This dissertation offers a comprehensive rhetorical analysis and theoretical critique of Advanced Placement English. AP English is identified and explored throughout as a site that instantiates most of the controversies that have arisen over the past several generations regarding rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of English. Chapter 1 focuses on the AP English Language and AP English Literature exams to probe the tensions between expanded notions of writing and reading processes against the demands of large-scale testing. It is argued that the exams valorize a problematic formalist approach to literary texts and undercut and attenuate the writing process. Some of the exams' flaws are considered as a means of demonstrating ways their validity can be challenged. In Chapter 2 the College Board's two AP English course descriptions are examined in detail. While explicitly acknowledging contemporary theoretical reconsiderations for the teaching of English, each course's "explicit curriculum" is subverted by an "implicit curriculum" rooted in New Criticism and current-traditional rhetoric that are fostered by the demands of the AP exams. In Chapter 3 the development of the AP Program is situated within its earliest historical, political, and ideological contexts by linking it to the values and methodologies of the first College Board entrance exams of the early 1900s, key aspects of which were later resurrected in the AP Program. The historical consideration continues in Chapter 4 through an analysis of the specific impetuses that created the AP program in the 1950s. Particular attention is paid to the often confused and contrary relationship between high school and college English as well as the often unstable and undefined position of the first-year college English course. Chapter 5 concludes with a personal explanation and interpretation of what it means to teach AP and its version of college English.

I am interested in locating assumptions about democracy and logos in the Greek democratic city-state which have been carried over into the modern, democratic national-state. The assumptions, I argue, offer insights into the hegemonic view among rhetoricians that antagonistic rhetoric is inappropriate in our contemporary democracies. In Chapters One and Two, I analyze the development of democracy in Ancient Greece in order to uncover the assumptions upon which that system was based. I argue that these assumptions are dominated by what I call "the ideology of sovereign right." In Chapter Three, I illustrate how this ideology has been carried over into contemporary treatments of democratic argumentation that have had influence in the field of rhetoric and composition. I argue that the Western tradition has privileged and continues to privilege the Aristotelian logic of non-contradiction, and thus, has left no legitimate place for antagonistic rhetoric. In Chapter Four, I return to ancient Greece to investigate the struggle over the construction of the rational that took shape in pre-Socratic philosophy. I argue that prior to the Socratics, another treatment of rationality developed, one based on the logic of contradiction, which provides a place in rhetoric for antagonism. In Chapter Five, I argue that dialectical materialism, as opposed to Aristotelian dialectics and post-structuralist notions of rationality, challenges the ideology of sovereign right embedded in democratic systems. In the Epilogue, I comment on the significance of this argument for the field of Rhetoric and Composition.

This dissertation investigates the rhetorical practices of a tradition: the Reform Movement in Judaism. I analyze the three platforms written in 1885, 1937, and 1999 to define the collective identity of the Reform Movement in America. I begin this study by concentrating on how the Reform Movement framed its collective identity in each of its platforms focusing on what this group agreed on and disagreed on and how they represented those disagreements. Through my investigation, I discovered that these documents reflected different stages in the tradition's development. In this dissertation, I argue that how the Reform tradition framed its collective identity depended on the tradition's stage of development. I argue that in the tradition's first stage of development, it questioned the external, broader tradition from which it diverged, yet it did not question its own internal beliefs, texts, and authorities, and it projected an authoritative identity uncomplicated by disagreements. For example, in 1885 the rabbis authoritatively declared that traditional Jewish practices were no longer meaningful in the modern era. As the tradition developed, the community no longer deferred to internal authorities unquestioningly, but became self reflective and asked questions about itself---questions that enabled the community to understand the lessons from its history and identify inadequacies. So in 1937, the rabbis stated that some of these practices were worthwhile, can be revised to be more meaningful, and can help keep Jews connected as a collective---as a people. Then, in 1999, the tradition faced an epistemological crisis because conflicts over rival answers to key questions could no longer be settled rationally. The problem was that the movement could not resolve the apparent contradiction of having a belief system that valued individual differences and being able to define itself as a collective. It was through the writing process of the 1999 platform that the movement articulated the tradition's most significant beliefs and solved its epistemological crisis by defining reform not by the contents of its changes but in the very process of change---the belief in the value of change and diversity.

Historians have widely studied and discussed the Progressive era in the United States, including the efforts of English-speaking women's organizations in civic activism. However, few or no studies explore the rhetorical process by which immigrant women forged a bilingual path into American society. Because of prior publicity, a number of early twentieth century immigrants tried to act upon the idea that the United States could be a fresh start for them, putting their plans for social and educational advancement into print. My study takes a structural approach to comparing the writing of three immigrant women, viewing these texts as sites of what Walter Fisher calls the narrative model of rhetoric. In particular, this analysis demonstrates how narratives made of such elements as Ernest Bormann's "fantasy themes" provide "good reasons" for action. Thus, this inquiry focuses on at least two aspects of rhetoric, particularly the role that these women's writing played in educating their communities about public issues, often employing an oblique style of stories and anecdotes. First, it explores the ways that literacy exercised an empowering role both in and beyond classrooms to open a social space for these writers, both as immigrants and as women. Secondly, my project furthers the conversation initiated by people such as Jane Addams and John Dewey by connecting their work with today's theorists such as Theresa Enos, Sally Miller Gearhart, and Sonja Foss.

Four-year colleges and universities in the US have a lengthy history of educating traditional students from privileged backgrounds. Such students usually arrive on campus with behaviors, beliefs, and learning strategies designed to help them succeed in classes that depend upon lectures as the primary mode of instruction. As increased numbers of nontraditional students have gained admission to four-year schools, college instructors have struggled to accommodate the diverse learning styles of this burgeoning student population. Unlike traditional students, nontraditional students generally lack a large repertoire of effective behaviors, beliefs, and learning strategies needed to succeed in college. Poor learning practices mean less learning and less learning transferred across assignments and courses. Although college composition classes tend to provide student-centered instruction designed to facilitate learning, nontraditional students continue to struggle to learn. In response to the learning challenges and failures that nontraditional students encounter at college, some four-year schools have chosen to redirect these students to two-year colleges. This dissertation argues in favor of equipping nontraditional students at four-year schools with effective learning practices via instruction in student self-regulation and self-efficacy inside the college classroom.

This study was designed to provide an in-depth examination of biliteracy development among students in a bilingual, second and third grade classroom over the course of one academic year. Biliteracy refers to children's literate competencies in two languages. This qualitative study focused on understanding biliteracy among children who were already bilingual in English and Spanish, and those who were monolingual in English. The three basic questions guiding this study are the following: (1) Can children become biliterate in this setting? (2) What kinds of classroom cultural practices foster biliteracy development? and (3) What are the theoretical and practical implications of these dual literacy practices for the development of a biliterate pedagogy? Three case studies of students provide insights into the processes of dual literacy learning. These case studies highlight significant aspects of each student's developing biliteracy, and are intended to demonstrate that there are multiple paths to and contexts for biliteracy development in English and Spanish. The results of this inquiry suggest that biliteracy development in classrooms is feasible, but that teachers and students must create "additive" conditions for learning that make both languages "unmarked" for classroom work. The study provides insights into the relationships between student characteristics and classroom dynamics, the specific contexts, processes, and content of English-Spanish biliteracy within the classroom. This study also raises issues for further research and pedagogy in this important but neglected area of study.

This study investigated the efficacy of using e-mail in the form of a class mailing list to help ESL students practice and develop academic writing skills beyond the spatial and time limits of a writing classroom. In this study, e-mail writing tasks of different purposes, audiences and task structures were integrated into a process-oriented freshman ESL writing class. The subjects of this study were 22 ESL students in a freshman composition course. In an ex post facto design (Hatch & Lazaraton, 1991), this study involved within-subject repeated measures of data collected from different e-mail writing tasks over the course of a semester. Data analysis included (1) computerized text analysis focusing on the linguistic and textual features of written discourses at the levels of syntactic complexity, lexical richness, textual cohesion and grammatical accuracy; (2) holistic and analytical assessments by ESL raters focusing on the overall rhetorical features and quality of writing. The results indicated that there were syntactic, lexical, textual and grammatical differences in ESL students' writing performance on e-mail writing tasks of different rhetorical purposes, and there was also variation between e-mail tasks involving an interactive audience and those involving an non-interactive audience, and between structured versus non-structured e-mail tasks. In particular, in e-mail tasks in which an interactive audience was present, students tended to produce texts that were linguistically more complex. Besides, students wrote with a higher level of syntactic and lexical complexity in the non-structured e-mail tasks than in the structured ones, indicating more sophisticated use of language when the student were given more freedom and control of the learning activities. The results also showed obvious tradeoff effects between linguistic complexity and accuracy, i.e. while students produced texts that were linguistically more complex, there was less attention to grammatical accuracy. Furthermore, the results suggested that motivation, attitude, and anxiety had some significant contributions to the variation in ESL students' writing performance while they composed in an electronic mode.

This microethnographic study describes what happened when a small group of 12- and 13-year olds were given the opportunity to compose with hypermedia in their language arts class. Drawing from semiotic, sociocultural, constructivist, transactional and holistic theories, the researcher interpreted the meanings the students and their language arts teacher ascribed to the creation of a student-run online magazine. The researcher investigated the kinds of things that the seventh graders in this study value, what the webzine project meant to the student editors, what processes are involved in the creation of a webzine, how hypermedia literacy functions as a language form, how the hypermedia design project impacted the language arts curriculum, and the roles that computers can play in the classroom. Hypermedia is a multi-symbolic semiotic language form that is still in the process of evolving. Hypermedia literacy requires transmediation, among print literacies, oral literacies, visual literacies, computer literacies and hypertext literacies. Becoming fluent in hypermedia involves orchestrating the various elements (cueing systems) of hypermedia and flexibly applying this knowledge within a variety of hypermedia genres. The webzine project was a positive experience for the seventh graders in this study because it met their affective needs to be active, to learn new things, to have new experiences, to feel motivated and interested, to be social, to have freedom, to feel proud and to have a sense of audience. It also stimulated the cognitive processes of generating ideas, collaborating, problem solving, representing concepts and monitoring their own learning. It is suggested that hypermedia design projects cannot be fully integrated into the language arts curriculum unless the district and/or the classroom teacher has made a paradigmatic shift from a transmission model to a constructivist philosophy of education. Successful integration of hypermedia composition in the curriculum is also related to the students' and the teachers' perception of the potential roles of computers. Based on the results of this study and others, the author concludes that junior high language arts students should be given invitations to compose with hypermedia whenever feasible, but that educators should not dismiss the challenges associated with such an undertaking.

In Ideological Intersections: The Cultural Work and Practical Implications of American Literature and Composition Telecourses, I draw on both my own experience developing, producing, and teaching two composition telecourses and an analysis of three nationally-produced and distributed telecourses in order to explain the benefits and disadvantages of using one-way, non-interactive telecourses to teach English studies courses. The Introduction locates the use of educational technologies within the current academic labor crisis in the Humanities. Chapter 1 situates the telecourse within the theoretical and pedagogical issues that confront teachers of writing, Chapter 2 describes in detail the viewing experience and the logistics of three composition telecourses, and Chapter 3 focuses on two of the leading, nationally distributed literature telecourses. The first sections of Chapter 4 demonstrate that telecourses have proved to be an accessible educational opportunity for students who would otherwise not attend school, an opportunity for faculty to gain new skills, and an additional revenue source for institutions. However, there are three primary disadvantages: (1) students have little opportunity for interaction, (2) telecourses have a markedly high drop-out rate; and (3) the course material is markedly conservative. The latter sections of Chapter 4 present technological solutions to the problem of interactivity, with the warning that such computerized teaching methods may function as a repressive surveillance system that inappropriately regulates faculty members and students. Chapter 5 demonstrates that the telecourses function as an ideological apparatus that transmits American culture. As such, the televised material reifies the rhetoric of the American melting pot, perpetuating the myth of standardized Americans who are happily inculcated into the educational and occupational systems of mainstream America, without acknowledging the complications or difficulties faced by such characters in real life. Moreover, the televised material reproduces the rhetoric of American individualism, offering students a false vision of a future of unbound glories in order to train them in occupational and functional literacy at the expense of critical, oppositional thinking. The Epilogue returns to the disturbing implications for academic labor, and argues that classroom teachers may no longer be necessary if institutions can disseminate information with the help of new technologies and simply hire inexpensive teachers to be responsible for logistics and assessment.

This qualitative study focuses on critical issues that surround English teaching in the two-year college. From the results of interviews with and observations of 24 two-year college English Instructors in five western states as well as a broader survey questionnaire, I examine the following issues: the reliance on part-time instructors in the two-year college; the continued hold of conventional grammar instruction; the lack of relevance of much of the graduate work that two-year college English instructors have undertaken; the "gap" between two-year college English instructors and the larger discipline of English studies; the weak academic culture of the two-year college; issues surrounding writing assessment; the critical attitudes of instructors toward the research and writing that appears in journals of rhetoric and composition; the lack of motivation for scholarship and writing among two-year college writing instructors; and the institutional constraints on two-year college English instructors. After presenting some history and commentary on the community college, I discuss the methodology of the research. In the dissertation I profile fourteen of the 24 teachers I interviewed, chosen partly because they are representative in terms of demographic factors, partly because they have distinctive, individual "voices." I present the study results as a narrative of my research, beginning with the interviews of part-time "freeway flyers" teaching at four colleges in Southern California. I then describe my interviews in Oregon, at two colleges in Idaho, at one college in Utah, and finally at two colleges in my home state, Arizona. Beginning with the perceived "gap" between writing instructors in two-year colleges and the broader scholarly discipline, the dissertation examines the institutional constraints that contribute to the isolation, alienation, and "burnout" felt by many community college instructors. In my final chapter I review the research and suggest ways in which college English departments can address the "gap" between them and the larger discipline and ways in which departments can work together as a team rather than as isolated individuals in order to create a more collegial and productive learning environment.