This dissertation collects three articles that emerged from my work as a teacher and a researcher. In Chapter One, I share curricular resources that I designed as a teacher of research literacies to encourage qualitative research writers in (English) education to engage creatively and critically with the aesthetics of their research-writing processes and to narrate their experiences in dialogues with others. Specifically, I present three heuristics for writing and revising qualitative research articles in (English) education: "PAGE" (Purpose, Audience, Genre, Engagement), "Problem Posing, Problem Addressing, Problem Posing," and "The Three INs" (INtroduction, INsertion, INterpretation). In explaining these heuristics, I describe the rhetorical functions and conventional structure of all of the major sections of qualitative research articles, and show how the problem for study brings the rhetorical "jobs" of each section into purposive relationship with those of the other sections. Together, the three curricular resources that I offer in this chapter prompt writers to connect general rhetorical concerns with specific writing moves and to approach qualitative research writing as a strategic art. Chapters Two and Three emerged from research inspired by my teaching, during which writers shared with me personal literacy narratives, or autobiographical accounts related to their experiences with academic research writing. In Chapter Two, I consider a major research literature on personal literacy narratives--writing-studies research on literacy sponsorship--and explore the affect of genre conventions at work in this literature and in the autobiographical accounts on which these studies have relied as chief evidence sources. I propose that the rhetoric of literacy narratives "sponsors," or enables and constrains, the literacy-related experiences of researchers, as well as study participants, and, by extension, of teachers, as well as students. Moreover, I suggest that future literacy-sponsorship studies might attend particularly to the affective force of narrative rhetoric, or literacy narratives' power to fascinate, repel, and otherwise move audiences and recounters. Drawing on important terms in Brandt's work on literacy sponsorship, I outline directions for future research that would honor and rework her three assumptions to examine literacy sponsors as rhetorical "figures," literacy narratives as "scenes" of literacy sponsorship, and literacy sponsorship as "involvement." Chapter Three is my preliminary attempt to pursue this research agenda. In this chapter, I examine how the rhetoric of literacy narratives, in collaboration with audiences and recounters, among other sponsoring influences, may perform poetic and persuasive work beyond literal meaning, and may thus support and limit how literacy is thought, felt, and lived. Analyzing a literacy-narrative excerpt generated in my five-year ethnographic study of doctoral-student writing groups, I highlight what I call "sponsor figures" and "template literacy experiences" (TaLEs), two kinds of narrative composite, which elide the specificity of people to produce character types, and assimilate situations and events to create typical forms, or genres, of experience. Presumably generalized from repeated past experiences, these patterns of social interaction may also be generalized to, and thus repeated as, present and future experiences. I propose that while such composites' original references may never be recovered, distinguished, or verified, their poetic and persuasive work may be examined by researchers, teachers, and recounters of literacy narratives.
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