abstract: While the literacy narrative genre has been studied in first-year composition and methods of teaching courses, investigations of the literacy narrative as a multimodal project for pre-service teachers (PSTs) of English Language Arts remain scarce. This research shares a qualitative classroom-based case study that focuses on a literacy narrative project, redesigned as a Multimodal Writing History Memoir (see Appendix 1), the first assignment in a required writing methods course in a teacher training program for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers at a large public university in the southwest. The study took place during the fall semester of 2019 with 15 ELA undergraduate pre-service English Education or Secondary Education majors. The study described here examined the implementation and outcomes of the multimodal writing history memoir with goals of better understanding how ELA PSTs design and compose multimodally, of understanding the topics and content they included in their memoirs, to discover how this project reflected PSTs’ ideas about teaching writing in their future classrooms. The memoir project invited pre-service teachers to infuse written, audio, and visual text while making use of at least four different mediums of their choice. Through combined theoretical frames, I explored semiotics, as well as pre-service teachers’ use of multiliteracies as they examined their conceptions of what it means to compose. In this qualitative analysis, I collected students’ memoirs and writing samples associated with the assignment, a demographics survey, and individual mid-semester interviews. The writing activities associated with the memoir included a series of quick writes (Kittle, 2009), responses to questions about writing and teachers’ responsibilities when it comes to teaching composition, and letters students wrote to one another during a peer review workshop. Additionally, my final data source included the handwritten notes I took during the presentations students gave to share their memoirs. Some discoveries I made center on the nuanced impact of acts of personal writing for PSTs, some of the specific teaching strategies and areas of teaching focus participants relayed, and specifically, how participants worked with and thought about teaching multimodal composition. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2020

According to current scholarship in writing studies, students with a positive affect toward writing are more likely to transfer writing knowledge and skills. Yet my findings from an IRB-approved longitudinal study suggest that this is not always the case. This study was designed to see what students transfer from their first-year composition course, focusing especially on rhetoric, process, genre, and mindfulness. In annual semi-structured interviews that took place over the course of three years, two study participants described having positive writing affect but did not discuss transfer, even when prompted. These students express caring much more about a writing task when it feels relevant to them, which frequently involves genres outside of academic writing. They also both admit that they have poor writing process habits, such as procrastination. Based on these findings, I suggest one way that writing instructors can purposefully use affect to potentially encourage transfer.

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This study seeks to explore ideas about learning and how it happens in writing center tutorials. The questions posed for this research are the following: 1) What does learning look like in writing center consultations? and 2) What moves do tutors make to prompt learning moments? The study was created by video recording nine writing center consultations over the course of a single semester. The researcher conducted the sessions herself and worked with the same writer each time. Segments of sessions were transcribed to reveal patterns of learning at work. Reflective memos were also collected, as well as a final retrospective interview. The results of the study showed that learning happens when tutors and writers create learning moments both together and independently of each other. Tutors and writers prompt learning by addressing four elements of writing center sessions: session activities, writer moves with the text at hand, writing processes, and learning processes. Addressing these elements in sessions leads to conversations about learning, which leads to learning taking place. This research is useful for further developing the identity of the writing center as a space that values and strives for authentic learning to occur.