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- Creator:
- Wallace, Ginamarie R.
- Description:
- Traditionally, emotion was viewed as something occurring only within individuals with those emotions being expressed outwards. Emotion is now being recognized as having relational and embodied components outside of the individual. Emotion as multifaceted contributes to meaning making in first year composition because students bring with them all of the emotions they feel concerning the class as well the emotions they feel about their other classes and their lives outside of school. This results in emotion being very present in the first year composition classroom. When the instructor acknowledges and has students use emotion in a productive way, rather than ignoring or suppressing it, students’ academic writing will improve because they will know how to correctly use emotion. The purpose of this research study was to examine the use of emotion on a teaching level in first year composition (FYC) by working with instructors. The importance of how instructors understand emotion in the composition classroom space was focused on by having the participating instructors complete open-ended questionnaires and participate in focus group interviews. Results suggest instructors are aware of the many ways in which emotion is present in the FYC classroom. The participating instructors viewed emotion as a way for them to make connections with students in order for them to create an environment where students are comfortable enough to learn, experiment, and engage. Moreover, emotion was seen as a way to ensure student engagement and interest in their writing and, therefore, help improve their overall writing skills.
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Letellier, Charlotte
- Description:
- Representations of queer relationships in literature are often put in the subtext of works, rather than explicitly addressed. Using Passing by Nella Larsen, Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, and The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, I am examining queer subtext in non-explicitly queer American works. I am focusing on the strong and complex bonds the protagonists have with their same-sex friends. Using the essays of other scholars reading these texts and Adrienne Rich’s theory of compulsory heterosexuality, I am analyzing the romantic subtext in same-sex friendships in literature, especially as compared to the heterosexual relationships. In Passing, my focus is on the protagonist, Irene, and the comparison between her relationship with her husband and her friend. In Winter’s Bone, I discuss the network of female relationships in their culture, as well as the protagonist and her close childhood friend and the way that the heterosexual marriages function apart from the female relationships. In The Outsiders, it is the friendship between the protagonist, Ponyboy, and Johnny Cade, as well as the symbolic nature of setting.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Kirkpatrick, Keaton R.
- Description:
- Embedded mentors are trained students who are placed directly into courses to support student learning. While embedded support models are becoming increasingly common, little empirical research has been done to understand who embedded mentors are, what they are able to do in a class space, and what benefits are gained by having them. Responding to this need for more research, a mixed methods study using semi-structured interviews, surveys, and fieldnotes was designed to learn about embedded mentors in two different embedded mentoring programs at one rural four-year public university in northern California . Findings from the data suggest the roles of embedded mentors are dynamic and situational; mentoring has benefits and considerations for faculty, mentors, and students; the purpose of mentors is to positively affect student belonging in college, course success, and identity; and roles and purposes are only sometimes connected by mentors. For future programs, it is recommended that embedded mentors are a part of course design and embedded mentoring is not universally defined. More research should be done at different universities to support or challenge the work done here.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- King, Kelsey Michelle Jessica
- Description:
- New teachers of composition have a lot to gain from developing a critically reflective stance about their teaching. If they can learn to intentionally engage in reflective practices which emphasize student success in relation to their course objectives, they can develop an epistemology of practice that is rooted in an informed consideration of their intentions and objectives. This study analyzes the responses of graduate students to a series of reflection questionnaires who were in their first year of teach ing First-Year Composition at California State University, Chico. Through the exploration of the data collected from study participants in relation to different theoretical perspectives of reflection, this study focuses on understanding the extent to which new teachers reflect on their teaching practices, how they make-meaning of their new experiences through reflective practices, and if they are engaging in student-centered reflection.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Keables, Jeanette M.
- Description:
- When We Must Walk in Darkness is a memoir beginning with a Critical Introduction, followed by a collection of vignettes, each one representing a significant moment after my son Tyler’s 2002 near-fatal motorcycle accident. In the Critical Introduction, I reference Phillip Lopate’s “double perspective” and illustrate how the work portrays my prior and present intelligences. In addition, I distinguish ways in which the writing exemplifies Mary Karr’s definition of interiority. The trauma recovery narrative at tempts to engage the themes of grief, familial distress, and acceptance. Depicting ways in which I endure and overcome calamity, the collection develops me as a character by portraying my inner conflict and how my past informs my choices as a mother. The stories characterize Tyler as I share anecdotes intended to represent who he was before the accident. As a form, the vignette allows me to capture distinct memories and reconstruct them, threading a tapestry of individual moments and portraying my distinct perspective as Tyler’s mother. One of the strongest emerging themes is how I learn to cope by compartmentalizing each experience, living entirely in the moment. Amnesty International’s motto, “It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” exemplifies what this work hopes to accomplish. Though the collection originates from my life experience, the stories relate to a larger audience as they attempt to convey a common humanity where each individual must grapple with life’s misfortunes and discover ways to “light a candle” rather than “curse the darkness.”
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Huso, Emily
- Description:
- Invasion of the Bees and Other Stories is a collection of short stories and flash fictions that explore themes of paternal absence and neglect, female distrust of men, relationship discord, self-sabotage, and various forms of abuse. Firmly footed in the genre of realism, the short stories in the collection attempt to reveal the aspects of ourselves that we try to conceal, stifle, or seal away like bees in an attic. Tethered together by shared themes and setting, the flash fictions in the collection borrow elements of magical realism to expose our most secret vulnerabilities. The critical introduction discusses the craft aspects of realism and magical realism with respect to authors such as Marilynne Robinson, Charles Baxter, John Gardner, Benjamin Percy, Alice Munro, and Maria Romasco Moore.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Gibaldi, Mary
- Description:
- In literary worlds, as in the actual world, women are often left without a space to call their own. Obliged instead to navigate men’s societal structures and homes, female characters naturally respond to the spaces they inhabit differently than their male counterparts. However, the most significant theoretical works of spatial and architectural poetics—branches of literary criticism and philosophy that make meaning of houses’ physical features—do not account for this difference in perception because these texts are predominantly authored by men. Indeed, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the most significant work in the field, omits any mention of domestic labor, assumes that his reader owns and is able to exact control over their home, and exclusively quotes other male writers; thus, the emotional impulses towards space as they currently exist in the field are profoundly privileged and inherently masculine. In order to respond to the gendered oversights in Bachelard’s argument, this project places his claims into conversation with female writers across time and space by explicating the houses represented in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette and Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Toni Morrison’s Love, and Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe. By analyzing these texts, the discrepancies between Bachelard’s masculine assertions regarding the experience of one’s home space and women’s experiences living in men’s houses become apparent and a new, feminized iteration of spatial and architectural poetics begins to emerge.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Duran, Hannah Nadiene
- Description:
- In the ongoing discussion of how to support diversity in higher education, language usage and its variation has been one of the most disputed features of writing pedagogy and instruction. The purpose of this research study was to examine how language variety is viewed, discussed, and responded to by instructors who teach writing intensive courses at an MA-granting university in northern California within disciplines primarily beyond the Humanities. Data was collected through six semi-structured interviews with instructor participants who teach or have taught writing in their respective discipline. The findings suggest that many instructors in other fields are either unaware of students’ language varieties in their classrooms or have a superficial awareness of student language diversity and lack the understanding, language, and training to respond to and assess student language variety in their writing assignments. As a result, the author proposes in the concluding chapter that the campus works towards developing faculty training programs or workshops that help to support, educate, and provide resources for writing instructors with the goal of improving course design, approaches to assessment, and overall teaching practices and ultimately create a more accessible and equitable classroom space for all students.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Dill, Kyler
- Description:
- The last two decades have brought along much scholarship in regard to monstrosity within literature. This has been thoroughly shown through the ways in which Christians in England have made monsters of other religions. Christians have repeatedly, especially in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, made Muslims and Jews monstrous in their literature, but not much work has been done to argue that Christians often did the same to themselves. The orthodox Christian of the West used monstrosity to warn against accepting heterodox practices of Christianity. I posit that this manifests differently through the centuries in geographical distance and what makes the Other, Other, but the goals remain the same. Whether it be the quasi-Christians in The Book of John Mandeville, Margery Kempe’s frightening, heterodox Christianity in The Book of Margery Kempe, or the liminal Christian in Beware the Cat, the Christian Self continued to fear the existence of Christian Others.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Astengo, Dan
- Description:
- This thesis argues for the necessity of improved teaching practices in higher education literature courses; suggests a theoretical framework for literary study that engages readers on a personal level as well as within communities of other readers; and shares the results of an action research project undertaken by a teacher-in-training. It argues that the decline of literary studies in higher education institutions is not just a symptom of the commodification of college degrees but of shortcomings in the experience of studying literature. Innovative teaching practices that allow for students to participate in meaningful ways and which might open up new avenues of participation in the field outside of the classroom are discussed. This thesis is an exploration of the potential that literature teachers have to positively impact their students and their discipline.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Chico
- Department:
- English