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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.

This project argues that college writing pedagogy can encourage and facilitate critical thinking by enabling students to pursue inquiries grounded in, and guided by, their own strongly held beliefs. Chapter 1 introduces my definition of critical thinking as the practice of examining received knowledge from a distance necessary to question and, if necessary, revise that knowledge. I proceed to show how beliefs, or ideas taken for granted, can serve as foundations for critical thinking. Extending Jeffrey M. Ringer’s notion that belief in the truth of an idea may prompt inquiry into the reality behind that idea, I show how inquiry rooted in belief can entail questioning and revising existing accounts of the realities to which belief lays claim. Chapter 2 shows how James Berlin’s writing pedagogy grounds critical thinking in students’ beliefs by positioning critique of ideology in the discourses of mass media as a necessary step in students’ production of those same discourses. Chapter 3 shows how an assignment called a “conversion narrative” grounds critical thinking in belief by requiring students to explain how their beliefs have changed over time. Working through multiple drafts of their writing, students identify the unstated assumptions on which the logical cohesion of their narratives rest and, based on their findings, revise their narratives to construct a believable and compelling account of conversion. Chapter 4 outlines an assignment called a community profile, in which students analyze a genre of communication used within a community who shares their beliefs, in preparation for creating their own, original document in that genre. Students explain how the rules, conventions, and rhetorical strategies that characterize their chosen genre reflect and reinforce the beliefs of the community who uses that genre. Here, belief is grounded in critical thinking insofar as genre analysis provided students with new insight into their beliefs—specifically, into the ways

This chapter examines U.S.-based approaches to curricular revision of the Rhetoric and Writing Minor at the American University in Cairo (AUC) through analysis of faculty interviews and relevant artifacts. Through this analysis, and consideration of AUC’s development in the context of changes in Egypt, the chapter argues that U.S.-based curricular approaches satisfied various local needs among AUC’s writing faculty and students. These findings complicate claims within international composition studies, which are concerned with non-reflective export of U.S. linguistic, pedagogical and program models into international sites. This chapter calls for expanding the perspective of U.S.-based approaches to composition studies to include paradigms from transnational literacy studies.

This chapter examines U.S.-based approaches to curricular revision of the Rhetoric and Writing Minor at the American University in Cairo (AUC) through analysis of faculty interviews and relevant artifacts. Through this analysis, and consideration of AUC’s development in the context of changes in Egypt, the chapter argues that U.S.-based curricular approaches satisfied various local needs among AUC’s writing faculty and students. These findings complicate claims within international composition studies, which are concerned with non-reflective export of U.S. linguistic, pedagogical and program models into international sites. This chapter calls for expanding the perspective of U.S.-based approaches to composition studies to include paradigms from transnational literacy studies.

This paper presents a hermeneutic reading (from a Gadamerian perspective) of the complex relationships that tied the two fields of Composition Studies and Literary Criticism within the English department and across the academia. These two academic disciplines have remained in a dynamic, interactive, reciprocal relation throughout the decades. The paper surveys the published scholarship in the field of Composition Studies and presents a reading of the different themes, philosophies, and approaches that have kept the two fields in an interactive, dialogic process of formation. Terms and concepts from philosophical hermeneutics are introduced and employed to explain this relation.&nbsp

This paper presents a hermeneutic reading (from a Gadamerian perspective) of the complex relationships that tied the two fields of Composition Studies and Literary Criticism within the English department and across the academia. These two academic disciplines have remained in a dynamic, interactive, reciprocal relation throughout the decades. The paper surveys the published scholarship in the field of Composition Studies and presents a reading of the different themes, philosophies, and approaches that have kept the two fields in an interactive, dialogic process of formation. Terms and concepts from philosophical hermeneutics are introduced and employed to explain this relation.&nbsp

This paper presents a hermeneutic reading (from a Gadamerian perspective) of the complex relationships that tied the two fields of Composition Studies and Literary Criticism within the English department and across the academia. These two academic disciplines have remained in a dynamic, interactive, reciprocal relation throughout the decades. The paper surveys the published scholarship in the field of Composition Studies and presents a reading of the different themes, philosophies, and approaches that have kept the two fields in an interactive, dialogic process of formation. Terms and concepts from philosophical hermeneutics are introduced and employed to explain this relation.&nbsp

This chapter examines U.S.-based approaches to curricular revision of the Rhetoric and Writing Minor at the American University in Cairo (AUC) through analysis of faculty interviews and relevant artifacts. Through this analysis, and consideration of AUC’s development in the context of changes in Egypt, the chapter argues that U.S.-based curricular approaches satisfied various local needs among AUC’s writing faculty and students. These findings complicate claims within international composition studies, which are concerned with non-reflective export of U.S. linguistic, pedagogical and program models into international sites. This chapter calls for expanding the perspective of U.S.-based approaches to composition studies to include paradigms from transnational literacy studies.

This chapter examines U.S.-based approaches to curricular revision of the Rhetoric and Writing Minor at the American University in Cairo (AUC) through analysis of faculty interviews and relevant artifacts. Through this analysis, and consideration of AUC’s development in the context of changes in Egypt, the chapter argues that U.S.-based curricular approaches satisfied various local needs among AUC’s writing faculty and students. These findings complicate claims within international composition studies, which are concerned with non-reflective export of U.S. linguistic, pedagogical and program models into international sites. This chapter calls for expanding the perspective of U.S.-based approaches to composition studies to include paradigms from transnational literacy studies.

This chapter examines U.S.-based approaches to curricular revision of the Rhetoric and Writing Minor at the American University in Cairo (AUC) through analysis of faculty interviews and relevant artifacts. Through this analysis, and consideration of AUC’s development in the context of changes in Egypt, the chapter argues that U.S.-based curricular approaches satisfied various local needs among AUC’s writing faculty and students. These findings complicate claims within international composition studies, which are concerned with non-reflective export of U.S. linguistic, pedagogical and program models into international sites. This chapter calls for expanding the perspective of U.S.-based approaches to composition studies to include paradigms from transnational literacy studies.

This chapter examines U.S.-based approaches to curricular revision of the Rhetoric and Writing Minor at the American University in Cairo (AUC) through analysis of faculty interviews and relevant artifacts. Through this analysis, and consideration of AUC’s development in the context of changes in Egypt, the chapter argues that U.S.-based curricular approaches satisfied various local needs among AUC’s writing faculty and students. These findings complicate claims within international composition studies, which are concerned with non-reflective export of U.S. linguistic, pedagogical and program models into international sites. This chapter calls for expanding the perspective of U.S.-based approaches to composition studies to include paradigms from transnational literacy studies.

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 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.

Like other forms of intellectual property, patents have increasingly been the subject of controversy regarding their successes and failures in promoting and channeling innovation. But unlike other forms of intellectual property, patents are constituted and defined in terms of officially sanctioned texts. As a consequence, patents are deeply embedded in communities of composition, interpretation, and practice. This paper outlines how genre analysis can be applied to interrogate the "typified rhetorical action" of the patent system and its constituent communities. It argues and demonstrates that understanding the rhetorical work of patents is key to addressing current criticisms of the patent system.

Like other forms of intellectual property, patents have increasingly been the subject of controversy regarding their successes and failures in promoting and channeling innovation. But unlike other forms of intellectual property, patents are constituted and defined in terms of officially sanctioned texts. As a consequence, patents are deeply embedded in communities of composition, interpretation, and practice. This paper outlines how genre analysis can be applied to interrogate the "typified rhetorical action" of the patent system and its constituent communities. It argues and demonstrates that understanding the rhetorical work of patents is key to addressing current criticisms of the patent system.

This project presents the results of a case study of creative nonfiction (CNF) pedagogical practices in undergraduate composition studies and creative writing courses at The University of Arizona, exploring how those who teach CNF at this top-ranked school for the study of the genre are shaping knowledge about it. This project analyzes within a rhetorical framework the various subject positions CNF teachers assume in relation to their writing and teaching as well as the teaching methodologies they utilize. I do this to articulate a theory of CNF pedagogy for the twenty-first century, one that represents the merging of individualist and public intellectual ideologies that I have observed in teacher interviews, course documents, and pedagogical publications about the genre. For students new to the genre, so much depends on how CNF is first introduced through class discussion, representative assigned prose models, and invention activities when it comes to creating knowledge about exactly what contemporary CNF is/can be and how writers might best generate prose that fits the genre's wide-ranging conventions in form, content, and rhetorical situation. Understanding how and why instructors promote certain ideologies in relation to CNF becomes increasingly important as this mode of personally situated, fact-based, narrative-privileging, literarily stylized discourse continues to gain popularity within and beyond the academy.

In this project, I argue for the importance of public engagement as a method of scholarship for the discipline of creative writing, in writing studies, and the broader humanities. I do so by using historical study, ethnography and survey data, in order to trace the history of creative writing's disciplinarity, define its contemporary practices as socially collaborative and inventive, and show how those practices align with the goals and methods of public engagement projects. This dissertation contributes to a growing body of work in composition studies calling for collaboration between composition and creative writing, and I argue that though creative writers in the academy often participate in what is variously called "community outreach" or "public engagement" activities, that work can and should be more clearly articulated as part of the work of the discipline. Higher education's recent turn toward public engagement--as evidenced by monographs on the subject but also by real-world changes like the addition of language about public engagement to the tenure and promotion guidelines and ten-year plans of many universities--presents a compelling opportunity to re-articulate what it means to be a writer in the university. Work in public engagement provides new access to institutional prestige and funding, and opens connections between the various areas of writing studies in order to better serve university communities, teachers, and students.

Dans cet article, nous souhaitons montrer l’intérêt de traiter les écrits à l’université en tant que genres de discours spécifiés par les disciplines universitaires dans lesquelles les étudiants inscrivent leur cursus. Cette démonstration s’appuie ici sur la confrontation des résultats de deux recherches sur ces écritures universitaires, menées l’une en France et l’autre aux États-Unis. Plus précisément nous nous centrons sur les ruptures qui jalonnent ces processus – telle celle qu’induit le passage de la licence au master – et sur, au contraire, les continuités qui les stabilisent. Il apparait clairement que ces ruptures et ces continuités sont largement soumises aux “contextes disciplinaires” qui spécifient ces écrits, ce qui renforce notre hypothèse théorique.

Dans cet article, nous souhaitons montrer l’intérêt de traiter les écrits à l’université en tant que genres de discours spécifiés par les disciplines universitaires dans lesquelles les étudiants inscrivent leur cursus. Cette démonstration s’appuie ici sur la confrontation des résultats de deux recherches sur ces écritures universitaires, menées l’une en France et l’autre aux États-Unis. Plus précisément nous nous centrons sur les ruptures qui jalonnent ces processus – telle celle qu’induit le passage de la licence au master – et sur, au contraire, les continuités qui les stabilisent. Il apparait clairement que ces ruptures et ces continuités sont largement soumises aux “contextes disciplinaires” qui spécifient ces écrits, ce qui renforce notre hypothèse théorique.

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.