The goal of this project is to suggest a way to combine a functional curricula (domains) with literacy experiences.

Many studies have shown that an overwhelming number of classroom teachers are encountering increasing diversity issues in both the content of what they teach and among the students they are teaching The purpose of this project is to provide elementary teachers with a resource of multicultural literature that can be integrated into any curriculum, whether it is Language Arts, Social Studies, or story time.

This thesis explores issues surrounding the question of using a literature-based assignment to teach composition at the college freshman level. Following a review of the critical debate on the use of literature in the composition classroom, spanning the last five decades, a specific work of literature is used as the basis for a writing assignment to be given to a freshman composition class.

Since 1979 feminist scholars have misread key images in Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own'. They delineated the extended essay as a groundbreaking feminist polemic that advocates abolishing the literary patriarchy, expressing distain for John Milton as chief offender. Through rhetorical analysis and close readings of passages, there seems advocacy for change in patriarchial education and for opening of the literary canon to women.

The problem of this study is that of developing a program of study of Mexican literature at the graduate level at North Texas State University. The study of literature and culture is approached by probing into the influences on the thinking of the Mexican and by using an in-depth study, rather than an "anthology" approach to teaching. The findings of the study indicate a need for an upper level course in Mexican literature at North Texas State University. Therefore, the following recommendations seem appropriate: (1) that North Texas State University initiate a course in Mexican literature which may be utilized by both students in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and students in the Bilingual/Bicultural Education program; (2) that the course be made available to both graduate and upper-level students; (3) that oral communication be emphasized in the course and that student participation in the target language be maximized.

Narrative point of view should be the initial place of focus in the study of prose fiction, but it is often difficult to understand or teach. This study proposes that stage or screen production of narrative fiction may be purposefully structured to enhance the understanding of narrative perspective. The study details grammatical analysis of narrative language and describes implications drawn from that language which influence production decisions. The thesis examines the techniques and technology of stage and screen production which may be manipulated to underscore narrative point of view, suggesting ways in which each medium can borrow from the techniques of the other for point of view production.

“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.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Un estudiante que empieza a aprender el español en la universidad sin experiencia previa generalmente no tiene un vocabulario amplio en el tercer año de la carrera cuando va a tener que hacer un curso de literatura. Este estudio investiga el reto que enfrenta el estudiante cuando empieza a estudiar la literatura hispánica. Se enfoca en los siguientes aspectos de este tema: 1) la brecha que existe entre el vocabulario limitado de un estudiante de segunda lengua y el vocabulario amplio de un hablante nativo; 2) en qué consiste un vocabulario mínimo; 3) cómo el leer extensivamente ayuda a desarrollar el vocabulario; 4) la necesidad de utilizar y saber utilizar el diccionario para aumentar el vocabulario; 5) la literatura infantil y juvenil como un recurso útil para desarrollar el vocabulario y 6) un análisis de unos libros escritos para niños de varias edades.

The United States has had an interesting and full history of debate over the place of religion in the public schools and each state has had its own unique history on the same subject. Religion/Bible saturated the typical public school in western Virginia before 1863. After West Virginia became a state, the saturation of religion/Bible gradually lessened, producing concern among some citizens. In 1917, the State adopted a direct plan for outside Bible study to incorporate elective Bible study class. Since 1935, however, there is no record of any statewide promotion of religion/Bible in the schools. In 1939 Bluefield, Mercer County, West Virginia, submitted a request to and received approval from the State Board of Education to offer Bible classes in its schools. Adjustments have been made to the program due to judicial or committee decisions. Some of these adjustments have been prompted by national and local controversy over religion/Bible in the public schools. Nevertheless, the existing Bible program has been sustained as a result of its location, community support, and dynamic leaders. The purpose of this study is two-fold: 1) to identify and describe the impact various influences such as the co-founders, the community, and the first teachers, had on the Bluefield Bible Program which contributed to its continued existence to this day; and 2) to create an accurate record of the history and proceedings of the Bluefield Bible Program. / Ed. D.

Poetics as Joyful Resistance: Exploring Juan Felipe Herrera’s Jabberwalking, engages in narrative teacher research to examine how the philosophies and practices of Juan Felipe Herrera’s hybrid text on poetry, composition, and creativity, titled Jabberwalking (2018), might extend the pedagogical principles and practices in teaching poetry to resist the norm of literary criticism as the purpose of teaching poetry. By examining three curricular experiences where the pedagogical principles of Jabberwalking guide my teaching practices, I document both students’ and my learning using narrative and spatial justice methodologies. The findings reveal that Jabberwalking may function as not only a pedagogical Thirdspace (Soja, 1996) that works against colonial norms around standardization and high-stakes assessment but may be a belief system about teaching literature and language. When I began this research, a problem that I encountered was the lack of scholarship in response to Jabberwalking. A survey of the literature in response to Herrera’s text, an English y Español retelling of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” reveals that the principal source of criticism consists of reviews. This dissertation contributes to the field by being the first of its kind to consider his philosophies on writing as a pedagogical style guide as well as a tool to work against institutionalized norms around standardized writing instruction. Since the focus of this study was to examine the pedagogical principles and practices that invite in diverse learners and decolonize and expand the literacy practices most often used in writing/literature classrooms, I used narrative research to re-tell the stories of ten participants who reflect the diverse student and teacher population of New York City schools. Through Zoom interviews with a total of ten New York-based teachers from a broad range of personal and professional experiences, I examine Jabberwalking, a text that straddles the polarity of the literary borderland (Templeton, 2019) for its pedagogical implications. My purpose was to examine what happened when the pedagogical principles of Jabberwalking were implemented in three separate curricular experiences that were facilitated in 2019–2022: one site was an improvisational music-oriented workshop in response to Jabberwalking, a second site was a Zoom-based Jabberwalking teaching and learning practices workshop, and a third site was a workshop that incorporated a project-based version of Jabberwalking. Two to three hour-long Zoom retrospective interviews with the ten participants from each of the three workshops were conducted. Their writing or projects produced from the workshop-based writing prompts were then analyzed to consider how or if their work reflects the principles of Jabberwalking I intended to incorporate. I also reflected on my own pedagogical practices because of the interviews and analysis of student work from these three curricular experiences. I transcribed and coded an average of forty pages of interview data for each participant, for a total of over four hundred pages of interview transcription analysis. Each of my research questions were addressed in different ways, depending on the site. I found the following themes in the data for each site: a) Jabberwalking as text, b) Jabberwalking as pedagogical method, c) the detrimental impact of standardization and high-stakes assessment, and d) changes in pedagogy and performance standards since 2020. Through the lens of poetics and the theoretical underpinnings of nonsense (Templeton, 2019), and the candid, expansive stories of the participants, this study arrives at a definition in process that formulates a new understanding of pedagogical possibility utilizing Herrera’s methods. This research has important implications for teachers, students, and policymakers that help us understand how Jabberwalking can present learners of all abilities with new methods of composition to inspire critical, analytical, and restorative writing through a sense of “serious play” (Burgess, 2019).