This study problematizes the literacy practices of a second-year, Japanese language classroom at a small women's college. Drawing on critical perspectives on language, literacy and d/Discourse (Gee, 1990)—in particular, on sociocultural and poststructural theories—this study discusses the joint actions of a classroom teacher and her students. Using Fairclough's (1992b) model of critical discourse analysis as an analytical tool combined with the methodology of critical ethnography, this study closely examines classroom interactions through moment-by-moment analysis of numerous literacy events. Through year-long ethnographic fieldwork and two subsequent years of dialogue with the teacher, I chose to focus my study on “moments of tension.” I selected five “critical moments” when diversions from the teacher's lesson agenda were observed during the classroom literacy events. The dynamic interplay among the texts, the students' identities and the teacher's discourses inspired those critical moments. They were moments when both the teacher and the students struggled to defend what they believed as true and attempted to inhabit ideal subject positions against textual representations. My use of critical discourse analysis revealed that, in general, the students drew from the dominant discourses that the teacher had provided so that they could successfully participate and make sense of the literacy events. However, when the texts represented a reality or truth that challenged the students' beliefs about their identity and/or ontology, the students resisted such representations and “disrupted” the dominant classroom discourse by drawing on counter-discourses. Similarly, when the students' counter-discourses challenged the teacher's ontology and/or identity, she resisted taking up those discourses and tried to normalize the moments by deflecting the issues at hand and by withdrawing from the “intersection of the discourses” rather than opting to facilitate a dialogue about competing discourses. This study argues that these moments of tension displayed how students contributed significantly to the production of knowledge in the classroom. They point out how students exercise their agency and take up positions as “knowers” that align with their sense of self. My analysis also allows me to draw implications for the possibility of critical literacy practices in a FL classroom.

This dissertation combines research in neuroscience, psychology, inter-cultural communication, and teaching with technology to envision a more balanced approach to teaching writing. Many composition scholars have proposed theories about the cognitive processes that support writing, and have suggested pedagogies based in these theories, but too often this work has evolved in isolation from the research carried out in other fields. I hope that by taking this interdisciplinary approach, I can rough out some avenues for fruitful future exploration and lay to rest some misperceptions that currently hinder our teaching. I introduce this study by sharing a brief literacy narrative, and then in Chapter One lay out the range of theories held in the composition community about writing, learning, and thinking processes. In Chapter Two, I examine how Multiple Intelligence (MI) Theory can add to our understanding these processes, and consider recent attention to cultural context. China stands out as a particularly useful example by demonstrating very a different but effective pedagogy. Recent neuroscience research supports MI Theory, and I consider how it explains the existence of multiple intelligences in Chapter Three. In Chapter Four I shift to more practical concerns; the media required by non-verbal intelligences are hard to bring into classrooms, but computer technology offers solutions to some of these difficulties. I discuss my own experiences designing an on-line writing tutorial as an example of how neuroscience can be applied to teaching with technology, then describe an introductory literature class in which I used technology to address multiple intelligences. I suggest paths of further inquiry, identifying gaps in current research on teaching with technology. When discussing computer technology, we must ensure that students can cross the “digital divide.” I look at recent studies of access to computers and the internet; analysis of these results gives a clearer picture of how we might ensure that technology serves our students, rather than acting as another stumbling block. To close, this study looks forward, suggesting questions to be addressed in the future, as well as practical steps teachers can take now, to begin addressing multiple intelligences in their college writing classrooms.

In this dissertation, I explore this question: why are students silent? My interest was sparked by the stories most teachers have heard and told—that “quiet students” are shy, resistant, hostile. While discourses focusing on the politics of silencing are critical, we also need to consider how students see their own silences. This study provides alternate visions of silence as imagined by students. The project draws on many sources to explore silence, including the dominant critical perspectives represented in teaching narratives and feminist and cultural theories, as well as my own experiences that shape my teaching and this research. In addition to my own autoethnography and the thinking of scholars in various fields, the study focuses on the perspectives of students. Drawing on written reflections and interviews with five students, I examine students' vision of the influence of teachers and pedagogies on the decisions to speak or be silent. Often, practices designed to invite students' speaking (requirements, etc.) are experienced as silencing. Students suggest they are more encouraged to speak by “smaller gestures”—the cultivation of teacher-student relationships, a teacher's presentation of “self,” and focused attention to how questions are asked and responded to. Such efforts positively alter the dynamics of power, knowledge, and authority. I examine the intersections of identity and community and their impact on a student's speaking or silence. Many cite the “openness” of the community and how speaking invites evaluation of one's response, intelligence, identity. This is troubling, but not because they fear conflict. Rather, they perceive such interactions as demanding risky self-revelation in anonymous communities; they are conscious of the lessons about voice and audience we try to teach in writing classes. Finally, I investigates the alternate constructions these students use to understand classroom silence, including the communal sense that silence is not necessarily problematic. Instead it can provide space for intellectual work through internal dialogue. This research suggests possibilities for moving students “beyond silence.” But it also leads me to conclude that we should work to foster generative silences as well as dialogue in our classes.

According to Deborah Britzman, a queer pedagogy enables a destabilization of identity, a destabilization of various socio-cultural and economic norms, and recognition that language reflects current dominant socio-cultural ideologies. While queer pedagogies have been applied to courses in various disciplines and queer texts and readings have been presented within a range of literature courses, the role of a queer text in the composition classroom bears further examination. To answer the question, "What purposes can be served by using a queer text in a composition course?" I conducted qualitative research, using interviews, observations, and textual analysis in three first-year composition classes as three teachers and nine students read, discussed and wrote about Eli Clare's text, "The Mountain," for the first time. The language and style of the text disrupted assumptions about how texts should function and exposed students to stylistic techniques they challenged, critiqued or used to achieve specific rhetorical effects of their own. Students had a stronger sense that authors make specific choices and that those choices affect how an audience reads a text. However, students' and teachers' enactment and understanding of academic norms may contradict the possibilities presented by a queer text like Clare's. Understandings of academic discourse based upon an ethos of certainty tend to work against the destabilization of identity and the questioning and uncertainty Clare's text fosters. While queer scholars claim that certain pedagogical approaches to texts reflect and encourage a queered understanding of identity norms and knowledge, critics of queer theory express skepticism about its applicability with undergraduate students. This study illustrated that a queer text can enable composition teachers (even those unfamiliar with queer pedagogical techniques) to enact goals those of us who teach and study composition value, including: reading texts for multiple purposes; extensive use of revision; experimentation with substance, style and audience. Yet, the study also demonstrated that we need a better understanding of how and why a queer text works (and how to communicate that to students), a better understanding of what constitutes academic writing and more self-reflection about how identities shape and are shaped by socio-cultural and discursive ideologies and material reality.

In this dissertation I make a case for multigenre essays to be made more available to students in all disciplines, but especially to students in freshman composition classes. I also present the results of a case study where I acted as teacher/researcher investigating how students experience the writing and reading of multigenre essays. By multigenre essays I mean essays that include creative elements such as lists, letters, and interviews, in addition to traditional academic prose. By combining creative elements with academic prose I propose that writers will be able to express more of what they want to say in an essay by using both analytical and associative ways of thinking. The benefits of having students write multigenre essays are three-fold: (1) when students are given the option of including such things as dialogs, poems, and vignettes in addition to standard academic prose, they gain in rhetorical flexibility---experimenting with and finding the right genres and combination of genres that best fits what they want to say; (2) they also gain in their ability to take a more personal stance on an issue by having more options for positioning themselves in reference to a given topic; and (3) they gain in their ability to push at the perceived boundaries of a discourse. In this dissertation I discuss how eight students in an experimental writing class responded to the writing and reading of multigenre essays, to what extent they found them worthwhile and/or pleasurable, their thoughts in reference to audience and subject matter, how they used multigenre essays for cognitive travel, and how writing multigenre essays gave them a way to push against the perceived boundaries of their discipline. My data come from four essays the students wrote, reader response assignments, reflection letters, and from interviews with five of the students. Overall students found the writing and reading of multigenre essays more difficult but more satisfying than that of standard academic prose. In some cases multigenre essays made them think in new ways about audience and subject matter; for almost all students, multigenre essays made them think differently about an essay's form and how a change in form allowed them to position themselves differently within their discipline.

This project explores the productive form and function of rhetorics that produce and are produced by the US crisis of migration. Occupying the disciplinary interstices of rhetorical theory, transnational feminist inquiry, ethnic studies, and critical analyses of race, this project presents an analysis of citizenship as defined by DREAMer activism. "DREAMer" is the popular label given to undocumented young activists who initially mobilized in support of the DREAM Act. I analyze multimodal texts from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance's (NIYA) "Bring Them Home" campaign, a DREAMer-led set of actions advocating for migrant belonging, and argue that in addition to their radical possibilities, migrant-rights rhetorics also reify neoliberal discourses of gendered, sexualized, and racialized oppression that sustain the dehumanization of migrants of color in the US. At a time when migration crises are gaining increasing global attention, this project challenges scholars and activists to imagine discourses and practices that avoid reproducing racialized, sexualized, and gendered oppressions. I analyze multimodal texts related to the Dream 9, Dream 30, and Dream 150 actions in which groups of DREAMers who had been deported or left the US on their own accord presented themselves at various US Ports of Entry and asked the US for asylum. Part of NIYA's "Bring the Home" campaign, these unprecedented actions transformed traditional migrant-rights activism by asking for DREAMers to be allowed to "return home," thus, crafting the nation-state as the home in which DREAMers belong. Employing rhetorical analysis, I argue that DREAMer activism helps to redefine the nation-state in ways that are more inclusive to migrants of color; yet, because they rely on the nation-state as the granter of belonging, these migrant rhetorics also reinforce neoliberal nationalist ideas of individualism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy that legitimize the continued exclusion of migrants of color from the national imaginary.

This dissertation, "(De)Compose, Shape-Shift, and Suture: Toward a Monstrous Rhetoric of Fan Compositions," argues that the multimodal compositions of fans--specifically, fan fiction, meta, videos, and visual-spatial compositions--are articulations of a new kind of rhetoric: a monstrous rhetoric. This monstrous rhetoric is characterized by the dissolution of textual, corporeal, and cosmological boundaries; intense affective engagement; decomposition and recomposition; shape-shifting; and reanimation. Employing a feminist nomadic research methodology, I rhetorically analyze multiple fan compositions across several online fandoms and explore how these creative works inform and challenge current conversations about embodiment, affect, subjectivity, and composition pedagogy. As a project grounded in pedagogical practice, this dissertation is concerned with how a greater awareness of fan cultures and practices can lead to a greater understanding of what drives and sustains student engagement and participation in the context of an increasingly digital and mobile media landscape. Ultimately, this project offers a new rhetorical framework located at the intersection of fandom and monstrosity, and, from that new framework, a pedagogy of the monstrous, which proffers new strategies for approaching, creating, and analyzing new media and multimodal compositions in college writing classrooms.

The performance objectives of professional education are often more explicit, and the relationship with the world of work more immediate and comprehensive, than those of other university majors that are frequently the subject of writing-across-the-curriculum scholarship. This cross-sectional study of samples of both students and professors in the basic undergraduate program leading to the Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree seeks (1) to determine how they view the roles of writing in the major; (2) to ascertain the assumptions that inform how both groups handle writing within the context of classroom and clinical settings; and (3) to discover what practices result from these views and assumptions. Information was gathered from students through questionnaires, interviews and writing samples, and from faculty through a course writing inventory, course materials and interviews. The data show how writing serves individual, course and program goals; describe some of the ways in which writing is related to the theoretical frameworks and evolution of the discipline; and provide insight into how students conceive of and approach the writing required in their coursework. The final chapter outlines the interconnected roles of writing in this academic program and discusses how writing is used in fashioning professional identity, in teaching, in curricular structure, in fostering individual development, and in advancing professional nursing, and possible links between feminist epistemological studies and the roles of writing in professional education are suggested.

This study explored, from a phenomenological perspective, the experiences people in therapy had with autobiographical writing, including the descriptions of their experiences and what occurred during and after writing, and their evaluations of this form of writing. It describes some ways in which this form of writing can help facilitate therapeutic change. Three women and one man in therapy engaged in a period of autobiographical writing focused on a problematic event in their family-of-origin that served as a quasi presenting problem for this study. Data was gathered through an in-depth interview with participants at the end of the period of writing, the journals that participants were requested to keep, and the observations of their therapists gathered by in-depth interviews. It was found that writing autobiography facilitated the expression of feelings, a shift in a personal paradigm, a beginning sense of self as agent, and changes in relationships. It was determined that this process of writing, regardless of the content of that writing, had the potential to provide therapeutic benefit to the writer. Participants found the writing partially responsible for their experiences and helpful in bringing forward the realization that there was a problem that needed to be addressed. It also made issues tangible and facilitated their ability to work with them, process and let go of them. Participants advocated the use of autobiographical writing as a tool in therapy because it brought up issues being worked on in a different format, it revealed things about the writer, even to that person, it loosened up things attached to the story, it made one's experiences real to oneself, and it was useful in reviewing one's life and honoring one's witnessing of one's life. Therapists found some benefits in this tool. For example, it facilitated deep focused work, accelerated the writer's process, fostered self-reflective work outside of therapy, and brought a particular experience to the surface and allowed it to be worked on.

The objective of this study is to provide the basis of demarcation between radically alternative philosophies, between different theories of society, and between competing politics, by rearticulating what-Althusser calls the Marxist Philosophy that Marx practices in his critique of capitalism. I argue and demonstrate how the Marxist theory of the condition of discourse about history illuminates the epistemological nature and political implications of various discourses, making coherent and effective praxis possible. Demarcation of radical alternatives is critical now more than ever because the alternative to the hegemonic practices, along with the very notions of demarcation and radical alternative, is severely undermined. As a case in which the alternative discourse and politics were sorely needed but conspicuously missing, I analyze U.S. public discourses about the North Korean nuclear program. The philosophical nature of the postmodern/poststructuralist anti-totalization needs to be closely examined and critiqued, because it has practically declared the death of Marxism as a critical theory of history and claims its place as the source of political inspiration for profound social change. I rearticulate the Althusserian Marxist theory of discourse in terms of the relations between philosophy and theory, between theory and the object of theory, between structure and a concept. From the perspective of the Althusserian Marxist theory of discourse and ideology, humanist notions of rationality and objectivity/subjectivity (that postmodernism and its critique have revived) are critiqued and juxtaposed with Althusserian concepts of 'determination of consciousness by ideology' and the 'relative autonomy of ideology and consciousness from the other historical conditions'. The central thesis of Marxist Philosophy is that determination and overdetermination are the key and organic properties of structure. It is also the basis of my critique of postmodern/poststructuralist anti-totalization. I examine the ways in which Foucault's Archaeology is an unwarranted return to the familiar empiricist inversion of Hegelian idealism. I argue that Derrida's deconstruction, his rejection of the very notion of philosophy that leads to sustainable knowledge, is based on the naturalization of the hegemonic philosophy in which the discursive universe consists of the dichotomy of empiricism and idealism.