Past Projects and Research

"Surviving Sexism to Inspire Change: Stories and Reflections from Mothers on the Tenure Track" Krystia Nora, Rochelle Gregory, Ann-Marie Lopez, and Nicole A. Williams. 

Published in the edited collection Surviving Sexism in Academia by Routledge in 2017, which examines the impact children have had on the careers of academic women in composition and the penalties they have paid. This ethnographic and survey based project uses the voices of many women to navigate the most important issues today and plot a path of action. 

Writing Technologies: Creative and Rhetorical Environments

This web text is part of a project developed by Casey McCardle, David DiSarro, and myself for our writing technologies course at Ball State University. The web text investigates some of the different pedagogical methods for web technologies in creative writing and composition classrooms, as well as tools for communicating with students.

The New Work of Assessment: Evaluating Multimodal Compositions

This web text, published in the Spring 2010 issue of Computers and Composition Online, done in collaboration with two of my colleagues, Elizabeth A. Murray and Hailey A. Sheets.The project begins with a survey investigation into writing instructors comfort and process with evaluating multimodal texts. We then argue and demonstrate that a traditional writing program rubric can be used to assess multimodal compositions.

Portfolios in First Year Composition: Collection, Selection, and Reflection-A Teaching Guide

"In truth portfolios are not a cure-all; they are not going to magically make students better writers. What they are is enough; a way of integrating testing, teaching, and curriculum; a way of reintroducing a piece of the most laudable feature of oral testing, the awareness that literacy of all kinds exists within a social setting"(Belanoff).

Interested in trying out portfolios in your own classroom? Take a look and find out what you need to know.

Reading the Gardner: Viewership, Readership, and Public Art

This research project investigates the relationship between viewership, the role of a viewer in a museum, and readership, the role of a reader with a novel, using the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. The Gardner, for the purposes of this project, should be understood as a text – constructed through the joint and critical work of readers/viewers and the museum. Both of these actions require the same critical moves and interpretive movements to make meaning from the text. After an ongoing ethnographic study of the museum examining gallery exhibits, listening to lectures and visitors, exploring the history of, and identifying the role of Isabella Stuart Gardner as “author” to this text, it became clear that the Gardner Museum provides a more challenging and rewarding experience for viewers. Research of both museum theory and visual rhetoric helped prove that the setup of the Gardner exhibits, which required work on the part of the viewers, was the most conducive for learning. After considering reading theory and the work of theorists Eagleton, Rosenblatt, Iser, Sontag, and Smith a similarity between reading written texts and the texts of museums became apparent. In both cases readers and viewers have to work to fill in gaps and blanks in the text using their own knowledge to make meaning from what they are reading or viewing. In turn readers acquire more knowledge from texts that they put work into.Thus, it can be asked why is it more art museums aren’t arranged in the style utilized at the Gardner which emphasizes a broader learning experience.