Recently, disability and writing studies scholars have demonstrated the extent to which widely accepted approaches to the teaching of writing fail to address the fraught intersection between mental disability and academic commonplaces, such as multimodal texts and assignments, with real consequences for the well-being of our students (Yergeau; Oswal; Selfe). Given the dramatic rise of online and other multimodal forms of instruction that has characterized and continues to shape college writing classrooms in the era of COVID-19, the barriers to access (social, physical, and institutional) that exist in multimodal writing classrooms require deeper examination. Drawing upon disability studies scholarship from Price, Kerschbaum, and Walters, my dissertation examines the complex relationship between writing instruction and mental disability in the context of Metro University’s First Year Writing Program (FYWP) and explores the affordances disabled students bring to bear on the multimodal spaces of their writing classrooms. In addition to examining the program’s standard syllabus, policies, and assignments, I conducted individual interviews with Metro undergraduate students, including students with disabilities, to collect data on students’ experiences of course policies (e.g., participation; grading) and practices (e.g., online peer review; multimodal composing) in the first-year writing classroom. I used methods drawn from critical discourse analysis and disability studies to identify elements of the curriculum that presented potential barriers to students with mental disabilities, including cumulative, interconnected penalties for absences, tardiness, and late work; a policy of not grading essay drafts; and the absence of policies designed to address issues linked to mental health. My analysis has revealed conflicting levels of access to participation in the course, pointing to the need for multimodal learning environments flexible enough to address a wide range of access needs at once. This work contributes to emerging writing and disability scholarship on the role of multimodality in developing non-normative writing pedagogies and inclusive program designs. The study was reviewed by the IRB and deemed not to be human subjects research. It was conducted in partnership with the university’s Disability Resources and Services and FYWP, which adopted attendant policy recommendations. / English

This project focuses on the way that new graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) in English develop both their professional identity as teachers and their view of Composition as a field. Drawing on social theories of disciplines (Prior, 1998; Hyland, 2004; Carter, 2007), disciplinary enculturation (Hasrati, 2005; Bazerman and Prior, 2005; Thaiss and Zawacki, 2006), and legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger 1998), this dissertation examines the transition that composition GTAs undergo during their first year of graduate school. Many of these GTAs move from little or no knowledge of Composition as a discipline to teaching their own writing courses. I focus on GTAs from MA and MFA programs at a large research university in their first year of teaching composition. Using multiple types of data, including in-depth interviews, observations of practicum and mentoring sessions, and teaching genres written by the GTAs, I construct a narrative that shows the role that teaching composition plays in the overall identity construction of graduate students as professionals. This wide data set has allowed me to see the various ways (and various genres) in which Composition is constructed in the lives of new GTAs. Teacher preparation programs offer a variety of assistance, including experience shadowing current teachers, practicum courses and individual or group mentoring. I study the ways these activities help GTAs in one first-year writing program move toward a fuller understanding of and participation in Composition, and how these experiences relate to the overall graduate student experience. Each of these experiences helps move GTAs toward participation as composition teachers. However, the degree to which these GTAs participate in Composition as a discipline has to do with their relationships with mentors and the connections they make between the multiple communities of practice that they must continually navigate. / Ph. D.

abstract: This yearlong project examines how multilingual undergraduate writers--including international visa students and U.S. permanent residents or citizens who are non-native English speakers--exercise agency in their first-year composition placement decisions. Agency is defined as the capacity to act or not to act contingent upon various conditions. The goal of the project is to demonstrate how student agency can inform the overall programmatic placement decisions, which can lead to more effective placement practices for multilingual writers. To explore the role of agency in students' placement decisions, I conducted a series of four in-depth interviews with eleven multilingual writers between Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 in the Writing Programs at Arizona State University. To triangulate these placement decisions, I interviewed some of the multilingual student participants' academic advisors and writing teachers as well as writing program administrators. Findings showed that when conditions for agency were appropriate, the multilingual student participants were able to negotiate placement, choose to accept or deny their original placement, self-assess their proficiency level as deciding to choose a writing course, plan on their placement, question about placement, and finally make decisions about a writing course they wanted to take. In the context of this study, conditions for agency include the freedom to choose writing courses and information about placement that is distributed by the following sources: advisors' recommendations, other students' past experience in taking first-year composition, the new student orientation, and other sources that provide placement related information such as an online freshman orientation and a major map. Other findings suggested that the academic advisor participants did not provide the multilingual students with complete placement information; and this affected the way the multilingual students chose which section of first-year composition to enroll in. Meanwhile, there was no formal communication about placement options and placement procedures between the Writing Programs and writing teachers. Building on these findings, I argue for improving conditions for agency by providing placement options, making placement information more readily available, and communicating placement information and options with academic advisors, writing teachers, and multilingual students. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012

abstract: The Stretch Model is a model of first year composition (FYC) that “stretches” the first semester's class over two semesters in order to help writing students who arrive at university with low test scores to succeed in their composition courses. Originally piloted in 1994 at Arizona State University (ASU), the Stretch Model of composition has been found to be effective in terms of retention and persistence of first language (L1) writers (e.g., Glau, 1996; 2007). It has become known at ASU and abroad as the Stretch Program. Since 1997, a separate track of the Stretch Program has been solely for second language (L2) writers, and L2 writing students are now roughly 17% of the program's population. Until fairly recently, there was no attempt to collect L2 data to support the Stretch Program's claims for effectiveness for the L2 population. As many universities across the nation have garnered inspiration for their own programs ("Stretch Award" 2016), and L2 writers have the potential to be in any composition class (Matsuda, Saenkhum, & Accardi, 2013), it is imperative to include the voices of L2 writers in the analysis of the Stretch Program. This study addresses the need for L2 writers' voices to be included in the analysis of the Stretch Program at Arizona State University. From the quantitative analysis of 64,085 students’ institutional data records, and qualitative analysis of 210 student surveys, findings include L2 writers have the highest rates of passing, but the lowest rates of persistence in the three-semester first year composition requirement when compared to Stretch L1 students and the traditional FYC population. Survey data also lends L2 student perceptions to complicate the main features of the Stretch Program including perceived writing improvement, having the same teacher and classmates for two semesters, and having more time to work on their writing. The quantitative findings are consistent with Snyder’s (2017a) analysis of the 2012 fall Stretch Program L1 and L2 cohorts. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2018

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<p>  </p> <p>The highly diverse character of US universities provides an opportunity for writing programs to (re)examine the extent to which their current administrative, curricular, and pedagogical practices support a growing student population with unique linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, resources, and needs. This dissertation research aimed to explores the ways in which writing programs address the increasing diversity in writing pedagogy education, as a key component of writing program administration work. The main goal of this research was to investigate how writing program administrators and teacher educators in my study context represent our current reality regarding engagement with the increased linguistic and cultural diversity in the activity of teaching to the newest members of the writing program, i.e., graduate teaching assistants. Analyses of data collected through semi-structured interviews and educational materials suggest that while issues surrounding diversity and multilingual students have been addressed in writing pedagogy education, there is still room for more work, especially integrative, (trans)disciplinary diversity work that will help turn the graduate composition practicum, as the main context for writing pedagogy education in writing programs, into a space where new writing teachers can navigate diversity in order to learn how to actively engage with and pedagogically respond to it in their writing instruction in the era of superdiversity. </p>