The malleability of disciplinary identity

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017This paper tracks the progress of a beginning undergraduate writer's disciplinary becoming. Much research in disciplinary identity focuses on graduate students and advanced undergraduate writers; however, sites of disciplinary identity formation also occur early on during the required first-year writing course. These sites are crucial because they inform the student writer's entrance into the academic conversation, and reveal the extent to which early assumptions about disciplinary roles affects further disciplinary identity formation. Drawing from Ivanič's framework of writer identity, this case study reveals the ever-shifting tensions of "disciplinary becoming." The analysis captures how a writer's discursive self shifts from a static disciplinary identity to a more malleable disciplinary identity through a cross-analysis of two separate writing assignments in order to learn how the student's petroleum engineer identity is performed, contradicted and re-negotiated. I argue that this shift will enable writing knowledge transfer and overall identity formation

Culturally Responsive Teaching For Significant Relationships

This article expands discussions of culturally responsive teaching to include the framework of what it is, why it matters and how it can be accomplished in the classroom. The four principles of interaction, accommodation, ownership, and opportunity outline culturally responsive strategies teachers use to create significant relationships with all students in the classroom

Cultivating Inclusive Learning Communities with Careful and Caring Conjunctions

This essay was originally the invited lecture I shared at ICCTE 2016. I arrived there, prepared to share about inclusive learning communities and our responsibilities to both model and teach our emerging educators to plan, teach, and assess diverse learners with inclusive and responsive practices. But just as I had to listen to the Sabbath whisper, I could not ignore the and whisper. So I ask that as you finish reading this essay and we go our separate ways, remember that we are embodied conjunctions. We are an important part of our language system that communicates so much about our culture. We may not get the amounts or forms of attention that we think education warrants and we may grow weary of all of our stakeholders telling us how to improve our practices. But we matter. Our voices can make a difference. You matter. Your voice will make a difference

The CorDis Corpus Mark-up and Related Issues

CorDis is a large, XML, TEI-conformant, POS-tagged, multimodal, multigenre corpus representing a significant portion of the political and media discourse on the 2003 Iraqi conflict. It was generated from different sub-corpora which had been assembled by various research groups, ranging from official transcripts of Parliamentary sessions, both in the US and the UK, to the transcripts of the Hutton Inquiry, from American and British newspaper coverage of the conflict to White House press briefings and to transcriptions of American and British TV news programmes. The heterogeneity of the data, the specificity of the genres and the diverse discourse analytical purposes of different groups had led to a wide range of coding strategies being employed to make textual and meta-textual information retrievable. The main purpose of this paper is to show the process of harmonisation and integration whereby a loose collection of texts has become a stable architecture. The TEI proved a valid instrument to achieve standardisation of mark-up. The guidelines provide for a hierarchical organisation which gives the corpus a sound structure favouring replicability and enhancing the reliability of research. In discussing some examples of the problems encountered in the annotation, we will deal with issues like consistency and re-usability, and will examine the constraints imposed on data handling by specific research objectives. Examples include the choice to code the same speakers in different ways depending on the various (institutional) roles they may assume throughout the corpus, the distinction between quotations of spoken or written discourse and quotations read aloud in the course of a spoken text, and the segmentation of portions of news according to participants interaction and use of camera/voiceover

Mapping basic writing "frontiers"

2011 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis will argue that there is a gap between the Basic Writing pedagogies of Min Zhan Lu and Mina P. Shaughnessy manifesting itself at the discourse site between the language of home and the language of school. This gap, it will be argued, develops from the conflicting expectations of both teachers and students created by past experiences in the classroom and a perception of belongingness based on group "membership." Further, it will be asserted that many Basic Writing students must face personal fears created by perceptions of past academic failures and a pre-determined sense of not belonging in the classroom in order to hear and respond to those conflicting expectations using their own voices. Teachers may be able to help students face these fears by disrupting the students' preconceived conceptions of the Basic Writing classroom. This thesis will attempt to show that one possible means of disruption is creating an "untraditional" classroom environment using a multigenre format

The Purpose of Assessment: Analyzing Alternative Assessments

Assessment is what drives instruction curriculum and is “essential to every instructional Metacognition is an essential process of learning and using one mode of evaluation does not provide evidence of this type of understanding. Using multiple assessments is key to discovering the different ways students understand material they have learned. Teachers have an immense impact of the formatting of a classroom. A survey was completed to discover if teachers have a tendency to format assessments based on their own preferences or the preferences of their students’ abilities and strengths. There were fifteen participants all who have a New York State certification. They answered the fifteen questions from the survey given to them online. This was done anonymously to give a view of teachers’ preferences for testing or projects within their classroom