Exigencies for engaging undergraduates in rhetorical problem solving : insights from engineering managers and A3 report analyses

Undergraduate education has a historical tradition of preparing students to meet the problem-solving challenges they will encounter in work, civic, and personal contexts. This thesis research was conducted to study the role of rhetoric in engineering problem solving and decision making and to pose pedagogical strategies for preparing undergraduate students for workplace problem solving. Exploratory interviews with engineering managers as well as the heuristic analyses of engineering A3 project planning reports suggest that Aristotelian rhetorical principles are critical to the engineer\u27s success: Engineers must ascertain the rhetorical situation surrounding engineering problems; apply and adapt invention heuristics to conduct inquiry; draw from their investigation to find innovative solutions; and influence decision making by navigating workplace decision-making systems and audiences using rhetorically constructed discourse. To prepare undergraduates for workplace problem solving, university educators are challenged to help undergraduates understand the exigence and realize the kairotic potential inherent in rhetorical problem solving. This thesis offers pedagogical strategies that focus on mentoring learning communities in problem-posing experiences that are situated in many disciplinary, work, and civic contexts. Undergraduates build a flexible rhetorical technê for problem solving as they navigate the nuances of relevant problem-solving systems through the lens of rhetorical practice

Building the New Babel of Transnational Literacies: Preparing Education for World Citizens

The transnational diasporas in a technological world that is postmodern and posthuman mean both exciting diverse communities and challenging problems. On the one hand, globalization brought human beings the convenience of exchanging ideas, doing business, and building a better world together. On the other hand, the political economy of nation states that shaped non-translational ideologies, created at the same time conflicts and misunderstandings among citizens from different parts of the world. Responding to the current transnational clashes in flow (information dissemination) and contra flow (surveillance and control of information flow) of our information age, this dissertation builds up a transnational rhetoric and communication model that can be used to examine the curriculum design, teaching materials, and pedagogy in communication and writing studies, especially in technical communication. In addition, this study investigates the present state of curriculum design, teaching materials, and pedagogies in a southeastern higher education institution. Empirical data was collected from students, instructors, and administrators from different departments of this institution to determine whether and how do curriculum design, teaching materials, and pedagogies frame and teach transnational literacy. Further, to engage the conversation with a national audience, major introductory technical communication textbooks were analyzed based on both the empirical data and the transnational rhetoric and communication model using content analysis. The findings indicate that although curriculum design, textbooks, and pedagogies have transnational components, they generally reply on traditional models and stereotypical examples that cannot meet with students’ needs in order for them to become genuine world citizens with transnational awareness and competence. The transnational rhetoric and communication model helps to fill the gaps in curriculum design, textbook revision, and pedagogies in cultivating world citizens

Visualizing Rhetorical Awareness: Building Critical Digital Literacies Practices With Visual Rhetoric in First-Year College Composition

Visual rhetoric assignments allow students a space to practice rhetorical design with a specific audience in mind. When used in concordance with traditional writing assignments, these visual multimedia projects (such as flyers and infographics) can be a useful way for college writing teachers to build rhetorical awareness, which is one of the objectives of first-year college composition courses. This project examines the use of visual rhetoric assignments within a concurrent enrollment college writing course. Students in the course created a community-based proposal, including flyers, infographics, and a final essay. By examining these assignments for evidence of critical digital literacies (decoding, meaning making, using, analyzing, and persona), the researchers investigated how the visual projects promoted student thinking about their audience in their designs and how composition teachers could use visual assignments, in combination with traditional writing assignments in college composition courses

Teaching strategies for lecturers and tutors to assist non-English mother tongue tertiary students: Summarising, paraphrasing and vocabulary enrichment

Given the increasingly globalised nature of tertiary education and the growth of English as a second or other language, high numbers of international students studying at English medium tertiary institutions have English as a second (L2) or additional language (EAL). But few efforts may be made to accommodate such students who report that the main difficulty relates to proficiency in English language, and that this results in greater stress and anxiety (Andrade 2006). The key skills of summarising and paraphrasing are reliant upon understanding of concepts and information, in written and oral forms. How can essential content be covered in lectures and tutorials so as to include assistance for non-native speakers of English? I consider a range of pedagogical strategies that can be adopted by university lecturers and tutors to enable EAL students to summarise and paraphrase effectively so as to demonstrate mastery of discipline-specific vocabulary.

A Pedagogy of Access Advocacy

ABSTRACT A PEDAGOGY OF ACCESS ADVOCACY by Molly E. Ubbesen The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2020 Under the Supervision of Professor Shevaun Watson I propose “a pedagogy of access advocacy” for students and teachers based on practices developed in the first-year composition classroom. A pedagogy of access advocacy aims to destigmatize the access needs of students and teachers by inviting them to share and support each other’s needs and to center and celebrate the creation of collective access. This dissertation brings together theories and methodologies from composition, rhetoric, disability studies, teacher action research, and critical discourse analysis to examine student reflections on how my designing and assigning the course theme “Accessibility and Advocacy” combined with the “Accessible Multimodal Advocacy Project” engaged students in collective access and led to deeper understandings of their own rhetorical situations. I argue that we need to orient to access pedagogically and rhetorically, and I provide strategies, curriculum, and student examples for more effective teaching, learning, and communication in first-year composition and teacher development

Conference Program [2009]

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Encounters beyond the interface: Data structures, material feminisms, and composition

This dissertation argues that data literacy should be taught in college writing classes along with other new media literacies. Drawing from several areas of study, this dissertation establishes a definition of data literacy, introduces a feminist methodological approach to Big Data and data studies, and makes a case for teaching data literacy in first year composition and professional writing courses as a foundational writing-related literacy. Information written into and read from databases supports research activities in any number of fields from STEM to the humanities; while different disciplines approach databases and data structures from diverse perspectives, all students need foundational data literacies. Nearly all digital environments are facilitated in some way by databases. They drive a range of web applications in ways that most users do not realize. On the surface, only GUIs are visible, and sets of data could be presented in any number of ways through them in the form of visuals, texts, and sound. It is important that students learn how data structures influence what comes across in the interface. By having students rhetorically analyze databases and then create them, composition teachers can help to demystify these ubiquitous yet invisible technocultural objects. Becoming aware of data structures gives students insight into how digital compositions emerge, empowering them to be more than “users” or “subjects” that use technological “objects.” Ideally, they would gain insight into how both “sides” of this encounter arise in dependence on many contributing factors, such as the standards, classifications, and categories perpetuated by techno-cultural infrastructures. Developing a socio-ontological methodology that combines scholarship in both feminist new materialisms and feminist rhetorical methodologies, this dissertation discusses the importance of researcher positionality. The socio-ontological methodology developed here expands on social constructivist theories to view all participants in a situation, including non-human ones, as mutually existing in dependence upon each other. Within this framework, contemplative mapping helps to articulate how the researcher does not exist outside of the research situation and assists in helping to make the situation uncanny, so that we can question assumptions and think through processes. Providing a foundational understanding of why data structures have become important to our professional and personal lives, this dissertation explains the public fascination with Big Data and exposes the ways that individuals can be affected by data collection practices, examining how the data structures that enable what comes across in user interfaces can be understood and taught in the context of writing studies