Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / This dissertation investigated whether women's traditional work, that is, the work of nurturing others, could rightly be classified as a form of creative expression. This was achieved through a theoretical analysis of the concept of creativity and a qualitative study of Virginia Woolf's creative identity as articulated in her female character, Clarissa Dalloway, in her novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925/1993) and coeval diary entries (1978, 1980). Five historical epochs were identified in the history of the concept of creativity, which were thematically determined, including, 1) ancient philosophies, 2) philosophies of the 4th to 15th centuries, 3) philosophies of the 16th to 18th centuries, 4) philosophies of the 19th century, and, finally, 5) philosophies of the 20th century. Whereas men's evolving conceptualizations of creativity were largely categorical, and appeared to value rationalism, individualism, control, mastery, and even superiority, women's generated systems of thought were more characteristically integrative, systemic, practical, and intent on the interpersonal. The study of Virginia Woolf's narrative revealed the same. In the process of writing her novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925/1993), Woolf and her character, Clarissa Dalloway, were simultaneously recreated. Both of these women's creative identities, in fact, were inherently relational, as opposed to individualistic and isolated-a creative identity that is consistent with traditional models of men's development. Findings revealed from both the theoretical study of the concept of creativity and Virginia Woolfs creativity identity were used to construct a more universal theory of creativity that acknowledged the developmental strengths of both men and women. Additionally, findings were discussed relative to optimism, the narrative construction of a woman's creative identity, and education. / 2999-01-01

Review of A to Z of American Women Writers, Revised Edition. New York: Facts on File, 2007. 398p. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8160-6693-3.

This project examines the representation of architectural and metaphoric spaces in the works of four nineteenth-century American women writers: Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Edith Wharton. I focus on what I call interstitial spaces: spaces that are neither wholly public nor private but that exist somewhere in between the public and private realms. Interstitial spaces are locations that women writers claim to resist the predominantly private restrictions of the family or the predominantly public conventions of society. Interstitiality becomes a border space that enables women writers?both for themselves and for their fictional characters?to redefine, rearrange, and challenge the expectations of public and private spaces in the nineteenth century. This dissertation investigates how nineteenth-century American women writers create interstitial spaces. Further, it demonstrates how they use such spaces to express their views, manipulate the divisions between the public and private realms, and defy societal and familial conventions. Since the mid-1970s, critics have been analyzing public and private under the assumption that the boundaries between the spheres were more porous than originally thought. This project adds to the critical dialogue concerning the separation of public and private realms as the conceptual framework of criticism shifts from an increased awareness of gender, race, and class. My project responds to the growing trend of analyzing literary works through architectural and spatial theories. While applying such theories, I focus on how race and class affect a writer's ability to create interstitial spaces. I further respond to this trend by considering authors who have not yet been included in this way, namely Wilson and Phelps. By analyzing the physical and rhetorical ways these authors manipulate space, I offer an account of gender, race, and class along with architectural and spatial concepts that juxtaposes authors who have not yet been considered together. My dissertation offers a new critical vocabulary to consider writers' representations of spaces by employing the word interstitial, which no other critic uses. I specifically use interstitial to describe spaces that exist between the public and private realms and describe the transformation in space that occurs through spatial and rhetorical manipulation.

Process writing research began with adult writers, eventually expanding to include school age children and more recently, emergent writers. Research at the early childhood level has often been directed at specific aspects of writing development rather than an examination of process writing development. This study used pre-existing writing samples to examine writing development in kindergarten and first grade over the course of the school year following the district-wide implementation of a writing process based intervention. The intervention utilized a writing workshop approach to teach the writing process with the addition of two elements: picture plans were used to support emergent writers’ prewriting plans, and teachers focused on a single teaching point to target writing instruction. Beginning and end of year samples from 138 kindergarten and 106 first-grade students from three elementary schools in a medium-sized, public school district in the southwestern United States were used for this study, yielding a total of 488 samples. The samples were scored to investigate the change over time on four outcome measures: quantity of words produced, attributes of prewriting picture plan, evelopmental level, and handwriting. In addition, the impact of fidelity to the intervention features was explored in relation to the four outcome measures. Fidelity to implementation was scored on each of the 10 separate aspects of the intervention: student choice for topics, reading-writing connections, prewriting, peer conferencing, teacher conferences, minilessons, revision, editing, publishing, and modeling. Overall, the study found that the greatest change over time in kindergarten and first grade was in the developmental level. There were also large effects for quantity of words produced and handwriting. A regression analysis was conducted to determine which aspects of the intervention feature were most critical to early writing development. Student choice had a significant positive association with all four dependent measures. Minilessons had a significant association with developmental level and handwriting; other significant positive associations included revision with quantity of words produced, and editing with planning. The findings suggest these features of writing workshops should be included in interventions designed to foster early writing development.

This mixed methods study combining a single-subject experimental design with an embedded case study focuses on the impact of a visual treatment on the handwritten and typed output of a struggling male writer during his 5 th through 7 th grades who has undergone a longitudinal remedial phase of two and a half years creating text-only material as well as graphic novels (on paper, on the computer, and online). The purpose of this research was to develop and assess the effectiveness and practicability of a visual treatment in order to help this high-achieving student with excellent comprehension and oral skills but impaired execution of writing tasks to produce cohesive, well-organized stories within a given time. It was hypothesized that by breaking up the assignments into visual chunks (speech bubbles), taking away the threat of a blank page to be filled by text only, exercising his artistic capabilities, and fostering pride of authorship and achievement through (online) sharing, this treatment would improve the participant's written output in quality, quantity, and pace. The 6+1 Trait ® Writing Scoring Continuum (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, early 1980s) was employed to assess the participant's writing performance, and the Flanders Interaction Analysis Categories (FIAC) (Flanders, 1970) were used to note his on-task/off-task behavior and the categories of his responses during tutoring sessions. An auditor was employed to confirm the investigator's evaluations; if contradictions occurred, the artifact in question was omitted from the study. The participant underwent extensive educational assessment regarding his reading and writing predilections and habits prior to study begin (quantitative data) in the form of rating scales, such as the Classroom Reading Inventory, the Elementary Writing Attitude Scale, and others. He was further observed during clinical supervision (audio- and videotaping), and underwent qualitative assessment (content analysis of written output) during the study, and post-study performance tests (quantitative and qualitative data). Baseline graphs were employed to establish the traits of his writing behavior during all three experimental stages (pre-treatment, treatment, post-treatment), and tutor logs shed further light on the participant's feelings and behavior under each condition. The interwoven mixed data revealed that the participant enjoyed the tutoring sessions, and even cried twice when he missed one, but that his attention deficit and off-task behavior severely interfered with the organization and quantity of his written output. The Flanders analysis showed that the slightest distraction through his environment (tutor, second tutee, etc.) took his focus off his writing tasks, and that the tiniest thing out of order (e.g., a wrong digital display of the current time of day on his computer screen) could occupy his thoughts for minutes, or trigger an exaggerated outburst after half an hour. Flanders also confirmed, as the higher quality of his output had shown, that the boy was strongly motivated by what interested him (Star Wars), and that he would put extra care in the creation of corresponding tasks. It can be concluded that self-chosen material, and not the format of graphic novels, motivated the participant to work. The content analysis of his post-treatment essay as compared to his pre-treatment essay showed that he was able to finish it, that the length had augmented, that the chronological order of events was maintained thanks to having learned organization through panels, but that the creativity and ideas had declined. Finally, the analysis of The 6+1 Trait ® Writing Scoring Continuum, which examined ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation of ten writing samples per stage, showed that the participant had scored 30.2 in the pre-treatment stage, 29.2 in the treatment stage, and 32.8 in the post-treatment stage. Given that the participant had matured during the two and a half years of study, the gain was not important enough to justify a graphic novel intervention to improve the writing of this specific student. The astonishing low score in the easiest stage, the treatment stage itself (where he only had to fill in speech bubbles) was a result of the genre itself (which called for less descriptive written output) and of the fact that the participant thought this stage was “easy” (as per interview from 05/17/2011) and might have felt not sufficiently challenged. It can be concluded that the graphic novel treatment was effective in helping with the chronological organization within the participant's texts, but this goal could maybe also have been achieved by structuring through sub-headings or perhaps voice recordings of a list of steps. Due to the high off-task behavior and time consumption, this treatment would not be feasible in a classroom setting, but might work in a resource room. During the treatment, the participant revealed himself as auditory, not just visual learner, who was motivated by sound and music, especially in combination with his online Star Wars photo story; he was planning on an animated story with movie features. In the future, this highly articulate child would benefit from self-chosen writing tasks that include the creation of online stories with pictures, animation, and sound. His behavior needed more remediation than the quality of his written output. Future studies should investigate the effectiveness of writing workshops using graphic novels within the classroom setting, as proposed by Thompson (2008), and also assess the benefits of digital story-telling (Burke & Kafai, 2012) as an additional motivational factor, while putting special emphasis on students who display autistic and ADHD behavior.

First, this study argues that the Oregon Writers' Project cannot be used as a measurement for the effectiveness of government subsidy of the arts. The people who ran the program never claimed to be supporting art but to be supporting unemployed writers. In fact, the administrators tried to discourage any freedom or flexibility which would have provided a climate for the writer to flourish in the artistic sense. With this recognition in mind, one may not validly use the Writers' Project as a tool for accurate measurement of governmental subsidization of art. This study also takes major exception to a previous work presented on the Federal Writers' Project in the Pacific Northwest. That study argued that a project was unnecessary in the Pacific Northwest due to the area's "literary and intellectual backwardness." In Oregon the program certainly had its problems, but the project was generally successful in meeting the major intent of the program--employing the unemployed in their self-selected profession. This program was not only useful but also humane; furthermore, it managed to preserve important history and the skills of people out of work in a time of severe depression.

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