(RE)MAKING/(RE)MARKING: GENRE AND MARKUP IN THE WRITING CLASSROOM A dissertation presented By Kevin G. Smith to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April 2018 (RE)MAKING/(RE)MARKING: GENRE AND MARKUP IN THE WRITING CLASSROOM A dissertation presented By Kevin G. Smith ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University April 2018 2 ABSTRACT This dissertation presents the study of a novel approach to rhetorical genre studies (RGS) pedagogy through a framework I call explicit collaborative modeling, which asks students to use networked, digital writing practices—schema building and text encoding with eXtensible Markup Language (XML)—to study, represent, critique, and produce a range of writing genres. The project rests at the intersection of three conversations: rhetorical genre studies, digital writing, and the digital humanities. At this intersection, this study asks: What can this novel form of digital writing reveal about how students make and make sense of genre knowledge? What can we learn about genre by interfacing with it through XML? What can we learn about this writing technology by using it to represent genres? The dissertation seeks to answer these questions by drawing on qualitative data gathered from students’ individual and collaborative writing, interviews, and reflective teaching journals to examine how students used XML to literally mark and remark upon their writing as they worked to make and remake their understandings of genres in the classroom. Doing so, this project intervenes variously to the three fields identified above. It advances explicit collaborative modeling, a novel RGS pedagogy, that serves as a way to explore the effectiveness of RGS pedagogies writ large. The study offers collaborative and individual case studies of students and examines the affordances and limitations of explicit collaborative modeling as a tool for developing genre knowledge and facility and for making visible key tensions in genre work. Though this approach uses XML and schema building, this model is not meant to be prescriptive, but rather serve as an example that indicates one way RGS teachers might put students’ conceptual understandings of genres in conversation with one another. By advancing this pedagogy, the study extracts pedagogical insights for RGS teachers and teachers of writing more 3 broadly. The principle contribution in this regard is the pedagogical concept of procedural design, an approach to teaching that recognizes the rhetorical role of procedures as they are enacted in the writing classroom and seeks spaces to invite students to intervene in them. The project provides situated, process-oriented views of how students—individual and collaborative—negotiate their understandings of genres through the writing technologies of XML encoding and schema building. Doing so, the project adds to the literature in writing studies and digital humanities on the ways in which technologies (whether acknowledged or unacknowledged and digital or analog) mediate rhetorical possibilities for students, and how students work to negotiate their individual and collaborative writerly positions and identities within the mediated spaces of writing classrooms. This study is held together by an approach to teacher research that is supplemented with rhetorical theories of usability and participatory design. I argue that these supplements to teacher research can enable researchers to better examine the technologies introduced into their classrooms and to leverage them to facilitate the goals and ethics of teacher research. As digital tools and environments become increasingly ubiquitous, as screens and interfaces become increasingly invisible, it is crucial for writing studies scholars to spur awareness and critique of these systems if we are to effectively prepare students to participate in and shape new environments for communication. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to begin by thanking my committee. To Chris Gallagher, my advisor, thank you for your support, guidance, and extensive feedback throughout this process. I have learned a lot from Chris, but what I value most is learning to be a better listener. Thank you to Julia Flanders, whose offhand comment at an English Department event was my first inspiration to pursue this project seriously. Thank you to Mya Poe, who has been an ardent supporter of my academic, professional, and personal development from my first semester of coursework. Thank you to Ryan Cordell, whose work is a constant reminder of what good digital humanities scholarship looks like. And thank you to Ellen Cushman, for teaching me to read critically but generously while I worked with her on RTE and in this project. I have been extraordinarily lucky to have all of your support during this project and to have you all as models of scholars, teachers, and mentors. Thank you. Thank you to the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks and the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern. Both groups supported this research through software licenses, grant funding, and by offering spaces for me to learn from—and share my work with—groups of smart, curious people from many disciplines. Over the past five years, I have been lucky to be around an amazing group of graduate students. To those of you who read and talked through portions of this project with me—Heather Falconer, Laura Proszak, Kristi Girdharry, Mike Dedek, Fitz, and Liz Polcha—and to those of you who hung out with me these past five years—there are too many of you to name—thank you. You made this fun. 5 Thank you to my friend, Charlie Lesh, who was an unofficial outside reader of this project. Everyone should be so lucky as to have a friend like Charlie in graduate school, who is as generous with his time as he is brilliant. He’s not a bad basketball player, either. To all my friends back in Chicago and all over the country, to my Buffalo friends Dan and Tim, to Steve at Punter’s, and to the Crossword Crew, thank you for keeping me going these past five years. I cannot thank you enough. Thank you to my parents, Mary Kate and Jerry Smith. When I was about twelve, my mom won an award for Educator of the Year from the Illinois Computing Educators (ICE) Association. In a lot of ways, my interest in the intersection of education and technology started then. Thanks, Mops, for keeping a computer in the house and for showing me how to be a loving teacher. To my dad, the hardest working man I know, thank you for teaching me the value of thinking differently, of questioning authority, of making things with your hands, and of remembering to laugh, even in the face of very difficult circumstances. Thank you to my sister, Megan Vorland, who taught me how to get into (and out of) trouble, and to my brother-in-law, Dave Vorland, for always staying up late to talk politics. Thank you to the Shaws—Meg, Frank, SAS, Dan, Quinn—for welcoming me into your family. I love you all. I met my wife Stephanie in Urbana, Illinois when I was an aimless undergraduate English major. I still have no idea how I got so lucky. Stephanie is the best person I know and the reason that this project exists. I love you, Steph. I can never thank you enough for convincing me that I could do this and for being on my team. Who’s better than us? And, finally, to my daughter, Ruby, whose earliest days were spent wrapped to me as I wrote and revised this dissertation: you’re the best writing partner I’ve ever had. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Acknowledgments 5 Table of Contents 7 Introduction 8 Chapter 1: Designing Teacher Research 51 Chapter 2: Procedural Design, Genre, and the Spaces of Writing Classrooms 92 Chapter 3: Flexibility in Schema Design 148 Chapter 4: Intertextuality in Schema Design 190 Chapter 5: Writing in XML 227 Conclusion 276 Appendix A: Study Materials 300 Appendix B: Advanced Writing Syllabus 309 Appendix C: First-Year Writing Syllabus 316 Appendix D: Categorical Coding of Schema Components 325 7 Introduction Interfacing with Genre “One way teachers can help students … is to make genres analytically visible to students so that students can participate within and negotiate them more meaningfully and critically” (Bawarshi 141) “We live in an age of markup … Markup is text. Markup is communication. Markup is writing” (Dilger and Rice xi) “[T]he act of encoding is indeed an act of making sense, creating conditions of intelligibility” (Flanders “Rhetoric” 248) “We’re actually remaking our chosen genre” (Daniel, Interview 2)1 This dissertation presents the study of a novel approach to rhetorical genre studies (RGS) pedagogy through a framework I call explicit collaborative modeling, which asks students to use networked, digital writing practices—schema building and text encoding with eXtensible Markup Language (XML)—to study, represent, critique, and produce a range of writing genres. The project rests at the intersection of three conversations: rhetorical genre studies, digital writing, and the digital humanities. At this intersection, this study asks: What can this novel form of digital writing reveal about how students make and make sense of genre knowledge? What can we learn about genre by interfacing with it through XML? What can we learn about this writing technology by using it to represent genres? In answering these questions, this project intervenes variously to the three fields identified above. It advances explicit collaborative modeling, a novel RGS pedagogy, that serves as a way to explore the effectiveness of RGS pedagogies writ large. The study offers collaborative and individual case studies of students and examines the affordances and 1 All students are referred to pseudonymously in accordance with study protocols, as approved by Northeastern’s Institutional Review Board (IRB# 16-02-19).