Body of Work

This essay offers a college English teacher\u27s account of transitioning from face-to-face to web-based instruction during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020

Schemes and Sense: Teaching Creative Writing with Design in Mind

This essay proposes a theoretical conception of design particularly suited for the creative writing classroom and suggests teaching strategies that enhance what I refer to as students’ design sense. Drawing upon the work of Francis Christensen, I highlight instructional approaches that reposition and reformat texts on the page such that the functional relationships between sentence elements are made more concrete and thus more comprehensible to students. I argue that by helping students see the subtle part-to-part and part-to-whole dynamics within sentences, creative writing teachers inspire students to move beyond their usual stylistic and syntactical tendencies

Terms of Uncertainty: Technological Change and Writing in the Digital Age.

This dissertation explains how the proliferation of digital and Internet technology generates uncertainty around the teaching of writing and, in an effort to clarify the terms of this uncertainty, develops concepts for analyzing the relationship between writing instruction and technological change. The concepts developed here are applied to theoretical, historical, and classroom-based sites of inquiry to highlight the complex and plural influences coming to bear on writing instruction in the digital age. The result is a multidirectional view of the interlocked relationship between writing pedagogy and technological innovation. This interlocked relationship is articulated concretely in an ethnographic account of two college English courses, which require students to compose multimedia and Internet texts. Two findings emerge from this ethnographic strand of the dissertation. The first is that students in both classes tended to associate the relevance of their projects with interests and objectives that hailed them from outside of classrooms and coursework. The second notable finding pertains to students’ and teachers’ interactions with Adobe Flash, a popular website design and development program. A representational hierarchy developed around students’ Flash-based projects whereby alphabetic writing was configured as less potent than the program’s visual and interactive affordances. Drawing upon a networked conception of pedagogical phenomena as well as conceptions of style, potency, distributedness developed in previous chapters, the dissertation concludes by putting classroom-based concerns arising from the ethnographic account into conversation with broader controversies shaping conceptions of literacy in the digital age. This multidirectional approach to inquiry exemplifies a network vision of pedagogical processes and illustrates the degree to which theory, history, and teaching practice are mutually enrolled in, and thus integral to, the study of writing pedagogy and technological change.PHDEnglish and EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93974/1/beg_1.pd

Jean Jacques Rousseau: reflexiones a 300 años de su nacimiento

El artículo pretende reflexionar sobre el aporte de Rousseau al pensamiento político, a 300 años de su nacimiento y a 250 años del Contrato Social, focalizando en sus ideas principales no solo este último escrito sino en sus otras obras

Gender and the Italian Stage from the Renaissance to the Present Day

No description supplie

Improvised Musical Play: A Way of Fostering Group Play Among Handicapped and Non-Handicapped Preschool Children

221 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1982.The author examined the effect of improvised music and lyrics on the social play of handicapped and non-handicapped preschool children. The study sought to discover (1) how the teacher and children interact to create improvised musical play, (2) to understand the effect of improvised music and lyrics on the social play of the children, (3) to formulate a judgment as to whether this experience is beneficial for handicapped and non-handicapped children, and (4) to determine the implications of this approach to play for teacher training in early childhood special education.Fifteen videotapes were studied intensively using microanalysis techniques to analyze the improvised musical play (IMP) of two non-handicapped and ten handicapped children. Analysis of the videotapes revealed teacher techniques for initiating and maintaining IMP. Improvised musical play progressed in phases from less coordinated to more coordinated group play, with the largest number of participating children consistently involved in the most coordinated phase of IMP activity.Detailed analysis of the play of three different types of players--one highly skilled, non-handicapped player and two less skilled handicapped children--revealed that the children relate to improvised music and lyrics in qualitatively different ways, the skilled player being involved in the content meaning of the play and the less skilled children involved in a more peripheral manner, or in the general social and musical ambiance, as opposed to the specific content of the play.New concepts related to the improvisation of play activities were delineated as a possible set of competencies enabling teachers to generate and maintain group play in mainstreamed preschool classrooms.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Gender and the Italian Stage from the Renaissance to the Present Day

No description supplie

Jean Jacques Rousseau: reflexiones a 300 años de su nacimiento

El artículo pretende reflexionar sobre el aporte de Rousseau al pensamiento político, a 300 años de su nacimiento y a 250 años del Contrato Social, focalizando en sus ideas principales no solo este último escrito sino en sus otras obras