M.Ed. / A personal tutoring established by the ancient universities and adopted subsequently by both old and new universities has implicitly acknowledged that High Education students derive both academic and personal benefits from one-on-one academic guidance and group collaborative work (Mattis & Dewart, 2007). In the Department of Mathematics, Science, Technology and Computer Education at the University of Johannesburg both the individual and group tutoring models are employed to assist students in their academic programmes. The research question that this study is addressing is: “What are the students’ expectations of the tutors in a postgraduate Computer- Based Education programme?” This research study describes a case study method based on the students’ expectations of the tutors in a post-graduate Computer-Based Education programme. For some reasons students have a misconception (about the roles of the tutors) that a tutoring session is a place where they will, with very little effort on their part, acquire and develop the computer skills needed for competency in the course. Either they view the tutor as an assistant lecturer, or someone who can give all the answers to their problems. The case is to elucidate the students’ perceptions and experiences towards the role of tutors in the Development of Web-Based Instruction in a Computer- Based Education course. Through qualitative data analysis the study revealed that the students in this study needed to know where to draw the line between the role of tutors and that of lecturers. The students acknowledged the kind of help that they received from the tutors during the tutoring sessions. Peer tutoring was portrayed by the students as having particular significance for them as they were faced with challenges of inadequate mastery of the necessary computer skills. It is also acknowledged that peer tutoring has the benefit to contribute to the improvement of their academic performance.

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This qualitative narrative study investigated the relationship between emerging adults’ understandings of themselves as writers and their autobiographical memories of writing. Narrative data, largely elicited through semi-structured interviews, were collected from 14 participants who were recruited from six postsecondary institutions. Recruitment efforts aimed to yield participants who had divergent educational experiences, career ambitions, and dispositions towards writing, and who inhabited divergent racial, social, and cultural identities. The study contributes to writer identity research by applying a sociocultural framework that holds memory, narrative, identity, and culture as reflections—and, often, distortions—of each other. The research questions, asked through this lens, aimed to provide insight into the emotional residues of pre-college writing experiences, the potential patterning of narrated memories or identities among participants, and the ways in which the stories participants shared and the identities they storied shape each other. While this is fundamentally an inquiry into the narrative features of writer identity, it is also a study about how certain lived writing experiences reincarnate as highly emotive autobiographical memories; even if such memories tend to be unstable, unreliable, and suggestable, they are nonetheless meaningful reflections of the lingering effects of the past. Through this retrospective study, a portrait emerges of classroom conditions and writing experiences that are particularly hospitable to the nurturement of positive memories and healthy writing identities, as well as to the inverse. This research is intended to speak to both secondary English teachers and English teacher educators and college composition instructors by bridging secondary and postsecondary understandings of how student writers are moving between worlds, the memories they are bringing with them, and the ways in which they might be storying their writer identities en route.

This dissertation journeys into the heart of narrative writing, exploring how personal stories shape the practices and identities of both students and instructors within academic writing instruction. At its core, it is an autoethnographic study that employs my own writing life as primary data to investigate the impact of narrative writing on teaching pedagogy. The research interrogates the traditional academic prioritization of objective, linear essay structures, questioning how such practices may obscure other legitimate forms of knowledge representation and identity construction within educational settings. Drawing from personal experiences of struggle within the constrictions of academic writing expectations, this work advocates for a narrative pedagogy. It recognizes storytelling as a rich, inclusive medium through which students can engage with texts and express complex understandings. By weaving in elements of motherhood, ancestry, and lived experience, the study underscores the need for a pedagogical shift towards recognizing the multiplicity of writer identities and the value of diverse narrative expressions.

“Under Wendy Bishop’s Eye” examines the teaching, learning, and social environment of a graduate student in an American creative writing MFA program in the early years of the 21st century. This dissertation is a work of autofiction; it is both an autoethnography and a fictionalized story written in the form of a novel. The project uses the scholarship of writing studies’ leader Wendy Bishop to discuss and analyze the dynamics of graduate student learning in creative writing courses, undergraduate learning in creative writing courses, graduate student teaching in creative writing courses, and graduate student teaching in expository writing or first-year composition courses at a four-year college. The project addresses the limitations of the “workshop method” for teaching creative writing, while supporting the benefits of writing pedagogy that includes cross-genre writing exercises in all university-level writing courses, specifically bringing “personal writing” and creative non-fiction into both creative writing and first-year composition course.

Despite the growing number of L2 studies examining digitally-mediated collaborative writing, the vast majority of these studies have focused on academic writing tasks. This study examined the dynamics and perceptions of groups of ESL students who used wikis to write collaborative short stories. The study also compared the short stories written in groups with posttest short stories written individually in terms of creativity, accuracy, and complexity. The study involved nine students taking a Creative Writing course in an intensive English program at a large university in the U.S. It followed a multiple case study design; the students were divided into three pairs and one triad (four case studies). For three weeks, the groups engaged in a series of wiki-based and creative writing activities and produced four collaborative short stories. During the following three-week period, the students wrote nine individual short stories using a similar writing prompt to the one used in the collaborative task. For each student, the collaborative and individual writing samples were compared on the three dimensions of creativity, accuracy, and complexity to examine whether collaboration influenced the quality of the product. Further, the dynamics of collaboration were explored through analyzing the wiki discussions and revision histories for each group. Finally, students' perceptions of the task were surveyed through individual interviews and self-assessment questionnaires. While there was not a clear effect of collaboration on the creativity and accuracy of the short stories, the complexity was slightly higher for the majority of the informants. The analysis of the short stories also indicated that ESL students faced difficulty writing in a genre that does not have a strict pre-established outline. Analysis of the wiki discussions and revision history showed trends of group dynamics in the four case studies. Further analysis of perception data revealed that although the majority of the informants had a negative perception of the collaborative task, they expressed a positive attitude toward the individual creative writing task.