The overall purpose of this study is to analyze how students talk and write about writing to understand why mainstream students struggle with writing when they are neither economically nor culturally marginalized. Composition scholars' literacy narratives have identified problems in education and literacy encountered by marginalized students, but they fall short in identifying and accounting for problems that mainstream students face. After examining literacy narratives by composition scholars, this study assesses interviews, questionnaires, and literacy narratives from 77 college students, ranging in ages from 18 to 26. These accounts indicate that mainstream students have had few opportunities to examine their literacy skills within the context of their developing sense of self. Because literacy narratives are stories about writers developing a voice to share with their community, ethos is central to this examination. Building upon classical and contemporary models, two aspects of ethos are developed in my analysis: ethos as it relates to students' character, identity, and self-awareness, and ethos as students' sense of their relationship to the communities that shape their character and form their audience as writers. My assessment of student accounts develops four conclusions. First, standardized testing and formulaic writing have done little to foster students' confidence or self-awareness. Second, as a result, exigence becomes a necessary addition to writing assignments to encourage students to learn from their writing and see themselves as writers. Third, having students write their own literacy narrative is a valuable exercise so that they may become aware of how literacy affects their identity. Fourth, students' self-assessments reveal that their perceptions of writing bear little resemblance to issues defined in recent debates in composition studies, particularly the rift between personal and academic writing and the debate concerning expressivist and social-epistemic pedagogies. I define an alternative, an ethos-based pedagogy, placed within the post-process theory paradigm as defined by Thomas Kent. An ethical pedagogy focuses on developing students' character and confidence and on moving students to examine the relationship between interior and exterior spaces they inhabit and on considering how these spaces influence them on a personal and a social level. An ethical pedagogy can move students to form stronger relationships with language and their literacy practices.

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When college composition teachers carefully consider the role and function of multimodal composition in their classrooms, they can enhance the teaching of writing and communication, engage and empower students, and better prepare students for the challenges and possibilities of life in our rapidly changing digital age. To meet this teaching challenge and study the impact of multimedia on student writers, I designed this mixed-methods case study to examine how video documentary essays function as a form of multimodal composition in first-year composition courses and how these types of texts may enhance the teaching of traditional composition skills, as well as contribute to the academic and professional communication skills of students. The study was designed to determine how students react to multimodal composition and how they view the benefits as well as pitfalls of composing new kinds of texts in their first-year writing courses. This teacher research was conducted at a mid-sized, urban community college located in southern Tennessee. I used surveys, interviews and reflection essays to collect the data from student participants. I then analyzed the collected data for this project. My conclusions are that students learn valuable skills in the multimodal composition process, such as organization and time management, in addition to learning how to use movie-making software. Students also develop a keener sense of audience and purpose when they compose video documentary essays. Multimodal composition can be used to teach traditional writing and rhetoric. Multimodal composition can be used to enhance the teaching of writing and communication, engage and empower students to participate in convergence culture, and better prepare them for the challenges and possibilities of life in our rapidly changing digital age.

A predominant metaphor in the autism community is that the neurotypical world is a "wrong planet" in which people with autism do not belong, and I assert that the university is one such wrong planet. I examine the rhetorical history of autism and argue that the construction and reconstruction of autism have led to learning spaces in higher education that Other students on the autism spectrum. I draw upon Krista Ratcliffe's rhetorical listening as a way to address the inequities that persist in college writing classrooms. However, to avoid a bias toward neurotypicality, I recast rhetorical listening as rhetorical sensing, a term that encompasses the multiple ways of experiencing the world rather than privileging one modality.I apply rhetorical sensing to four aspects of higher education. First, I look at the ways in which students with autism are programmed to rhetorically sense neurotypicals through therapy models such as Social Thinking. I argue that such training is not true rhetorical sensing because the burden of sensing is placed solely on students with ASDs, further marginalizing them. Next, I turn my attention to the college composition classroom and present ways for instructors to rhetorically sense their students with autism. I provide strategies based on universal design that can help all students, regardless of neurodifference, thrive. I then turn my attention to composition instructors who parent children with autism. Drawing upon a rich body of research on working conditions for women in rhetoric and composition, I describe the ways in which adjunctification has left caregivers over-worked, under-paid, and under-insured as they try to provide for their children. Drawing upon Aimee Carrillo Rowe's power lines and Andrea O'Reilly's gynocentric mothering, I propose ways to improve conditions for teachers who parent children with autism. Finally, I focus on ways in which writing program administrators can make programmatic changes in order to foster inclusive learning practices. I propose low-cost training and partnership models that can create an inclusive planet that supports neurodiverse students, faculty, and writing programs.

This project provides rhetorical and sonic exploration of listening practices, musical song, crowded subject formations and multimodal composition pedagogy. Conceptually drawing from rhetorical studies, sound studies, queer and women of color (Q/WOC) feminisms, cultural studies, affect studies, and composition pedagogies, the project maintains commitments to multiply situated knowledge production. The project's sonic inquiries and cross-disciplinary interests offer scholarly interventions primarily aimed at improving rhetoric and composition studies analytical and affective responsiveness to sonority. Secondarily, the project is aimed at increasing sound studies rhetorical responsivity and attention to personified performance techniques. The project’s first chapter argues that disciplinary distancing between rhetorical, compositional and sonic arts can be lessened through the temporal principle of kairos. This chapter also overviews key methodological concepts, offers working definitions of key terms, and glosses the project's chapter progression. The second chapter is a multi-faceted literature review that surveys the ways listening is rhetorically emplaced and affectively confined within classical and contemporary discussions of Aristotelian epideixis. This chapter notes the limits of commonly accepted and received feminist rhetorical "recovery" projects that frequently place listening in service to logos; highlights the ways listening can act as a generative method of performative "respond-ability" through certain positions; and resonantly attunes listening to two audio-visual materials: timbral tonality and rhythmic temporality. Chapters three and four analytically train listening practices on two specific genres of musical sound: protest song and EDM-pop musical productions. The third chapter analyzes singer-songwriter-activist Nina Simone’s early 1960's protest song "Mississippi Goddam" while the fourth chapter focuses on contemporary singer-songwriter Sia's EDM-pop productions for "Chandelier." Treated as case studies, these songs and artists exemplify body-subject impressionability, political disaffection from historically dominant forms of whitened, hetero-patriarchal, liberalized ideology, and the performative possibilities of crossing and crowding subject-hood through persona crafting. Following these case studies, the project concludes by offering conceptual im/possibilities and pedagogical materials for rhetorically teaching composition as a sonic art. The fifth and final chapter conceptually intervenes in rhetoric and composition's pedagogical tendencies toward elevating and espousing notions of the minimally affected, individual, authorial, agentive rhetor/writer by developing a series of activities designed to give instructional supports for scaffolding student learning and composing specific to vocalic sound and the sorts of affects engendered in listening.

Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education developed to challenge forms of social oppression through the acquisition of agency, what advocates argue traditional teaching methods fail to accomplish. It is because of this and because writing is considered by many to be a gateway to learning that critical pedagogy as a teaching methodology in composition studies is a logical alternative to traditional theories guiding composition pedagogy today. Critical pedagogy is meant to help students gain the tools needed to become active participants, influencers, and decision-makers in society. This paper argues for the need for critical composition pedagogy in present times as well as attempts to mold critical pedagogical theory into reliable praxis for first-year composition (FYC) instructors, while also meeting the goals of FYC as established by the Council of Writing Program Administrators (the WPA). The ultimate goal in providing a model for critical composition pedagogy is not to provide a different vision than that of other critical composition pedagogues, but an alternative.

"'Thinking Things Together': What Contemplative Practice Can Offer Academic Writing Instruction," calls for the inclusion of contemplative practices (e.g., mindfulness meditation, visualization, deep listening, reflective journaling, etc.) in the instruction of writing, due to their potential to foster more self-efficacy in the writing process. Because recent research has linked contemplative practices to improved cognition, they are especially well-suited to facilitate writing, which is-at least in part-a cognitive act. In other words, the common denominator of composition studies and contemplative practice is cognition. However, composition studies has failed to make this connection because the field has been largely dismissive of cognitivist writing research, and has neglected to stay abreast of recent research on cognition and writing. By presenting recent research on the cognitive processes involved in the production of text, as well as recent research on the effects of meditation on the brain (pioneered in the emerging field of contemplative neuroscience), this transdisciplinary project highlights the points at which these two bodies of research converge. Two systematic literature reviews (SLRs) of these-seemingly disparate-areas of research reveal that they share interests in the cognitive processes of executive function, working memory, attention, motivation, and self-regulation. Furthermore, a meta-synthesis of the research conducted on these cognitive processes illustrates how contemplative neuroscience can inform-and improve-the theory and practice of teaching writing. Specifically, I provide readers with classroom activities and assignments that implement contemplative practices in the writing classroom in empirically-informed and effective ways.