Browsing by Author "Fox, Steve"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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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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    "Discovering" Writing With Struggling Students: Using Discovery Learning Pedagogy to Improve Writing Skills in Reluctant and Remedial Learners
    (2016-03) Bohney, Brandie Lee; Lovejoy, Kim B.; Fox, Steve; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee Elizabeth
    Few writing teachers will disagree that teaching writing conventions in isolation is a fruitless, even harmful, pedagogy which does little, if anything, to improve student writing. Teaching conventions, style, and usage (often collectively referred to as grammar) in context, however, proves difficult when struggling secondary students develop good ideas and evidence but fail to clearly articulate them because of their lack of understanding of various writing conventions. The purpose of this study is to test the efficacy of a carefully designed discovery learning activity which intends to push students into metacognition about what they read, how it is structured, and how that structure affects the reader. Three sources of data were used to determine whether students who had learned by discovery were better able to avoid and revise run-on sentences than students who did not learn through discovery pedagogy. The data sources include two sets of essays, surveys taken by the students, and teacher analyses of essays for readability. The results of the data analysis indicate that use of run-on sentences, especially early in an essay, detrimentally affects the readability of student written work; discovery learning activities improve student understanding, application, and transfer of skill; and while students believe they understand more than their written work indicates, the results provide teachers direction for further instruction. The findings of this study indicate that use of discovery learning for writing instruction with struggling learners holds great promise: a group of students generally regarded as academically weak showed greater understanding and application of run-on sentence avoidance than slightly stronger students who learned without discovery methods. This indicates that discovery learning is a method that improves learning among reluctant secondary students, a population many teachers struggle to reach effectively. Discovery learning is not limited to conventions, though: the promise of its application potential extends into a variety of writing skills and concepts. In addition to the run-on sentence discovery activity studied here, discovery activities for various other skills—from semicolon use through creating characterization with dialogue—are included.
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    Half a Loaf? Hard Lessons When Promoting Adjunct Faculty
    (NCTE, 2017-09) Fox, Steve; Powers, Mick; English, School of Liberal Arts
    In discussions of working conditions for non-tenure-track adjunct faculty in university and college writing programs--most recently, the CCCC Statement on Working Conditions for Non-Tenure-Track Writing Faculty--the goal of equity leads to calls for comparable pay and benefits, hiring practices, access to professional development, class sizes and assignments, and work space and resources. The New Faculty Majority lists professional advancement as one of its seven goals: Equity in Professional Advancement: Progressive Salary Steps and Equal Access to Professional Development Opportunities for All Faculty. The CCCC Statement does briefly mention promotion in its first core principle: Departments, programs, and faculty must work to ensure equity for NTT writing faculty by attending to issues associated with employment: compensation; job security; benefits; access to resources; access to shared governance; and opportunities for professional advancement.
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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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    Linguistic Diversity as Resource: A Multilevel Approach to Building Awareness in First-Year Writing Programs (and Beyond)
    (Duke University, 2018-04) Lovejoy, Kim Brian; Fox, Steve; Weeden, Scott; English, School of Liberal Arts
    Drawing on research in systems theory and their own programmatic efforts to recognize, value, and integrate language differences in first-year composition, the authors argue for a multilevel approach for sustainable and systemic change to occur. Multilevel work functions to identify points of leverage for enacting language rights in institutional settings.