non/standard. Additionally, this dissertation analyzes standard language discourse, the discursive production and manifestation of SLI, in order to better understand the rhetorical construction of linguistic neutrality. I argue that identifying and interrogating SLD allow for a critique of not only the perceived neutrality of SEAE but also SLI. Ultimately, this dissertation offer inroads to challenging SEAE’s indexicality and perceived neutrality, both of which offer unearned privilege to some students at the expense of others and, in the process, perpetuate race- and class-based privilege.

This multi-site case study examines literacy practices across four theatre companies for young adults. The study draws upon ethnographic methods including interviews, field notes, and video data to show how composing practices situated with acts of design fostered multiple entry points through text, a multimodal stance when reading, collaboration, play, shared response, and sustained engagement in the orchestration of available modalities in the creation of characters. Drawing upon theories of multimodality, play, and masculinities, the study links literacy practices in drama with the configuration of historically subordinated, non-normative masculinities, including self-identified gay youth. These young men reported excessive self-monitoring and identity management strategies within heteronormative school contexts, but took-up a plurality of masculinities as they engaged design practices that encouraged play, risk-taking, and the appropriation of available media in their design of characters. The study cultivates an awareness of how literacy practices in drama intersected with affirming construction of non-normative gendered and sexual identities typically subordinated in school settings, but that were reportedly more aligned with informants’ sense of self. The study draws implications for how educators may help young people critique structures of heternormativity and hegemonic masculinities that often limit the identities and masculinities available in school. In addition, the study draws implications for classroom practice in the language arts that position youth as designers of multimodal texts that allow for multiple representations of the self.

This dissertation identifies several reasons that the field of composition studies has largely neglected the issue of reading, and builds upon conceptions of reading and writing as connected activities to argue that it is insufficient to teach writing without also attending to reading. The dissertation presents the first-available topography of reading approaches—systematic ways of engaging with a text that encourage readers to attend to certain textual features while reading with very particular goals in mind—that instructors might teach students to adopt as they read assigned texts. Drawing on surveys and interviews of writing instructors at the University of Michigan, this project compares how these instructors define and describe various reading approaches with the definitions and descriptions found in scholarship, thus offering a more complete picture of how reading is theorized and taught in first-year writing courses. Instructor data reinforces how inexact the definitions for these reading approaches are and how this imprecision can make it difficult to teach reading effectively in first-year writing. Instructor and student data suggests that being explicit with students about how course reading assignments connect to course writing assignments can increase student motivation to complete assigned course reading, and this dissertation highlights two distinct strategies that can be used to connect reading and writing: teaching students to “steal” or imitate writing strategies, and assigning model texts to serve as exemplars. The dissertation outlines several additional benefits of teaching reading and writing as connected activities. This dissertation also recasts writing workshop as a pedagogical strategy for teaching reading-writing connections. By asking students to read with an eye toward improving their own writing, workshop integrates reading and writing in ways that can help students to recognize important connections between the two meaning-making processes. The dissertation proposes a new, fuller conception of workshop in which students analyze both published texts and student-produced texts to identify what could be improved upon and what is already working well. Students return to their own writing better prepared to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of their work and to implement specific new writing strategies and techniques.

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a significant difference between students who completed a service-learning component and those who did not complete a service-learning component in the areas of student achievement of learning outcomes and perceptions of the course. Proponents of service-learning claim that students write higher quality papers and are more engaged, motivated, and satisfied when they complete a service-learning component. However, these findings are largely based on anecdotal and qualitative evidence that lack empirical evidence to strengthen these claims. This study employed a quasi-experimental design using static group comparison to measure differences between the groups. Student perceptions of the course were measured by the Academic Writing Student Perceptions Scales that demonstrated high reliability through Cronbach's alpha. Assessment of learning outcomes was accomplished by evaluating students' academic papers with the Learning Outcomes Assessment Rubric. To compare the groups, t-tests for independent samples and Cohen's d were utilized to determine significant differences and the effect size. Results indicated significant differences in student perceptions and in the achievement of learning outcomes. Medium effect sizes were found in student perceptions and large effect sizes were demonstrated in achievement of learning outcomes. These findings provide empirical evidence of the positive effect that a service-learning component has on an academic writing course. Implications for practice, recommendations for future research, and a call for more empirical studies in composition are also included in this study.

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.

This dissertation discusses composition history treatments and the scant amount of scholarly research devoted solely to composition textbooks, though scholars such as Robin Varnum and Stephen North argue that studying textbooks cannot divulge much about the history of composition instruction. However, in “Handbooks” History of a Genre” and “Handbook Bibliography,” Robert Connors sets in motion detailed historical studies of composition textbooks. Composition textbooks can provide insight into how publishers think instructors should teach students or how colleges want instructors to teach students—merely how students should learn to write, what students should learn about writing. Most importantly, this dissertation explores structural changes of handbooks by: first, in Chapter Three, defining the composition handbook genre as one comprised of textbooks that help instructors mark essays and help students correct essays; Second, in Chapter Four, tracing the development of purely American composition textbooks from the 1800s to 2005, namely by describing how John C. Hodges's Harbrace College Handbook has evolved since it's first printing in 1941; and third, comparing features in the most recent editions of Harbrace to features in current textbooks: The St. Martin's Handbook and Penguin Handbook. Though the composition handbook genre has markedly changed during the last century, I conclude Chapter Four by arguing that the guiding theory behind composition handbooks has not changed. New handbook chapters dedicated to writing with computers or composing in a digital age merely come with corresponding correction codes. Though Connors argues in 1983 that composition handbooks have not changed although composition theory has, my exploration of handbooks shows that handbooks have remained largely similar to Woolley's Handbook, first published in 1907. Handbooks have since then and still exist as tools to assist grading (instructor) and correcting (student) compositions. Because composition handbooks still have structures similar to the 1941 edition of Harbrace, in Chapter Five I discuss hyperliteracy and propose further research into the usability of composition handbooks, as current students generally know how to navigate hypermedia though handbooks have retained their index-driven form.

This thesis suggests that composition studies is in need of further efforts to bring the concept and practice of nonviolence into the discipline's theoretical and pedagogical framework. I survey and synthesize existing literature on nonviolence in composition as well as related writing on spirituality in education, feminism, the environment, and moral education. The implications of critical pedagogy and social construction theory for the subject are also considered. Ultimately, I argue for the importance of an approach incorporating the personal and the spiritual on the part of both teachers and students. Such an approach retains a strong social perspective because it works toward an understanding that the self cannot be seen as separate from its others. Guided by these ideas, I present and discuss a proposal for a one-semester university-level composition course entitled 'Writing Nonviolence.' I conclude the thesis by briefly considering alternate pedagogical models and by calling for further exploration, testimony, and commitment by teachers and scholars of composition and rhetoric.

This dissertation examines out lesbian teachers in the college composition classroom from a viewpoint of feminist teacher research and “queer geography”. Employing composition history, the ideological erasure of lesbian teacher subjectivities in the composition classroom is outlined. Case studies of lesbian teachers and students in lesbian teachers’ composition classrooms indicate in a preliminary way that students’ choice of writing topics, student writing and student subject positions are affected by the presence of out lesbian composition teachers.

If rhetoric, as Aristotle suggests, is a defensive art—an art based on opposition—can we imagine a rhetoric that is also about coming together, about building solidarity? Drawing from an ethnographic case study of the Vietnamese American Coalition (VAC), I explore a rhetoric that both reflects and achieves solidarity—a solidarity that is based on mutuality, respects difference, and builds alliances. A grassroots college student organization formed in 1993, VAC’s mission has been to foster political awareness and community activism among Vietnamese Americans, university students, and, generally, the local community. VAC students’ meetings, newsletters, and interview accounts reveal multivalent sources for coming together, ranging from involvement in an immediate interaction to a solidarity that revolves, more broadly, around public texts. By analyzing these students’ speech and writing, I call readers’ attention to several dimensions of a solidarity rhetoric: (1) invitations into a community, (2) identifications that forge new alliances, (3) memorial connections that write individuals and groups into larger sociohistorical contexts, and (4) public texts that perform and revise our relationships. The solidarity that emerges as central to VAC students’ rhetoric is critical not only to their community, but is moreover fundamental to the ways that we, as social beings, make our worlds cohere. In this sense, students’ rhetorics are instructive to the ways in which speakers and writers connect through rhetorical means.

This dissertation explores ontological issues, the real conditions of experience, and their relation to contemporary composition studies. Given the shifting terrain of contemporary socio-cultural practices concerned with issues of experience, affect, and labor, I explore alternative ways of thinking about and understanding these concerns. In order to develop this concern, I argue for a relational ontology that is normative rather than absolute and which speaks to the real conditions of experience and transforming the double binds that capture students, teachers, and institutions in oversimplified modern and postmodern ontologies. In Section One, I raise three concerns about the way students and composition scholars typically treat experience. I argue that composition studies would be best served by making relations, rather than student agency, the subject matter of composition. I then explore two attempts that try to develop the idea of experience and relations pointing out that these attempts need to go farther. In Section Two, I argue that a model of composition studies generated by an understanding of relations needs a different model of critique. Such a model of critique emphasizes the study of bodies and emotions and recognizes that the point of critique is to transform persons’ feelings about and sensibility of experience. I use what I call the Spinozist assemblage to reconstruct thinking about affect, experience, and bodies along radical monistic lines that develop the thought of difference. In Section Three, I turn to the issue of labor—particularly the work composition studies asks its students to do. I take the insight of composition scholars that what students produce by their labor are social relations and push this insight to a radical conclusion: I theorize writing as a kind of becoming—a symbiotic process whereby multiple bodies interact on affective, perceptual, and conceptual levels to think differently and beyond the boundaries of a simplistic ontology.