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"In our composition classrooms, how many of us take the time to talk to our students about their everyday writing lives? Do we ask them about the responsibilities they feel (or not) to their writing activities and spaces, and if they feel more authoritative in one community versus another? Do we dismiss these extracurricular practices, many of them rooted in popular culture, because we assume they are playful or even disruptive rather than critical or productive?
If students' extracurricular practices are as important to them as Andrea Lunsford's Stanford Study of Writing suggests, and if these practices are as dynamic as the research of Rebecca Black and other literacy scholars suggest, it seems that inviting students to talk about them within the context of the composition classroom is an essential pedagogical practice. Doing so can help bridge the extracurriculum and curriculum and can serve as a way to help students enhance their rhetorical knowledge and critical thinking skills by, for instance, comparing the social and material conditions across different sites of literacy." -- Exploring Literacy Sponsorship in the Digital Extracurriculum: How Students' Participation in Fan Fiction Sites Can Inform Composition Pedagogy |
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Welcome! From 2010-2012, I was an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. As of August 2012, I will be joining the English department at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill, New York. I will teach a variety of American lit as well as composition courses, and I am thrilled at this new opportunity. I received my M.A. in English from Boston College and my PhD in English and Education at the University of Michigan. I specialize in Composition and Rhetoric and also teach American literature. For my dissertation, I conducted a qualitative study focused on college students' participation in online fan fiction communities. Using literacy sponsorship as articulated by Deborah Brandt (2001) combined with positioning theory
(Rom Harré, 1970), I examine the ideologies and agents at work in fan fiction sites to reveal how participants are interactively and reflexively positioned as they register for the site, design their profile pages, take on rights and responsibilities associated with their positions in the community, and interact with other members. I also illustrate how they reshape, reinforce, or sometimes reject those ideologies in order to make their literacy practices more meaningful for themselves and for the community. Research on the digital extracurriculum has significance for the field of composition. First, college students remain an under-represented demographic in conversations about technology and literacy; thus, such research would attend to and include the experiences of this dynamic demographic. Second, as Andrea Lunsford's longitudinal Stanford Study of Writing reinforces, extracurricular literacy practices are tremendously important to college students. If instructors invite the extracurriculum into the curriculum without necessarily appropriating it, we can honor students' skills and experiences and also prepare students to be more critical participants as they traverse across increasingly complex sites of literacy. I argue that a framework of literacy sponsorship, along with positioning theory, can frame these theoretical and practical conversations. I have other projects going on as well. I have two articles in the works: One article is about how fan fiction writers use profile pages to position themselves in their communities and the ways in which these profile pages (or something similar) can be used in the composition classroom. The other article is about peer workshopping and how instructors can help students' negotiate their expectations (as well as the instructor's expectations) for peer-to-peer feedback. Also, I am excited to announce that my co-authors and I are working on the second edition of our textbook, Writing Places (Longman), which we anticipate will be available September 2012. Please browse my bio, CV, and teaching and administrative philosophies, and feel free to contact me! |
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