Edited Book by Andrea R Olinger
Developed from presentations at the 2018 International Writing Across the Curriculum conference, ... more Developed from presentations at the 2018 International Writing Across the Curriculum conference, this collection documents a key moment in the history of WAC, foregrounding connection and diversity as keys to the sustainability of the WAC movement in the face of new and long-standing challenges. Contributors reflect on the history and ongoing evolution of WAC, honoring grassroots efforts while establishing a more unified structure of collaborative leadership and mentorship. The chapters in this collection offer a rich variety of practices, pedagogies, mindsets, and methodologies for readers who are invested in using writing in a wide range of institutional and disciplinary contexts. Boldly engaging such pressing topics as translingualism, anti-racism, emotional labor, and learning analytics, the 18 chapters collected here testify to WAC's durability, persistence, and resilience in an ever-changing educational landscape.
Papers by Andrea R Olinger
Teaching English in the Two Year College, Sep 1, 2012
Written Communication, 2020
People communicate through language as well as visual embodied actions like gestures, yet audio r... more People communicate through language as well as visual embodied actions like gestures, yet audio remains the default recording technology in interview-based writing research. Given that texts and writing processes are understood to involve semiotic resources beyond language, interview talk should receive similar treatment. In this article, I synthesize research that examines how visual embodied actions reveal and construct embodied knowledge and stance, and I apply these lenses to my own study, showing how visual embodied actions are essential to understanding three writers’ experiences with particular writing styles. I conclude by discussing the benefits of videorecording for writing research, offering guidance on how video can help researchers explore the interview as a social practice, and suggesting ways to design the consent process with transparency and democratic practice in mind. Ultimately, this article serves as a guide for writing researchers who wish to challenge the audio default when conducting interviews.
Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 2019
This qualitative multi-case analysis investigates the role of "educational niceness" and "neutral... more This qualitative multi-case analysis investigates the role of "educational niceness" and "neutrality" (e.g., Baptiste, 2008; Bissonnette, 2016) in preservice English teacher feedback on sociopolitical issues in student writing. As part of the field experiences for several ELA methods courses at two universities, one urban and one rural, the teacher-researchers used Google Docs and other technologies (screencasts, Google Community) to connect preservice teachers (PSTs) with high school writers at a geographical distance so that urban-situated PSTs could mentor rural-situated writers and vice versa. Five methods courses over 2 semesters served as cases, and 12 PSTs from those courses participated in focus groups. Data included audio recordings of 9 focus groups and PSTs' digital responses to student writing. Using thematic analysis, we explored how PSTs responded to sociopolitical perspectives in students' writing-both engaging them and staying neutral. Although authentic opportunities for responding to student writers supported PSTs' critical reflection on teaching writing, analysis of PSTs' responses indicate that such authentic practice may not be sufficient for preparing PSTs to navigate sociopolitical issues and may, in fact, exacerbate PSTs' impulse to enact educational niceness.
Re-theorizing literacy practices: Complex social and cultural Contexts (David Bloome, Maria Lucia Castanheira, Constant Leung, & Jennifer Rowsell, Eds.), 2019
This chapter argues that even practice approaches to academic writing and learning have persisten... more This chapter argues that even practice approaches to academic writing and learning have persistently been ensnared by metasocial and metasemiotic ideologies that isolate disciplines and imagine academic literacies as reading-and-writing-in classrooms and disciplines. Despite fatal empirical evidence and theoretical critique, these ideologies continue to reanimate a host of zombie concepts around academic literacies (e.g., discourse communities, autonomous texts, singular authorship, literal meaning, stylistic clarity). The authors argue it is past time to jettison such concepts and point to an alternative where literacies, disciplinarity, and acts of semiosis are understood as purely historical, dialogic phenomena, matters of dynamic, emergent, embodied, laminated assemblage and semiotic becoming. This alternative is illustrated with analyses from two studies. The first examines how faculty and students represent and enact academic writing styles in ways both highly variable across contexts and embodied (e.g., registered in gestural metaphor, affect, and embodied action). Tracing trajectories of academic literacies in a case study of a biologist, the second study sketches how two family car rides (at age 3 where a pretend game was created and at 30 where analyzing acoustic properties of zebra finches was discussed) trace laminated assemblage and semiotic becoming across the lifespan.
Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie , 2018
The author presents and reflects on a found poem she composed from the final papers of students i... more The author presents and reflects on a found poem she composed from the final papers of students in her multidisciplinary graduate writing class.
Research in the Teaching of English, 2017
Multimodal composing can activate literacy practices and identities not typically privileged in v... more Multimodal composing can activate literacy practices and identities not typically privileged in verbocentric English classrooms, and students’ identities as particular kinds of learners (e.g., “visual artist”) may propel—or limit—their engagement in classroom work, including in multimodal composing. Although researchers have studied the ways multimodal projects can evidence literacy learning and have argued that identity is negotiated, improvisational, and hybrid, they have offered few sustained analyses of the processes by which identities evolve during and across multimodal composing tasks. By examining how students position themselves and one another as particular kinds of learners over time, researchers can better understand the ways in which multimodal tasks help students explore new skills and roles or reify old ones. Drawing
on an approach to discourse analysis from the linguistic anthropology of education, we trace the pathways of three 12th graders’ learner identities across two events as they worked in a group to compose visual responses to literary texts for their English class. We examine how one student’s robust identity as an artist emerged in tandem with the devaluing of other participants’ artist
identities. Seven weeks later, these positionings led her to act as the painting’s primary author and other students to act in increasingly perfunctory ways. We call for teachers and researchers to consider how students’ identities—interacting with factors such as the teacher’s expectations for group work and the affordances of particular media and materials for collaboration—drive students’ participation in and ownership of multimodal compositions.
Rhetoric Review, Mar 2016
Common definitions of style have tended to treat it as an artifact controlled by the producer, ov... more Common definitions of style have tended to treat it as an artifact controlled by the producer, overlooking two features afforded attention in sociocultural linguistics: dynamism and co-construction. Although some scholars have highlighted style’s interactivity, their accounts have not yielded a comprehensive theory. This essay advances and illustrates a more rigorous definition of style as a fluid activity in which meaning is often contested, continually negotiated, and necessarily informed by interlocutors’ beliefs. Ultimately, in integrating and expanding on theories of style’s interactivity and contingency, it provides guidance for style researchers and demonstrates the value of cross-disciplinary conversation around style.
Research in the Teaching of English, May 2014
This article explores how three writers in ecology understand and enact a disciplinary writing st... more This article explores how three writers in ecology understand and enact a disciplinary writing style. To accomplish this, it draws on theoretical approaches to style from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, as well as analyses of drafts of coauthored texts and video-recorded literacy history and discourse-based interviews. This study finds that metaphor and embodied actions such as gestures are valuable sites for comparing writers’ stylistic understandings and practices. The three writers expressed broad agreement when describing the qualities of good scientific writing, using similar verbal and gestural metaphors, such as Communication as Journey and entailments of the Conduit Metaphor. Yet in discourse-based interviews, specific stylistic choices provoked conflicting preferences not only between writers but even within them over time, as they sometimes changed their minds about what they had preferred over a year earlier. These conflicting and changing views, and the writers’ arguments for them, complicate popular notions of writing style: that a particular discipline has a style uniformly shared among experts and that experts’ mastery of their own style is stable and absolute. The finding that stylistic disagreements are undergirded by similar metaphors in language and gesture highlights the ways our stylistic understandings are tied to life histories and are also deeply embodied. Working from a sociocultural perspective, I provide a richer, more complex empirical and theoretical understanding of what it means to command a particular disciplinary style.
Writing & Pedagogy, 2013
This article introduces teachers to some freely available online resources designed to help write... more This article introduces teachers to some freely available online resources designed to help writers – those of all skill levels, especially L2 learners – with collocation. It shows how wildcard searches on search engines, online corpora, and concordance tools can be used to check and explore collocations.
TETYC, 2012
A program in which prisoners teach ESL classes, supported by volunteer teacher-trainers, is a lea... more A program in which prisoners teach ESL classes, supported by volunteer teacher-trainers, is a learning community with immense and sometimes unforeseen value.
Teaching English in the Two-Year College, 2012
Linguistics and Education, 2011
There has been little research on academic writers that shows how social interaction influences t... more There has been little research on academic writers that shows how social interaction influences the construction of “discoursal identity” (the impressions that writers convey about themselves in their texts and that readers develop about writers). This study analyzes a collaborative writing session among college students to explore the negotiation of discoursal identity in the selection of a single word, discourse. Drawing on video-based conversation analysis and ethnographic methods, it argues that the writers’ embodied stances on the word discourse index an array of identities: that of the teacher and class (over)using the word, the teacher reading the word, the good student who fluently uses the word, the student who displays that the word is not a natural part of her vocabulary, and the student who is trying not to “show off.” Through an examination of stancetaking during group work and interviews, this study details how interaction constructs discoursal identities.
Conference Presentations by Andrea R Olinger
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Edited Book by Andrea R Olinger
Papers by Andrea R Olinger
on an approach to discourse analysis from the linguistic anthropology of education, we trace the pathways of three 12th graders’ learner identities across two events as they worked in a group to compose visual responses to literary texts for their English class. We examine how one student’s robust identity as an artist emerged in tandem with the devaluing of other participants’ artist
identities. Seven weeks later, these positionings led her to act as the painting’s primary author and other students to act in increasingly perfunctory ways. We call for teachers and researchers to consider how students’ identities—interacting with factors such as the teacher’s expectations for group work and the affordances of particular media and materials for collaboration—drive students’ participation in and ownership of multimodal compositions.
Conference Presentations by Andrea R Olinger
on an approach to discourse analysis from the linguistic anthropology of education, we trace the pathways of three 12th graders’ learner identities across two events as they worked in a group to compose visual responses to literary texts for their English class. We examine how one student’s robust identity as an artist emerged in tandem with the devaluing of other participants’ artist
identities. Seven weeks later, these positionings led her to act as the painting’s primary author and other students to act in increasingly perfunctory ways. We call for teachers and researchers to consider how students’ identities—interacting with factors such as the teacher’s expectations for group work and the affordances of particular media and materials for collaboration—drive students’ participation in and ownership of multimodal compositions.