Browsing by Author "Belanger, Kelly R."
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- Disciplinary Participation and Genre Acquisition of Graduate Teaching Assistants in CompositionCover, Jennifer (Virginia Tech, 2011-03-29)This project focuses on the way that new graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) in English develop both their professional identity as teachers and their view of Composition as a field. Drawing on social theories of disciplines (Prior, 1998; Hyland, 2004; Carter, 2007), disciplinary enculturation (Hasrati, 2005; Bazerman and Prior, 2005; Thaiss and Zawacki, 2006), and legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger 1998), this dissertation examines the transition that composition GTAs undergo during their first year of graduate school. Many of these GTAs move from little or no knowledge of Composition as a discipline to teaching their own writing courses. I focus on GTAs from MA and MFA programs at a large research university in their first year of teaching composition. Using multiple types of data, including in-depth interviews, observations of practicum and mentoring sessions, and teaching genres written by the GTAs, I construct a narrative that shows the role that teaching composition plays in the overall identity construction of graduate students as professionals. This wide data set has allowed me to see the various ways (and various genres) in which Composition is constructed in the lives of new GTAs. Teacher preparation programs offer a variety of assistance, including experience shadowing current teachers, practicum courses and individual or group mentoring. I study the ways these activities help GTAs in one first-year writing program move toward a fuller understanding of and participation in Composition, and how these experiences relate to the overall graduate student experience. Each of these experiences helps move GTAs toward participation as composition teachers. However, the degree to which these GTAs participate in Composition as a discipline has to do with their relationships with mentors and the connections they make between the multiple communities of practice that they must continually navigate.
- Epideictic Space: Community, Memory, and Future Invention at Civil War Tourist SitesFields, Cynthia Fern (Virginia Tech, 2015-04-26)This dissertation examines American Civil War tourist spaces in order to describe how epideictic rhetoric has distinct spatial functions that affect the identity of tourists. Through an analysis of three Civil War spaces in Virginia--Lexington, Appomattox Court House, and the Museum of the Confederacy--I argue epideictic space is a locus of invention that has the performative power to create community, public memory, and a vision of the future through the movement of bodies in space. Through a consubstantial ethos established between space and audience, epideictic creates kairotic space and time by collapsing past, present, and future in order to create a narrative history with which the community can identify. This study traces rhetoric related to the Confederate flag, slavery, nationalism, and reconciliation through an analysis of the Civil War spaces in which these discourses are embodied. I suggest that creating a productive rhetoric of blame starts through connecting blame, such as remembering slavery, to the materiality of space and through creating narratives of responsibility that connect memory to a vision of the future.
- From Inclusion to Transformation: Decolonial Feminist Comix Methodology (With Handy Illustrations)Howes, Frances A. (Virginia Tech, 2014-07-25)Feminist rhetorics need to move us from inclusion to transformation: instead of "including" more and more marginalized groups into the scholarly status quo, or "including" comics into methods of analysis that we already use, we need to transform our practices themselves. Seeing comics research as an expedition into comics doesn't work. The spatial metaphor is failing because it's analogous to a takeover in the colonial sense. I center the both/and experience of being a producer of comics and analyst of them. Drawing from a critical reading of my own comic, I describe "the disobedient how," a way of learning from transgressive models. I argue that instead of "collecting" comics, decolonial feminist methodology asks that we "attend" comics through listening, experiencing, and having a relationship with them and their creators. As Shawn Wilson's work suggests, knowledge lies in relationships. I use this concept to guide an analysis of Lynda Barry's recent comics work as well as her comments during a panel at the Comics: Philosophy and Practice conference. In order for academics to have true knowledge about Barry's work, we must have a right relationship to her and to it, which requires decolonizing our relationship to texts and taking Barry's comics seriously as sources of theory. Next, I argue for scholars to pay closer attention to Alison Bechdel's comics beyond their engagement with her memoir, Fun Home. I describe her participation in queer rhetoric through a close reading of her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For and her public discussion of her composing practices. Finally, I perform a retrospective of the history of my own comic book, Oh Shit, I'm in Grad School, drawing on (and developing documentation for) personal archives.
- From Reflection to Reflexivity: Challenging Students' Conceptions of Writing, Self, and Society in the Community Writing ClassroomO'neill, Megan Elizabeth (Virginia Tech, 2012-03-28)This dissertation, "From Reflection to Reflexivity: Challenging Students' Conceptions of Writing, Self, and Society in the Community Writing Classroom," examines the disconnect that characterizes much of the discussion of reflective writing in community writing studies and argues for the potential of reflexivity as a concept to further develop the kinds of reflective writing assigned in community writing classrooms. Many practitioners and scholars view reflective writing as a potentially powerful tool that may help students learn challenging or abstract theories and practices from their own community writing experiences. With such potential, it can be disappointing when student reflective writing does not achieve teacher expectations of critical thinking and analysis, stopping before critical engagement and understanding is achieved. Instead, it often centers on students' personal feelings and motivations that shape or arise from their community experiences. This dissertation argues that one reason for such a disconnect between teacher expectations and actual student writing, comes from the word "reflection" itself. While a traditional understanding of reflective writing asks students to look back on their experiences, observations, feelings, and opinions, community writing teachers use the term "reflection" with qualifiers like "critical," "sustained," or "intellectually rich." In qualifying their expectations for reflective writing, teachers are in fact asking for something very different from reflection, namely, reflexivity. When reflexive thinking is presented to students as "qualified reflection" it loses the considerable theoretical grounding that makes it a particularly unique way of using experiences as the foundation for inquiry. Building on theories of epistemological reflexivity for researchers in the social sciences, this dissertation highlights the methodological reflexivity theorized and practiced by feminist researchers. Feminist reflexivity specifically affords researchers more nuanced ways of looking at issues of positionality, social transformation, and agency. Such strategies have the potential for moving student reflections from private writings toward writings that impact students' understandings of the rhetorical and theoretical issues that community writing hopes to illustrate. This combination of feminist reflexivity and community writing reflections can provide community writing theorists and practitioners with alternative ways to solve reflective writing's challenges.
- Organizational Identity-Power in Practice: The Rhetorics of University IdentitySharp, Matthew R. (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-11)This dissertation explores how various versions of a university's identity"including the leadership-sponsored brand as well as alternate rhetorics of organizational identity"shape the policies and practices of the university itself through the lenses of rhetoric and power. While the concept of organizational identity has been studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including marketing, organizational communication, graphic design, and organizational behavior, they all seem to have a common goal: maintaining the status-quo of management's control over all perceptions of the organization's identity. Most organizations however, do not have a single monolithic identity, especially large, decentralized organizations like universities. Alternate rhetorics of identity exist, but these management-centered approaches do not allow for their role in shaping organizational identity or practice. The rhetorically-grounded approach that guides this dissertation, however, which is based on identity-formation through identification as well as the role of rhetoric as a method of determining the most appropriate and effective ways of moving people to action, acknowledges the role of these alternate identity-rhetorics in organizational life and recognizes their potential impact on organizational activity. Through three cases of organizational decision making and policy creation at Virginia Tech, this dissertation explores the ways that the various rhetorics of identity within the university (including the official, leadership-sponsored brand and other versions of organizational identity held by university members) contradict, reflect, and co-construct each other and organizational practice. Through ethnographic interviews with members of the Virginia Tech community, participant-observation of a brand training program, and analysis of various visual, verbal, and multimodal texts related to each case study, this project explores these many rhetorics of organizational identity as they struggle for the power to shape the institution. This dissertation encourages researchers, teachers, and practitioners of professional and technical communication to recognize alternative organizational identity-rhetorics because of their potential power to shape the organization. Specifically within educational institutions, this project suggests that branding initiatives be critiqued as potentially hegemonic forces that repress these alternative identity perspectives, which may provide necessary incentives or conduits for organizational growth.
- Research Centers as Change Agents: Reshaping Work in Rhetoric and WritingGogan, Brian; Belanger, Kelly R.; Patriarca, Ashley S.; O'Neill, Meagan (National Council of Teachers of English, 2010-12)This article defines research centers as associative enterprises for solving scholarly and societal problems that cannot be adequately addressed by individuals. We identify more than fifty research centers in rhetoric and writing, past and present, and argue that they function as change agents by emphasizing collaboration and conducting research focused on publics.
- Specialized Online Publics and Rhetorical Ecologies: A Study of Civic Engagement in Natural Resource ManagementKowalewski, Scott Jacob (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-03)This dissertation examines the public writing and civic engagement of an online community of a sportsmen forum, as the writing and engagement relate to natural resources management. Drawing from theories of public discourse and public rhetoric, this dissertation argues the sportsmen forum represents a specialized online public"publics that are constituted in digital spaces around shared interests and the circulation of texts and (vernacular) discourses, while existing in rhetorical ecologies. This dissertation argues sportsmen and sportswomen are an overlooked public within the field of Rhetoric and Writing. Not only are sportspersons stakeholders in natural resources issues, but they also represent primary reader-users of natural resource policy, making them a public of interest for rhetoric and writing scholars in areas such as public rhetoric, digital rhetoric, and technical communication. Beginning in the digital archives of the sportsmen forum, the dissertation isolates two case studies, each focusing on a current natural resource issue: deer management and feral swine management. The deer management case study represents the ways in which specialized online publics operate within rhetorical ecologies, while also exposing a space where these publics might make a greater impact in management practices through the formation of hybrid publics. Illustrating how hybrid publics might operate, the feral swine case study, examines collaboration between wildlife managers and sportspersons in the digital space of an online forum. Following the case studies, the dissertation concludes with a discussion of the scholarly and pedagogical implications of specialized online publics.
- Writing in a New Environment: Saudi ESL Students Learning Academic WritingSaba, Maggie Sami (Virginia Tech, 2014-01-09)This qualitative case study sought to gain a deeper understanding of the obstacles that students from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia face when learning English in a writing course that implements critical thinking and writing process pedagogy. The study took place over five months at the Virginia Tech Language and Culture Institute in spring 2012. While ten participants--six female and four male Saudi Arabian ESL students--participated in this study, these findings focus primarily on one male and one female student. The aim of this focus was to give a rich and in-depth description of the two students. Two main queries guided this study: 1) How do sex differences affect Saudi students' perception of their teachers' and peers' authority? 2) How do those perceptions affect their development as writers and critical thinkers when learning in an intensive writing course at the high intermediate level? The researcher documented data through three sources: classroom observation, interviews with ESL students and teachers, and student writing samples.