SCHLACHTE, CARL PAUL, Ph.D
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SCHLACHTE, CARL PAUL, Ph.D. Before the Aftermath: A Pedagogy for Disaster Responsiveness (2019). Directed by Dr. Risa Applegarth. 257pp. Before the Aftermath: A Pedagogy for Disaster Responsiveness examines how teachers of writing at the college level can respond to social, natural, or political disasters that interrupt their classes. As disaster becomes an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary life, teachers are encountering it in their work, and being forced to address these circumstances pedagogically. This project extends from that premise to explore what teachers who experience disaster do to address these disruptions, and to offer strategies of preparedness that can be deployed in teacher training efforts to better equip them to respond. From cases including the classroom responses of teachers to Hurricane Sandy in New York City in 2012, and the online circulation of strategies for response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, I demonstrate the complexities of choosing to address disruption, a task that requires teachers to attend to classroom emotions, to the stories of marginalized groups affected by the events, and to embrace the necessary failure of any pedagogical response to disaster. For scholars in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, this project offers a critical vocabulary for understanding and engaging with unpredictable and often tragic circumstances of teaching by (1) theorizing disaster as a rhetorical situation of teaching and learning, and (2) offering concrete pedagogical strategies and orientations they can use in response. Ultimately, this project asks us to view teachers as a kind of “first responder” in their classrooms, and to view teaching in the wake of disaster as an ethical responsibility in an adversity-laden age. BEFORE THE AFTERMATH: A PEDAGOGY FOR DISASTER RESPONSIVENESS by Carl Paul Schlachte A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2019 Approved by _____________________________ Committee Chair APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Carl Paul Schlachte has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair Committee Members _____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _____________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would not have been able to complete this project without the support of many people. First, to Risa Applegarth, my advisor, I am unendingly grateful; her enthusiasm, encouragement, critical questioning, and occasionally skeptical glances have made this project what it is. Simply put, no part of this document or of who I am as a scholar has not been shaped by her intellectual generosity. I am also extremely grateful to Nancy Myers, whose keen sense of what I am trying to get at has often unsnarled me from knots of my own invention, and to Stephen Yarbrough, whose commitment to scholarly precision has made me a more careful and more nimble writer. Further thanks are due to Heather Adams, who has helped me to further hone my ideas in many enlivening conversations. The support of these teachers, and the model their scholarship provides, has been a constant reminder of what I have hoped to achieve over the past several years. This project was supported by the Mildred Kates Dissertation Fellowship in the English Department at UNC Greensboro. The Kates Fellowship greatly facilitated the completion of this project in its final phases, and so I thank Carolyn Brown for her support of this project through the fellowship that she makes possible. I am also deeply thankful for the support of my friends and colleagues at UNCG, especially Kristie Ellison, Andrea McCrary, and Brenta Blevins, all of whom have been incredibly supportive for as long as I have known them. Conversations with these friends as we have all worked to chase down the research we believe in has helped me find my way, but more than that, they have helped to keep me grounded whenever the process has iii seemed insurmountable. Perhaps most importantly, over the past few years, friends like these have helped to make Greensboro a genuine home. My greatest thanks of all are for my family, who have supported me since long before I even dared to consider graduate study. My parents, Carl and Nancy, have been an unending source of love and encouragement, and their support of my desire to learn over my entire life and these last few years especially has meant the world to me. My brothers, Christian, Jacob, and Peter, are the unstated audience for almost everything I do, and when I write, I always have the questions and jokes I know they would make in the back of my mind. The final thanks are for Jennifer, the best partner, scholar, and person that I know. Thank you for your belief in me, which is always there when I need it most. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ vii LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: SHELTER IN PLACE .......................................................... 1 Teaching Writing Amid Disaster ................................................................ 5 Disaster and Other Challenging Circumstances for Teaching .................. 11 Emotional Dimensions of the Experience of Disaster .............................. 18 Training Teachers to Prepare for Disaster ................................................ 23 Personal Stakes: Hurricane Sandy, 2012 .................................................. 27 II. EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES OF DISASTER IN HURRICANE SANDY ................................................................................ 30 Contextualizing Interviews with Teachers ................................................ 33 Affective Experiences of Disaster, Failure, and Labor ............................. 38 How Did Teachers Respond to Hurricane Sandy? ................................... 54 Flexibility and Preparedness ..................................................................... 79 III. HASHTAG SYLLABUSES AS PUBLIC MEMORIALS IN CHARLOTTESVILLE .................................................................................. 88 The Violence in Charlottesville and Its Online Responses ....................... 92 Understanding the Forms of Immediate Response ................................. 102 The Charlottesville Syllabus as Public Memorial ................................... 119 Theorizing the Hashtag Syllabus as a Mode of Disaster Response ........ 135 IV. A PEDAGOGY FOR DISASTER RESPONSIVENESS ................................. 149 Designing and Distributing Intervention Surveys ................................... 152 Dimensions of Pedagogy in Experience, Reflective Thinking, and Queer Failure ................................................................................ 157 Pedagogical Interventions to Foster Disaster Responsiveness ............... 177 A Pedagogy for Disaster Responsiveness ............................................... 201 v V. CONCLUSION: BEFORE THE AFTERMATH ............................................. 213 Available Means of Disaster Response ................................................... 214 The Problem of Recurrence: Implications and Further Research ........... 218 Hurricanes Florence and Michael ........................................................... 222 A Heuristic for Disaster Response .......................................................... 224 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 227 APPENDIX A. HURRICANE SANDY IRB MATERIALS ......................................... 250 APPENDIX B. PREPAREDNESS INTERVENTION IRB MATERIALS ................... 252 vi LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1. Average Number of Strategies Chosen by Respondents .................................. 197 vii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. Schema of Flexibility ........................................................................................ 74 Figure 2. Tweet Establishing the #FergusonSyllabus Hashtag ......................................... 96 Figure 3. Partial Listing of Prompting Questions Posed by Marcia Chatelain Using the Hashtag #FergusonSyllabus ......................................................... 97 Figure 4. The Beginning of the Charlottesville Syllabus as Posted by UC Press ...................................................................................................... 100 Figure 5. The End of the Charlottesville Syllabus as Posted by UC Press ..................... 101 Figure 6. The Charlottesville Syllabus, Posted by the UVa Grad Coalition ................... 102 Figure 7. Tweet Circulating the Charlottesville Syllabus ............................................... 129 Figure 8. The Immigration Syllabus: “A Note on Accessing Readings” ....................... 142 Figure 9. A Portion of the Puerto Rico Syllabus Preface, Linking to Other Syllabuses ................................................................................................... 142 Figure 10. Kathleen Luschek Circulates the Charlottesville Syllabus with Hashtag and Link, in Response to a Question about Teaching the Events .................................................................................................