First Year Composition (FYC) is one of the most important courses for any incoming college student. This course (often designated as English 101) provides students the rhetorical tools to fully engage in critical thinking and writing on the college level. One of the most common methods of organizing FYC is to use a topic as the center of all the reading and writing prompts. The use of outside subject matter to teach FYC is a common practice that is rarely interrogated for its effectiveness. However, the Hairston debate in the early 1990s opened up a public discussion of how FYC should be taught. I am arguing that this debate was never fully resolved. Instead of using this historical moment in our field to discuss how topics impact FYC instruction, the use of topics has continued to be normalized during the last twenty years with little attention given to interrogating what actually happens in a FYC course that focuses on a topic. This dissertation study examines what happens when a controversial theme like race is used as the primary organizing principle of both a day and night FYC course in a metro-St Louis area community college. Using discourse analysis, I analyze student writing to determine how the students' writing is impacting by the subject matter of the course.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The presented study contributes to growing and necessary research compilations that include the field of Deaf Education and First Year Composition. The central goal of this study is to better understand what d/Deaf students, American Sign Language interpreters, and writing instructors currently experience when working together in a mainstream writing classroom to conduct clear communication among all participants. To address the support of d/Deaf students in such environments, a review of current literature that intersects the fields of Deaf Education, Disability Studies, and Writing and Rhetoric was conducted. Then, an IRB approved general interview study was conducted with culturally Deaf students, mainstream writing educators, and a nationally certified interpreter of the Deaf. Although this research touches just the very edges of an entire situation of inquiry and discourse, it offers a starting point from which educators and researchers alike can continue to develop further analysis of communication techniques to support d/Deaf writers in the writing classroom at the college level.

This dissertation studies how first-year writing teachers' experiences learning grammar impact their teaching of and responses to the topic of grammar. Scholars like Francis Christenson and Martha Kolln agree that some knowledge of grammar helps students' rhetorical acuity but not when taught with rules and isolated exercises. CCCC's "Students Rights to Their Own Language" and the work of scholars like Geneva Smitherman and April Baker-Bell have shed light on the language-identity relationship and the damage that standardization inflicts on a person's sense of self. This pedagogical paradigm has created tension for writing teachers and their departments. Grammar is, for many, an emotional topic. Joseph Williams wondered at the rage caused by certain grammar deviations in his essay "The Phenomenology of Errors." This dissertation builds on Williams' work, suggesting we look to teachers' histories to understand their emotions and find usefulness in these emotions. Using grounded theory, I code six interviews in which first-year writing teachers describe their memorable encounters with grammar instruction. I then identify patterns in these stories and the interviewees' practices and compare them against the results of a nation-wide survey of over a hundred first-year writing teachers. In this study, I identify a type of experience I call epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction. Encounters are epiphanic when the instruction impacts the learner's sense of self. I trace a connection between these encounters and teachers' feelings of empathy for their students and passion for grammar instruction's reform. I argue that reflection on epiphanic encounters can help teachers locate points of empathy for their students' experiences of grammars and promote productive conversations about grammar instruction. Based on these findings, I recommend that educators of first-year writing teachers implement grammar-focused reflection into their teacher training as a way of leveraging teachers' emotions toward the topic of grammar to facilitate productive conversations about grammar instruction. In the first chapter, I question the impact of teachers' emotional resonances from personal encounters with grammar instruction. I introduce my emotional encounter with grammar instruction and describe the emotional reactions I have encountered when attempting to engage writing teachers in conversations about grammar instruction. After reviewing the project, I situate my work in scholarship on emotions in composition. My findings respond to Joseph Williams' "Phenomenology of Errors" in which he explores why people respond strongly to "grammar errors." My work also contributes to inquiries in teacher training and the use of self reflection as professional development. I suggest that student teachers reflect on their past encounters with grammar to better empathize with their students' experiences. Chapter Two constructs a history of grammar instruction in America, from the 1860s to the present, mid-twenty-first century. Through this review, I show how pedagogical debates and language anxiety have always followed grammar and, depending on the person's skill and class, made it the source of anger, fear, hope, or shame. I highlight the social and educational shifts that formed grammar around the ugly shapes of class and race discrimination, including the East Coast's development, regional dialects, and increased demand for education. Chapter Three details my methods of investigation. Here I explain the rationale behind my study design, which uses surveys and interviews. The interviews provided qualitative details beyond what the heavily structured survey could and allowed teachers to describe their beliefs and experiences in their own words. It was important to collect these first-hand accounts to better understand the internal processes behind teachers' reactions. The survey provided quantitative data with which to identify overarching trends and test theories devised from the interviews. These steps in turn indicated the generalizability of the findings. This chapter also explains my use of Critical Incident Theory to write the survey and interview questions and my use of grounded theory to code and analyze the data. In Chapter Four, I present the results of the nation-wide survey and the six, one-on-one interviews. By comparing responses to different survey questions, (e.g. number of respondents to report having had positive emotions at the time of their experience and now hold negative emotions toward teaching grammar), I determined that the teachers' emotions at the time of their experience did not correlate with any particular teaching practices or feelings toward teaching grammar. However, 72% of all teachers surveyed and 89% of teachers who had "very negative" emotions at the time of their experience reported that their experience has impacted their teaching of grammar. This means grammar studies that hope to change teachers' practices will need to consider how to address teachers' past experiences. Chapter Five is the first of two analysis chapters. By attending to content and word choice of survey and interview responses, I find that the teachers whose stories include evidence of epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction tend to show empathy for students' diversity and the negative experiences their students may have had with grammars. Furthermore, most of these teachers spoke of teaching practices they implement to serve multilingual/multidialectal students. Teacher training can benefit from these findings since self-reflection on transformational learning experiences could be used in teacher training to help teachers appreciate the issues surrounding grammars and respond to them with sensitive practices. In Chapter Six, I show how in addition to empathy, teachers with epiphanic encounters also tend to feel passion. I use the term passion to designate heightened emotions, such as anger or excitement, that compel teachers to teach new perspectives on grammars in classes and/or social settings. I find that this emotion is not always pleasant for the teachers experiencing it, but their beliefs in a more equitable teaching of grammars motivates them to spread alternative understandings of writing instruction and grammars' role in it. Additionally, this chapter compares the survey data to the interview data and finds evidence that the pattern of passion exists in this larger sample. This finding strengthens the likelihood that this trend extends to most first-year writing teachers, making grammar-focused reflection a viable tool to motivate new teachers to continue valuable conversations needed to spread new knowledge about grammars. In the final two chapters, I present a lesson plan to be used to prepare student teachers to address grammars in a way that honors students' identities and language rights. This activity has teachers reflect on their emotional encounters with grammar instruction and consider how their students' experiences may be similar or different. The discussion questions push student teachers to dig deep into the complicated and uncomfortable issues surrounding grammar instruction. After the lesson, students should understand the most common debates about grammar instruction and have strategies to teach grammars rhetorically and respectfully. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation studies how first-year writing teachers' experiences learning grammar impact their teaching of and responses to the topic of grammar. Scholars like Francis Christenson and Martha Kolln agree that knowledge of grammar can benefit students if it is taught in context. Scholars like Geneva Smitherman and April Baker-Bell have revealed how critical language is to people's identity formation. Because grammar is important but controversial, it is a point of tension for writing teachers and their departments. Grammar is, for many, an emotional topic. Joseph Williams wondered at the rage caused by certain grammar deviations in his essay "The Phenomenology of Errors." This dissertation builds on Williams' work. I suggest that first-year writing teachers look to their histories to understand their emotions toward grammar. Using grounded theory, I code six interviews in which first-year writing teachers describe their memorable encounters with grammar instruction. I identify patterns in the interviewees' stories and teaching practices. Finally, I compare these patterns against the results of a nation-wide survey of over a hundred first-year writing teachers. In this study, I identify a type of experience I call epiphanic encounters with grammar instruction. Encounters are epiphanic when the instruction impacts the learner's sense of self. I trace a connection between these encounters and teachers' feelings of empathy for their students and passion for grammar instruction's reform. I argue that reflection on epiphanic encounters can help teachers locate points of empathy for their students' experiences of grammars and promote productive conversations about grammar instruction. Based on these findings, I recommend that educators of first-year writing teachers implement grammar-focused reflection into teacher training. Through this self reflection, student teachers can better understand their emotions toward the topic of grammar. Beyond this understanding, student teachers who use grammar-focused self reflection will be more emotionally prepared to discuss grammar instruction.

This project responds to increasing efforts in higher education to retain students, i.e., keep them enrolled until graduation, through various initiatives. Building upon the arguments of composition scholars Matthew McCurrie (2009), Sara Webb-Sunderhaus (2010), and Pegeen Reichert Powell (2013), who propose that retention efforts can overlook students’ needs, goals, and lived experiences, this study evaluates whether retention initiatives communicate a definition of success that ignores and/or aligns with how students value success. This project draws on an historical overview of US success ideology to contextualize a case study of Georgia State University, a leading institution in the country for raising its retention rates. Georgia State’s Strategic Plan and celebrated retention initiatives are then analyzed to determine how the institution defines success; that analysis is compared with data gathered from focus groups and interviews. Ultimately, this study suggests that the definition of success is not necessarily where students and universities diverge; rather, the data gathered has revealed that far more conflicting are the ideas students and universities possess for how to achieve success. This project argues that while historically success has been valued as the achievement of social and financial upward mobility, Georgia State’s framing of student success communicates, more narrowly, the value of efficient mobility. From the analysis of students’ perspectives, a framework is provided to show how a focus on efficiency provokes a shift in methods for how universities support students’ pursuit of success, a shift from what this author terms facilitative methods to methods that can be more dictative of students’ college experiences. This framework is used to argue that dictative methods of support risk removing agency from and present new challenges for students whose lifestyles and responsibilities conflict with their universities’ preferred path towards graduation; often these students are commuters, non-traditional and/or are students from low-income households. This dissertation concludes by providing a model for writing program administrators to consider how they can work toward promoting more facilitative, and thus more inclusive, retention practices.

The purpose of this project is to argue the effectiveness of utilizing comics as a learning tool in the first-year composition classroom to help students better understand synthesis. The two main features of comics that help teach synthesis are comic panels and comic closure. Library research was conducted to give insight into the history and terminology of comics, the value of comics in the classroom and in the field of rhetoric and composition, the practicality of using visual rhetoric and literacy in the classroom, and synthesis in the first-year composition classroom. I furthered my research by conducting a retrospective account of my own synthesis comic that I created during my graduate program. I analyzed how creating the synthesis comic helped me to better understand synthesis. I also analyzed how I was better able to effectively execute synthesis specifically through the genre conventions of panels and comic closure. Based on insights from my retrospective account, I will illustrate how the scaffolding exercise of creating a synthesis comic can be an effective tool in the first-year composition classroom. Additionally, I will offer suggestions for further research on the significance of this scaffolding exercise. Comics are becoming more widely valued in academia at large, as well as valued specifically in the field of rhetoric and composition. It is my hope that this thesis will contribute positively to this trend.

This dissertation intervenes in a long-simmering debate about whether literature belongs in composition classes. Using a combination of empirical and textual methods, my scholarship proceeds inductively from analyzing artifacts of teaching, providing a better sense of what is happening in writing classrooms rather than simply speculating about it. In doing so, I revisit arguments made against using literature in composition and argue that the 21st century English department provides a different context within which literature and composition co-exist. One of the charges leveled against using literature to teach writing is that it is a "humanist" practice and therefore elitist. I trace the genealogy of this term and demonstrate the wide range of meanings this term has carried within the last century alone, arguing that those who raise the alarm against humanism need to clarify what they mean. Taking off from the humanistic concern with style, I analyze composition anthologies to see how the questions following the literary selections deal with stylistic concerns. By and large, I find that the literary selections reinforce the themes of the primarily nonfiction chapters, but are not presented as prose from which students can derive stylistic lesson. I then turn to analyzing syllabi, testing the accusation that those coming from literature backgrounds will teach literature in their composition classes at the expense of working on student writing. I find that literature specialists do not necessarily spend an excessive number of class days on literature, but do spend more class days on readings generally, with fewer days devoted to student writing than rhetoric specialists. Finally, I argue that the validity of student evaluations of teaching needs to be assessed by composition scholars because concerns specific to our courses--the small sizes, the frequent feedback teachers give students, the difficulty of assessing student work, and the fact that ours is a female dominated field--mean that research conducted by educational psychologists may not apply to composition. My research reinforces the idea that our course readings, assignments, pedagogy, and assessment methods should align purposively with each other. / text

In recent years, an increasing number of military veterans have enrolled in higher education. Little research has been conducted on veterans in tandem with higher education, but what does exist shows that they are a unique student population because of their military background. In the last few years, scholarship has called for research on veterans in classroom environments. Moreover, composition scholars in particular have called for research on veterans and writing. Although veterans have been recognized as a unique student population, little research has been conducted on what pedagogical practices can be used to help them as they become students. First-year composition courses are the perfect context to examine the intersection of these calls for research because most veterans have to take them – since they often enroll as freshmen – and they involve varied written assignments. The purpose of this study was to explore what veterans’ experiences had been in the classroom environment of first-year composition courses and in working towards the course goals for written assignments through qualitative methods. This study also sought to discover what veterans thought could be altered to improve their experience in first-year composition. This study focused on the context of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, and its first-year composition course, Engl-101. In order to discover what veterans’ experiences had been, a focus group of five veterans that had taken Engl-101 at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale was held. Additionally, a follow-up interview was conducted with one of the participants of the focus group. The results were consistent with the findings of other research on veterans. What was most notably clear was that veterans’ experiences in Engl-101 were greatly influenced by their experiences in the military. Participants expected their instructors to wield more authority over the class, much like their superiors would in the military. Additionally, veterans were often challenged by the behaviors of non-military students, which they perceived as disrespectful. Despite these challenges that participants encountered in the classroom environment, they also drew from the leadership skills they acquired while in the military to counter them. Additionally, the participants of this study raised that their instructors cared about the students and the content of the course, which alleviated some of the challenges they encountered. When it came to working towards the course goals for the written assignments, veterans struggled to expand their ideas beyond a few sentences, largely due to the style of writing they were used to in the military. That said, once veterans had a clear understanding of the conventions needed for an assignment, they were able to write strong essays. Ultimately, instructors of first-year composition that work with veterans will need to further training on the expectations that veterans’ carry with them from the military. Once instructors have knowledge of the ways veterans learn, they can adapt their pedagogical practices to suit.

This thesis portfolio discusses my journey as a Master of English graduate student at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. I began as a graduate student in nineteenth-century American literature and switched concentrations halfway through my degree to Rhetoric and Composition. The decision to change programs was the result of my love for teaching beginning composition courses at SIUC. My passion for teaching drives each installment of this portfolio, focusing on my journey as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, my examination with a prominent theorist in the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition, and my interest in student engagement in the First-Year Composition classroom. My goal for this thesis portfolio is to offer a fresh perspective on Rhetoric and Composition, which allows me to explore my voice within the field.

This phenomenological study examines Saudi students’ perceptions of writing difficulties in U.S. universities as they have experiencing EFL and ESL contexts. The reason for focusing on Saudi students as participants is to limit linguistic, educational, cultural, and social factors that may affect the findings. The participants are seven Saudi graduate students at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). Interview is used as a research instrument to provide a space for each participant to recall as many memories and perceptions as possible in order to manifest comprehensive presentations of their experiences in the Saudi and U.S. contexts. The two research goals are: (1) exploring the similarities and differences between the two contexts based on the participants’ perceptions; and (2) identifying potential effects of these similarities and differences on the participants’ writing during graduate studies in the U.S. Participants’ perceptions focus on the differences between the Saudi and U.S. contexts, rather than similarities, and their comparisons of the two contexts are discussed based on eight key factors: student’s role, students’ expectations, teacher’s role, relationship with instructors, writing process, feedback and grading, off-campus social life, and educational policies. The potential effects of these differences on Saudi students’ writing in the U.S. context are classified into three domains: educational procedures and academic standards; pedagogies; and writing processes. I conclude this study by offering recommendations for U.S. professors and instructors who may teach Saudi students and future Saudi students who plan to come to the U.S. universities.

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