Although response scholarship has continually called for a greater emphasis on context when analyzing instructors' written commentary on student writing, textual analysis of written comments remains a primary direction for response research. Additionally, when context is accounted for, it is oftentimes done so in a rather reductive fashion, with a single contextual factor examined in relation to response or context approached in a solely theoretical fashion. As a result, discussions of the influence of context in response scholarship remain limited in scope and/or mostly theoretical. However, an increased attentiveness to context is not as easy as it appears. Since context is a rather opaque concept, and setting parameters for context is a difficult endeavor, this dissertation sought to provide a model for examining the context that surrounds response that focused on three primarily textual contextual factors—what I call (con)texts. Chapter 1 examines the dilemma of context in response scholarship and reviews the literature on the influence of context on written commentary. Afterwards, a new model for contextual response scholarship is proposed, one that accounts for multiple contextual factors that share unifying characteristics. For this study, the three contextual factors under examination—assignment description/texts, student/teacher interactions, and grading materials—were primarily textual in nature, creating the (con)texts for the study. This study sought to examine the manner in which students articulated their interpretations and uses of their instructors' written commentary in relation to the three (con)textual factors under examination. After introducing the new model for response scholarship, Chapter 2 delves into the details of the study and the methodology employed. The study focused on two composition classrooms, with three students participating from each classroom. The details of the participating instructors, participating students, and the classroom contexts—as well as the (con)texts within each classroom—are depicted. Furthermore, the methodological approaches, which primarily consisted of student interviews and discourse analysis, are discussed. In particular, the second half of the chapter focuses on the structure of the student interviews and the coding schemes employed to analyze the student interviews. The student interviews consisted of both unprompted—not directly addressing the (con)texts—questions and prompted—directly addressing the (con)texts—questions and were coded in two distinct fashions. The empirical results of the study are presented in Chapter 3 with each of the student interview results being presented separately to begin the chapter. Following the results of each individual student's interview, the results of the students in Jill's (Instructor #1) class are compared along with the results of the students in Jack's (Instructor #2) class. Finally, the results for all students in the study are presented. Chapter 4 discusses the results of the study in a more nuanced, intricate fashion. This discussion is arranged by seven key findings that emerged from the study: 1) Each of the students in the study drew upon the (con)texts in order to help them interpret and use their instructor's written feedback in a unique fashion; 2) Students' answers to the unprompted questions demonstrated that they were less inclined to put the (con)texts directly in conversation with the teachers' written responses until prompted to later in the interview; 3) During the unprompted portion of the interviews, the instructors' written commentary frequently promoted student engagement with particular (con)texts; 4) Students used the assignment description/texts to understand how well they understood and executed the teachers' expectations of the assignments as well as to gain a firmer understanding of what the expectations for the assignments were; 5) Student/teacher interactions—primarily face-to-face in conferences—played a pivotal role in how students articulated their interpretations and uses of instructors' written feedback; 6) While the rubric or grading criteria had a more subtle influence, the actual paper grade had a substantial impact on students' interpretations and uses of their instructors' written commentary; and 7) The (con)texts frequently worked together as students articulated their interpretations and uses of their instructors' written commentary. This dissertation concludes in Chapter 5 by revisiting the exigence for the study while also discussing delimitations and limitations for the study. Afterwards, implications for the study—both pedagogical and scholarly—are discussed in-depth and the necessity for greater attention to context in response scholarship is emphasized. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2016. / March 31, 2016. / Assessment, Assignments, Conferences, Context, Grades, Response / Includes bibliographical references. / Michael R. Neal, Professor Directing Dissertation; Melissa R. Gross, University Representative; Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Committee Member; Deborah C. Teague, Committee Member; Kathleen B. Yancey, Committee Member.

Concerned with the 1974 Conference on College Composition and Communication initiative Students Rights to Their Own Language (SRTOL), a resolution calling for writing teachers to respect the rich diversity of languages students bring with them to the classroom, this dissertation investigates the language interactions between writing tutors and their tutees in a historically black college or university (HBCU) writing center to better understand the intersection of African American Language (AAL) and Edited American English (EAE) . Composition studies has yet to explore the implementation of SRTOL in a historically black university, particularly in the site of a writing center. This dissertation fills that gap. Using a case study methodology, this dissertation constructs a rich description of the ways participants negotiates the challenges posed by linguistic push-pull (Smitherman) guided by three questions: 1. How are AAL and EAE used in the within an HBU writing center? How do the uses of AAL and EAE reflect linguistic push-pull (LPP)? 2. How does the intersection of AAL and EAE support or erode the writing center's learning goals as well as the student's and or tutor's perceptions of his or her learning goals? 3. What does this intersection of multiple language practices reveal about the benefits and challenges of implementing multilingual teaching in a HBU writing center? This study included eight self-identify AAL participants, three tutors and five tutees, who negotiated AAL and EAE for two ends: to bond and to work. Given that the tutor-tutee interactions in this study share AAL and EAE, the results of this study revealed that patterns in (a)motivation: reticence, resistance, and diversion. For example, Matthius, an AAL-speaking tutor, used EAE syntactical as well as organizational structures when teaching his participants EAE grammar, but he used rhetorical features of AAL, such as signifying, narrativizing, and indirection, to establish or sustain fictive kinships with his tutees that positively influenced student and tutor outcomes. Meanwhile, Maya's use of these same strategies at time yielded adverse responses. Overall, the interpretation of these data depicts how LPP supports, and at times erodes, the expectation of learning in the FAMU Writing Resource Center. Though challenges of teaching AAL include the homogenizing HBCUs and deciding who will teach it, the benefits of viewing AAL as multilingualism yielded individual and collective valuation of language and culture. Taken together, AAL tutors and tutees align with Natalie DeCheck's claim that tutors who share common interests with tutees, such as language, motivate tutees to improve their writing. Specifically, they use AAL to redefine amotivation as an agentive process of learning and instruction. The results of this agency not only expands our understanding of culturally-situated motivation but they also complicates Smitherman's definition of LPP, to love and hate one's language simultaneously. Tension between the tutor and tutee, however, proved to be more complex and resulted from varying degrees of LPP. This study, then, also provides insight to intersection of African American language and culture and their impact on AAL student-tutor negotiations of academic literacies. By seeking deeper knowledge of the language and literate practices of African American learners, this dissertation provides a means of supporting and valuing these learners and the spaces they create to value themselves while traversing the often dismal academic terrains. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2015. / December 4, 2015. / African American Language, Composition Studies, Writing Center Studies / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Robert A. Schwartz, University Representative; Maxine L. Montgomery, Committee Member; Rhea Estelle Lathan, Committee Member.

ABSTRACT This dissertation has two aims. The first is to further expand the scope of composition studies to include the/a/our body within digital multimodal composition—considering how it can be an active participant in both the process and the product. The second aim is to interrogate the ways in which the/a/our body interacts with technological components through literacy activities that are engaged within the composing process. Toward that end, it attends to the following overarching question: how does a composer creates an embodied digital performance? The problem space of this dissertation is multifaceted, building first upon bodies in composition and then exploring how they might potentially add to the importance of digital multimodal composition; these two areas of focus are not always examined in tandem, which makes their connection a space worth studying. Therefore, this dissertation addresses both challenging spaces by asking sub questions: 1) How does a composer incorporate his or her body as a site of or component of digital multimodal composition? 2) What literacy activities facilitate the movement between or the integration of material and digital bodies? This exploration adds to the existing scholarship within Rhetoric and Composition because it invites compositionists to consider, and explicitly acknowledge, the body as we continue to compose digitally, thereby revisiting the multimodal component of the body and pushing the boundaries between material and digital composing. In order to answer these questions, this dissertation describes the composing process through the lens of dance; identifies literacy activities in which the/a/our body participates; and theorizes the ways in which digital embodiment, and the mind-body connection reintegrate (explicitly) the/a/our body into the composing process. In order to understand the/a/our body’s potential in composition, this study focuses upon a singular case study that crosses disciplinary boundaries by examining digital dance, or dance and technology choreography. This study details the invention, revision, and performance of the dance Zero, One… performed in spring 2015. Studying this particular performance piece throughout the process highlighted the ways in which a composer (the choreographer in this instance) worked to simultaneously integrate movement phrases of the/a/our body and movement of digital projection as an immersive experience for both the dancers and the audience. In addition to the observation of rehearsals and the performances, interviews were conducted with both the choreographer and the dancers in order to understand the experiences of the composing body and the bodies that were a part of the final product, and choreography notes were collected. The data collected was analyzed in layers; first, it was organized into the major components of the composing process, then the interviews were inductively coded with two coding schemes, and the choreography notes and video observations were analyzed holistically. The analysis of the data points to four key contributions that directly impact approaches to digital multimodal composition: 1) the/a/our body is active in the process of digital multimodal composition—composing across invention, revision, and performance through the literacy activities enacted; 2) the integration of the/a/our body and technology creates a sense of hyperawareness (distributing attention/awareness to multiple components simultaneously), and it uses kinesthetic awareness (awareness of the relationship between the/a/our body and space) to achieve integration; 3) the somatic and digital components inform one another in the creation of each through their affordances and constraints because they evolve in tandem; and 4) the/a/our body shifts from the individual and becomes a part of the whole within the performance of the digital multimodal composition, and it achieves this by redistributing focus to all of the contributing elements equally. The/a/our body is an active and necessary component in digital multimodal composition, and it is not only relegated to being the composing body but also a contributing element to the composition as a whole. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2016. / June 21, 2016. / Body, Composition, Dance, Embodiment, Literacy, Multimodality / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Cassandra Cole, University Representative; Michael Neal, Committee Member; Tarez Graban, Committee Member.

Scholarship on multimodality repeatedly emphasizes the need not just for a multimodal focus in individual composition classrooms but also an integration of multimodality into the composition curriculum. Collectively, this scholarship sounds a call for a new kind of composition curriculum and, accordingly, new outcomes. This poses a key question for us as well: how might we develop, implement, and sustain multimodal curricula within composition programs so that curriculum reflects more accurately the current communicative landscape? To answer this overarching question, this project utilizes a mixed methods approach combining survey and case study methodologies. The findings for this dissertation include the following: 1) composition programs at the national level still focus overwhelmingly on print, proving that multimodal curricular transformation has not yet taken place; 2) there is little consensus on what a multimodal composition curriculum looks like or includes; 3) programs that have achieved multimodal curricular transformation do so at the intersection of outcomes statements and assignments; 4) outcomes statements at programs that have achieved multimodal curricular transformation define composition as a rhetorically-based, inquiry-driven process of making texts; and 5) assignments at programs that have achieved multimodal curricular transformation ask students to combine multiple modes, attend to design, exhibit material-rhetorical flexibility, and circulate the texts they create, thereby exhibiting transformed practice. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2016. / June 21, 2016. / administration, curricular revision, curricular transformation, multimodality, outcomes, outcomes statements / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristie Fleckenstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Melissa Gross, University Representative; Michael Neal, Committee Member; Kathleen Blake Yancey, Committee Member.

As a discipline, composition today inadequately understands the ways digital technologies intersect with economic concerns and the effects of that intersection on the teaching of writing. Digital technologies produce and call attention to economic inequalities via the very same means by which they increase economic productivity---by substituting capital-intensive processes for labor-intensive processes---but composition has largely failed to address those inequalities in economic terms. Instead, composition's pedagogies have reduced economy to culture and student social class to pedagogical exigency. This dissertation offers a categorical analysis of the one way in which composition does explicitly address economic issues: by constructing them as class. However, even in its various engagements with class, composition's theoretical constructions of class habitually posit the remediation of inequality as a cultural rather than economic concern. The work of Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, and J. K. Gibson-Graham offers the foundations for an alternative theory of class that maintains a useful focus on economic concerns while not denying the cultural. After constructing this theory, this dissertation applies it to the composition classroom in order to examine the economic nature and value of student work, particularly in terms of the production and digital reproduction of student writing. The dissertation's final portion connects recent scholarship on the value of affect and immaterial labor to the ideas of legal scholar Lawrence Lessig and the open source movement today often associated with digital technologies of reproduction in order to posit an alternative theory of value for student writing, and the implications of such a theory for composition pedagogy in general.

Conscious consumerism is a layered phenomenon. "Going green," "fair trade," "buy organic," "carbon footprint," and "shop local think global" are now familiar phrases in the lexicon of American shopping strategies, and conscious consumerism has a relationship with all of them. Groups defined as socially responsible consumers and trends in ethical consumption have been studied for over thirty years. After decades of consumer research and theories about the effects of mass consumerism in culture, conscious consumerism products and marketing campaigns are now major contributors in redefining consumer practices in a postmodern world. The messages they deliver about the changing roles of consumers and consumer goods makes it suitable for rhetorical scholarship to develop a stronger participatory role in the research. I use theories of style, material, and visual rhetoric to examine conscious consumerism today. The texts I examine were also marketing and aesthetic phenomenon. Chapter Three features the "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" canvas tote designed by Anna Hindmarch that was sold at select stores around the world and was one of the first sensations in the reusable bag industry. In Chapter Four, I compare and contrast two artifacts, the Livestrong bracelet and the Support Our Troops magnetic ribbon. I discuss the issues of disposable display, of plastics as markers of belief, and nationalism in our buying practices. Chapter Five is about (Product) RED not just as design but about what its presence does when recognizing issues of globalization. Chapter Six consists of conclusions, limitations, parodic responses to conscious consumerism, and a call for eloquent consuming. While each chapter has a particular focus in theorizing the material of each case study--the communicative praxis of the material rhetoric of canvas, the relationship between the body and the materials bought to put on the body, and larger global concerns within the fabric of language and T-shirts--all three case studies share connections in terms of style and living in a postmodern age.

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