Scholarship

As a scholar, I've never seen myself as devoted primarily to teaching at the expense of research, or vice versa. On the contrary, I consider myself to be a teacher researcher, an approach that keeps both sides of my academic identity in conversation with each other.

This duality is evident in my professional background. I was trained in Texas Tech's Technical Communication and Rhetoric program, well known for its robust instruction in research methods — but most of my career has been at teaching-focused, open-enrollment institutions. In my research, therefore, I bring qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods to questions of pedagogy and classroom success.

As shown below, my scholarly work primarily centers on writing program administration, teacher preparation, online writing instruction, accessibility, usability, and rhetoric.

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Current Projects

Instructor Presence and Autonomy

Can pre-designed online courses be enhanced to allow for more authentic instructor–student interaction without sacrificing efficiency and quality?

At Park University, online asynchronous versions of courses are developed by subject-matter experts working with an instructional design team, and then the resulting Canvas shells are duplicated each term for a veritable army of adjunct non-designer instructors.

This "enterprise model," as it is called, is efficient from an institutional standpoint — but it introduces its own problems. As a writing program administrator with expertise in online writing instruction pedagogy, I felt that giving instructors more autonomy would be an important first step in improving both instructor satisfaction with teaching as well as student outcomes, but it wasn't the fix I expected it to be.

A deep dive into the research about the Community of Inquiry Framework and the role instructor presence plays in online learning led me to design a study examining the role that design can play in enabling instructor autonomy and presence in pre-designed courses. I give a brief overview of the project and its outcomes in the following video:

Our analysis of the data we collected suggest that the changes we made had a huge impact on both students and instructors — in fact, the pass rate for the enhanced version of the course was 20 percentage points higher than in the unmodified version.

My team and I presented our extended findings as a panel at the 2023 ATTW conference, and we are now hard at work preparing three article manuscripts for submission, as described in the video.

Methods Employed: quasi-experimental design, questionnaire, semi-structured interviews

Synthesis and Media Literacy

A new writing course project designed to help students develop two interrelated skills simultaneously.

Over years of teaching a junior-level writing course at an open-enrollment institution without a dedication Writing in the Disciplines program, my research partner and I noticed that students consistently struggled with two things:

• Synthesis: The course asked students to practice synthesis in the form of a literature review related to their major, but because so many students did not come from a traditionally college-ready background or were not yet far enough along in their major to appreciate how it approaches research and synthesis, students were not adequately developing this key academic skill and others related to it, including research, source evaluation, source integration, joining in the public or academic discourse, and more.
• Media Literacy: In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, research suggested America was facing a crisis in news media literacy and confidence, and our experiences working with students supported those conclusions. Often we heard expressions of outsized cynicism about reputable news outlets or extreme trust in fringe news organizations and voices (from both sides of the political spectrum). Few students seemed to understand the difference between a news anchor and a political pundit, and declarations of apathy concerning engagement with the news were common, almost a badge of honor among the young adults in our classes.

In response to this, we developed a new synthesis unit focused around a project we called the Current Event Coverage Report. The report requires students to

1. choose a recent event of national interest that has received wide coverage in the public discourse
2. gather as much media coverage as they can about their event, including articles, editorials, show segments, blog posts, pundits’ monologues, think tank essays, analyses, etc.
3. evaluate the merits, credentials, biases, and failings of each in an annotated bibliography
4. write a report about the event and the way it was covered in the media.

We found that, through this unit, students developed greater proficiency in synthesis-related skills while also developing confidence in engaging constructively with news media. In their reflections, students — many of whom began the unit apathetic or cynical about current events — excitedly described the media diets they intended to consume, often a deliberate mix of print, audio, and video sources offering varying amounts of reporting, analysis, and opinion.

I presented our findings at the 2018 CCCC Annual Convention, and our article is currently under review at Prompt.

Using Slack to Enable and Extend Class Interactions

The modern classroom is always hybrid, regardless of course modality. I explore how workplace messaging software improves access for today's students.

I have used the workplace messaging software Slack in my face-to-face, hybrid, and online asynchronous classes for over 7 years as a way to foster more (and more organic) interactions between students, instructors, and course material and to extend classroom interactions out into an accessible, low-stakes third space.

I haven't yet made my use of Slack the focus of a formal, empirical study, but when the COVID pandemic forced so many classes to move to online and hybrid settings, I decided to share my experiences — and the principles I gleaned about the effective use of Slack and similar software — with other instructors in hopes of helping them meet the challenges of the COVID era.

My audience and focus for each of these presentations was different but in each one I showed how messaging software can be used to

• allow students greater control over how they present themselves to classmates,
• increase modes of access, enabling more student participation,
• allow a greater degree of underlife in and out of class, and
• promote community building among students separated in time and space.

I also presented the heuristic I use when evaluating new software for potential use in my classes. The materials and resources used in one of these presentations is archived on Grover's English, my OER website.

My intention is to undertake a more formal study in the future and publish a scholarly article.

Past Projects

The following represent a few of my past scholarly projects; for a complete listing of scholarly output, please see my curriculum vita.

Ethos in Cook's Illustrated

For the inaugural symposium of the Applied Rhetoric Collaborative in 2018, I presented a paper on the rhetoric of cookbooks and recipe writing, a long extant but all-but-unstudied avenue of technical communication.

My paper specifically examined the working of ethos in a popular cooking magazine, Cook's Illustrated, the flagship publication of America's Test Kitchen. I applied a framework for analyzing credibility in the context of online product reviews — drawn from Mackiewicz’s 2010 article "The co-construction of credibility in online product reviews” — to a full year's run of the magazine in order to determine how it presents itself as a credible and reliable producer of recipes.

I concluded that, on the one hand, Cook's Illustrated conveys trustworthiness in the form of explicitly putting its readers’ needs and wants first and creating a personal, personable affect, especially in the guise of its founder and spokesperson, Christopher Kimball. On the other, it conveys expertise by repeatedly highlighting its scientific method-esque approach to recipe development, its eschewing of advertising (and, therefore, any implied bias), and its absolute consistency in its print layout.

Methods Employed: rhetorical analysis, content analysis

Immersion, Reflection, Failure: Teaching Graduate Students to Teach Writing Online

This article grew out of a panel I participated in at the CCCC Annual Convention in 2016. When Kelli, Heidi, Kevin, and I realized how closely our individual papers intersected, we decided to explore the connections in greater detail. Here's the abstract:

Choose Your Own Adventure: Agency as Constitutive Rhetorical Vision in Web 2.0

On November 21, 2012, web comic artist Ryan North began a Kickstarter project campaign called “To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure” to raise money to cover the publishing costs of an 80,000-word, Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that he had written.

The project met its initial funding goal of $20,000 in less than four hours, and by the December 21 deadline 30 days later, the campaign had exploded, receiving $580,905 in pledges from 15,352 backers, or 2904% of its funding goal, becoming the most funded publishing project in Kickstarter history to that time.

The obvious questions, then, were how did this happen and why did it happen to this project instead of another? I attempted to answer these questions by performing a fantasy theme analysis informed by Maurice Charland’s idea of constitutive rhetoric. The resulting paper was delivered at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference.

Method Employed: fantasy theme analysis

Preparing Graduate Teaching Assistants to Teach Writing Online

My dissertation — done through Texas Tech University and overseen by Kelli Cargile Cook, the past president of both ATTW and CPTSC — bridged the fields of teacher preparation and online writing instruction. Here is the abstract:

I presented on the three phases of my research at the three premiere conferences for my areas of scholarship:

Methods Employed: mixed methods sequential exploratory design, content analysis, questionnaire