This qualitative study seeks to examine literacy acquisition and identity formation patterns in a group of learning disabled labeled (LDL) college students. This study involved the formation of a genre/constructive inspired reading and study skills class. This genre/constructive inspired class was then used with a group of students enrolled in Piedmont College, a small private two-year college specifically designed for students diagnosed with learning disabilities. Piedmont College was an institution organized around principles of cognitivism and information processing. In this study I have examined the ramifications of using an alternative constructive pedagogy in an institution dominated by information or cognitive pedagogy. Cognitive instructional techniques emphasize a skills-based curriculum leading to metacognition as a goal. My alternative pedagogy emphasized membership and participation leading to a concept I call production of knowledge. Production of knowledge is the ability of members to see themselves as sanctioned to create what is seen as viable, valued information and is an essential part of membership in an academic community. The findings of using this alternative pedagogy relate to both literacy and identity. Research reveals a complex literacy and identity formation process with these LDL students. This is not a simple case of skills development. In the area of literacy, research findings suggest that all students enter the class with a general understanding of academic literacy. As the class proceeds, however, they are able to develop and deepen this understanding. Greater degrees of membership are thus accomplished as the students incorporate academic literacy into their pre-existing discourse community memberships. In the area of identity, research findings suggest that the use of a genre/constructive pedagogy allows for student assumption of subject positions that otherwise would not be available. This provides alternative avenues for students to explore, grow and produce knowledge. These are necessary characteristics for membership in the target (academic) discourse community.

Using a feminist poststructuralist framework, "the self," language, gender, writing, and schooling are retheorized in this study. An undergraduate course focused on developing thinking in writing was taught to nine female students. The intent of the study was to learn more about writing as an active socio-cultural site where writers could be found negotiating their ways through networks of power relations. Data were gathered to provide a description of the content and process of the course and the creative space it provided for students to develop their own writing practices; to examine subjectivity in flux and how writing came to influence it; and to consider the students' thinking as conveyed in their writing in terms of its discursive content. Several significant features of the course emerged. Most importantly the course was structured around an array of intertextual layers, including continual opportunity for writers to hear each other's in-class writing and feminist readings. Other aspects that are discussed include the teacher-student relationship and the provocative edge that emerged in the course by setting aside a more traditional disciplinary focus and dramatically increasing polyvocality. The writing of two students across the semester is examined in-depth. Feminist poststructuralist theorists describe subjectivity as pieced together, as in process, and under construction. By looking at the students' writing, these features were found but from the point of view of lived subjectivity. Using Foucault's theory of discourses as a starting point, the following content was discovered in the students' writing and is explored as a function of discourse: struggles within heterosexual relationships; preoccupation with the female body; and New Age Thinking. The intertextual layers of the course together offered these female student writers an alternative version of the social world. The writing did not bring the students to any definitive point, but rather it became a way for each to articulate and follow her own movement in and out of struggle. These writers negotiated their way through these relations of power at the same time that a new subject position--that of female thinker/writer--presented itself through the course structure.

This dissertation contextualizes and analyzes community/university partnerships through which college writing is paired with community action. Over the past few years a range of community-based and service-learning initiatives have been launched in departments of English. While some research is available on particular projects, little considers the wider movement. In response, I propose a typology for programs, distinguishing between those that write for, about and with the community; further, I investigate three exemplar programs. Throughout the study I explicate how such practices are situated within (and extend) the discourse of rhetoric and composition. The opening provides an overview of community-based writing initiatives at a range of colleges and universities, and how these programs position themselves in relation to current disciplinary discourses. I then propose a typology which sorts community-based writing pedagogies into three paradigms: those that write for the community, about the community, or with the community. These paradigms are distinguished according to the different aims, literacies and discourses most valued by each. The typology is intended not as a rigid means of categorization, but as a heuristic. John Dewey and Paulo Freire are established as the primary theoretical frames of reference for through a survey of their respective educational philosophies and pedagogical approaches. The places where Dewey's liberal progressivism and Freire's critical pedagogy overlap are emphasized, as are the issues on which they diverge. To put such theoretical discussions in dialogue with lived experience, the dissertation includes three empirical case studies. A junior-year writing-across-the-curriculum course at the University of Massachusetts is studied as an example of "writing for the community." A first-year service-learning composition course at Bentley College offers an example of "writing about the community." And the Community Literacy Center (CLC), a collaboration of Carnegie Mellon and a community center, stands as a representative of "writing with the community." An in-depth and comparative analysis of each results in a sharper understanding of their distinct theoretical, rhetorical and ideological assumptions. To close, this study looks forward, suggesting how community-based and service-learning programs both draw upon and enrich significant disciplinary debates in composition studies.

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.

This dissertation addresses the problem of how best to teach undergraduate literature courses in the climate of challenge and hostility which surrounds traditional literary studies today. The practical purpose of the dissertation is to recommend that teachers of undergraduate literature classes not only become thoroughly familiar with current academic debates over how and which literature to teach, but that they incorporate these debates into the curriculum. The dissertation further recommends that undergraduate literature courses teach the historical circumstances which shaped literary study in America and subsequently created the issues and positions with which the current debate is concerned. The five chapters of the dissertation present an historical account of the development of literary studies in American higher education. Particular attention is paid to the influences of power and class which were brought to bear on this process from its origins in classical Greek education to its institutionalization in the late nineteenth century. This history is intended to serve as resource material for literature instructors who wish to expand their curriculum and teach undergraduates that the historical and cultural background to any text is essential to understanding its purpose and meaning. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for how teachers can incorporate cultural history into the undergraduate literature curriculum.

James Berlin, Stephen North, and other leading historians of composition have implied that nothing very interesting happened in composition classrooms before 1960. To counter that assumption, I offer my description of English 1-2 at Amherst College, an innovative and challenging freshman writing course directed by Theodore Baird from 1938-1968. Although no one published much about this course while it was a going concern, several members of its staff, including Walker Gibson and William E. Coles, Jr., later wrote about similar courses they designed elsewhere. My observations about English 1-2 are based on interviews with its faculty and graduates and on a study of materials now held in the Amherst College Archives. English 1-2 was taught collaboratively by a staff of eight or ten men who devised a new and demanding sequence of 33 assignments each semester, calling on students to write from experience. The instructors, who otherwise used no text, mimeographed their students' papers and made these the focus of classroom discussions. The instructors invited students to explore the relation between language and reality and to view themselves as makers of meaning. Paradoxically, English 1-2 seems both to have generated a potentially disempowering mystique and to have enabled many students to claim new measures of authority over language.

This dissertation describes in-depth, using participant's words, experiences of undergraduate college writers. The study was undertaken in an attempt to understand from a student perspective what it is like to write in one's major course of study and throughout the university curriculum. There were seven students, representing different academic majors at a large university. Each were interviewed in a series of three open-ended interviews totaling four and one-half hours. Key questions followed Seidman's (1987) protocol for phenomenological in-depth interviewing: What was writing like for you before college? What is writing like for you now? And, What does your writing mean to you? Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, Three participant's transcripts were edited into profiles of the individual writers while other interviews were used to illumine themes common to all the participants. Insights from this study suggest students are "practitioners" and possess a certain "practitioner-expertise" in being student writers. This practitioner knowledge reveals student experiences are more complex than indicated by previous research. Among these complexities are students' interactions with their instructors, and their own procrastination, which produce tension about writing. Forms of this tension are explored in the histories and current experiences of different students. These experiences indicated that when student writing is perceived as a "task" which must be completed simply to comply with a course requirement, there is a tendency to approach writing in a formulaic way, with little attention paid to the writing processes. On the other hand, the participants expressed that writing is a positive experience at times when they are consciously aware it has contributed to their learning in a subject-area or when it has aided them in their personal growth. The study indicates writing in college is often shaped by the bureaucratic enterprise of grading and sorting students. Recommendations include making teacher-student interactions consultative and personable, teachers and administrators stronger advocates for smaller class size, and giving students choices of instructional approaches to writing so individual needs as writers are being met in composition courses and across the curriculum.