Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rowan University, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rowan University, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dep. of Education, August 2002 / Includes bibliographical references. Also available of the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, November, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-65).

The work of play theorists such as W. D. Winnicott, Gregory Bateson, and Erving Goffman suggests that the element of play has intriguing potential for the teaching and learning of writing: repositioning students in relation to dominant discourses, providing an avenue for risk-taking and experimentation, and offering students and teachers a subtle means to negotiate social roles. However, play as a discrete subject has drawn little attention in composition studies, and as yet there has been no attempt to enact a curriculum that deliberately foregrounds the element of play in all aspects of a composition course. The study described in this dissertation fills this gap. In Chapter 1, I discuss interdisciplinary theories of play in relation to work done in composition studies and develop a provisional definition of “play.” In Chapter 2, I present the methodology I used in this study, which focuses on three sections of a first-year composition course I taught during a single semester. In Chapter 3, I describe the curriculum I designed in light of the theories discussed in Chapter 1. I also relate my observations on how the curriculum was received, comment on my own experiences of play, and discuss spontaneous play initiatives. In Chapter 4, I present and discuss student reactions to the play activities as expressed in written reflections, individual and group interviews, and other artifacts. In Chapter 5, I focus on the identity negotiations of three students as these negotiations related to play in classroom discourse and their formal essays. Finally, in Chapter 6, I draw together, complicate, and extend the central themes of the previous chapters by discussing them in the context of the key questions that guided the study.

The purpose of this study was to investigate issues of writer identity in a college classroom, especially as they relate to the social and cultural influences of society. Using a poststructural lens to establish the theoretical viewpoint, this study examined the role of discourse in both framing student constructions of their identities and shaping the ideological stances from which they drew those understandings. The methodology used included an ethnographic study of a junior year writing class required of education majors at a large university. Examination and analysis of student writing/talk was used along with observation of student behaviors. Discourse analysis was also employed as a means of more closely examining the work of four of these students who were chosen because they constructed their identities in a more negative fashion. The research was conducted with twenty-one students with findings indicating they did not generally recognize aspects of race, ethnicity, second-language, disability or other sociocultural conditions as influential factors on their writer identity constructions. Students demonstrated a clear preference for expressivist writing, constructing more positive identities around it. Many students expressed concerns about aspects of traditional formal writing and signaled stunted growth and uninitiated-type identities when discussing these concerns. A third of the students expressed concerns about process writing, primarily fearing judgment and critique of their peers. Discourse analysis provided evidence that the composition discourses of expressivism, traditional formal academic discourse, and process permeated student language and were instrumental in constructing writer identity. This methodology also provided evidence that the basic composition metaphors of “stunted growth” and initiation were implicated in student writer identities, especially in relationship to traditional formal academic discourse. Writer identity in almost all cases was found to be multiple and, for most students, conflicting across situation and genre. The implications of this study suggest a need for explicit discussion of the political aspects of written language use in the academy. A case is also made for integrating more hybrid forms of discourse into writing classes as students taking up expressivist discourse, for the most part, constructed more positive writer identities.

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The construction of critically literate students must be paramount among goals in the freshman composition classroom. The approach for constructing critical readers positioned in this thesis employs conceptualizing both the complexity of a text and the importance of comprehending the context within which a text is both read and written. It utilizes the rhetorical feature of irony.