Ideologies of response in composition classrooms.

This project responds to a neglected, over decade-old call from Jane Fife and Peggy O\u27Neill for greater consideration of classroom contexts in scholarship on teachers’ commenting practices. Drawing on Raymond Williams\u27s reconceptualization of ideology, I examine how response occurs within larger contexts including societal, programmatic, institutional, and disciplinary expectations, how teachers and students operate within and against these expectations, and how their beliefs and actions shape the production and reception of response. Deploying data collected through a mixed-methodology approach including classroom observation, interview, textual analysis, and protocol analysis, I examine three first-year writing classes, the instructors for these classes, and students enrolled in the observed courses. Chapter 1 introduces the limitations of previous response scholarship and defines the various contexts that comprise the classroom context. Chapter 2 focuses on how the expectation for first-year writing as service shapes the production and reception of response. Chapter 3 examines how one instructor\u27s use of a non-traditional grade alongside formative response and the student\u27s reading of this response illustrate the complexities present between grading and response. Chapter 4 draws on the work of Elaine Lees, Louise Weatherbee Phelps, and Elizabeth Rankin to investigate how response may extend formatively across multiple texts and contribute to what I call “a cumulative project.” In tracing this expansion of response across texts, I consider how the values and beliefs teachers and students have for response both facilitate and complicate such expansion. Chapter 5 concludes the project by demonstrating how the increased attention toward computer grading/response illustrates the central role response occupies in conversations about writing and writing improvement. I summarize the central role “the text” has played in the previous chapters and link this privileging of the text to these calls for computer grading. I argue that future response scholarship must be attentive to both the text and classroom contexts so as to demonstrate the full complexity of response to student writing

Upstream Consciousness: exploring artists’ fieldwork through geomorphing, spiralling and co-productive ecologies

This practice-based enquiry examines the ways in which artistic practice encounters and then utilises the spatio- temporal, relational, material, and embodied nature of fieldwork. The thesis is developed predominately through my own field based activities and artistic production within peatland landscapes in Finnish Lapland (Sápmi), Eastern Finland and at Moor House–Upper Teesdale National Nature Reserve, UK research that I have conducted with and alongside other artists and scientists, supported here by a critical survey of other artists’ methods in, and approaches to, the field. The research therefore develops, enacts and proposes practical strategies that investigate conditions in and connections between artist and field. To this end, the thesis finds value in three critical terms and approaches – geomorphing, spiralling and co-productive ecologies. Geomorphing is a practice which is reactive to material and experiential conditions; spiralling holds and works with indeterminate openness; and co-productive ecologies privilege collective actions as eventful and critical to field-based research. These methods not only position fieldwork as a situated, self-reflective and embodied practice, they also foreground ethical questions of environmental responsibility. As such, the research advances an ethos for a productive ethics of engagement, which I call upstream consciousness: a soft activism, potentially creating the conditions to reorientate ourselves within the current environmental crisis. Through a practical and theoretical approach, building upon recent ecologically conscious geographical, feminist and philosophical insights, this research fosters a coming-together of bodies, temporalities, spaces and concepts, whilst also unsettling notions of established knowledge production. Informed by Doreen Massey’s notion of ‘spatio-temporal events’; Jane Bennett’s conception of enchantment and vibrant matter; and Donna Haraway’s situated and ‘response-able’ feminist thinking, the research broadens understandings of artists’ fieldwork as a discursive and creative activity of relevance to the arts, science and philosophy. In conceiving of such methods as productive and complex acts of engagement, it furthers discussion of diverse and interdisciplinary ways of knowing – and contributes to evolving discourses of more-than-human fieldwork, place-orientated thinking, and coproductive research. In an era of increasing environmental instability, this research asks in what ways artists’ approaches might engage productively with a field in continual process, and in turn contribute to interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical understandings of particular environments. In doing so, the research contributes to contemporary epistemologies of place, landscape and related ecological thought

Disability is Beautiful, Disability is my Culture

The stories of advocates in the disability rights movement remain largely undocumented, especially in the area of the arts. This research uses ethnographic fieldwork to document such stories in the interviewee's own words. The resulting portrait of disability, advocacy, and the arts also details the story of interviewee and interviewer, and of the fieldworking process as a whole. This thesis focuses on the life history and life story of musician Jim Whalen and his contributions to the disability rights and arts movement. The fieldstudy explores the stories, creations, beliefs, motives, feelings, philosophies, thoughts, and life histories, of not only Whalen but also of the researcher and others intersecting with Whalen's life and work, including writer Steve Kuusisto. An ethnographic methodology, including both in-depth interviews and participant observation, comprise the research design. The researcher uses the interdisciplinary-research tools of fieldwork in order to document and represent his findings. In this study, advocacy and art are understood as vehicles to reframe current notions about disability. In addition to insight into the disability rights movement at this point in time, the stories included provide an arsenal of techniques, concepts, and tools to help disability advocates understand, reframe, and renegotiate life experiences, in particular through art. In conjunction with reframing ideas such as "This is normal for me" and renegotiating experiences such as "Always stops right now," other advocacy tools discovered include "Summoning the dragon," "Not if, but how," and "Everyone has a why." The final product is part word portrait, part life history, part snapshot, part auto-ethnography, part biography, part oral history, part cultural history, part narrative, part ethnography --it is both an explanation and an ode to the two central themes from which the title is born: "Disability is my culture" and "Disability is beautiful.

The souls of good folk: prophetic pragmatism as a pedagogy of humanity in the composition classroom

This dissertation pinpoints empathy deficit as a major social issue in the United States and it argues that schools could help address this root problem by offering humanity training. As an example of how humanity training could be implemented in higher education, “The Souls of Good Folk” is offered as a pedagogy of humanity for the composition classroom. This pedagogy uses Cornel West’s derivative philosophy of prophetic pragmatism as a lens of cultural criticism and community action. Furthermore, the pedagogy employs W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk as an example of prophetic pragmatism enacted in the real world. It expands Du Bois’s trajectory from a focus on Blacks to a generalized “good folk.” Du Bois’s book is not used as a blueprint for social transformation, but analyzing it could inform ways of addressing social problems. “The Souls of Good Folk” critical pedagogy uses the word souls to represent people’s actions and the phrase “good folk” to represent anyone who shows society what needs improving and possibly offer ways of doing it. Good folk include marginalized people, cultural workers, grassroots activists, teachers, artists, musicians, and others that help America see itself in efforts to make appropriate changes. The work of good folk is reviewed in this classroom as literature and tangible examples of how to enhance society. The composition classroom is the site for this pedagogy due to its focus on critical literacy – actively and questioningly engaging with the text to read underlying messages – which is needed to help solve social problems. Teaching through a prophetic pragmatist framework is critical academic work, for it helps produce responsible democratic citizens and it sustains local communities. The prophetic pragmatist classroom is an experiential learning laboratory that combines traditional teaching methods with progressive, hands-on approaches to make experience paramount to the learning process. The main objectives of this pedagogy are for students to understand social issues comprehensively and to find creative, empathetic ways of addressing these problems

An Autoethnographic Curriculum For Appalachian Studies: Merging Humanities and Social Science Theories and Methods

Autoethnographic method is used in this curriculum for the interdisciplinary classroom in Appalachian Studies. Student exploration of the cultural environment of Appalachia as related to or compared with their own is encouraged. The design of the curriculum and autoethnographic method can be applied to other regional studies and disciplines. Drawing upon the theory of New Historicism, the curriculum is a blend of Humanities and Social Sciences

Strategic road mapping for Europe's creative industries: the EU CRe-AM project

The authors present a novel paradigmfor roadmapping Creative sectors in Europe based on three key successively integrated phases that implement mindsets, techniques and technology. In the first instance this roadmapping paradigm is piloted for identifying weak and strong signals as well as trends in the sector of Architecture based on aggregated opinions from leading Architects. Further versions of the process and software will separately explore the current state and ideal evolved future state of the Architecture sector. The roadmapping methodology will also be applied to the other creative sectors comprising the project including Media and Epublishing, Gaming, Design and Art. The roadmapping methodology has been created for the CRe-AM project1, a European Union FP7 funded project that aims to bridge communities of creators with communities of technology providers and innovators, in a collective roadmapping effort to streamline, coordinate and amplify collaborative work. The focus of the project is developing and mainstreaming new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and tools by addressing the needs of different sectors of the Creative industries

Pedagogies of possibility : a study reconceptualizing the teacher\u27s role in a reggio-inspired urban preschool classroom.

The Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education is an innovative and often imitated “way of being” with young children (Rinaldi, 2006). Reggio-inspired teachers enact rich pedagogical stances in their work with young children. In North American contexts, the approach is frequently associated with wealthy, suburban communities. Adopting a feminist methodology, this dissertation explores the pedagogical moves one teacher made as she enacted the identity of a Reggio teacher in an urban preschool classroom. The theoretical framework guiding this study is grounded in feminist poststructural, postmodern, and decolonization scholarship, each of which inform a movement known as Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education (RECE). RECE works to disrupt assumptions about children, childhood, and early educators, providing counternarratives to deficit perspectives often associated with children of color, their families, neighborhoods, and teachers. This dissertation argues for reconceptualizing the teacher’s role as she enacts pedagogies that create spaces for children to demonstrate their myriad competencies and suggests that feminist methodologies result in more equitable researcher-participant relationships

Gulliver’s Travels

No Abstract Availabl

Tattoos and Body Piercing - The Longevity of An Ancient Trend

I began with a field study to find out the reasons why people participate in body modification. From there I did background research on health implications. social acceptance, and spirituality

Land Arts. Les fabriques spatiales de l'art contemporain

National audienceSpatialities of Art contributes as a collection to the recent reinforcement and renewal of the pluridisciplinarity around Contemporary Art. It aims at considering new ways of thinking Contemporary Art and opens up possibilities that were not addressed in previous approaches: authors engage Dance and Installations rather than limit themselves to Literature and Painting ; they focus on art practices, mainly fieldworking and mapping, rather than on objects of art – which are rather replaced within the perspective of art practices. In so doing, they investigate new objects, the map and the territory, and critically examine more classical ones, such as the landscape ; they understand the political dimension of the work of art within a politics of action rather than within a politics of representation. This paper more specifically addresses the spatial dimension of Contemporary Arts and aims at renewing its understanding. Speaking from a geographical standpoint, it uses the American Land Art, mainly resorting to Dennis Oppenheim's and, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's practices, objects and texts as a new matrix for a theoretical understanding of Art. Reloading and expanding the signification of land (in Land Art), it grounds a schema of intelligibility of the spatial dimension of Contemporary Arts in their practices, objects and designs. The second part replaces the collection of papers within this theoretical framework and shed light on the set of practices, objects, disciplines and paradigms put forward by this pluridisciplinary renewal. It thus demonstrates that Art is not simply a constructed object of pluridisciplinarity, but that it participates in it as an acknowledged discipline (even science) of space.Témoignage du renforcement et du renouvellement d'une pluridisciplinarité autour de l'art contemporain, Spatialités de l'art ouvre plusieurs pistes pour penser la spatialité de l'œuvre d'art contemporaine. Ce collectif de textes opère une série de décentrements par rapport aux référents plus habituels de cette pluridisciplinarité : les auteur(e)s choisissent leurs exemples dans la danse et les installations plutôt que dans la littérature et la peinture ; ils s'intéressent aux pratiques artistiques, tout particulièrement au travail de terrain et à la cartographie, plus qu'aux objets d'art qu'ils placent dans la perspective de la pratique ; ce faisant, ils examinent de nouveaux objets, la carte, et réexaminent de manière critique les anciens, le paysage ; ils conçoivent la dimension politique de l'œuvre d'art dans la perspective d'une logique d'action et non de représentation. Une partie du texte d'introduction de ce numéro se veut une contribution à la construction de l'intelligibilité de la spatialité de l'art contemporain. Elle présente, du point de vue de la géographie contemporaine, les éléments théoriques d'une compréhension du changement de matrice disciplinaire opéré par le Land Art états-unien, et s'appuie tout particulièrement sur la pratique, les objets et les citations de Dennis Oppenheim et de Christo et Jeanne-Claude. En rechargeant de sens la notion de land (dans Land Art), elle trouve les fondements d'un schème d'intelligibilité de la dimension spatiale des arts contemporains, dans leurs pratiques, leurs objets et leurs visées. Une deuxième partie place les textes rassemblés dans le numéro, dans cette perspective théorique pour donner à voir un ensemble de pratiques, objets, disciplines et paradigmes amenés par ce renouvellement pluridisciplinaire. Ce faisant, elle démontre que l'art n'est pas simplement objet construit de la pluridisciplinarité, mais qu'il concourt à sa construction au titre reconnu de discipline (voire science) de l'espace