Browsing by Author "Ruie Jane Pritchard, Committee Chair"

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    How Teachers Become Leaders in a Fellowship Program: A Normative Discourse Perspective
    (2005-12-06) Thompson, Ashlie Leah; Ruie Jane Pritchard, Committee Chair
    Traditionally, teachers have been at the bottom of the hierarchy of power that exists in education, leading teachers to define themselves as 'just teachers' (Katzenmeyer and Moller, 2001) not leaders. The current movement to professionalize teaching recognizes the classroom teacher as an untapped leadership resource for improving student achievement. This research analyzes the impact of a Fellowship Program for Curriculum and Leadership Development on its participants using the lenses of normative discourse and the culture of power that exist in education. Specifically, this study explored the extent to which participants were taught to 'perform whiteness' (Warren, 2003) in order to gain power and a voice as teacher leaders. In order to examine the Fellows' experiences, narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000; Mishler, 1986) was used to gather the stories of four Fellows. Both narrative analysis (Hatch, 2002; Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber, 1998; Riessman, 1993) and poetic analysis (Gee, 1999) were employed to 'restory' the participants' stories (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). Then, the Fellows' stories were analyzed to examine how their fellowship experiences affected their self-identification as teacher leaders and, furthermore, to explore the extent to which normative discourse and the culture of power shaped the Fellows' experiences.
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    Persuasive Developments: Reflective Judgment and College Students' Written Argumentation
    (2003-10-13) Overbay, Amy Stephens; Nancy Penrose, Committee Member; Ruie Jane Pritchard, Committee Chair; Hiller Spires, Committee Member; Alan Reiman, Committee Member
    This study investigated the relationship between college freshmen's stage of reflective judgment and the patterns in their written arguments using a mixed-method design with two major and two secondary data collection strategies. The Reflective Judgment Interview (RJI) was conducted with 15 college freshmen enrolled in a composition course that focused on persuasive writing. Participants' essays were examined for patterns in position-taking, evidence-usage, treatment of objections, and rhetorical strategies. Essays were examined 'blind' to participants' reflective judgment scores, and then analyses were compared across reflective judgment groupings. Participants' qualitative interviews and self-recorded reflections on Paper 4 were used to supplement analyses of their essays, and to provide information about contextual factors. Based on assessments made by independent raters, four participants were described as using predominantly pre-reflective judgment, and eleven were described as using predominantly quasi-reflective judgment. Qualitative interviews revealed that participants in both groups had received instruction in persuasive writing in high school, had taken advanced English classes, and were familiar with their own writing processes. However, participants rated as using predominantly quasi-reflective judgment tended to adopt balanced positions, differentiate their views from an authority's, acknowledge the ill-structured nature of the rhetorical dilemma, and respond to objections more frequently than their pre-reflective counterparts. At the same time, findings for both groups of students suggested that the writing context did not support participants' use of sophisticated assumptions about knowledge and justification, in that most essays written by participants in both groups included one-sided positions, an uncritical use of evidence, and superficial attention to the objections of a doubting audience. Based on these findings, the researcher made recommendations for more developmentally-sensitive instruction.