Published Articles by Misty Anne Winzenried
Composition Forum, 2017
Although compositionists recognize that student talk plays an important role in learning to write... more Although compositionists recognize that student talk plays an important role in learning to write, there is limited understanding of how students use conversational moves to collaboratively build knowledge about writing across contexts. This article reports on a study of focus group conversations involving first-year students in a cohort program. Our analysis identified two patterns of group conversation among students: " co-telling " and " co-constructing, " with the latter leading to more complex writing knowledge. We also used Beaufort's domains of writing knowledge to examine how co-constructing conversations supported students in abstracting knowledge beyond a single classroom context and in negotiating local constraints. Our findings suggest that co-constructing is a valuable process that invites students to do the necessary work of remaking their knowledge for local use. Ultimately, our analysis of the role of student conversation in the construction of writing knowledge contributes to our understanding of the myriad activities that surround transfer of learning.
Graduate teaching assistants (TAs) and the general education yet discipline-specific courses they... more Graduate teaching assistants (TAs) and the general education yet discipline-specific courses they often teach occupy a complex peripheral position in the university. This qualitative comparative case study investigated disciplinary TAs' identities and pedagogical strategies as they taught writing courses linked with disciplinary lecture courses at a large research university in the Western United States. Drawing on Wenger's (1998) theory of communities of practice, this article examines how TAs brokered students' encounters with disciplinary genres and how they helped students negotiate the tensions inherent in a general education curriculum. Focusing on two TAs, one from political science and one from art history, this study draws on interviews, classroom observations, and course documents. Findings suggest that the TAs positioned themselves in distinct ways in relation to their fields of study and the courses they taught—one as boundary crosser and the other as insider. The TAs' identities influenced how they brokered disciplinary genres and writing practices for students as well as how they mediated the tensions between discipline-specific and general education goals and contexts.
Dissertation Manuscript by Misty Anne Winzenried
This dissertation explores the reciprocal nature of teaching and learning in a disciplinary writi... more This dissertation explores the reciprocal nature of teaching and learning in a disciplinary writing course on a university campus. The study draws on qualitative, ethnographic case study methodology to examine how an instructor and teaching assistants in a junior-level geography course taught the discipline’s writing practices, genres, and epistemologies, and how students in the course took up that disciplinary writing knowledge. Using Rhetorical Genre Studies, Wenger’s (1998) theory of brokering, and Gee’s (2011) concept of Discourses, I demonstrate how the instructor positioned the course content, learning goals, and discipline in order to give students access to the knowledge production practices of geography. First, I found that the primary genre of the course—the literature review—functioned to mediate this course objective of critical consciousness rather than mediating students’ entry into the discipline of geography. Second, I found that the genre in this classroom came into being in four distinct ways through the brokering practices of the instructor and teaching assistants. Third, through an examination of representations of the genre in instructors’ and students’ talk, I found that while students were frequently conversant in the genre’s characteristics, they at times struggled to enact the particular rhetorical moves that signaled to their instructors that they had taken up the genre successfully. Overall, this dissertation provides a theoretically grounded framework for understanding how meaning is co-constructed in the entering spaces of a disciplinary writing classroom. By examining a class that was positioned by the instructor as an opportunity to understand knowledge production in the academy, this study extends conversations about critically conscious genre pedagogy to pose new possibilities for how disciplinary writing and research courses might be designed as opportunities for raising students’ critical consciousness.
Papers by Misty Anne Winzenried
Standardized English language conventions often serve as gatekeepers in classrooms, preventing ma... more Standardized English language conventions often serve as gatekeepers in classrooms, preventing many students -- particularly language minoritized students -- from constructing identities as writers. This paper examines writing instruction in Mr. Branson’s linguistically diverse 4th and 5th grade classroom. We explore the affordances of his approach to conventions instruction, which centers meaning-making and rhetorical effect – rather than focusing on standardized “right” and “wrong” understandings of conventions and language more broadly. We rely on a sociocultural understandings of language, literacy, and literacy instruction in order to map classroom Discourse regarding conventions, drawing on interviews with Mr. Branson and his students, as well as transcripts of classroom-based teaching and learning. We explore the opportunities for learning and identity-construction that meaning-focused conventions Discourse afforded.
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Published Articles by Misty Anne Winzenried
Dissertation Manuscript by Misty Anne Winzenried
Papers by Misty Anne Winzenried