Browsing by Author "Brooks-Gillies, Marilee"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 13
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    Beyond Deficit: Reconstructing Perceptions of Justice-Involved Writers in the Field of Writing and Rhetoric
    (2024-08) Hawkins, Kelsey; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Fox, Steve; Hyatt, Susan
    This project analyzes and deconstructs deficit thinking in the perceptions of justice-involved writers within both carceral and post-carceral contexts. Current scholarship within the field of writing and rhetoric often discursively constructs incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers’ literacies, epistemologies, and rhetorical practices through a deficit lens. By critically analyzing the discourses surrounding justice-involved writers, I identify the ways in which deficit thinking manifests in the field’s scholarship and instead emphasize anti-deficit understandings of carceral knowledge, rhetoric, and experience. The analysis reveals alternative approaches to researching, conceptualizing, and constructing justice-involved writers through antideficit lenses as well as pedagogical possibilities for teaching incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students.
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    Breathing New Life in the Classroom: Hip Hop as Critical Race Counterstories
    (2023-05) Raines, Brooklyn Ciara; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Buchenot, André; Hoegberg, David
    Critical race counterstories give people the space to share their racialized stories with the world. These stories work to expose different forms of racism like color-blind racism. Critical race counterstories originated from the work done in critical race theory (CRT). In this thesis, Brooklyn Raines makes the case for how hip hop functions as a method of critical race counterstory. Because of hip hop’s ability to reflect the social, political, and economic conditions in the world with an emphasis on the role race plays, Raines promotes the use of counterstories in their pedagogy with hip hop as a particular instance for incorporating counterstory in first-year writing courses to equip students with liberating tools. These tools include skills like critical thinking, rhetorical knowledge, and text interpretation. In this thesis there’s a literature review of how hip hop has been incorporated in classrooms as well as two chapters dedicated to units for educators that want to bring hip hop as a form of critical race counterstories into their classrooms. The first unit is based around Kendrick Lamar’s rhetorical exchange with Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera. The second unit is created around the backlash Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion received from their empowering record WAP. The hope for this project is educators can equip students with tools like media literacy skills, the ability to interrogate notions of White supremacy, and the ability to form their own opinions with the assistance of responsible research. Educators deserve to know there is exciting curriculum outside of the cannon of what is expected to be taught that is oftentimes rooted in White supremacy.
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    Constellations Across Cultural Rhetorics and Writing Centers
    (IWCA, 2018) Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; English, School of Liberal Arts
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    Generation Five: A Chicana's Journey From Being to Becoming in the Biracial Kitchen
    (2019-10) Chan-Brose, Khirston S.; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Zimmerman, Anna; Kirts, Terry
    Cultural rhetoricians work to decolonize research practices to make space for all possible realities, placing a particular emphasis on story as theory. As such, this thesis utilizes an auto-ethnographic approach to demonstrates how KC Chan-Brose struggled to construct her biracial identity as a white-passing Chicana and how she used food and cooking as a tool for reading and writing cultures. Chan-Brose argues that cultural identity is made, or constructed, by people. With this argument, the oppressive notion of either/or, which implies that biracials must choose one culture and align themselves with that culture, loses power. This loss of power also challenges the notion of authenticity within cultures, positing the notion of authenticity as exclusionary, rather than inclusive. She examines her claim to color by storying her experience of coming to understand herself as biracial. She concludes that biracial identity is constructed from the mundane everyday experiences of our lives, and of both sides of our cultures. Chan-Brose posits that we must acknowledge the ways our culture is constructed by the ways we speak, relate to one another, and understand ourselves, and then garner the authority over our own identities to influence our culture’s construction. To model this, Chan-Brose proposes constructing cultural identity through the lens of fusion food and uses Gloria Anzaldua’s mestizaje and Malea Powell’s metis to demonstrate both/and identities as viewed from biracials who have claimed their biracialness as their power.
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    Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines: Identifying, Teaching, and Supporting
    (The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado, 2020) Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Garcia, Elena G.; Kim, Soo Hyon; Manthey, Katie; Smith, Trixie G.; English, School of Liberal Arts
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    "I Knew Grad School Was Gonna Be Hard But...": Community and Feedback in Graduate Writing Support
    (2021-06) Worrell, Brandilyn Nicole; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Buchenot, Andre; Layden, Sarah
    Often, one of the first areas to cave under the pressures of graduate school is a graduate student’s writing. Sometimes this is because a writer feels unprepared for the amount or types of writing or it is simply due to the fact that writing is a layered process that has not been fully explained to graduate students before. In any of these situations, there remains a need for graduate writing support that accounts for these varied experiences and the larger graduate school environment. In order to better understand these needs on the IUPUI campus and begin to address them, this study collected data from current IUPUI graduate students and a pilot Graduate Writing Group program through the University Writing Center. Through this research, two key themes arose as vital to addressing graduate writer needs and student success in graduate school: community and feedback. By encouraging consideration of these topics within graduate writing programming, support offered can encourage these areas for graduate writers. Community provides space for students not only to learn from each other but also share common experiences and struggles. Through these spaces, graduate students can gain insight into their writing, program, field, and themselves by recognizing what is a natural part of the graduate school process, what needs to change, and how they develop as a result. Quality and diverse feedback leads to deeper understanding of a student’s field, their voice, and their writing process. Without an understanding of these two elements of graduate writing, students remain more likely to struggle with the graduate school process and with the liminal space of being students and professionals.
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    Indications of Single-Session Improvement in Writing Center Sessions
    (2020-05) Wilder, Aaron; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Fox, Steve; DiCamilla, Fred
    In the complementary fields of Composition and Writing Center Studies, the common goal is to guide writers toward improvement in literate practices. However, the meaning of the word “improvement” has undergone radical shifts across time within both fields. It has of late shifted away from a concrete, product-oriented definition toward a non-concrete, process and person-centered nebula. In short, the field of Writing Studies has become very sure what improvement is not, while less sure what it is. Despite this uncertainty, one area of recent agreement appears to be the importance of control that writers hold in navigating within and across literate contexts, often referred to by the slippery term, agency. This pilot study seeks to utilize the voices of researchers across a spectrum of fields to more precisely define agency. This definition will be consistent with current scholarship in both Composition and Writing Center Studies and informed by related fields such as linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. It will then utilize that definition in constructing a RAD (replicable, aggregable and data-driven) qualitative analysis of post-session interviews between researcher and writer. This method will attempt to determine possibilities and guidelines for future research. Particularly, it will provide a framework for future researchers to measure improvement in writing through a more refined definition of social agency. Through that, it will seek to support previous study which suggests as little as a single session in the Writing Center can demonstrate improvement in students’ perceptions of their own writing.
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    Listening Across: A Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Understanding Power Dynamics within a University Writing Center
    (University Writing Center at UT Austin, 2022) Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Balaji, Varshini; Chan-Brose, K. C.; Hull, Kelin; English, School of Liberal Arts
    In this multivocal piece, we take a cultural rhetorics approach foregrounding story and lived experience as we investigate the internal power structures of our writing center. We share positionality stories from our different institutional and social identities to practice there-ness and constellate our stories to create what we call a listening across framework. Through listening across our stories, we sometimes find common ground and sometimes find ruptures that we cannot mend. We see listening across as a decolonial practice that interrogates and disrupts practices that reinforce colonial structures and ways of knowing.