Invention should be privileged in the writing classroom. This is the most important implication resulting from extensive interviews with seven published writers about how they write. There are vast differences in their approaches to writing, but one thing common to all of them is that invention is central. Invention was central for Aristotle and for early eighteenth century pedagogical theorists, and it was again privileged by the theorists involved in the early days of the writing process movement of the 1960s, but historically it has always been gradually neglected. One predominant pedagogy today, often labeled current-traditional rhetoric, privileges form and correctness. The attempts to discredit current-traditional pedagogies have long been raging, and yet writing textbooks continue to teach their methods. Three important approaches to composition often associated with the process approach—expressionism, cognitive rhetoric, and social constructionism—represent a pulling apart of Aristotle's important proofs of ethos, pathos, and logos. The pedagogies of invention that are usually associated with these theories tend to emphasize one proof over another, and the unfortunate result is a narrowing of the concept of invention. Until we privilege and enrich invention we may never see the changes needed in the conceptualization and teaching of the process approach. We need to broaden our perception of a writer's process of writing to understand when invention is occurring and to recognize its powerful drive. Because of its serendipitous nature we need to be less rigid in our pedagogy to allow for and validate a writer's proclivities. Pedagogical implications from this study include the need for student writers to begin their writing and to be continually nourished by their own inventions. They will be motivated by their ideas to improve their writing. Student writers need to know the importance of recognizing and recording their inventions and to trust their individual writing processes that produce the inventions. Student writers will benefit by sharing in-process writing with people they trust, and they will benefit from the positive comments of teachers in response to their writing. Invention centered pedagogy, fortunately, promotes writing worthy of praise by teachers.

This study is based on in-depth interviews with seven graduate students of literature who teach for a large research university, and the main concern is with their personal experiences and perspectives as they develop as teachers and students. How do they see themselves as readers and critics of literature? How do they see themselves as instructors of writing? The interviews focus on the reading, writing, and educational histories of these seven individuals, as well as on their impressions of their current classrooms: those they enter as students and those they enter as teachers. What stories do they have to tell? In addition to considering the seven participants as individual teachers and students, this study also focuses on their relationships with the teaching community within which they work. According to these seven teachers, how does their program construct the image of a writing teacher? Of a writing classroom? Of a writing assignment? How do those images align with previous ones held by the seven teachers? What adaptations and alterations take place? How might those changes relate to their study of literature? Some writers (Bishop 1995, Gale, Sullivan 1989) have portrayed the graduate literature classroom as pedagogically antithetical to certain writing classrooms, and this study investigates the oppositions and connections between those two spaces. Ultimately, this study also speaks to the complex disciplinary relationship between the fields of literary studies and composition. The participants provide a unique perspective on the relationship, and one that has been given little attention in other work. At times the difference between the two fields has been considered a cultural one (Elbow 2002, Moran 1995), necessitating different identities. But the participants here do not talk of shifting identities, or of cultural differences. Instead, their concerns with studying literature overlap with their concerns about teaching writing.

According to Deborah Britzman, a queer pedagogy enables a destabilization of identity, a destabilization of various socio-cultural and economic norms, and recognition that language reflects current dominant socio-cultural ideologies. While queer pedagogies have been applied to courses in various disciplines and queer texts and readings have been presented within a range of literature courses, the role of a queer text in the composition classroom bears further examination. To answer the question, "What purposes can be served by using a queer text in a composition course?" I conducted qualitative research, using interviews, observations, and textual analysis in three first-year composition classes as three teachers and nine students read, discussed and wrote about Eli Clare's text, "The Mountain," for the first time. The language and style of the text disrupted assumptions about how texts should function and exposed students to stylistic techniques they challenged, critiqued or used to achieve specific rhetorical effects of their own. Students had a stronger sense that authors make specific choices and that those choices affect how an audience reads a text. However, students' and teachers' enactment and understanding of academic norms may contradict the possibilities presented by a queer text like Clare's. Understandings of academic discourse based upon an ethos of certainty tend to work against the destabilization of identity and the questioning and uncertainty Clare's text fosters. While queer scholars claim that certain pedagogical approaches to texts reflect and encourage a queered understanding of identity norms and knowledge, critics of queer theory express skepticism about its applicability with undergraduate students. This study illustrated that a queer text can enable composition teachers (even those unfamiliar with queer pedagogical techniques) to enact goals those of us who teach and study composition value, including: reading texts for multiple purposes; extensive use of revision; experimentation with substance, style and audience. Yet, the study also demonstrated that we need a better understanding of how and why a queer text works (and how to communicate that to students), a better understanding of what constitutes academic writing and more self-reflection about how identities shape and are shaped by socio-cultural and discursive ideologies and material reality.

In this dissertation I make a case for multigenre essays to be made more available to students in all disciplines, but especially to students in freshman composition classes. I also present the results of a case study where I acted as teacher/researcher investigating how students experience the writing and reading of multigenre essays. By multigenre essays I mean essays that include creative elements such as lists, letters, and interviews, in addition to traditional academic prose. By combining creative elements with academic prose I propose that writers will be able to express more of what they want to say in an essay by using both analytical and associative ways of thinking. The benefits of having students write multigenre essays are three-fold: (1) when students are given the option of including such things as dialogs, poems, and vignettes in addition to standard academic prose, they gain in rhetorical flexibility---experimenting with and finding the right genres and combination of genres that best fits what they want to say; (2) they also gain in their ability to take a more personal stance on an issue by having more options for positioning themselves in reference to a given topic; and (3) they gain in their ability to push at the perceived boundaries of a discourse. In this dissertation I discuss how eight students in an experimental writing class responded to the writing and reading of multigenre essays, to what extent they found them worthwhile and/or pleasurable, their thoughts in reference to audience and subject matter, how they used multigenre essays for cognitive travel, and how writing multigenre essays gave them a way to push against the perceived boundaries of their discipline. My data come from four essays the students wrote, reader response assignments, reflection letters, and from interviews with five of the students. Overall students found the writing and reading of multigenre essays more difficult but more satisfying than that of standard academic prose. In some cases multigenre essays made them think in new ways about audience and subject matter; for almost all students, multigenre essays made them think differently about an essay's form and how a change in form allowed them to position themselves differently within their discipline.

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.

The purpose of this study was to investigate issues of writer identity in a college classroom, especially as they relate to the social and cultural influences of society. Using a poststructural lens to establish the theoretical viewpoint, this study examined the role of discourse in both framing student constructions of their identities and shaping the ideological stances from which they drew those understandings. The methodology used included an ethnographic study of a junior year writing class required of education majors at a large university. Examination and analysis of student writing/talk was used along with observation of student behaviors. Discourse analysis was also employed as a means of more closely examining the work of four of these students who were chosen because they constructed their identities in a more negative fashion. The research was conducted with twenty-one students with findings indicating they did not generally recognize aspects of race, ethnicity, second-language, disability or other sociocultural conditions as influential factors on their writer identity constructions. Students demonstrated a clear preference for expressivist writing, constructing more positive identities around it. Many students expressed concerns about aspects of traditional formal writing and signaled stunted growth and uninitiated-type identities when discussing these concerns. A third of the students expressed concerns about process writing, primarily fearing judgment and critique of their peers. Discourse analysis provided evidence that the composition discourses of expressivism, traditional formal academic discourse, and process permeated student language and were instrumental in constructing writer identity. This methodology also provided evidence that the basic composition metaphors of “stunted growth” and initiation were implicated in student writer identities, especially in relationship to traditional formal academic discourse. Writer identity in almost all cases was found to be multiple and, for most students, conflicting across situation and genre. The implications of this study suggest a need for explicit discussion of the political aspects of written language use in the academy. A case is also made for integrating more hybrid forms of discourse into writing classes as students taking up expressivist discourse, for the most part, constructed more positive writer identities.

This dissertation is based on an interview study of twelve participants who had been students in various sections of College Writing taught by the researcher. This study focuses on participant descriptions of the writing they did in the class and its transformative impact on them. Based on the literature that claims that writing can transform and heal writers, this study seeks to understand how university students make sense of the ways in which writing makes personal and social change possible. I conducted two, ninety-minute individual interviews with each participant. I also collected complete College Writing portfolios from each participant. Data coding and analysis were ongoing and guided by a feminist poststructural perspective. Through recursive analytic induction, I coded transcribed interviews and student texts for references to writing and transformation. I looked for individual and shared stories, metaphors and discourses that participants used to construct their writing experience in College Writing. The identified sections of the data that referenced writing and transformation underwent discourse analysis. To conduct discourse analysis, I coded the data for the social, cultural and institutional discourses students drew on to shape their understanding of writing and transformation. Findings of the study include: (1) Students draw on multiple and complex discourses to define transformative writing. (2) Students identify multiple literacy practices as transformative. (3) Relationships within the classroom play an integral role in writing for transformation. (4) Feminist poststructuralist discourse can offer students the space to write for transformation. (5) Writing for transformation may offer resistance to the silencing of dominant discourses. This study suggests that for these students writing is a sociocultural practice deeply imbedded in their sense of self and their constructs of knowledge and power. This study also suggests that writing in a classroom that creates the space for students to connect their subjective experience and knowledge with academic literacy practices is transformative. This study argues feminist poststructuralist discourse can offer teachers and students subject positions of resistance and agency so students may enter academic discourse communities as speaking subjects and teachers may work toward a more transformative educational practice.

Originally presented as the author's Thesis (Universität Hannover, 1990). / Includes bibliographical references (p. 242-282).