Dissertation Information for Paul Prior NAME: - Paul Prior
- (Alias) Paul Arthur Prior
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- English
SCHOOL:
- University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (USA) (1992)
ADVISORS: - None COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - None
MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected
Title: Contextualizing writing and response in graduate seminars: A sociohistoric perspective on academic literacies
Abstract: This ethnographic study explores students' (native and non-native speakers of English) writing and professors' responses in four graduate seminars (Sociology, Geography, American Studies, and Agricultural Economics). Data included fieldnotes and recording of seminars, students' draft and final texts (typically with professors' responses), semi-structured and text-based interviews, and one process log. Data analysis was hermeneutic: I sought to understand how academic writing and response was cued, produced, and responded to in context and over time.
To understand the dynamic interaction of multiple contexts (personal, interpersonal, institutional, and sociocultural), I took a sociohistoric perspective on academic literacies informed by the work of Bakhtin, Bazerman, Brandt, Myers, Phelps, Tannen, Vygotsky, Wertsch, and others. I discuss sociohistoric alternatives to structuralist notions of language, schemata, textual classifications, and discourse communities.
Applying Bakhtin's notion of speech genres, I first compare the four seminars, examining how participants' multiple contexts and histories were reflected in the topical content of their talk and text and how classroom interactions, composing processes, professor responses, and students' reactions to response signalled engagement in different spheres of activity. Next I present two case studies from Sociology, where student writing reflected membership in a research team. The first case analyzes how oral response influenced revision of a dissertation prospectus. It traces how the multiple nature of classroom discourse and argumentation, particularly a series of sociocultural narratives on gender, were rhetorically transformed into a more unitary text that constructed disciplinarity and the student's authorship. The second case analyzes a student's conference paper across multiple episodes of written response and revision. Employing intertextual analyses and parallel discourse-based interviews with the student and professor, it examines how the unitary surface of the text masked its collaborative construction and how disciplinary enculturation was accomplished in complex negotiations involving authoritative and internally persuasive concepts, perceptions and identities. Taking a sociohistoric perspective on the construction of texts, identities, and knowledge in the four seminars provided valuable insights into the multiple, dialogic, and sociohistoric nature of academic work, insights with pedagogical as well as theoretical implications.
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MPACT Scores for Paul Prior A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2010-02-08 12:07:43
Advisors and Advisees Graph
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