Institutions of higher education pride themselves on their commitments to access, inclusion, and care. However, when motivated by neoliberal goals of productivity, such initiatives may confuse inclusion with normative assimilation by attempting to align all individuals with an ableist status quo. In other words, neutral documents, discourses, and design practices may contribute to the rhetorical and material circulation of systemic ableism by encouraging compulsory alignment with able standards and norms. To examine how the systemic force of neoliberal ableism may move across higher educational spaces, this dissertation engages understandings of rhetoric as complexly circulating across trans-situational, everyday sites in universities. Further, I show that neoliberalism relies on the rhetorical circulation and normalization of ableist rhetorics across seemingly neutral university documents, discourses and design practices like those aimed to promote access, inclusion, and care. This dissertation thus follows the social justice call in technical and professional communication to interrogate participation in documentation, design, and discursive practices that may contribute to larger systems of oppression. Specifically, I apply a mixed-methods, qualitative approach of corpus linguistic analysis, semi-structured interviews grounded in user-experience design, and thematic, concept, and in vivo coding to examine and disrupt the circulation of ableist rhetoric across composition program mission statements, self-care documents, and digital classroom interfaces. Drawing from technical and professional communication, rhetoric and composition, disability studies, rhetorics of health and medicine, social justice, and disability justice scholarship, this dissertation explores theoretical frameworks for interrogating ableism’s material-discursive implications and provides guidelines for university stakeholders to engage in more equitable communications. Ultimately, I offer a theory of “cripistemological coalition” that calls for transdisciplinary, coalitional measures that position disability as integral to university inclusion, access, and care.

This dissertation develops a heuristic—one I call the iterative narrative reflection framework—for rhetorically engaged, data-driven teacherly theory building using Kenneth Burke’s frames of acceptance and rejection. Teacher-scholars regularly develop curricula and lesson plans informed by theory and prior experience, but the daily practice of teaching and learning with students rarely plays out as expected. In many cases, institutional constraints and the unpredictable lives of students interact with teachers’ plans in surprising and sometimes confounding ways. Teachers typically make sense of such challenges by constructing post-hoc narratives about what happened and why, attributing motives and agencies to other participants in ways that suggest how to respond, move forward, and get back on track. Whether such narratives are part of a deliberate practice of reflection or an informal and largely unnoticed mental process, they are rarely thought of as constructed accounts and therefore as rhetorical acts that can be subjected to serious review, criticism, and revision. Yet these stories are shaped by familiar genre conventions that influence interpretations of events and motives in ways that may or may not serve well as teachers consider how best to respond to unfolding events. Using the iterative narrative reflection framework to guide my analysis of my own teacherly narratives through multiple layers of reflection and criticism, I demonstrate across the dissertation’s three cases how such deliberate, methodical analysis can reveal tacit assumptions and additional interpretive possibilities. Ultimately, such a process of iterative reflection enables the teacher-scholar to choose from among a wider range of available means of persuasion and pedagogical possibilities.

This project emphasizes a complex, holistic, and additive view of content knowledge in the Discipline of Writing, advocating for balanced and affirming scholarship and pedagogy rather than a competitive approach that leads to an epistemology of erasure. As a composite project, the introduction contextualizes three articles linked by their articulation of holistically and additively thinking for students and scholars in the discipline of writing, preparing the reader to see the rhetorical steps that I attempt to take in each article along these lines. Article 1, “The Collaborative Work of Composition,” uses Marxian language of production to highlight the complexities of collaborative writing in a social microcosm drawing focus to the difficulties some students have collaborating, particularly those of linguistic and cultural minority groups, because they or their collaborators struggle to adopt an additive valuing system to position themselves and one another as part of a team with varying strengths. In Article 2, “An Integrative Translingual Pedagogy of Affirmation,” I build on this valuing of writers by advocating for an affirming pedagogy that allows teachers to help students see the complexity and value of their shared languages and their individual (L)anguage as well as the identity connected to these. Article 3, “Familia Académica: Translingual History and the Epistemology of Erasure,” draws on a deep and overlooked history that provides a more complex holistic lens for the current socio-politics of the discipline of Writing’s interaction with the translingual approach, re-orienting to a more additive blend of the extreme perspectives that key scholars have taken between second language writing and translingual writing. Finally, the last section of the dissertation acts as a metaconstruction of the discipline of Writing, pointing to moments within the previous three articles that indicate a sustained effort to complicate binaries and then provide an alternate symbiosis of scholarly perspectives for disciplinary discourse and identity in Writing. Most importantly though, the final section of the dissertation synthesizes the partial approaches introduced in the previous three articles which inform my understanding of disciplinarity. Further, this final section attempts to find equity in the variety of partial approaches developed in the previous articles and which I have since matured into what I call the 8 Aspects of Writing. The 8 aspects and their components move beyond individual issues presented in each article and synthesize a more holistic, additive, and systematic model of defining the content knowledge for the discipline of Writing.

This dissertation investigates the origins of dual enrollment (DE) writing courses that give students the opportunity to receive college credit for writing in high school. While no previous research dates DE programs to before the 1970s, this dissertation analyzes the development of the self-proclaimed “longest-running” DE program that began at the University of Connecticut in 1955. In this work, I contend that the University of Connecticut’s DE program began as a complacent act that further advanced already privileged (white affluent) students and further marginalized students of color, which extends marginalizing aspects of the origins of the first-year writing requirement.

I first establish the historical, social, and political context for the development of DE programs at the University of Connecticut with an overview Brown v. Board of Education, whites’ resistance to integration, and the white complacency of citizens in Connecticut in the 1950s. Using whiteness theory and feminist research methods, archival research conducted at the University of Connecticut focused on the development of DE programs shows an institutional absent presence, that is, there is an absence of reference to Brown, integration, or race of students where it concerns the construction, inception, and operation of the first DE writing courses. And finally, an attempt at a disparate impact analysis of current assessment practices that determine enrollment in DE writing courses highlights access and assessment as a connection between the history and the present state of DE programs and DE composition courses. With the inclusion of DE composition, my dissertation project fills at least some of the identified gap in historical research in Rhetoric and Composition Studies during the 1950s and extends arguments of how white complacency has and continues to influence the field and first-year writing.

The Stretch Model is a model of first year composition (FYC) that “stretches” the first semester's class over two semesters in order to help writing students who arrive at university with low test scores to succeed in their composition courses. Originally piloted in 1994 at Arizona State University (ASU), the Stretch Model of composition has been found to be effective in terms of retention and persistence of first language (L1) writers (e.g., Glau, 1996; 2007). It has become known at ASU and abroad as the Stretch Program. Since 1997, a separate track of the Stretch Program has been solely for second language (L2) writers, and L2 writing students are now roughly 17% of the program's population. Until fairly recently, there was no attempt to collect L2 data to support the Stretch Program's claims for effectiveness for the L2 population. As many universities across the nation have garnered inspiration for their own programs ("Stretch Award" 2016), and L2 writers have the potential to be in any composition class (Matsuda, Saenkhum, & Accardi, 2013), it is imperative to include the voices of L2 writers in the analysis of the Stretch Program. This study addresses the need for L2 writers' voices to be included in the analysis of the Stretch Program at Arizona State University. From the quantitative analysis of 64,085 students’ institutional data records, and qualitative analysis of 210 student surveys, findings include L2 writers have the highest rates of passing, but the lowest rates of persistence in the three-semester first year composition requirement when compared to Stretch L1 students and the traditional FYC population. Survey data also lends L2 student perceptions to complicate the main features of the Stretch Program including perceived writing improvement, having the same teacher and classmates for two semesters, and having more time to work on their writing. The quantitative findings are consistent with Snyder’s (2017a) analysis of the 2012 fall Stretch Program L1 and L2 cohorts.

This dissertation presents reflective teaching practices that draw from an object-oriented rhetorical framework. In it, practices are offered that prompt teachers and students to account for the interdependent relationships between objects and writers. These practices aid in re-envisioning writing as materially situated and leads to more thoughtful collaborations between writers and objects.

Through these practices, students gain a more sophisticated understanding of their own writing processes, teachers gain a more nuanced understanding of the outcomes of their pedagogical choices, and administrators gain a clearer vision of how the classroom itself affects curriculum design and implementation. This argument is pursued in several chapters, each presenting a different method for inciting reflection through the consideration of human/object interaction.

The first chapter reviews the literature of object oriented rhetorical theory and reflective teaching practice. The second chapter adapts a methodology from the field of Organizational Science called Narrative Network Analysis (NNA) and leads students through a process of identifying and describing human/object interaction within narratives and asks students to represent these relationships visually. As students undertake this task they can more objectively examine their own writing processes. In the third chapter, video ethnographic methodologies are used to observe object oriented rhetoric theory in practice through the interactions of humans and objects in the writing classroom. Through three video essays, clips of footage taken of a writing classroom and its writing objects are selected and juxtaposed to highlight the agency and influence of objects. In chapter four, a tool developed using freely available cloud-based web applications is presented which is termed the “Fitness Tracker for Teaching.” This tool is used to regularly collect, store, and analyze data that students self-report through a daily class survey about their work efforts, their work environment, and their feelings of confidence, productivity, and self-efficacy. The data gathered through this tool provides a more complete understanding of student effort and affect than could be provided by the teacher’s and students’ own memories or perceptions. Together these chapters provide a set of reflective practices that reinforce teaching writing as a process that is affective and embodied and acknowledges and accounts for the rhetorical agency of objects.

The struggle of the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) to make space for women’s history in the United States is in important ways emblematic of the struggle for recognition and status of American women as a whole. Working at the intersections of digital-material memory production and using the NWHM as a focus, this dissertation examines the significance of the varied strategies used by and contexts among which the NWHM and entities like it negotiate for digital, material, and rhetorical space within U.S. public memory production. As a “cybermuseum,” the NWHM functions within national public memory production at the intersections of material and digital culture; yet as an activist institution in search of a permanent, physical “home” for women’s history, the NWHM also counterproductively reifies existing gendered norms that make such an achievement difficult. By examining selected aspects of this complexly situated entity, this dissertation makes visible the gendered nature of public memory production, the digital and material components of that production, and the hybrid nature of emerging public memory entities which operate simultaneously in multiple spheres. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and guided by Carole Blair’s work on rhetorical materiality, this dissertation explores key aspects of the NWHM’s process of becoming, including an examination of the centrality of the interpellation of publics to the rhetorical materiality of public discourse; an analysis of the material state of public memory production in national history museums in the U.S.; and an exploration of the embodied engagement that undergirds all interaction with and presentation of historical artifacts and narratives, whether digital, physical or both at once. In a synthesis of findings, this dissertation describes a set of key characteristics through which certain hybrid digital-material entities (including the NWHM) enact increasingly complex variations of rhetorical agency. These characteristics suggest a need for a more flexible analytic framework, described in the final chapter. This framework takes shape as an heuristic of functions across which digital-material entities always already enact a situated, active, embodied, and simultaneous agency, one that can account fully for the rhetorical processes through which space is “made” for women in U.S. public memory.

"Bringing-before-the-eyes": Visuality and Audience in Greek Rhetoric examines how Greek rhetorical theories are understood through the lens of visuality and the ways in which orators accounted for audience knowledges and expectations in the creation of rhetorical texts and performances. Through a close reading of Greek rhetorical texts from the classical period, I develop three heuristics for analyzing the ways in which rhetoricians invite and encourage visualized images through rhetorical practice.

By exploring (1) language cues that orators use to signal visualization, (2) the ways in which shared cultural memories and ideas allow orators to call upon standardized images, and (3) the influence of stylistic choices and audience emotions related to the vividness of rhetorical images, I argue that it is possible to analyze the ways in which classical Greek orators understood and employed visual elements in their rhetorical performances. I then conduct an analysis of the visual aspects of Demosthenes' On the Embassy using these heuristics to demonstrate the ways in which these three aspects of visuality are intertwined and contribute to a greater understanding of the relationship between the verbal and the visual in rhetorical theory.

My findings indicate that Greek orators readily identified the influence of visual ways of knowing on rhetorical theory and presented early hypotheses of the ways in which sense perceptions affect social practice. This project complicates the ways in which rhetorical theory is categorized. Rather than considering visual rhetoric as a distinct field from traditional, verbal text-based rhetorical studies, this project explores the ways in which visual and verbal modes of thinking are interconnected in Greek rhetorical theory. By bridging these two areas of rhetorical study and arguing that verbal rhetoric can instantiate internalized, visual phenomena for audiences, the dichotomy of verbal and visual is problematized. By focusing on the rhetorical theory of classical Greece, this project also invites future research into the ways in which dominant, Western historic and contemporary systems of epistemology are influenced by the co-mingling of verbal and visual in classical Greek philosophy and education.

This project is an institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005, 2006) that examines the lived experiences of nine second language (L2) writing teachers, specifically with regard to the interpersonal, material, and spatial relationships inherent in their work. Using interviews, focus groups, and a mapping heuristic for data collection, the study investigates the current culture of L2 writing that is (or is not) created within this specialized community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and the individual participant motivations as actors within a complex and dynamic network (Latour, 2007). Because findings from the study are relevant for a variety of fields and audiences, the dissertation is separated into three freestanding but interrelated articles.

Article one focuses on the data of one participant whose teaching roles/ranks in the writing program shifted over time: from graduate teaching associate to part-time adjunct faculty member to full-time non-tenure track writing instructor. Article two uses all nine participants’ data and focuses on their perceptions of and experiences with L2-specific teacher training. Results share the perceived benefits and drawbacks of teacher training to specialize in working with multilingual student populations considering various material conditions present in the institution. In addition, the article locates additional programmatic spaces where professionalization happens (or can happen), and ultimately assesses and questions the justification of specialization of teachers within the writing program and where that specialization can/should occur. Article three reflects on a specific data collection technique—a mapping heuristic—and discusses the ways in which this method is beneficial, not only for observing the different connections that L2 writing teachers create in their work lives, but also for collecting data in any institutional ethnographic study.

While these three articles are intended to be independent of one another, together they comprise a dissertation-length institutional ethnographic inquiry that demonstrates the diverse voices, motivations, and experiences of second language writing teachers that inform the decisions made in an institution known as a writing program. WPAs can use the knowledge and takeaways gained in the study to learn more about how to support and advocate for this important stakeholder group.

This dissertation examines collaborative inquiry as a form of graduate mentoring. To investigate this issue, I analyze the research and writing process of a team of five multilingual graduate students and their mentor as they collaboratively design, implement, and report a study based in their local writing program over the course of two years. Through a qualitative activity analysis of team meetings, participant interviews, and the team’s written drafts and email correspondence, I investigate the ways in which self-sponsored, team-based collaborative research and writing supports participants’ learning and development of a professional identity.

Key findings show that unanticipated obstacles in the research context present participants with “real-world” dilemmas that call forth disciplinary alignments, reinforce existing disciplinary practices, and, most importantly, generate new practices altogether. An example of this process is reflected in the research team's frequent need to adjust their research design as a result of constraints within the research environment. The team's ability to pivot in response to such constraints encouraged individual members to view the research enterprise as dynamic and fluid, leading ultimately to a heightened sense of agency and stronger awareness of the rhetorical challenges and opportunities posed by empirical research. Similarly, participants’ demonstrated an ability to recognize and resolve tensions stemming from competing demands on their time and attention during the course of their graduate study. Actively constructing resonances across various domains of their graduate worlds—coursework, teaching, and non-curricular research and professionalization activities—served to clarify purposes and increase motivation.

An additional aspect of this study is the way graduate students leverage their language resources in the collaborative process. This dissertation extends the disciplinary conversation by investigating ways in which language resources function as rhetorical tools within the research context. This focus on language, in concert with collaboration and rhetorical stances to inquiry, challenges persistent views of authorship, apprenticeship, and language norms, while simultaneously lending insight into how graduate students invent new ways of participating in their professional worlds.