While grammar is a core aspect of written and oral communication, many find grammar instruction equally frustrating and boring, and as such, grammar receives very little formal attention in the university system (Hoffman). My thesis draws attention to this overlooked, and yet central component of composition, and asks a radical...
The following thesis presents a case study analyzing a service-learning project implemented in a second-year level Writing in Business course at Oregon State University. The classroom project required business writing students to serve as cultural ambassadors and conversation partners with international students through INTO OSU's Cultural Ambassador Conversant Program. Relying...
This thesis evaluates the contact zone of the remote composition classroom and offers mediations for leveling the authoritative powers by fronting disability studies in pedagogies. The purpose of this thesis is to create pedagogies from disability scholarship and real teaching experiences that can be implemented in the remote classroom to...
This thesis examines the bilingual poetry of indigenous, Mexican poet Irma Pineda Santiago. In her work, she composes mirrored poems in Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish. I analyze the ways in which her work brings Zapotec and Spanish into contact with one another, demanding that readers acknowledge narratives of erasure that...
With the rapid development of new computer mediated technologies, instructors have more options of the modalities of responding to student writing. Whereas traditionally, responses have been written by hand, technological developments allow responses to take very different forms. Some of these technologies, such as word processing, mimic the text-on-page techniques...
Close reading has long been favored as an interpretative framework within those classrooms commonly united under the umbrella of English studies. This thesis explores the role of a particular brand of close reading—one often assessed through text-dependent questions—and critiques its centrality within assessment and curriculum materials for the AP Program...
The ocean provides many ecosystems services and yet humans have viewed the ocean as a black hole for trash since the 1950s. With recycling not getting to the source of the problem, smarter consumer choices are being targeted, specifically choices centered around the use of plastic. Thus efficient, useful communication...
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Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Committee Member, representing School of Writing, Literature, and
This thesis explores the ways in which creative placemaking, a neighborhood-based practice for building community, can offer community-building and civic action wisdom as a model for composition. This model brings attention to spatial metaphors for rhetoric and teaching that have persisted for millennia; it re-focuses us on community; it encourages...
Contrasting the productive ground gained in ecological rhetorical theory through embedded fieldwork, composition as a discipline has yet to enact such transformative engagements with ecology. In this thesis, I put forward a praxis for ecological rhetoric and composition through permaculture design, utilizing the design framework’s system of ethics and principles...
Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia provokes us to embrace our Earthboundedness to approach the problematic political ecologies of the Anthropocene. Latour’s call for the Earthbound is to re-trace networks of society, institutions, and meaning and to challenge, as enemy, those that would continue to behave as if we lived on more...