Special Libraries, September 1976

Volume 67, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1976/1007/thumbnail.jp

Way of the Ferret: Finding and Using Resources on the Internet

This source-book is designed to aid educators in exploring the Internet.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/educationbook/1000/thumbnail.jp

When Does Literacy Professional Development Work? Understanding How Instructors Learn to Teach Writing in their Disciplinary Classrooms.

This dissertation asks how disciplinary literacy professional development (PD) can effectively support instructors’ learning about writing instruction. Common sense and existing research suggest easy answers. For literacy PD to work: Allocate the time necessary for instructors to learn about and try writing pedagogy; rehearse and reflect on literacy practices; and access exemplary PD curricula. Using ethnographic methods, this study reveals the inadequacy of those assumptions. It describes a cross-disciplinary team’s yearlong participation in research-based literacy training. By analyzing their discursive interactions across contexts, it highlights a critical element missing from their PD experiences: framework analysis. Frameworks include the cognitive schemas, which emerge through social interactions bound by cultural norms, that instructors employ to make sense of conversations about writing. Frameworks also include how instructors define and redefine “what we are about” through their interactions. The study demonstrates how the frameworks instructors employ and encounter support or impede their ability to make meaning of PD experiences. Instructors followed three paths as they participated and worked to apply PD learning to their writing instruction: discontinuing, negotiating, and integrating. Those who successfully negotiated conflicts found congruence among frameworks and responded to contextual realities at their urban high school. Those who integrated PD learning into their instruction benefited from disciplinary writing experiences and specific kinds of support such as reflective writing, explicit conversations about framework conflicts, and participation in a teacher research inquiry process where they pursued answers to their questions about disciplinary writing. Integrating framework considerations into literacy PD can more effectively support instructors’ learning about disciplinary writing instruction. The study offers practical suggestions for accomplishing this goal, including why and how PD designers and facilitators should: solicit the frameworks for writing instruction that instructors employ; name and articulate the disciplinary writing frameworks that inform the PD curriculum for and with participants; and support instructors’ framework negotiation by responding to their contextual realities and offering them ongoing disciplinary writing experiences that they can draw on as they work to integrate PD learning and improve the quality of writing instruction—and, by extension, student writing—in their disciplinary classrooms.PHDEnglish and EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111474/1/lillged_1.pd

Assessing the Cyborg Center: Assemblage-Based, Feminist Frameworks Toward Socially Just Writing Center Assessments

This dissertation will broaden the purview of recent scholarship pertaining to socially just writing assessments by making connections among assemblage theory and materialism, studies of ecological and anti-racist assessments, and studies of writing center work, to ground theoretical conversations in everyday practices. Focusing on systemic oppression in the neoliberal university and consciously using assemblage theory as a mechanism for confronting multiliteracies allows writing center directors to see the constant movement and reshaping of students’ knowledges as they approach different environments, different courses, and different genres. Notions of intra-relatedness and intertwinings evident in assemblage theory are essential to this dissertation’s consideration of pedagogy and administration. Expanding upon research on ecological and anti-racist assessment practices, I argue that it is vitally important for writing program administrators and writing center directors to bring complex views of literacies and identities to their assessment protocols. I further argue that this practice can be aided by frameworks based in assemblage theory. Using archival research and critical discourse analysis, this project explores one WC’s history and current practices in a large public, urban university system as a case study. Acknowledging the burden of negotiating hurdles set up by corporatized university structures, this dissertation examines the ways institutional pressures can shape assessments, and makes suggestions for new, socially just approaches relying on assemblage theory that follow current trends in writing assessment

Can You Hear Us Now? Investigating the Effects of a Wireless Grid Social Radio Station on Collaboration and Communication in Fragile Populations

The ability to interact with peers and coworkers in online digital networks is essential in learning and business environments. Our digital participatory culture is based on communication in response to purposeful activity and is facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICT). Students with emotional, behavioral, and learning disabilities are often disengaged and excluded from this knowledge-building conversation. This disengagement results in a cycle of failure exhibited through diminished self-efficacy and inadequate academic and emotional self-regulation. A critical goal of those who work with these students is to bolster their resilience, persistence, participatory, and communicative skills--to invite them back into the conversation. This research study investigated the potential for wireless grids technologies to serve as a viable infrastructure for students in a therapeutic high school setting to participate in digital social networks. Using social cognitive theory as a theoretical framework and activity theory as a conceptual framework, this study specifically investigated how a wireless grids implementation of the WeJay Social Radio Edgeware Gridlet was used to positively impact perceived self-efficacy and academic and emotional self-regulation associated with written and oral communication. This study also investigated how a digital networked environment could extend and enhance current methods used by school staff and programs to address cognitive, emotional, and behavioral issues affecting student socialization and learning in a therapeutic high school setting. The supports, resources, and opportunities for collaboration and socialization in the networked environment of the research space proved motivating for students and staff, and fostered academic, emotional, and behavioral self-regulation and positive self-efficacy for written and oral communications as evidenced by the artifacts and radio shows produced by students. Furthermore, students and staff participants expressed their interest in continuing to use WeJay. The outcomes of this research study suggest that informal, interest-based learning should take place in school. For some students, school is the only place they will have access to the technology and supports required to engage in powerful informal learning experiences. For fragile populations, these experiences may provide opportunities for success that have eluded students in formal, teacher-directed, curriculum-driven educational settings

Special Libraries, September 1971

Volume 62, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1971/1006/thumbnail.jp

Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies

Once again, Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe offer a volume that will set the agenda in the field of computers and composition scholarship for a decade. The technology changes that scholars of composition studies face as the next century opens couldn\u27t be more dramatic or deserving of passionate study. While we have always used technologies (e.g., the pencil) to communicate with each other, the electronic technologies we now use have changed the world in ways that we have yet to identify or appreciate fully. Likewise, the study of language and literate exchange, even our understanding of terms like literacy, text, and visual, has changed beyond recognition, challenging even our capacity to articulate them.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1118/thumbnail.jp

Special Libraries, Spring 1985

Volume 76, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1985/1001/thumbnail.jp

Special Libraries, Spring 1985

Volume 76, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1985/1001/thumbnail.jp