This study traces the transfer of writing-related knowledge and concepts from the composition classroom into the writing assignments composed by students within the same course. Working in a first-year-composition classroom taught through a writing-about-writing curriculum, the researcher observed students as they navigated from the initial learning of concepts such as rhetorical situations, writing processes, and discourse communities, into an application of these concepts in various writing assignments, including rhetorical analyses and discourse community profiles. By analyzing a composition instructor's objectives for her assignments and observing the interaction between students and their instructor in a single composition course for the duration of one semester, the researcher traced how students operationalized knowledge from the classroom and applied it in their own writing. After tracing this operalization through interviews with the instructor, observation of class activities and analysis of assignment sheets and student papers, the researcher proposes that instructors may encourage transfer within their composition classrooms by adequately presenting assignment objectives to students, and by allowing sufficient scaffolding of writing tasks. In this way, the researcher explains that students may be able to understand the objectives of their writing assignments in a way that may encourage them to apply the knowledge they learned in the classroom to the writing tasks assigned by their instructor.

This thesis analyzes the life and work of Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai, one of the foremost African woman rhetors of our time. Wangari Maathai--founder of Kenya's Green Belt Movement (GBM), Member of Parliament, and activist for democracy, sustainable development, and human rights--has cultivated a multidimensional literacy that has allowed her to truly understand and address the problems that post-colonial Kenyans face. Her strong solution-oriented approach has allowed her to develop and refine operation of the GBM, which began simply planting trees, to produce a worldwide organization that works for sustainable development, human rights, and environmental conservation/restoration (among many others) by attacking the roots of disempowerment and challenging participants to become the primary agents of change. Through the overlapping lenses of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Jacqueline Jones Royster's Traces of a Stream, and Filomina Chioma Steady's Women and Collective Action in Africa, I trace Maathai's emergence as a literate women in late 20th century Kenya who is able to effect meaningful social change. This examination of her life and work uncovers the convergence of literacies (academic, critical, civic, and cultural) that have created her unique worldview. Furthermore, it also examines her rhetorical construction of self through an analysis of her context, her ethos construction, and her mandates for action. At the heart of the study is an exploration of the GBM as an outlet of civic and environmental education. This discussion explores Maathai's approach to civic education as well as the potential pedagogical implications of that approach in the composition classroom of the Western university.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1962. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (294-301).

abstract: "Bringing-before-the-eyes": Visuality and Audience in Greek Rhetoric examines how Greek rhetorical theories are understood through the lens of visuality and the ways in which orators accounted for audience knowledges and expectations in the creation of rhetorical texts and performances. Through a close reading of Greek rhetorical texts from the classical period, I develop three heuristics for analyzing the ways in which rhetoricians invite and encourage visualized images through rhetorical practice. By exploring (1) language cues that orators use to signal visualization, (2) the ways in which shared cultural memories and ideas allow orators to call upon standardized images, and (3) the influence of stylistic choices and audience emotions related to the vividness of rhetorical images, I argue that it is possible to analyze the ways in which classical Greek orators understood and employed visual elements in their rhetorical performances. I then conduct an analysis of the visual aspects of Demosthenes' On the Embassy using these heuristics to demonstrate the ways in which these three aspects of visuality are intertwined and contribute to a greater understanding of the relationship between the verbal and the visual in rhetorical theory. My findings indicate that Greek orators readily identified the influence of visual ways of knowing on rhetorical theory and presented early hypotheses of the ways in which sense perceptions affect social practice. This project complicates the ways in which rhetorical theory is categorized. Rather than considering visual rhetoric as a distinct field from traditional, verbal text-based rhetorical studies, this project explores the ways in which visual and verbal modes of thinking are interconnected in Greek rhetorical theory. By bridging these two areas of rhetorical study and arguing that verbal rhetoric can instantiate internalized, visual phenomena for audiences, the dichotomy of verbal and visual is problematized. By focusing on the rhetorical theory of classical Greece, this project also invites future research into the ways in which dominant, Western historic and contemporary systems of epistemology are influenced by the co-mingling of verbal and visual in classical Greek philosophy and education. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

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<p> This dissertation explores how the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Occupy Movement (OM) <i>writ large</i> generated new forms of rhetorical invention through its emergence in geographical places and virtual spaces across the world. The genesis and development of Occupy on these &ldquo;radical&rdquo; grounds provide an empirical grounding to theory on the <i>chora,</i> rhetorical invention, and the vernacular, where the word occupy and the tactic occupation designate vital sites <i>(topoi)</i> of rhetorical activity: seats/sources of local meaning(s) that occupiers used to bring new lines of thought to life. The radical uptake of &ldquo;occupy&rdquo; would create what Edward Schiappa calls a definitional rupture: a disruption of the &ldquo;natural attitude&rdquo; around the meaning or usage of a word. To suture this gap, I acknowledge the ethical and normative ramifications that accompany the act of definition as a political act and then conduct a philological analysis on &lsquo;occupy&rsquo; and &lsquo;occupation&rsquo; by tracing these words to their earliest or &ldquo;radical&rdquo; roots. I then attend to the emergence of OWS in the place of Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza, followed by its first call to action and popular uptake in virtual streams and media, where both places produced new vernacular modalities and media. In gesturing to the disaster sociology literature on emergent citizen groups (ECGS) and emergent phenomena, this assembly of Occupy in time, place, and space, radically reconceives &lsquo;what it means&rsquo; to &ldquo;occupy&rdquo; common places and spaces towards the creation of new socio-economic realities in response to crisis.</p>