In the interest of fostering deep student transactions with texts, the purpose of this research is to study a particular approach to teaching writing, and to observe and investigate the impact of a dramatic shift in the methods and frequency of assignment of writing in a college-level philosophy class, and the ways in which the students and instructor negotiate this new territory and these different demands over three cohort years, from Fall 2014 to Spring 2017. This dissertation is an empirical study of what happens when an inquiry-based apprenticeship approach to teaching academic writing (Blau 2011) is employed in a required sophomore- level interdisciplinary humanities course in a highly selective college. This classroom research project seeks to undertake an examination of whether students can be successfully inducted into the academic community through a particular assignment in a Philosophy course. This writing assignment, the “commentary,” encourages students to focus on questions and therefore functions as an instance of writing-to-learn, which belongs to a long tradition across disciplines and cultures. This dissertation will also undertake an examination of the potential capacity of the commentary to create an academic discourse community of practice that supports critical reading and interpreting of literary and philosophical texts. The strategy of this new method is to have the students write twice-weekly 300-500 word commentaries of exploratory and sometimes argumentative writing on assigned texts twice a week, posting the writing in an online discussion board. They receive responses immediately, from each other, and get credit for completing the assignment (on time, relevant, and of appropriate length). The instructor never replies to their postings and never grades their postings on a scale or for quality. Students simply earn credit for completing the full number of required commentaries. The research is not experimental, but rather a qualitative observation of the effects of an approach established by the instructor in this class and in other similar classes as an adaptation of a model for learning academic writing through participation in an authentic academic discourse (Blau). The approach represents an enactment of situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger) in a college classroom and is constructed to advance academic learning while providing an opportunity for situated performative assessment indistinct from instruction. The place of the commentary in this course is established in a literary and historical context as it is authorized, valorized, and illuminated by a tradition of writing-to-learn grounded in the ideas of Isocrates, Quintilian, Cicero, and Montaigne. It is also supported by current seminal research in writing instruction, including James Moffett’s theory of abstraction in writing (1983), Sheridan Blau’s pedagogical applications of apprenticeship systems (2011), James Gee’s theories of discourse analysis (2001), and John Dewey’s “How We Think” (1910). Where decorum permits, there will be deeper meditations and excursions into and elaborations on the auto-ethnographic metacognitive writing of Michel de Montaigne, exploring the history of the practice of writing to learn and its relationship to critical thinking and Dewey. My analysis is situated in examining the culture of writing in this class and the markers of growth in thinking in student writing, using tools out of ethnography and the tradition of teacher research. Based on asking the initial question, “What happens when students write regular commentaries on their reading of difficult texts?” analysis of the collected student writing explores students’ attempts to channel curiosity into productive interpretive techniques, embrace uncertainty, make meaning and connections, and grow in the capacity to welcome and seek out productive confusion and doubt. I will focus primarily on whether this assignment contributes to the construction of a class culture whose implicit and explicit rules, conventions, and patterns of interaction are consistent with those that characterize the knowledge-building communities of the kind that colleges and universities aspire to in their departments, organized research units, and professional associations. I am also interested in exploring whether this shift in the culture of writing impacts whether students come to perceive themselves as contributors to the construction of knowledge as members of an academic community.

Writing Fellows Programs (WFP) are in effect among college campuses across the country, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Nova Southeastern University; however, Florida Atlantic University has yet to establish a peer tutoring program that is tied to writing-intensive courses that would enable disciplines across campus to share the responsibility of improving student writing instead of delegating the task to the English Department or college writing center. There is also an apparent disconnect between the writing skills being taught within the non-English Department courses and the work being done within the University Center for Excellence in Writing (UCEW) to teach the effectiveness of strong, academic writing to students. This disconnect can be eliminated with the help of peer tutors acting as the bridge connecting the faculty across the disciplines to the UCEW. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Abstract not available

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

This research mainly aims to design a Wiki-based Collaborative Process Writing Pedagogy (WCPWP) to help Mainland Chinese upper primary school students with their writing. A wiki-based learning environment (www.joyouswriting.com) named Joyous Writing Club (JWC) was designed and developed by the researcher using MediaWiki software. This study was conducted in a primary school in Shenzhen, Mainland China. This research applied Design-based Research (DBR) methodology, and included three iterative research phases which lasted for over one and a half years (three semesters). Through the cyclical process of design-based research, the design for WCPWP was modified and refined during the three phases. Quantitative and qualitative methods as well as methodological triangulation were used for data collection (Hussein, 2009). Instrumentations included online wiki documents (group writing); course feedback questionnaire; writing ability (composition) pre- and posttest; writing attitude pre- and posttest; observations; interviews; open-ended questions for teacher’s questionnaire. At the beginning of the study, a rudimentary conceptual framework of WCPWP was put forward to guide the initial teaching and learning of writing in the first research phase. The WCPWP framework is proposed based on Constructivist Learning Theory (Piaget, 1967; Vygotsky, 1978; Hewett, 2009), and Social View of Writing Process Theory (Faigley, 1986; Tompkins, 2008). The initial design of WCPWP was guided by principles for exploring virtual collaborative writing (Hewett, Robidoux, & Remley, 2010) which provides a broad framework for the research design and links the general learning theory to the specific domain of learning in this study. Besides, the Systems Approach Model of Dick and Carey (1996) is used to support the instructional design in this study. Furthermore, the Alessi and Trollip's (2001) model for software design and development was used to design a wiki-based virtual learning environment. The first and second research phases involved the same Chinese language teacher participant and student participants in the same class. Both of the two phases mainly aimed to improve the design of WCPWP by investigating students’ collaborative writing processes, students’ and teacher’s perceptions and attitudes towards WCPWP, the change on students’ writing attitudes. The results in each phase showed both effective and ineffective aspects of WCPWP, which became the starting points of pedagogical (WCPWP) improvement in the next research phase. The third research phase mainly aimed to investigate the effects of improved WCPWP on students’ personal writing ability and attitudes towards writing compared that of Traditional Individual Product-oriented Writing Pedagogy (TIPWP). Besides, students’ writing process on wiki, students’ and teacher’s perception and attitudes towards WCPWP were also explored. Based on the results in this research phase, an elaborate conceptual framework of WCPWP was put forward. The results showed that the Chinese language teachers and most students had positive attitudes and perceptions towards WCPWP. They perceived that WCPWP had positive influence on improving students’ writing ability, writing attitudes, collaboration, reading and oral expression. They were also interested in using WCPWP in their future Chinese writing activities. The results further revealed that WCPWP had significant positive effects on students’ writing attitudes compared with TIPWP. Furthermore, interview results and students’ writing performance on wiki suggested that WCPWP had positive effects on students’ writing ability. However, the statistic results did not show that WCPWP had significant positive effects on students’ personal writing ability compared with TIPWP. This study also discussed the possible reasons causing the results based on theories and related literatures. This study provides an example of capitalizing on computer and wiki technology to support the collaborative writing among Mainland Chinese upper primary school students. The results of this study have theoretical implications for applying the design principles for implementing wiki-based collaborative process writing in Chinese Context. It also has great theoretical value to the field of collaborative writing in Chinese by adopting more precise characteristics of wiki-based collaborative process writing. This study may also deepen primary educators’ understanding of the links among technology, pedagogy and content. Finally, it guides educators in the integration of social media (wikis, Google Docs) as well as the design of effective matching pedagogic strategies in their teaching of writing. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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What might becoming a poet have to do with becoming a teacher? What might becoming a teacher have to do with becoming a poet? Is it possible to invite someone to become a teacher or a poet? What might such an invitation look like? What kinds of conditions are involved in "making poetry"? What might these conditions have to do with "making pedagogy"? Further, what might these conditions — of making poetry or pedagogy — have to do with "making research"? Based on a study of a six-week intensive language across the curriculum course involving a group of prospective Secondary School teachers, this dissertation explores the kinds of conditions that might create an interpretive location in which to entertain and address the above kinds of questions — of the making of poetry and pedagogy and research — i n all their relations. Moving backward and forward — between the lived particulars of a group of preservice teachers' writing practices in a workshop-styled setting, and the writing practice of a researcher/teacher educator/poet curious about the acts of learning and teaching, writing and researching — this work attempts to live well with the necessarily tangled relationships among literacy, aesthetic practice, and the ongoing production of subjectivity in teacher education and our educational researchings of teacher education. The value of writing practice, as this dissertation attempts to enact it, is not only in its offer of further practice — of writing to learn (about writing and teaching and researching) — but also in its offer of a location where we might become curious about the performative nature of learning itself. The dissertation seeks to show the ways that my own writing life, shaped as it is by the work of those who have brought hermeneutics, postmodernism, psychoanalytic theory, and the literary imagination to bear on teacher education, is deeply implicated with other writing lives, others who are always and already writing lives. The invitation to imagine the curious time of researching pedagogy, then, is part of an invitation to think differently about preservice teachers thinking differently about their time together in classrooms, engaged in acts of learning and teaching, writing and researching.

Learners in the Junior Secondary Phase (Grades 8 to 10) are often required to answer open-ended questions which require a response in the form of an explanation. As frequently reported in the external examiners' reports of Life Sciences, learners do not write adequate explanations as responses to explanatory questions. This thesis reports on action research based on my experience as a Life Sciences teacher trying to address this problem. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop suitable, manageable and effective strategies that I could implement in order to improve my teaching of explanation writing skills of in the Junior Secondary school learners with a view to enhance curriculum content knowledge in Life Sciences. The intervention was carried out in a Grade 10 Life Sciences class which consisted of 35 learners. The first cycle consisted of seven lessons carried out over two weeks in normal school time. The main sources of data from my lesson interventions were the learners' written work, their journal entries, the researcher's journal, the field notes from the non-participant observer and interviews with two focus groups. Both the interviews and the lessons were recorded and transcribed. The research data reveals that the ability of the Junior Secondary learners to write explanations was hindered by language problems. In addition, a lack of integration of language issues into the subject content was a contributing factor to their inadequate writing skills. Spelling errors and lack of expression in English second language contribute to the problem of writing good explanations. The data has also revealed that learners‟ writing skills can be improved by implementing suitable teaching strategies, such as the curriculum cycle as proposed by Gibbons (2002). The curriculum cycle can be modified to fit the learners' needs and the real teaching situation. The amount of practice required to master the skill of writing in the genre of explanations should be considered.