This dissertation is a fantasia in f-minor for piano and orchestra. The accompanying treatise is an analysis of the piece, which discusses the composer’s influence and inspiration, as well as issues of form, melody, harmony, and various other compositional elements. The purpose of the analysis is to provide the listener/reader with the necessary background to truly understand and appreciate the eclectic nature of the work, which has elements from several different musical genres, including classical, jazz, gospel, R & B, funk, and hip hop. / text

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This dissertation develops out of an extensive program of research investigating the intersection and apparent contradictions of two trends: the expansion of community-based activities and activist rhetorics in higher education, and the growing critiques of the university as functioning primarily for corporate and dominant interests. Employing Marxist critique, I examine the ways institutionalized higher education perpetuates problematic dominant socio-economic structures as well as the possibilities available from sites of higher education for challenging those structures through critical pedagogy and community-based programs. I contextualize my analysis of current practices in community-based learning by deconstructing the rhetoric of liberal ideology embedded within both the current and historical discourse surrounding the mission and development of public higher education with extensive analysis of the Land Grant Act in chapter one. In my discursive analysis of the discourse and history surrounding the creation of land grant colleges, I explicate the importance of a theory of cultural hegemony as it relates to universities functioning under dominant cultural logic. In chapter two, I analyze specific university-based community outreach programs in order to deconstruct and situate the rhetoric and practices of these programs in a broader socio-economic context. I draw out theories of cultural hegemony from Marx and Gramsci to identify and characterize American liberal capitalism as a system which depends upon perceived freedom and equity while requiring inequity and exploitation. I situate higher education within that system as a cultural institution that provides necessary means for capitalism (in the forms of technology, knowledge, and trained labor) as well as creates ideological apparatuses to contain possible resistance to the dominant system. I deconstruct and re-theorize the ways in which voluntarism and community service enable contemporary capitalism to remain hegemonic, and I look specifically at such activities generated from and institutionalized in higher education to critique the implications of this relationship. In the third chapter, I argue that although the tendencies of dominant institutions are to contain "radical" or transformational practices, no system is an utterly closed system. Consequently, the critical enactment of community-based activities in higher education may provide an opening for counter-hegemonic responses, but only through a carefully articulated theory of critical pedagogy. Drawing on Paulo Freire, Paula Allman, and others, I lay out the principles of critical pedagogy. I also outline what I understand to be necessary limitations on institutional work and institutionalized critical pedagogies based on the analyses of the previous chapters. Based on that critical pedagogy, in the final chapter I outline a practical method of enacting critical community-based work by looking at the issue of accountabilities, outcomes, and measurements in order to identify practices that may serve to create conditions for counter-hegemonic, transformative activities to occur. I conclude the dissertation with some reflection on activities in the university other than community-based learning programs where critical pedagogy has a significant role to play.

Employing ethnographic and case study research methods, this study attempts to examine student attitudes toward, and senses of purpose about, a first-year college writing course and their roles as students and writers within it. The study argues that students possess clear and highly articulated conceptions of writing classes, of writing's place both within and outside academia, and of themselves as students and writers. These conceptions, like all theories, exhibit both strengths and weaknesses. However, students rarely have the opportunity to engage in dialogue about their views on writing. Because of this, the students in this study generally accommodate themselves to, but compartmentalize, the writing course and the strategies they are exposed to in it. The study suggests, therefore, that writing teachers approach their students not as novices to be corrected concerning the "true" ways of writing, or rejected for their unwillingness to accept these truths. Rather, we should consider writing students an audience to be persuaded to a concept of writing both different from, and similar to, the concepts they already hold. This means that writing teachers must elicit, listen to, and engage with the writing conceptions of their students. Means for fostering this dialogue include having students create narratives of their writing development, asking students to develop mini-ethnographic language projects, and historicizing with and for them standard academic English style.

This study contributes to the growing body of research on gender and writing and extends previous research suggesting that women adapt diverse discourses as they write for the academic discourse community. This study asserts that college women writers attempt to present themselves as more powerful writers by suppressing gender-typical linguistic features in their writing. This tendency to suppress linguistic politeness strategies, which are associated with female-typical language use, provides specific evidence in support of this assertion. In the introductory chapter, I indicate the source of my personal interest in the issue of women writing for the academy. I then review the literature that depicts women literary writers as a muted group and attests to the suppression of women's voices in the academy. Chapter 2 provides a critical review of the essentializing tendencies of the research on gender and language. In this chapter, I also review studies on women's epistemology and present an alternative metaphor for representing gender differences. Finally, I review the research on linguistic politeness theory. In Chapter 3, I indicate the purpose and limitations of the study, and I describe the methods and procedures for this study. In Chapter 4, I discuss my findings, which reveal only limited evidence of gender differences in the use of politeness strategies. I interpret these results in light of current reviews of research in gender and writing that report similar disparate results. I conclude my study with a discussion of the various theories that may account for gender differences in written discourse as well as some suggested pedagogical implications for these theories of gender difference. The significance of this study is that it provides a functionally oriented analysis of gender and writing; that is, it describes the social functions indicated by gender-typical syntactic features. In this way, it provides insight into the ways that discursive practices construct gender identity.

This dissertation contains three major arguments. First, teaching ethics in technical communications courses is worthwhile. Chapter One, a review of literature on ethics in technical communication maps books and articles into three categories: theoretical, case study, and pedagogical approaches. It summarizes ways in which major textbooks address ethics and calls for a pedagogy that combines the benefits of all three approaches. Chapter Two provides the theoretical and philosophical groundwork for a "pedagogy of action," based on an ethical stance called "specific feminism" located in a conversation among feminine, feminist, and discourse ethics perspectives. The chapter addresses work by theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, Jurgen Habermas, and Alisdair MacIntyre. Specific feminism emerges as an ethic of deliberation and action. The second major argument is that in order to effectively "teach" ethics in technical communication and fulfill their social responsibilities, instructors must be involved in their communities as local intellectuals. Chapter Three begins with an argument about the nature of the public intellectual, drawing on ideas from Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and Paulo Freire. The chapter ends with a case study of the author's own work as a technical writer for a local AIDS prevention program. The final major argument is that the best way for teachers to bring ethics into the technical writing classroom is through service learning. Chapter Four includes an overview of service learning in composition and describes "the seduction of empathy," a dangerous pattern of substituting emotional response for action in service experiences. This chapter includes case studies of students who used a specific feminist perspective to help them move beyond personal reactions to their service learning experiences, converting their empathy into social action. Chapter Five includes an analysis a popular approach to teaching ethics in technical writing, the hypothetical scenario/case study method, and argues that this model is not as effective as one based on service learning. It describes a semester-long method for bringing ethics into the technical writing classroom and argues that service learning gives students opportunities to apply ethical frameworks they articulate through discussions of theories and case studies.

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This project speaks to those with broad research interests in rhetorical studies, the ethnography of working class students and scholars, and the role of socioeconomic class in education. In this dissertation, I take as the object of my study two groups of primary sources---the autobiographical rhetorical pieces that appear in a set of five main books of essays by and about working class people and postings to a national working class academic listserv. My purpose in examining these texts is to compare definitions and experiences of "working class scholars" as conveyed by the writers and to explicate and analyze these definitions and rhetorical strategies. This study argues for the existence of a shared discourse among working class intellectuals that developed from the autobiographical essays the scholars created for a core set of published texts, the working class listserv, and additional related texts. These shared narratives give insight into working class scholars' beliefs, actions, education and worldviews as the writers attempt to understand the ways class has acted on their lives and their scholarship. On a larger scale, this study investigates how people tell stories about themselves and how these stories evolve over time to become stronger and more similar to each other, the longer the discourse exists. In their discourse, the working class academics give voice to members of an emerging and identifiable common discourse. Texts in this discourse include commonalties of form and thematic content that circulate freely among members even though the discourse community is widely dispersed geographically. The working class writers use a common language to characterize their experiences and to speak meaningfully to each other about them. Exploring the classed discourse and difficulties expressed in these texts sheds light on American class structures, and suggests ways in which universities might better serve and retain working class people.

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