Writing Studies Teacher & Researcher
Research
Phi Kappa Phi Induction & Award Ceremony with Dr. Susan Blessing
Graduate School annual award ceremony, spring 2016
Transfer of Transfer Group at FSU Party
Phi Kappa Phi Induction & Award Ceremony with Dr. Susan Blessing
My research trajectory is organized around three intersecting areas of interest: everyday writing, students' transfer of writing knowledge and practice, and visual mapping. More specifically, much of my research uses visual mapping as a method for documenting and tracing students' developing conceptual knowledge of writing as they compose within a Teaching for Transfer (TFT) course and across different writing contexts. The TFT curriculum focuses on three interlocking components: key writing concepts, a reflection framework, and the development of students’ theory of writing. In this area, I have two research projects: (1) a CCCC-funded multi-institutional research project, and (2) my dissertation. The first project, a collaborative effort called the Transfer of Transfer Project, investigates the efficacy of the TFT curriculum across four different institutional sites and writing courses. My dissertation, also focuses on students' transfer of writing knowledge and practice across sites of writing, taking a 2000 level TFT course as the site of study.
Dissertation Research
"Visualizing Transfer: How Do Students' Conceptual Writing Knowledge Structures Connect to Their Transfer of Writing Knowledge and Practice?”
Situated at the intersection of research on writing transfer, concept mapping, and dual coding theory, this study investigates students' transfer of writing knowledge and practice across sites of writing, taking a 2000 level Teaching for Transfer (TFT) course (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak) as the site of study. In taking up students' use of prior knowledge—made explicit through their key terms for writing and the knowledge structures linking them—this project continues a line of research that Kathleen Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak began in 2009 at Florida State University when they designed the TFT curriculum for first-year composition (FYC) courses and studied whether, and how, the course supported students' transfer of writing knowledge and practice from the TFT course to other writing sites. Carrying forward this line of research, this dissertation (1) documents via a series of visual mapping assignments the prior knowledge of writing that students bring with them into the composition classroom, and (2) traces whether, and how, these visual mapping assignments, integrated into the TFT curriculum, can assist students in both developing new writing knowledge and transferring this conceptual writing knowledge from a sophomore-level writing course, ENC 2135: Research, Genre, and Context, for use in other sites of writing. Using yearlong case studies of student writers and scored compositions from TFT and other courses, this mixed-methods dissertation lays a foundation for developing a research agenda that will more fully account for students' prior conceptual knowledge of writing and how they repurpose their writing knowledge and practice for use in other contexts. The case study portion of the dissertation identifies changes in students' key terms and writing knowledge structures and provides documentation of how this conceptual knowledge of writing assisted them—or not—in composing across contexts. The compositions scored by writing studies professionals provide evidence for (1) students' claims about what they transferred from ENC 2135 to other courses, and (2) an indication of the success of their compositions. (Committee: Kathleen Blake Yancey (Chair), Michael Neal, Kristie Fleckenstein, and Jennifer Proffitt).
Refereed Publications
"A Room of Our Own: The Case for Everyday Writing in Rhetoric and Composition."
with Kathleen Yancey, Joe Cirio, and Jeff Naftzinger. Revised manuscript under review.
Although everyday writing is absent from recent discussions of writing-as-(perhaps) a discipline, such writing--ranging from Anne Ruggles Gere's articulation of the extracurriculum to Katrina Powell's examination of the anguished letters Virginia citizens wrote to resist eminent domain--has increasingly captured the attention of the field. At the same time, such writing is neither organized into nor theorized as a category of its own, a rhetorical move that could help scholars and teachers organize extant work, identify new texts and archives, pursue continuing research questions, and engage in disciplinary and interdisciplinary opportunities for continued exploration. In other words, thinking of everyday writing as its own category could help us collect, explore, and theorize the richness of such texts as well as help us understand writing itself more fully. Here, then, we begin to take up this task. We start by defining everyday writing as a specific and purposeful cultural practice and object of study. We then provide three extended examples demonstrating both the varieties of everyday
writing and its overall purposeful and inventive character, in each case analyzing the particularities of the text--the first, as practice of identity formation; the second, as example of hermeneutical responsiveness and invention; and the third, as networked political action. Last, we conclude by articulating questions that can guide further work in this area.
Works in Progress
"Emma Willard's Geographical Pedagogy: Supporting Students' Knowledge Integration through Visual Mapping”
revising manuscript for resubmission
Almost 200 years before composition studies turned its attention to students' prior knowledge, Emma Willard configured it as a central element of her geographical pedagogy and supported it through visual means. Although concerned with geography, not composition, and although published at the tail end of the long eighteenth-century, Willard offers important insights for twenty-first century research on students' integration of prior and new knowledge in the writing classroom. In this essay I argue that research on knowledge integration has primarily focused on verbal knowledge rather than visual knowledge, and that Willard, particularly her visually inflected pedagogy, offers a fruitful site for developing a more robust understanding of knowledge integration facilitated through visual means.
CCCC grant-funded multi-institutional research project with Matt Davis, Liane Robertson, Kara Taczak, and Kathleen Yancey
This IRB-approved research project takes up two central questions:
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How does a curriculum designed for transfer—in this case, the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curriculum documented in Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing—support students’ transfer of writing knowledge and practice into other sites of academic writing on four very different campuses?
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How can the TFT curriculum be adapted to support students’ transfer of writing knowledge and practice in two upper level classes, one a stand-alone technical writing class with students from various majors; the second, a professional writing class serving as an introduction to the major?
Digital Publications
“Writing Assessment.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (2013). (with Joe Cirio).
Digital Projects
This ePortfolio was created for Dr. Kathleen Yancey's seminar in Everyday Writing as a way of defining and reflecting everyday writing and curating an exhibit of relevant course projects. The reflection contained within this portfolio explores assemblage as a composition process that differs across handmade texts like zines and digital texts like ePortfolios.
This ePortfolio was created for Dr. Michael Neal's seminar in Writing Assessment in the Age of Digital Technologies as a way of showcasing major projects completed in the course. Within this portfolio, you can find an early draft of my theories of assessment, program assessment, and response and grading. I have also included a validity analysis on a college composition portfolio assessment, and a collaboratively-authored research presentation on rubrics.
