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Framed by a sociocultural understanding of literacy acquisition and learning, this research study investigates methods content area teachers can use to meet the needs of adolescent English language learners and native English speakers who struggle to read texts in school. The interventions were designed to both expand students’ concepts of literacy and of themselves as literate people, and to capitalized on students’ multiliteracies by using visual art to teach students how to notice main ideas in nonfiction texts. Statistical analyses indicate that English language learners made significant gains in reading comprehension. However, analyses of students’ written reflections and of stimulated recall interviews illustrate that, although students practiced literacies in diverse and powerful ways outside of school, they maintained generally low self-concepts and highly schoolish conceptions of literacy. / Teaching & Learning

This is a full-length poetry manuscript.

Searching for Afrekete is a hybrid collection of poems, epistles, a short story, and an essay conveying a search for a queer God. This god is reflected from Audre Lorde’s seminal work ZAMI. Each genre represents a quest to find, lay bare feelings, and be in conversation with the god, trickster, and mother Afrekete who encapsulates these personas according to some seminal scholars in dialogue with ZAMI. This collection is a lament and affirmation of black, queer life and spirituality.

This study explores aspects of the theoretical basis of Louise M. Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading and its focus on the reader's efferent and aesthetic stances during transaction with nonfiction and fiction. The study explores the following questions: Does genre (nonfiction or fiction) influence the reader's response to a literarytext? Does a reader's process of reading change during a nonfictional reading compared to a fictional one? Are there certain factors that persuade a reader to view a nonfictional piece of writing differently than a fictional one? To examine these questions and to ensure the validity of the study, I wrote a story titled "The Exit" and presented the writing to three freshman English classes, first as nonfiction and then during the next class period as fiction. I chose to follow Rosenblatt's class procedure: an initial reading with free responses, an interchange of ideas, and then a rereading of the same text. For research purposes I needed bulk written and verbal responses to compare and contrast. This three-day immersion in nonfiction and fiction reflections produced sufficient data to analyze: (1) written free responses from the initial reading of the text as nonfiction; (2) recorded audio tapes of their small groups, responding to five inquiry questions regarding the nonfiction text; (3) written individual take-home responses to the same five inquiry questions; (4) written free responses from the second reading of the text as fiction; (5) recorded audio tapes of the small group discussions on their nonfiction and fiction responses; and (6) recorded audio tapes of the entire class reflections on the responses to reading the story as both nonfiction and fiction. During this expedition I kept a journal of each day's events so that as my students and I experienced this exploration together, I could capture what we all were feeling and thinking as it was actually happening. Although the students were unaware of genre influence until the third-day class reflection, there were distinct differences in student responses to nonfiction and fiction. These students predominately read nonfiction aesthetically and fiction efferently. In this study with these students, genre did influence the reader's response; the reader's process of reading did change during the nonfictional reading compared to a fictional one; and there were certain factors which persuaded the reader to view the nonfictional piece of writing differently than the fictional one. The contrast and comparison of the students' responses to nonfiction and fiction are shown in a detailed Venn diagram. In addition, I have included an extensive essay titled "The Transactional Dance: Louise Rosenblatt's Presence in the History of Literary Criticism." Her transactional theory of reading transcends time and continues to invite research. / Ed. D.

This paper examines the relationship between memoir and truth, and the implications of that relationship for the rhetorical work that memoirs do. It uses the grounding example of Tara Westover's 2018 memoir Educated and looks at how the recreation of events within her life works both in conjunction with the way she portrays them in the text and juxtaposed against other competing narratives, such as her mother's 2020 memoir Educating. This essay continues the work done by literary theorists such as Phillipe LeJeune, applies the critical framework developed by Katherine Mack and Johnathan Alexander in their article "The Ethic of Memoir," and encourages the reader to consider the ways in which memoirs are rhetorically acting upon the culture at large through their narrative and emotional aspects. / Master of Arts / This paper looks at the relationship between memoir and truth in memoirs. Using rhetoric as its basis, it examines memoirs in their contexts using Tara Westover's 2020 memoir Educated as a case study. It looks at the way that memory is used to build narratives, and more specifically, the way that lived personal experiences are represented in the form of the memoir genre. In considering these ideas, this paper explores questions of objective "truth" and how lived experiences can be affected by internal emotional narrative, and by extension, how that emotional narrative is depicted in memoir.

<p dir="ltr">I'm most interested in the aspects of self-confession and focusing on the small moments of life. My project will be about piecing together small moments that together tell a larger narrative.</p>

The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework for the Post-Civil Rights Era, but instead to understand it as a period of transition, revolt, and transformation which asked many important questions that have remained unanswered. I apply multiple theoretical frameworks to my research — like queer theory, Afro-pessimism, fugitivity, and more — to offer insights into the nonfiction works of writers such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Larry Neale, and Toni Cade Bambara. It is my hope to continue the work of such scholars as Hortense Spillers, Angela Ards, and Margo V. Perkins, by illustrating not only how these authors offered literary and aesthetic innovations, but also, through the archiving of their life experiences in print, create theories and practices for survival, forged in the past, which impact our current moment, and inspire us as scholars and activists to do the same.