Writing the University

This anthology is the product of a collaborative process involving a professor (Hepzibah Roskelly), a university archivist (Erin Lawrimore), graduate student instructors (Scott Gibson, Tammy Lancaster, Emily Hall, Lavina Ensor, Kt Leuschen, and Summar Sparks), and undergraduates. With a desire to engage undergraduates with the University of North Carolina’s rich history, in the fall of 2011 the teachers began meeting with a university archivist, Erin Lawrimore, to design assignments incorporating archival research. The assignments varied, but each one was created to empower undergraduates to more fully engage with primary sources and with their local communities. In the Spring of 2012 and the Fall of 2013, the assignments were used in composition and literature classrooms. As undergraduate students discovered their own abilities to interpret history, many became interested in sharing their work with the broader UNCG community. This electronic book is the result of these students’ efforts researching, drafting, revising, revising, and revising

An Unquiet Pedagogy : Transforming Practice in the English Classroom

An Unquiet Pedagogy argues for a new approach to teaching English in the high school and college classroom, one that reconceives the relationship of literacy and the learner. The title is taken from an essay by Paulo Freire in his book with Donaldo Macedo entitled Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Like Freire, the authors believe that pedagogy must be critical -- that it must examine the assumptions that teachers and students bring to any educational enterprise, that it must take into account the contexts of learners\u27 lives, and that it must question, rather than quietly accept, existing practices. Voices of beginning and experienced teachers are heard often in the book, exploring how such an unquiet pedagogy might come to be. The authors examine the experiences of these teachers, as well as their own, showing how the classroom can become a place of inquiry for both teachers and students and how theory and research that provide an integrated perspective on language, literacy, and culture must inform teaching practice. Their aim is to transform the English classroom into a place where the imagination becomes central and where learners construct knowledge in the development of real literacy

Date of Final Oral Examination ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

In recent years, composition classes in universities across the country have focused more and more on social and political issues like race, class, and gender. At its base, this dissertation argues that prophetic religious belief should receive such a focus as well. This project also attempts to recognize the difficulties that might arise when addressing religion in the writing class and subsequently draws upon the thinking of the American Pragmatists to meet those difficulties. From this Pragmatic foundation, I explore notions of mediation, experience, habit, and certainty in the hopes of providing some orientation to a topic that is as important to our students as any other we ask them to consider. My theoretical grounding is set out with an eye towards practical application in the classroom (as theory is little without practice, and practice little without theory). I address possible writing assignments, particular texts, and the use of current events in relation to the Pragmatic approach I describe. In sum, this dissertation is an attempt t