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Item English Teacher as Dungeon Master: Game Design Theory Meets Course Design in Rhetorical Education(2018) Frankos, Rick James; Wible, Scott; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Traditional pedagogical practices—lecturing, standardization, product-based quality grading—do not promote deep, critical learning. Addressing the deficiencies of traditional pedagogy, gaming pedagogy is a branch of critical pedagogy that identifies the effective design principles of games and then applies these principles to course design. In doing so, gaming pedagogy reproduces the experience-based, autotelic, intrinsically-motivating properties of games within the classroom, making education more fun and effective. In this document, I apply gaming pedagogy specifically to rhetorical education, which is uniquely advantaged to benefit from game design principles. In what follows, I present an objective definition of play and game, identify the overlapping design goals of games and education, identify the useful experiential qualities of games and explain how they apply to rhetorical education, summarize and analyze useful course design praxes from the perspective of gaming pedagogy, and conclude with an application of gaming pedagogy to my own first-year writing classroom.Item Beyond Words: A Post-Process Business Writing Pedagogy(2016) Lloyd, Adam M.; Wible, Scott A; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The goals of this dissertation are twofold: to identify shortcomings in contemporary business writing pedagogies that result in students being insufficiently prepared for the writing challenges of their post-college careers and, to develop an alternative pedagogy that addresses these problems. To achieve these ends I review the recent history of business writing pedagogy, examine 105 business communication syllabi from U.S. colleges, and perform a close textual analysis of the five textbooks most commonly used in these courses. I then perform a communication audit of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network as an exemplar of how communication functions in a workplace setting. Armed with this data I assert that contemporary pedagogical models do not adequately account for the atomistic complexity and fluidity of actual workplace discourse: the historical and organizational factors that affect every discursive interaction, the personal preferences and individual relationships that determine success with each new dialogic engagement, the very nature of communication as uncodifiable and paralogical, or the generative, living genres that allow these activity systems to function. “Beyond Words” presents a new pedagogy that accomplishes several objectives: first, it accounts for the weaknesses of current business writing pedagogies. Second, it addresses the challenges of contemporary workplace communication, in which writing expectations are constantly evolving and progressively intricate. Third, it incorporates the principles of post-process theory—that writing is public, interpretive, and situated—and draws on aspects of activity theory and ethnographic analysis that remain consistent with a post-process framework but add depth to the holistic conception of discourse practices. Fourth, rather than trying to teach students how to write—which post-process theory argues is impossible—it focuses on helping students to “read” the situated contexts of what are commonly considered discourse communities as evidence of prior communicative theories so as to better triangulate the passing hermeneutic strategies of each of their interlocutors. Most importantly, this pedagogy prepares students for the increasingly complex, unstable, diverse writing conditions of the contemporary workplace and empowers them to better analyze and adapt to whatever communications challenges they face throughout their professional careers.Item Towards a Global Rhetoric: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy(2014) Hoffmann, Mark Robert; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation works towards building a theory of "global rhetoric" as well as practical strategies for both using and teaching global rhetorical principles. Global rhetoric, as I suggest, describes argumentation that maintains persuasive potential for audiences beyond the rhetor's immediate location and time. I build this theory of global rhetoric by offering three "case studies" of exemplary global rhetorical texts: Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893), Randolph Bourne's "The State" (1919), and Aung San Suu Kyi's "In Quest of Democracy" (1991). In each of these case studies, I pay particular attention to the rhetorical tactics that drive the arguments of the essays as well as to the sets of appeals that would maintain persuasive potential as they reached broad, vast, and dispersed audiences. I bring this analysis to bear on everyday needs. I examine how professional business communicators can use global rhetorical strategies in their work in order to communicate and persuade more effectively across borders and cultures. To this end, I offer a case study of how a multimodal business presentation was revised to better address global audiences. Finally, I suggest how we can better teach both first- and second-language writing students to be global rhetors. I outline a professional writing course - Professional Global Rhetoric - and I offer both a pedagogical rationale and ready-to-use assignment sheets. These assignment sheets are designed to enable writing instructors and Writing Program Administrators to launch a course that builds upon the principles of global rhetoric. The argument put forth in this dissertation builds from the longstanding rhetorical notion that argumentation is a situated, circumstantial practice that is shaped by the audience. What a global rhetoric suggests, I argue, is that rhetors can look beyond their immediate rhetorical situations and deliberately construct arguments to maintain persuasive potential for audiences across geographic borders and through time.