VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "George, Diana L."

Browsing by Author "George, Diana L."

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Among the Giants: Resituating the Environmental Philosophy of John Steinbeck
Shanks, Justin Donald (Virginia Tech, 2009-10-23)
Deeply influenced by emotional, ethical, and ecological principles, John Steinbeck developed a holistic ideology to describe and analyze the relationships among individuals, society, and the more-than-human world. Although he explored environmental issues with ecological insight and philosophical contemplation that placed him well beyond his literary and scientific contemporaries, Steinbeck’s contributions to modern ecological inquiry and environmental thought have received only intermittent attention from literary scholars. Throughout his writing, Steinbeck develops a view of intellectual holism that encourages (perhaps even enables) us to dovetail science and ethics as we attempt to construct a new environmental paradigm. Viewing the world through his holistic lens, Steinbeck was able to see the global ecosystem, local environments, human communities, and even minute tide pools as objects of scientific and artistic inquiry. Specifically, it is my contention that the American environmental movement owes a greater debt to John Steinbeck than it realizes. In short, John Steinbeck made significant contributions to the growing awareness of human-nature interconnectedness and the parallels between social ills and ecological ailments. Yet, for whatever reasons Steinbeck is not granted a position of honor alongside the other giants of American environmental thought. Now witnessing the full blossoming of 21st century environmentalism, it is useful to cast a reflexive eye upon our ideological forebears with the intent to better understand the genealogy of the American environmental movement. Doing so will not only provide a richer and fuller family tree, but will also promote additional flourishing of new approaches to solving ongoing environmental troubles.
Assessing the Impact of Writing Centers on Student Writing
Lama, Prabin Tshering (Virginia Tech, 2018-04-30)
This study assesses the influence of writing center tutorials on student writing and presents tutoring best practices. Writing center scholars have emphasized the need for evidence-based studies to understand how one-on-one tutorials influence student writing practices. After examining twenty tutorial recordings along with their pre-and post-intervention drafts in two state universities (ten in each university), the author traced the influence of writing center tutorials on students' post-session revisions and identified tutoring best practices. The findings show that all the twenty students included in the study followed up on the issues addressed in their tutorials, in some form or the other, in their post-session drafts. In terms of tutoring strategies, the findings revealed that although most of the tutors in the study could identify and speak about global concerns (i.e. development, structure, purpose, audience), many lacked specific strategies to address these concerns effectively. To address this concern, this study identifies tutoring best practices related to global concerns. Furthermore, the findings also revealed that the tutors faced challenges navigating the directive/non-directive continuum of tutoring. To address this concern, this study presents tutoring best practices to demonstrate how tutors can shift flexible between directive and non-directive strategies during a session.
Beyond Invention: How Hackers Challenge Memory & Disrupt Delivery
Lockridge, Timothy Alan (Virginia Tech, 2012-03-29)
This dissertation uses a case study of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly to consider how the practices of a hacker public might be theorized as a rhetorical activity. The project is contextualized within a history of hacking (building from a narrative that centers on Levy's 1984 book Hackers) and within the arc of recent copyright legislation, specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the 2011-12 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) debates. Within this framework, the dissertation examines how specific patterns and cases within 2600 might further our understanding of the rhetorical canons of memory and delivery and of dissent in digital spaces. Specifically, the project presents three practices of memory at work in 2600: Aggregating, Fingerprinting, and Narrating. Drawing on the work of Collin Gifford Brooke and Mary Carruthers, among others, the dissertation examines how texts printed in 2600 present memory not as an inert technology but rather as a practice and a pedagogy—a response to the increasing commercialization of technology. The dissertation then uses Jim Porter's techne of digital delivery to analyze three specific moments in 2600's history (the 1985 U.S. Government raid on New Jersey hackers, the E911 lawsuit, and the DeCSS narrative), illustrating how our spaces of textual production have become increasingly regulated and commercialized and considering how that regulation/commercialization affects our understanding of ownership, circulation, and the public sphere. Building on Michel de Cereteau's concept of strategies and tactics and Michael Warner's theory of (counter)publics, the dissertation ultimately argues that a history of hacker publics offers one way to reconceptualize and reintegrate theories and technologies of digital circulation into our scholarly work and curricular goals.
Crazier than Sack of Ferrets!: Deadpool as the Post-Watchmen Superhero
Day, Kenna Alise (Virginia Tech, 2015-09-14)
Watchmen has been hailed as revolutionary not only for the literary quality of Alan Moore's script and the precise execution of Dave Gibbon's art, but also for the novel's successful exploration of sophisticated subject matter and realistic moral conflict. Perhaps the most interesting question Watchmen forces us to consider is why an individual would put on the costume and don the mask, and how such a constructed persona affects the individual psychologically and morally. For those heroes that came before, the compulsion to fight crime was often an in-born ideology of justice. But for Moore's Watchmen, we find that even superheroes are corruptible, flawed, imperfect, and even (more than) a little crazy. In the wake of what is arguably one of the most influential superhero novels published to date, the comics industry saw a rise in the popularity of anti-heroes like Moore's, but it wasn't until the 1991 creation of Marvel's Deadpool that fans saw exactly what it means to be a hero in the post-atomic, post-Vietnam age. Through self-reflexivity, genre deconstruction, and dark hysteria, Deadpool shows us that it isn't so easy to walk the straight line of the righteous, and that sometimes it's much easier to submit to the madness of a chaotic, morally ambiguous world.
Disciplinary Participation and Genre Acquisition of Graduate Teaching Assistants in Composition
Cover, 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.
The Evolution of Marie de France's Lanval
Briscoe, Emma Caitlin (Virginia Tech, 2015-09-28)
Since the early fourteenth century, scholars, playwrights and screenplay writers have translated and reinterpreted Marie de France's Lanval. This lai in is the second most frequently translated throughout the medieval era and it continues to be reimagined and retold. All of the translations and reimagined renditions of the Lanval story have in common a strange tonality of otherworldly attraction, unusual gender dynamics, a curious new age aura, and elements of proto-feminism especially in terms of female agency, empowerment and eroticism. While some of these motifs seem to reflect more modern understandings of gender dynamics and conceptualizations of women, a critical analysis of Marie's original text in combination with an exploration of Celtic sources reveals that these motifs were always already present. These elements, stemming from Celtic oral traditions and finding their way across the often unnavigable barriers of time, culture, language, re-adaptation, and genre, establish Marie's Lanval as timeless.
Holy Cards/Immaginette: The Extraordinary Literacy of Vernacular Religion
George, Diana L.; Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi (National Council of Teachers of English, 2008-12)
Like other seemingly ordinary materials (cookbooks, street art, scrapbooks, etc.) the subject of our investigation-holy cards or (in Italian) immaginette-often function as rich repositories of personal and cultural memory as well as indicators of popular literacy practices. But to relegate them to the category of ephemera, as is customary with materials of this sort, diverts attention from their significant cultural and pedagogical value. In our attempt to foreground the complex nature and function of these artifacts, we have found much of the scholarship on vernacular or material religion and everyday culture particularly helpful. In their attention to what popular culture scholar David Morgan has called "objects that have not mattered in most historical accounts," these areas of study have lent support to our "understanding of the[ir] power and meaning" (xi). Yet, it is literacy studies that has enabled us to cast light on and to articulate their intricate, extraordinary pedagogical workings. At the same time, these humble artifacts have enabled us to critically re-approach and put pressure on some of the most commonplace articulations of literacy. Our goal then is to demonstrate that these seemingly "ordinary objects" are significant cultural and historical signifiers and that as such they can contribute to a fuller understanding of the common literacy practices of vernacular religion.
Identity, Ethos, and Community: Rhetorical Dimensions of Secular Mommy Blogs
Macdonald, Lindsey Marie (Virginia Tech, 2015-06-17)
This study examines secular mommy bloggers, a group of women who blog about the difficulties of being a nonbeliever parent in a predominantly religious society. In this study, I explore the rhetorical dimensions of four separate blogs by investigating how each mother builds identity within her personal blog and how her sense of identity enables her to construct individual ethos. Furthermore, I illustrate how the individual ethos of each blogger contributes to a group ethos representing the entire secular parenting community. Ultimately, I show how these mothers rhetorically set themselves apart from other nonbeliever/secular groups.
"Like Their Lives Depended On It": The Role of Comics in Subverting Anti-Arab and Islamophobic Discourse
Lawson, Daniel (Virginia Tech, 2011-04-22)
This dissertation examines the role the medium of comics plays in the construction and subversion of anti-Arab and Islamophobic discourse. It seeks to address the following questions in particular: how does the medium of comics interpellate subjects regarding the Western discursive formation that conflates Arab, Muslim, and terrorist? What does the medium of comics afford creators in subverting dominant discourses that dehumanize Arabs and Muslims? I argue that as a hypermedium in which text and repeated images are in continual tension, comics challenge the sort of foundational notion of truth necessary for dominant discourse. I use a Foucauldian lens to examine several comics in relation to larger discursive formations. In Chapter 1, I explain the problem, my methods, and my theory in more detail. In Chapter 2, I apply this theory as a lens to examine the rhetorical work the medium plays in subverting dominant discourse in Palestine, a nonfiction piece of comics journalism. I use Chapter 3 to problematize the assertions made in the first two chapters by looking at an instance where comics are used to reinscribe dominant discourse. Specifically, I analyze the graphic adaptation of The 9/11 Report. Chapter 4 acts as something of a retort to Chapter 3; it examines In the Shadow of No Towers to interrogate the ways in which Art Spiegelman explicitly addresses not only the issues he grappled with as a New Yorker during and after 9/11, but the complex relations of representation that arose from the event. Chapter 5 I examine how subversion works when a hypermedium is further remediated by analyzing Didier LeFevre's The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders. The Conclusion is devoted to discussing the implications of this study, both in terms of pedagogy and in terms of theorizing the relationship and differences between image and text. I argue that comics demonstrate the productive ideological tensions that exist between modes of signification (such as verbal and visual). An understanding of this ideological tension is key for scholars of visual rhetoric and hegemonic discourse.
Multimodal Composition and the Rhetoric of Comics: A Study of Comics Teams in Collaboration
Scanlon, Molly Jane (Virginia Tech, 2013-05-01)
The field of writing studies has long inquired about how writers engage in individualized writing processes. As an extension of this inquiry, contemporary scholarship in writing studies began to study collaborative writing through the understanding of writing as a social act. Our understanding of writing processes and collaborative writing has expanded through studies of writing as it occurs in the academy, the workplace, and extracurricular settings. Still, to a large extent, inquiries about writing processes and collaborative writing activity centered on alphabetic texts and focused on writers. Rarely do studies engage"in addition to writers"artists and designers as authors in the collaborative writing process. Composing, as understood by scholars and teachers of writing, is changing due to technological shifts in media and yet, as a field, we have failed to question multimodal composing as an individual or collaborative process.
To extend previous writing studies scholarship, this dissertation engages qualitative case study methodology to explore three unique multimodal collaborations of comics authors. As a visual rhetoric scholar with a personal focus on teaching students about composing in all media, I am drawn to asking questions about how arguments are composed using multimodal means. My personal and scholarly interest in comics led to inquiries about how comics are composed and initial research found that comics are often composed in collaboration, with writers and artists who with them carry multiple and varying literacies (alphabetic text, visual, spatial, etc.). Comics provide a rich subject of study to address this inquiry because of their inherently multimodal nature as a medium that incorporates both word and picture in diverse combinations and for a variety of rhetorical purposes. For this study, I have chosen to focus on comics texts that differ in terms of subject matter, genre, and collaborative makeup in order to examine multimodal collaborations and create distinct cases. Through three cases of multimodal collaboration"Understanding Rhetoric, the Cheo comics, and Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline"this study argues for a further complication of our field\'s understanding of writing processes and collaborative composing.
Playing the Writing Game: Gaming the Writing Play
Beale, Matthew Carson (Virginia Tech, 2006-04-26)
My studies consider the application of digital game theory to the instruction of writing in the first year composition classroom. I frame my argument through dialectic of representation and simulation and the cultural shift now in progress from the latter to the former. I first address the history of multimodal composition in the writing classroom, specifically noting the movement from analysis to design. In the third chapter, I examine several primary tenants of video game theory in relation to traditional academic writing, such as the concept of authorship and the importance of a rule system. My final chapter combines the multimodal and digital game theory to create what I term "digital game composition pedagogy." The last chapter offers new ways to discuss writing and composing through the theories of video games, and shows how video games extend the theories associated with writing to discussions that coincide with an interest that many of our students have outside of the classroom.
Re-Defining C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman: Conventional and Progressive Heroes and Heroines in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and The Golden Compass
McKagen, Elizabeth Leigh (Virginia Tech, 2009-04-28)
C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman are two very popular authors of British Children's Fantasy. Their books The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and The Golden Compass straddle the period of writing that Karen Patricia Smith calls the Dynamic Stage of British Fantasy: from 1950 to the present. Both of these books are part of a larger series and both have been made into recent motion pictures by Hollywood. This paper explores these two books through the lens of their conventional and progressive authors. I discuss in detail the gifts that the heroes and heroines are given, the setting of these books, and the function of destiny and prophecy in order to explore the irony of these books: C.S. Lewis, often viewed as the more conventional author by scholars, is in fact more progressive than his contemporary counterpart.
Specialized Online Publics and Rhetorical Ecologies: A Study of Civic Engagement in Natural Resource Management
Kowalewski, 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.
A Study of Writing within Discipline-Specific Writing Support Centers: Expanding our Definitions
Morrison, Rebecca Ann (Virginia Tech, 2016-08-01)
This dissertation explores discipline-specific writing support spaces in an attempt to better understand disciplinary writing from various perspectives. Neal Lerner suggests that writing center scholarship would benefit from interdisciplinary work; therefore, I investigate spaces that are uniquely positioned in disciplines to identify disciplinary questions within writing center work. These spaces will allow writing center professionals to gain a better understanding of the intersections between writing in the disciplines and writing center work, and the writing center's role in student learning, from within the disciplines. We can then integrate these interdisciplinary frameworks into writing center scholarship to broaden perspectives and subsequently better accommodate students across disciplines. This scholarship could offer some clarity as we try to expand our scholarly purview in order to identify some of the questions writing center professionals should be asking. Through ten interviews from three different academic institution, this dissertation interrogates questions that have been embedded within writing center scholarship for decades. This dissertation shows the prominence of the generalist / specialist debate, the 'students can't write' narrative, and explores a situated learning theory in writing center practice. While there has been valuable research done in writing center research and scholarship in an attempt to move writing centers out of the margins, many writing centers still maintain a marginalized status to some faculty and administrators within their institutions. Unless we shift the perception of, and the narratives coming from, writing centers, we might be replaced by writing support centers that are not affiliated with writing centers. These writing support spaces, as shown in this dissertation, provide students a plethora of discipline-specific resources, often including research and communication. If writing centers do not distinguish themselves as a place that can help students across disciplines, writing centers might move from a marginalized position into having no position within the institution at all. For writing center scholars, professionals, and students, the findings of this dissertation mean that as writing centers attempt to accommodate students who write in the disciplines, our identity potentially becomes distorted. Therefore, we must pay special attention to the narratives we use in the writing center and subsequently circulate to our faculty. We have an opportunity to reconsider those narratives and offer a new theoretical framework for how we conceive of and define writing center work. If we do not adapt a situated learning theory in writing centers, we might consider other alternatives so that writing support spaces, such as those highlighted here, do not replace writing centers altogether. Those of us who are involved in writing center theory and practice have a responsibility to consider the alternative venues students might seek for help and to, as a community, identify best practices and theoretical frameworks as writing centers seek to accommodate disciplinary writers.
Transfer and Faculty Writing Knowledge: An Activity Theory Analysis
Dirk, Kerry Jean (Virginia Tech, 2013-04-23)
The purpose of this study was to determine how faculty members' previous writing experiences in a variety of activity systems shaped their current understanding of writing, as well as to analyze the ways in which this understanding manifests itself in the courses they teach. Using a survey, interviews, genre analysis, and class observations, I aimed to gain an understanding of the ways that faculty members across disciplines transferred and/or recontextualized their own disciplinary writing knowledge. Previous research on faculty writing knowledge is often limited to participants at universities with long-standing, formalized WAC programs. Through nine case-study analyses of faculty across disciplines, this study expands the scope of previous research by focusing on a more diverse set of faculty to contribute to our knowledge of how faculty members negotiate their own understanding of writing with their goals for student writing. The participants' ability to transfer writing knowledge was largely determined by the way they understood their own processes of learning to write. Those who understood learning to writing from a social interactive perspective transferred rhetorical knowledge among activity systems, while faculty who understood learning to write from a text-based ideology relied on their knowledge of form, grammar and/or mechanics. Participants who shared a writer-based understanding, on the other hand, were resistant to the notion that writing can be taught. Though not entirely inclusive, these unique understandings of how writers develop manifest themselves in the ways disciplinary faculty include writing in their courses. This study demonstrates the nuanced and complex reasons for faculty choices in relation to student writing and encourages WAC/WID writing scholars to consider the complexities of faculty understandings of writing knowledge.
Writing in a New Environment: Saudi ESL Students Learning Academic Writing
Saba, 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.

Browsing by Author "George, Diana L."

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