A Genre Of Collective Intelligence: Blogs As Intertextual, Reciprocal, And Pedagogical

This thesis investigates the rhetorical features of blogs that lend them dialogic strength as an online genre through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin\u27s theories of speech genres, utterances, and dialogism. As a relatively new online genre, blogs stem from previous genres (in print and online as well as verbal), but their emergence as a popular form of expression in our current culture demands attention to how blogs also offer us different rhetorical opportunities to meet our changing social exigencies as online subjects in the 21st century. This thesis was inspired by questions about how blogs redefine the rhetorical situation to alter our textual roles as readers, writers, and respondents in the new generic circumstances we encounter--and reproduce--online. Applying the framework of Henry Jenkins\u27 Convergence Culture and Pierre Levy\u27s Collective Intelligence, this thesis analyzes how blogs enable us as online subjects to add our utterances to our textual collective intelligence, which benefits from our personal experience and the epistemic conversations of blogs as online texts. In addition, it is also an inquiry into how the rhetorical circumstances of blogs as textual sites of collective intelligence can create a reciprocal learning environment in the writing classroom. I ultimately examine blogs through the lenses of alternative pedagogy--informed by David Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald\u27s Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom and Xin Liu Gale\u27s Teachers, Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom--to suggest the potential consequences of a writing education that includes how we are currently writing--and being written by--our culture\u27s online generic practice of blogs

Stories at work : restorying narratives of new teachers\u27 identity learning in writing studies.

Rhetoric and composition has a long, robust history of studying how we train new writing teachers in our graduate/writing programs; yet we lack in-depth inquiries that foreground how new writing teachers learn. This dissertation traces five graduate students learning how to be and become writing teachers, using narrative as an object and means of analysis to study the tacitly internalized process of newcomer professional identity learning. In this project, I enact narrative as a feminist, interdisciplinary methodology to restory new writing teacher research narratives away from implicit deficit or explicit resistance and toward a more generative focus on newcomers’ motivated learning and complex experiences mediated by understandings of teaching, learning, and education that precede, exceed, and infuse the program training and academic literacy histories that our research has historically privileged. Drawing on research in writing studies, education, sociology, and psychology, this dissertation conducts a narrative inquiry into new writing teachers’ identity learning by analyzing stories of teaching and learning elicited from five new writing teachers during a year-long semi-structured, text-based interview study. Using the interplay of thematic and structural analysis of participants’ 248 stories and artifact analysis of participants’ teaching texts, I practice narrative inquiry as an explicitly feminist methodology to destabilize and interrogate what we think we know about new writing teachers’ identities and understandings of learning (as in Chapter Three), experiences and teaching troubles (as in Chapter Four), and motivated desires for the future (as in Chapter Five). I also rely on interdisciplinary theories of learning and identity to understand new teachers as complex people mediated and motivated over time in ways that academic writing/composition theories alone have not adequately illuminated. Ultimately, I argue that new teacher research in writing studies should employ more complex methodologies for studying new writing teachers’ identities as learned and storied over time; and that listening rhetorically to newcomers’ stories and for learning and meaning-making is one way to interrupt unproductive assumptions about newcomer deficit or resistance and to restory our research, administrative, and teaching practices to authorize and encourage more agentive positions from which newcomers (and we all) can learn to act

Radiant Figures: Visual Rhetorics in Everyday Administrative Contexts

Radiant Figures: Visual Rhetorics in Everyday Administrative Contexts presents an approach to writing program administration that understands, accounts for, and embraces the rhetorical potential in the creation and circulation of everyday visual artifacts. This edited collection shares visuals (representations of curricula, visual metaphors for administrative work, graphics representing student demographics, etc.) created by contributors within their own contexts, for their own purposes. Each of the twelve chapters included in the collection discusses the visual-rhetorical strategies utilized in the invention of such graphics and highlights the affordances of visuals as administrative tools. Additionally, Radiant Figures has two hallmark features. The first is a table of contents that offers seven polyvocal paths, and each chapter in the collection is featured in at least two of the paths. These paths, such as “Mapping in/as Administration” and “Visualizing Change,” emphasize the complex and overlapping nature of visual administrative work. Second, each path includes a response from an experienced administrator-scholar in writing studies. These responses draw connections, highlight promising questions, and speculate about possibilities for the update and adaptation of everyday visual artifacts. The collection presents a compelling case for the advantages of visual-rhetorical administrative strategies and offers concrete ways that readers can take up those strategies in their own contexts.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hcas_dcma_facbooks/1059/thumbnail.jp