Linguistic and Rhetorical Ideologies in the Transition to College Writing: a Case Study of Southern Students

Linguistic and Rhetorical Ideologies in the Transition to College Writing: A Case Study of Southern Students by Sarah Catherine Swofford A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English and Education) in the University of Michigan 2015 Doctoral Committee: Professor Anne Leslie Curzan, Co-chair Professor Anne Ruggles Gere, Co-chair Associate Professor David Phillip Gold Professor Lisa Rose Lattuca Professor Robin M. Queen DEDICATION To my family: Krista, Mama, and Daddy, in loving acknowledgment of your unflagging support and unconditional love. And in memory of my grandparents: Francis and Robert Henderson and Stevie Swofford, who believed in the power of education…and in me. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I want to thank my intrepid committee, who I privately (and now not so privately) refer to as “the Dream Team.” Anne Ruggles Gere and Anne Curzan have served dual roles as the co-chairs of my program and of my dissertation. Like many other students in JPEE, my work has been forever changed by Anne Curzan’s invitation to ask the questions I think are interesting—and to help other people find those questions interesting as well. Anne Gere invited me into Sweetland, where I had countless opportunities to talk about students and their writing, but mostly importantly, where I had the opportunity to talk to students about their writing. I am also enormously grateful to her husband, Budge Gere, for his spiritual guidance and support throughout the past year. Anne and Anne, both of you have been constant mentors throughout this process, and there are simply too many moments to thank you for here. My committee members: Lisa Lattuca, Robin Queen, and David Gold have generously given their time, energy, and expertise to me and to this project. I am incredibly fortunate to be able to work with you all. The faculty at the University of Michigan have been a source of incredible expertise throughout this process. I am especially grateful to Judith Irvine, Mary Schleppegrell, and Carmel O’Shaunessey for their help with this project in its earliest stages. Tom Toon, my Old and Middle English professor extraordinaire showed an incredible commitment to my growth and development throughout my years at Michigan. I’m so lucky to have been his student. I have been consistently overwhelmed by the support of the community in the Joint Program in English and Education, and my life and my work are better for the happy hour conversations, writing groups, and mentoring that you all have offered. My cohort has been a source of support and kindness. My “shadow committee” of current and former JPEE students have shaped this work in lovely ways: Christie Toth, Crystal Vankooten, Justine Neiderhiser, Liz Homan, and Melody Pugh, you have each offered your time and insights to making me a better scholar, a better teacher, and a better person. Thank you. I’ve also been lucky enough to room with two of my fellow program-mates, and to have had the late-night conversations that have pulled me through and been a source of inspiration, so Justine Neiderhiser and Ruth Anna Spooner deserve a special thanks for putting up with me! iii This work was supported by the Rackham Graduate School, the School of Education, the Joint Program in English and Education, and by a fellowship funded by Randall Pinder and his partner Paul Pearson. Randy is a JPEE alumnus whose dissertation also offered me a lovely model of how to do work that is sensitive to its participants and rigorous in its scholarship, and in my first year in this program, Randy and Paul’s hospitality was a warm welcome to life here at Michigan. When I thought I would never find a research site, Matthew Nelson, another graduate of JPEE, stepped in and offered his own professional network of schools in South Carolina, and though I ended up finding another site, his generosity is yet another example of the amazing community of the current and former students in JPEE. I’m honored to be a part of this program. The administration at Upstate School District took a chance and allowed me into their classrooms, though they had never worked with a researcher before. I admire their commitment to research-based instruction, and I hope the insights found in these pages benefit their schools for years to come. The teachers I met at UHS opened their classrooms to me and shared their experiences working with (and their memories of being) rural Southern students. Most importantly, thank you to the students of UHS, for allowing me to share in their experiences throughout their first semesters of college. I can only hope I have done justice to their experiences. My amazing friends in South Carolina have been sources of constant encouragement. They reminded me of times they experienced language ideologies in their own college years, telling me over and over how important this work is to Southern students. During the fall of 2013, as I was collecting data in South Carolina, they kept me entertained and well-socialized, and they continue to encourage and bolster me throughout this process. I am inordinately blessed to have Lori Lee, Brad Peterson, Evan Goetz, and Justin Addington as my friends. Jessicah Schwab Lahitou, a fellow Baylor alum and classroom teacher read the draft and offered her thoughts as a non-Southern teacher of Southern students, and her support as my friend. I’d also like to thank Kathy Ewing, whose friendship has been a source of constant support. I never imagined when we taught together in South Carolina that we’d both be in Michigan at the same time, but I’m awfully glad we were! Finally, but certainly not least, I am immeasurably blessed to have a family who offer me unconditional love and support. My mother’s parents Francis and Bob Henderson died long before this began, but I learned to love research from watching my Pops dig through family iv history archives, and my Granny always had a stack of library books waiting on the kitchen table for me when I visited. They, too, are part of this story. Thank you to my grandmother Karen Swofford and to my PaPa, Stevie Swofford, who passed away before I could finish this project, but whose legacy looms large in its pages. To my sister, Krista Swofford, for the smiles and laughter. We’ve taken different paths through life, but our footprints remain similar in ways that only sisters’ can. And to my mother and father, Karen and David Swofford, to whom I simply don’t have the words to express how grateful I am. You were my first teachers, and I teach because of how you taught me. v PREFACE “We’re from Cowpens, Ms. Swofford. You can’t expect us to talk like you do.” I was in the middle of a writing mini-lesson on how to structure a thesis in an “academic essay,” but when Blake spoke, I stopped in mid-sentence. I was not shocked that Blake, one of my energetic 8th grade students, had interrupted me. Rather, I was dismayed that his defiant plea for me to consider his local identity and language was something I simply did not feel prepared to address. I am, in fact, from Cowpens, South Carolina, a small town in the Piedmont region nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Cowpens is best known for its role as one of the “turning points” in the American Revolutionary War,1 but it has been a relatively quiet little town ever since then. My connections to the Cowpens community run deep. My grandmother attended school in the very building where Blake and I stood, and I had taken 8th grade algebra in the same classroom where I taught English/Language Arts and South Carolina History. My senior year of high school, I drove my first car through the winding “mill hill” roads past kudzu- encrusted homes every morning. My great-grandparents had lived in one of those houses, and they worked in one of the local textile mills for many years. At the time, I thought Blake’s comment surprised me because he knew about my long- standing family history in the area, a piece of knowledge that just the week before had sent Blake and two other students scurrying to the school library in search of old yearbooks, where they found typically awkward pictures of me in 8th grade. So I was, frankly, a little confused by Blake’s assertion that I, somehow, was an outsider who could not understand something about his home language, because Cowpens was my home too, and I thought I talked like it too. I consider myself a speaker of Southern English, though when I taught K-12 I experienced the tension many non-standard speakers feel when they enter the classroom as educators. I wanted 1 The battle of Cowpens is often hailed as the “turning point” of the American Revolution because the victory brought about by Commander Daniel Morgan’s innovative military strategy was the first decisive victory on the road to the Yorktown, Virginia, where just ten months after the Battle of Cowpens, General Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington. The battle was and is a point of much local pride. In fact, at the time I taught at the middle school in town, our school motto, “A Revolutionary Past, an Extraordinary Future”, hearkened back to the battle and was a constant reminder of the importance of local history. vi my students to have access to the cultural capital of Standard English, but I never explicitly told my students that their dialect was inappropriate for our classroom.

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