Control is a central issue in any text: does the author's intention or the reader's interpretation better explain the resulting meaning of the text? This question has long been the subject of debate among textual theorists; this essay proposes a middle ground, namely that the author and the reader engage in a collaborative effort to make meaning in a text.

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This thesis shows how Stephen Gosson's The School of Abuse (1579) functions as a rhetorical composition. The elements of writer, readership, and text are each examined in order to elucidate the rhetorical decisions made by Gosson during the composition of The School.

Through a piloted model of curriculum designed for ENC 1101 this teacher-research study investigated how service-learning can shape the experiences of both teachers and students in the first-year composition classroom. The research aimed to determine the ways in which enhancement occurred for students and teachers through evaluation of student coursework, a post-semester student focus group and a faculty interview. Focusing on the impacts of this curriculum on a part-time teacher, this study also aimed to bring to light some of the challenges inherent in service-learning within FYC, while offering ways to mediate those challenges in both course design and departmental implementation. As a result of this project, recommendations were made for modification of this curriculum to be used as an option for instructors alongside appropriate professional development, which is essential to the success of service-learning in FYC. Continued research dealing with various approaches to using service-learning in FYC was also recommended.

While methods of creative play are still utilized occasionally in elementary education, by the time students reach college there are fewer opportunities for them to play in order to learn creatively in the classroom. Often, they are bored or uninspired by “traditional” composition instruction, where they read essays and then emulate their structure. Students can sometimes struggle to find ways to compose, both academically and creatively. I have seen in my classrooms the efficacy of giving students more flexibility and freedom in their ways of composing. This project proposes that play—the serious “work of childhood” (attributed to Piaget)—is just as essential in the college composition classroom. Giving students ways to access their imaginations, through visual and multimodal composition, making activities, metaphors, and other infusions of creative play pedagogy in the classroom and beyond—are not niche methods of instruction. Rather, I assert that play-learning helps form thirdspaces of play that I term playspaces. Specifically, in this dissertation I inquire through teacher/practitioner research to explore these questions: 1) What are some of the possibilities and limitations of play pedagogy for the composing processes of three first-year college composition students and their instructor? a. How are students using play pedagogy in the learning space? What functions might it serve or not serve? b. How am I implementing my play pedagogy in our classroom? What does play pedagogy mean for me as a teacher? c. How does play pedagogy inform the space and spatial understanding of the composition classroom? This qualitative study examines what happens when play pedagogy is employed in the college writing classroom, using arts-based research (ABR) including narrative inquiry as its main methods. The analysis for my dissertation uses what I’ve termed spatial thematic analysis in the form of longer narrative vignettes to attempt to reconstruct the spaces of play of each of the three students in the study as well as myself as teacher/researcher struggling with play and writing. These vignettes focus on Diana—a student who moved between accepting and rejecting the invitation across a semester paired with my own struggles during the pandemic to write and my use of collage to find a sense of play again, Lito—a student who accepted the invitation throughout the semester and the freedoms that emerged in his composing processes and meta-reflections, and Jenny—a student who digs deeper into one of those freedoms—the concept of deep play—as a potential affordance in the college writing space. From these longer vignettes, I have summarized in the findings the themes that emerged from the study: the invitation to play, the freedoms of play pedagogy including: to work across mediums and modes, to make mistakes and fail, to create and imagine, and to explore the self, including the opportunity to engage in deep play in their composing work, and the importance of spatial understandings of play pedagogy. This study seeks not just to define playspace as a third space of play-learning in the college writing classroom, but also to find the essential components of these spaces to generalize the structure for teachers hoping to use their own playful pedagogies in their classrooms. Keywords: composition, playspace, spaces of play, playful teaching, play pedagogy, pedagogy of play, creative play, play learning, thirdspace, third space, college literacy, visual literacy, multimodal learning

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This investigation examined the linkages between and across the language processes of listening, speaking, reading, drawing and writing as well as the meanings displayed within and across these modes in children’s response to story. Eight first grade children whose reading levels represented a range of low to above-average ability participated in four individual storyreading sessions for a total of 32 sessions. Each session was twenty-to-thirty minutes in length and took place during the class's reading/writing period. Drawing/writing samples, field notes, and videotapes and audiotapes were collected over a six week period. The drawing/writing composing sequence was recorded for each story and flow charts were made depicting each child's pattern of movement between and across language processes. The flow charts were used to examine the language process usage and linkage patterns evident in the movement between and across modes. The kinds of meanings examined included response to conference questions, functions of language displayed during the drawing/writing, and the coherence and specificity present in the story retellings and picture stories. The results of the study indicated that no one particular language process was chosen exclusively to convey meaning in response to story. Some linkage patterns, described as simultaneous or sequential, did occur more frequently than others. The simultaneous linkage pattern of talking/listening and drawing/picture reading was a common pattern displayed by both the high and low ability groups. An analysis of the response to conference questions revealed some awareness by the children of their drawing/writing composing strategies. Another aspect of process knowledge, concept of story, was seen in the analysis of the initial image drawn or written by each child. The functions of language displayed during the drawing/writing composing process were identified as informational, procedural, and format-regulatory. The concept knowledge, examined in terms of coherence and specificity, was characteristic of the categories described as skeletal and interpretational for both groups' story retellings and picture stories. This study suggested that children differ in the way they use the language processes to display meaning in response to story. Parallels were drawn in examining children's thinking processes across the modes. This study supports the notion that recognition and understanding of the various ways children communicate meaning can help educators in their roles as facilitators of language learning. / Ed. D.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the influence of different expository text structures on fourth and sixth grade students' written retellings. Although previous research has shown that text structure can assist in understanding and recalling text, little work has been done with the use of different expository text structures by elementary school students, who typically have difficulty with expository text. The basic questions of the study were (1) Is there a difference in students' use of structure or number of idea units? (a) in retellings of passages presented in four different structures? (b) in the retellings of students in grade four compared with those in grade six? (2) Is there an interaction between structural pattern and grade level in the use of structure or the number of idea units? (3) Is there an interaction between structural pattern of text and topic in the use of structure or the number of idea units? Subjects were thirty-nine students in each grade with average and above average reading ability. Using passages in four top-level structures identified by Meyer (1975) -- collection/description, problem/solution, comparison/ contrast, and cause/effect--subjects read and immediately retold passages in writing. The retellings were scored for the use of the author’s original structure and the number of targeted idea units. Hypotheses were tested using a 4 (text structure) x 4 (topic) x 2 (grade level) factorial analysis of variance for each dependent variable. The analysis indicated the following results: (1) For the dependent variable of level of text structure use, there was a Significant difference for grade level and interactions between topic and structure. There were no interactions between grade and structure. (2) For the dependent variable of number of idea units, there were was a Significant difference for grade level, but none for text structure. There were no interactions between grade and structure and none between topic and structure. Subjects were found to use the original structure for problem/ solution more than for the other three patterns. Differences in text structure were found to have little effect on the number of idea units in the students' retellings. Developmental differences were evident both in the use of structure and in the number of idea units produced by fourth and sixth grade students. / Ed. D.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of type of written practice (collaborative and independent) and time of writing sample (pre-training, mid-training, and post-training) on sixth grade students' argumentative responses to literature and on the development of three elements of argument (stating claims, citing data, and using warrants). Forty-eight sixth grade students from a small, metropolitan Northern Virginia public school participated in three weeks of training. Training included instruction plus collaborative written practice or instruction plus independent written practice. Students we~e assigned randomly to the two treatment groups. Writing samples, which were written individually, were collected at three points in time (pre-training, mid-training, and post-training). Each writing sample was scored for how well the student stated the claim, cited data to support the claim, and used warrants to connect the data to the claim. A composite score made up of the scores for the three elements reflected the student's total effectiveness. The scores for each element and the composite scores were analyzed by employing analyses of variance with repeated measures. The design was a 2 x 3 mixed design with repeated measures on one factor. The results of the analyses of variance indicated that type of written practice and time of writing sample had significant effects on sixth grade students' total effectiveness scores and on the scores of two of the three elements of argument. There were significant interactions for total effectiveness, citing data, and using warrants. The results of all three analyses indicated that the collaborative written practice group scored, on average, significantly higher than the independent written practice group on the mid-training and the posttraining writing samples. Results also indicated that the members of the collaborative written practice group increased their citing data, using warrants, and total effectiveness scores significantly from the pre-training writing sample to the mid-training writing samlple. Although not significant, increases for the collaborative written practice group were noted from the mid-training to the post-training writing samples as well. No significant interactions or main effects existed for the stating claims element. Based an these results, instruction and collaborative written practice appeared to emerge as effective strategies for developing the citing data and using warrants elements of argument resulting in an improvement in the students' total effectiveness. The pattern of development suggests that when provided appropriate training, sixth grade students can develop their argumentative written responses to literature. / Ed. D.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education