Browsing by Author "Rude, Carolyn"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    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.
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    Letter from English professor Carolyn Rude
    Rude, Carolyn (Digital Library and Archives, University Libraries, Virginia Tech, 2012-03-12)
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    Protecting the Breast and Promoting Femininity: The Breast Cancer Movement's Production of Fear Through a Rhetoric of Risk
    Desiderio, Gina Christine (Virginia Tech, 2004-04-30)
    Tremendously popular in American society, the breast cancer movement functions through a rhetoric of risk to persuade women to monitor their breasts and thus medicalize their bodies. The vast majority of breast cancer literature available is specifically aimed at women with breast cancer, while the research here examines the way the breast cancer literature actually includes women without breast cancer in its audience, expecting these women to see breast cancer as an eventual experience. The rhetoric of risk focuses on lifestyle choices, the body, genes, and the environment in order to encourage women to engage in body projects to prevent breast cancer. The attention to risk factors without reliable facts produces fear of the body. Prevention of breast cancer, really impossible, becomes synonymous with early detection, thus displacing responsibility for the disease from society to the individual. Through the rhetoric of risk, the breast cancer movement promotes the ideology of femininity by manipulating women to become complicit subjects in their subordination. Furthermore, the directives, as yet unproven, to prevent breast cancer are the same directives to attain the white heterosexist ideal of beauty. The woman is thus reinscribed into the traditional feminine role of caretaker (of her body) and femininity is not only preserved but produced despite a disease that physically threatens a woman's most visible marker of her femininity, the breast.
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    Rhetoric, Disability, and Prenatal Testing: Down Syndrome as an Object of Discourse
    Reed, Amy Rachel (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-20)
    This project considers how disability studies and rhetorical studies—specifically the area of medical rhetoric—might usefully inform one another. In particular, this project examines prenatal testing for Down syndrome as a rhetorical situation that initiates and circulates many different discourses about Down syndrome. Chapter One begins by examining a frequently cited statistic in critiques of prenatal testing—the estimated pregnancy termination rate after a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. It explores the validity of this statistic and uses this discussion to suggest that the effects of prenatal testing on social understandings of Down syndrome are complex and largely unknown. Chapter Two argues that intellectual disabilities, like Down syndrome, are underrepresented in disability studies literature and that their absence can be partially attributed to models of disability used in the field. Chapter Three argues that rhetorical analysis provides a means of examining how Down syndrome is discursively constructed. Chapter Four describes the events of prenatal testing for Down syndrome and analyzes the events as a rhetorical situation. In addition, it reviews feminist, disability, and cultural critiques of prenatal testing demonstrating the strengths of each strand of scholarship and suggesting where rhetorical analysis might provide new information. Chapters Five and Six provide analysis of two commentaries on the rhetorical situation of prenatal testing—genetic counseling discourse and parent discourse. These chapters find that ideal genetic counseling discourse offers pregnant women some opportunities to resist medicalization but also exhibits tension between what counselors say they do and what their rhetorical practice affords, especially regarding disability. In addition, analysis shows that users of prenatal testing are concerned with several factors of decision-making that are either not emphasized or ignored entirely in genetic counseling discourse. This project concludes that although different discourses about Down syndrome are available, elements of the prenatal testing situation make it easier for participants to draw on some discourses rather than others. Furthermore, it appears that certain events in the prenatal testing situation—such as the offer of amniocentesis—operate rhetorically in tacit ways, obscuring the relationship between the choice to undergo genetic screening and perceived meanings of Down syndrome.
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    The Social Role of Popularized Science
    Ross, Derek Gilbert (Virginia Tech, 2004-07-29)
    In this thesis I will argue that popularized science books should adhere to normative criteria regarding the presentation, interpretation, and understanding of the natural sciences. The increasing popularity of popular science texts (PSTs) - based on sales, critical notice, and scholarly attention - indicates that they can function to interest and partially educate the lay public in scientific principals and practices. I will identify and analyze the narrative, rhetorical features of two popular science texts: Douglas Adams' Last Chance to See and Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams. These texts are selected based on a series of normative criteria, criteria constructed for the purpose of enhancing the public understanding of science. Additionally, these criteria are needed to help the lay public develop a proper appreciation of science. A proper appreciation of science, I argue, enables people to make better informed decisions regarding their own personal welfare and also that of the natural world. Finally, a proper appreciation of science, stimulated by PSTs, may help both scientists and the lay public reconceive the possibilities of narrative, public writing, and civic discourse.