English, Rhetoric, & Spanish

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11274/15376

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AP? CLEP? Dual credit? Advice from a professor
(Tanglewood Moms, 2019) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie
In Texas, some school districts are now offering to pay AP, CLEP, or dual credit fees in order to push students to complete associate degrees before finishing high school. Yes, the rush to educate students out of school is growing, and the pressure falls most heavily on parents to make decisions before their children know if or where they will attend college.
Design as renewal
(Tanglewood Moms, 2021) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie
Each time I return to my mother’s house, I’m excited to see what’s changed. I know that stored away are tarnished cheerleading trophies and bent Polaroids. There’s a satin chiffon prom dress and a floral hatbox holding tattered college textbooks. These relics bring me comfort.
We don’t need to be SuperMom
(Tanglewood Moms, 2022) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie
According to The Blue Dot Project, one in five women will face a maternal mental health disorder at some point in their life. This estimation is higher for first-time mothers, especially those suffering from birth trauma. Despite being so common, few women share their experiences with perinatal or postpartum mood disorders, seek professional counseling, or educate themselves on how to manage their new roles while also managing symptoms of depression, anxiety, or psychosis.
“Am I using rhetoric right?”
(Tanglewood Moms, 2023) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie
Seeking confirmation for his understanding of rhetoric as duplicitous, empty speech, a relative asked me this question at a holiday party last year. He peered over his glass of merlot expecting an explanation, and I sighed audibly before saying, “How long do you have?” As an assistant professor of English at Texas Woman’s University, people assume I have a menagerie of pet peeves about the use (and alleged abuse) of the English language. I am often asked to hypothesize as to why no one knows how to use a comma or to play therapist to those most concerned with texting’s effect on the writing skills of the youth. And yet, these selfproclaimed protectors of the English language never upset me more than they do with their flippant dismissal of rhetoric.
Connection
(The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (AEPL), 2017) Wenger, Christy; Martorana, Christina; Hoermann-Elliott, Jacquelyn; Godbee, Beth; Wojcik, Adrianne; Musgrove, Laurence
At Texas Christian University, I teach a themed section of first-year composition called “Yoga-Zen Writing.” One of the first writing assignments my students receive is a “This I Believe” essay, for which I ask students to choose a belief or a personal mantra that guides their daily living or reflects their values in a way that is personally meaningful to them. My students are prepared for the assignment by listening to several “This I Believe” podcasts—available for streaming through Thisibelieve.org. As a class, we write in our journals and discuss out loud how these podcasts reflect the personal essay genre outlined in Bruce Ballenger’s The Curious Writer. The greatest challenge of this writing assignment is that students are expected to deliver one to two brief but well-detailed narrative experiences in approximately two pages, which always challenges them to winnow their words down to what is absolutely essential and memorable. Having taught this essay several times, I decided to write my own “This I Believe” essay in the fall of 2016. My intention was to refresh my memory of the process involved in writing a personal essay, and throughout the process I was reminded of how challenging personal essays can be.
Coming up for air from binge writing: Research to support the role of rhythm in writing performance
(The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, 2016-02-26) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie
I am a binge writer. I live for and dread the days when my schedule is free enough to claim a 6- to 8-hour space for myself to write. Dr. Carrie Leverenz first introduced me to the concept of binge writing through Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers. Boice touches on issues of rhythm and repetition as early as his introduction when he stakes this claim: “When writers remain productive, they learn to make writing painless, efficient, and successful” (2). Later in that text, he refers to rhythm as an “automacity” that occurs most frequently when writers consistently control distracting stimuli and hold themselves accountable to a writing group or program to establish a habit of practice (76, 94).
Meditating on the move: Can cardio exercise become part of contemplative writing pedagogy?
(The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, 2016) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie
When my Zyn22 spin instructor yells, “This is your time! Time to meditate on the move!” I can’t help but feel a little frustrated. Maybe I’m frustrated because the next command that often follows usually sounds like this: “Time to dig deep! Time to leave no gas in your tank!” Or maybe I’m frustrated because the act of meditation is being seen as chasing a euphoric state of sweaty bliss or objectifying the practice in front of gentrified fitness junkies. Maybe the McMindfulness thoughts I expect them to have aren’t fair assumptions though.
Asking big: Creating a culture of support for academic mothers’ advocating in times of crisis
(The National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE Program, 2021) Bender, Ashley; Hoermann-Elliott
This essay brings into focus institutional inequities faced by academic parents that stem from the systematic socialization of women to remain silent about their professional and personal needs under ideal circumstances and even more so in times of crisis. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic’s changing higher education policies daily, we argue there has never been a better time for us to ask for more when academic women, especially those identifying as mothers, are suffering professionally and personally. We trace key cultural insights and recent research regarding how the global pandemic has increased the strain that academic mothers feel, particularly BIPOC mothers, before calling on readers to reclaim their right to advocate on behalf of their and their families’ needs. We conclude by defining the culture of asking we seek to foster at our own institution and make recommendations for how readers might “ask big” at their home institutions.
Scaffolding toward self-efficacy: Preparing underrepresented writers to pitch as freelance authors
(Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments, 2023) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie; Williams, Margaret V.
This article describes a Pitch Assignment, designed by two journalists turned faculty, to increase support and self-efficacy for writing majors enrolled at a minority-serving institution (MSI). Pedagogical theory to support pitching processes and development is substantially undertheorized. Much of the extant literature focuses on academic writing and editing for undergraduate research; this article extends that discussion by focusing on the needs of underrepresented students seeking careers in nonacademic fields. Those needs include opportunities for increasing confidence and skill for such nonacademic work as freelance writing for newspapers and magazines. For this assignment, students write a pitch for a preview or review feature they will write later in the course. This assignment scaffolds how to analyze, prepare, and successfully pitch to target publications of students’ choosing while developing a sense of self-efficacy that will transfer into future professional writing contexts. The authors conclude by reflecting on how this assignment might be approached differently by other instructors and how support for diversity might be offered in other ways.
Love, community, and Quakertown: Guidance from bell hooks on teaching counterstories
(National Council of Teachers of English, 2023) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie
As a course assistant to a professor of color at Texas Christian University (TCU), the predominantly white institution where I earned my doctorate, I first encountered bell hooks’s theory of engaged pedagogy as a path toward education as a practice of freedom. Several years later, I found myself reconnecting with hooks’s scholarship in an inverse scenario: as a white faculty member teaching students at a minority-serving institution (MSI) about the historical displacement of people of color in our local community. Intent on teaching this class as justly as possible, I found myself returning to the pages of Teaching to Transgress, Teaching Community, and Bone Black. And after a long semester filled with laughter, playfulness, and much humbling dialogue, I learned of hooks’s passing on December 15, 2021. Although I never met hooks in person, her influence on my antiracist pedagogical development and the discipline at large feels significant as well as unfinished.
A review of Social Media in Disaster Response: How Experience Architects Can Build for Participation
(Kairos, 2015) Hoermann, Jacquelyn E.
Although the time is never right for disaster to strike, discussing effective communication strategies for disaster scenarios couldn't be more timely, especially in the wake of massive social media development. In Social Media in Disaster Response: How Experience Architects Can Build for Participation, Liza Potts' (2014) research and analysis offered productive ways for rethinking how many of us, in academia and industry, might better approach communication across networks, particularly when crisis strikes and reliable information needs to be made available (and quickly).
A review of Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing
(Composition Studies, 2014) Hoermann, Jacquelyn E.; Enos, Richard Leo
On December 8, 1975, a very disturbing essay appeared in Newsweek called “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” This essay was unsettling because it publicly exposed America’s literacy problem. The title would lead any reader to believe that the problem lies with the child, but in the following decades of research we have seen that the problems associated with literacy lie not with the child but rather the system the child learns from and society’s view of what constitutes good writing. For his entire career, Peter Elbow, recently retired from The University of Massachusetts-Amherst, sought to correct this perception of the student as the problem. As the capstone to a long and prolific career, Vernacular Eloquence (VE) amasses much of Elbow’s research and experiences in teaching literacy through orality, contributing to the field a philosophy of writing that is timely, needed, and exceptionally eloquent in its own right. Elbow’s views on writing first came to national attention with his 1973 volume Writing Without Teachers, a work that challenged many assumptions about how students learn and how the process of writing unfolds. Such a radical challenge to the conventional notions of literacy and the teaching of English has not been without political consequence in academia.
Collaborative tactics in a globally focused cocurricular writing program
(Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition, 2019) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie; Robbins, Sarah Ruffing; James, Whitney Lew; Reed, Meagan Gacke
This program profile describes a globally focused cocurricular writing program led by faculty, staff, and graduate students from academic affairs and student affairs. Revisiting the program’s first two years, the authors (three graduate students and a faculty member) assert that writing-oriented learning activities within Texas Christian University’s (TCU) GlobalEX program were productively positioned to enable students to engage with other cultures and hone skills for becoming intercultural navigators. Drawing on a similar approach from Fernando Sánchez and Daniel Kenzie to apply Michel de Certeau’s ideas about tactics in cultural work, our program profile identifies important features shaped by this program’s cocurricular context that can be productively drawn upon both in non-course contexts and in curricular spaces. These include writing reflectively within flexible structures arranged to support learning through progressive stages; capitalizing on multimodal composing genres conducive to collaboration; and situating writing in public contexts without the individual pressure of grades.
Going all in on OER
(Magna Publications, 2021-03-17) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie
As a minority-serving institution where 44 percent of students are Pell Grant eligible, TWU students benefit tremendously from the cost savings that OER can offer them. The collective savings to all students enrolled in our first- or second-semester sequence courses averages out to $197,000 annually. This means that in the last five or so years that we have been using our textbook, our FYC students have spent nearly one million dollars on textbooks for our courses. Beyond saving money, there’s relatively recent data to show that eliminating textbook costs can improve student performance. In 2018, a study of over 21,000 students at the University of Georgia found that OER improved end-of-course grades and decreased D, F, W grades for all students, particularly the Pell eligible students (Colvard 2018). These findings, initially shared with me by TWU digital services librarian, Amanda Zerangue, who mentored me through my transition to OER, gave me enough persuasive data to make the case for OER as a means to increasing student performance and possibly retention, but it only tells part of the story.
Dual credit at your doorstep: What you need to know
(Magna Publications, 2023-09-08) Hoermann-Elliott, Jackie; Johnson, Tanisha; Figueroa, Jorge
In 2019, the US Department of Education reported that one in every three American high school students participates in dual enrollment courses (Shivji & Wilson, 2019), a number expected to rise in the coming years. Texas is one such state where rapid expansion is underway. From 2000-2017, a sharp 753% increase of students enrolled in dual credit courses was observed, representing 10% of all students enrolled in Texas higher education (THECB, 2018). Not only is dual credit growing rapidly, it’s playing a critical role in bridging the educational achievement gap by offering college coursework opportunities to high school students, many of whom lack access to such transformative academic programming.
XI The Eighteenth Century
(Oxford University Press, 2023-06) Turner, Joseph; Milne, Fiona; Carver, Dylan; Bender, Ashley
This chapter has four sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Drama. Section 1 is by Joseph Turner; section 2 is by Fiona Milne; section 3 is by Dylan Carver; section 4 is by Ashley Bender.
12 years later, displaced Syrian women remain unheard
(Columbia University, 2023) Abunasser, Rima
Nearly 12 years since the beginning of the Syrian civil war crisis, more than 6.7 million people continue to be internally displaced, with more than 5.4 million Syrian refugees registered as refugees in neighboring countries. Of the Syrians displaced globally, nearly two thirds are women, and despite anecdotal stories of individual survival and success, their circumstances remain dangerously precarious. Moreover, the views and lived experiences of Syrian refugee women are rarely incorporated in research, service provision, and policy design – a situation largely unchanged since early in the crisis. Syrian women are at the intersection of multiple precarities, and rendered invisible in the global narrative and even more vulnerable to various forms of gender-based discrimination and violence. It is incumbent upon researchers, activists, politicians, and humanitarians to center displaced Syrian women’s experiences and narratives and to build more constructive coalitions that would lead to truly durable solutions.
Traditions of western rhetoric and Daesoon Jinrihoe: Prolegomena to further investigations
(Daesoon Academy of Sciences (DAOS), 2022) Fehler, Brian
Applying the long and distinguished heritage of rhetorical theory to any sacred text, such The Canonical Scripture of Daesoon Jinrihoe, could fill many volumes of many books. This study, then, will provide some suggestive prolegomena for directions rhetorical criticism of the Scripture can take, now and in future research. This study will, further, make necessarily broad strokes in order to familiarize audiences and scholars of new Korean religions, and Eastern thought generally, with Western, both ancient and more modern, modes of rhetorical thought. As rhetorical criticism is increasingly embraced by Western religious scholarship, and as comparative religious studies remain an important dimension of textual scholarship, this article will contribute to both areas by presenting perhaps the first rhetorical-critical approach to the sacred scriptures of Daesoon Jinrihoe. When the new English translation of the Scriptures becomes available in the West, general and scholarly readers will be interested to find parallels and departures with religious and critical traditions with which they are already familiar (in this case, early American Protestant Calvinism). This study will make contributions, then, to the areas of rhetorical-religious criticism, comparative East-West presentations of nature within scriptural contexts, and establishment of grounds for further comparative investigations of Western traditions and Daesoon Jinrihoe.
Flannery O’Connor, Richard M. Weaver, and midcentury conservative critiques of social science discourse
(Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature: Brigham Young University, 2020) Fehler, Brian
In her fiction and correspondence, Flannery O'Connor demonstrates particular disdain for secular social scientists, including such supposedly well-meaning people as Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away and Sheppard in "The Lame Shall Enter First." O'Connor, who majored in social sciences while in college, wrote to her longtime correspondent Betty Hester years later, "In college I read works of socialscience, so-called. The only thing that kept me from being a social-scientist was the grace of God and the fact that I couldn't remember reading the stuff but a few days after reading it" ( Collected Works 905). It may be unclear whether the "so-called" in O'Connor's letter refers to the social sciences in general or to the works she had been assigned. In either case, O'Connor certainly seems to have held the work of social scientists in contempt. But why should that be the case? The Catholic Church certainly has a long history of advocating for the improvement of conditions in this world, while still preparing for the next. O'Connor, who trains her "rage of vision" on the Church as well as on secular society, reports, for example, the mixed results of a Jesuit's social advocacy in "The Displaced Person," but undoubtedly she reserves her sharpest criticism for those socially conscious individuals outside the Church.
Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes as Sacred Rhetorician
(Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature: Brigham Young University, 2016) Fehler, Brian
Hazel Motes, a peculiar character even among Flannery O'Connor's cast of eccentric characters, stands out among the rest because of his extreme introspection. Many O'Connor characters are alike in their desire to flaunt their odd but cherished attitudes and behaviors. But Hazel represents something else. He is a young man recently returned from war, yet his psychological peculiarities seem to have preceded that war. While Hazel, one may imagine, did not appear as an average soldier, he seems nevertheless not to have acquired any more scars in the war than he did anywhere else in his life. No, the "haunting" of Hazel Motes comes from something else (Seel 68), from, as O'Connor writes in the preface to the tenth-anniversary edition of Wise Blood (1949), "the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind" ("Author's" 1265). Strangely enough, this "ragged figure" seems to push Hazel toward the city, toward spectacle-filled, circus-like Taulkinham, a city where there seems to be a place for anyone and anything- anyone except Hazel, that is.

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