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Title: Written evaluation at Justin Morrill College : implementing an organizational innovation
Creator: Cullen, Neil Henderson, 1942-
Date: 1942
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Writing the archives : context, materiality, identity
Creator: Narayan, Madhu
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In Writing the Archives: Context, Materiality, Identity, I develop a theoretical and methodological framework for studying archives as institutions that reproduce the rhetorics and identities of particular cultures. This framework includes four key arguments: 1) Archives are constituted through a selective and subjective process of appraisal; 2) What counts as "historical" or even "archival" depends on the attitudes and values of the cultures that create archives; 3)...
Show moreIn Writing the Archives: Context, Materiality, Identity, I develop a theoretical and methodological framework for studying archives as institutions that reproduce the rhetorics and identities of particular cultures. This framework includes four key arguments: 1) Archives are constituted through a selective and subjective process of appraisal; 2) What counts as "historical" or even "archival" depends on the attitudes and values of the cultures that create archives; 3) Archivists depend on communicative processes such as writing in order to organize and frame the materials in their care. These processes are culturally-situated and are not the same across all archival spaces; 4) Archives are material spaces that bear very little resemblance to the metaphorical notions of "The Archive" developed by theorists such as Thomas Richards, Diana Taylor, Michel Foucault etc. Central to this framework is the idea that all archives are different since they are constituted by communities whose experiences in the world are unique and different. I argue that my framework for understanding archives would allow us to create better archival research methodologies and also help us better train students who are interested in archival research at the graduate and undergraduate level.I employ a mixed method approach for understanding the role of archives in the constitution of communities and identities. These methods include oral history interviews with archivists who have worked at sites such as the archives as the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and the Lesbian Herstory Archives. A close analysis of these interviews and these sites reveals that archives are built in order to produce particular kinds of communityengagement. Decisions pertaining to the materials collected by these archives and access to these materials depend on the communal and identity politics of these institutions.Additionally, I closely analyze finding aids from the above archives in order to show how they communicate the original context surrounding the production and circulation of archival records. I argue that that the contextual information offered by archival finding aids is always partial in nature. As such, finding aids are rhetorical artifacts because they build histories and identities for archival materials that affect the way in which these materials are read and interpreted by researchers. Finding aids frame researchers' knowledge of archival collections since they provide contextual information about how and where records were produced. I further demonstrate how western models of archival finding aids have been complicated by GLBTQ communities and indigenous communities; these communities argue for more egalitarian finding aids that acknowledge multiple record creators and stakeholders.Lastly, I analyze the digitization practices of two digital archives, namely the Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives and the Blake Archive. I draw from the work of digital humanists and archivists to argue that in the context of digital archives, digitization of records is a cultural process. The manner in which we choose objects to be digitized reflects our biases, and it is never an "objective" process. As such, I argue that digitization is a rhetorical process because it creates culturally-mediated representation of a material object. I also point out that digitization does not necessarily mean that an archival record has been "preserved." All digitized records have unique identities and histories that need to be preserved as well. Therefore, I argue that archival digitization should attempt to connect records with their material counterparts in order to create a holistic representation of the original context in which records were produced and circulated.
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Title: Writing on the factory floor
Creator: Garcia, Elena (Elena Adkins)
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The study of writing within industrial workplaces has been taken up by many disciplines and focuses of study, such as technical writing, engineering, management, literacy studies, and literacy education, to name a few. Industrial workplaces are highly complex--with machinery, robots, floor workers, engineers, and managers all working together--making them fantastic locations for studies of power, authority, labor, and text. In addition, industrial workplaces like factories represent labor...
Show moreThe study of writing within industrial workplaces has been taken up by many disciplines and focuses of study, such as technical writing, engineering, management, literacy studies, and literacy education, to name a few. Industrial workplaces are highly complex--with machinery, robots, floor workers, engineers, and managers all working together--making them fantastic locations for studies of power, authority, labor, and text. In addition, industrial workplaces like factories represent labor histories as well as the changing economic environment of the U.S., often making them a locus for both research and nostalgia. My own interest in conducting writing study research in factories is this locus of scholarship and nostalgic memory, for factory work is part of my family's identity. I explored existing literature on factory workplaces and the writing that is done there, with the goal to merge an interest in writing with working-class upbringing. I found a gap in the literature that troubled me--where was the research that focused on the shop floor workers and their writing? Where were the studies that viewed such individuals not as people who do not and cannot write but as important knowledge makers (the way I view my dad)? Then I wondered, in the complex physical and social environment of factories, what kinds of texts do shop floor workers write and how do they develop those texts? This dissertation grew out of my desire to answer the questions of what and how factory workers write. I developed a research approach that I call "case-study with a phenomenological sensibility" to help me, and through this research methodology I was able to learn about the writing experiences of two factory machine operators at a Post Cereals plant in Battle Creek, Michigan. Through the interviews I conducted I learned that, in the cases of the two particular machine operators I worked with, their workplace writing practices and processes were shaped almost entirely by the time and resource regulations of the factory. I also discovered that because both operators were highly invested in their work already, they felt pride and a sense of being valued when they shared their knowledge through writing. What this dissertation offers, then, is a glimpse into the workplace writing lives of two factory machine operators. Turning the research gaze to writing that these operators did on the factory floor reveals how the changing nature of industry--a national and global issue--has influenced the everyday working activities of factory floor laborers. More specifically, my own research gaze has revealed the growing importance for collaboration in writing in traditionally hierarchical factories, benefits gained through writing about work practices, and the significance of personal investment in the workplace lives of two factory workers. Though the claims made in this work are narrow in focus, they provide strong evidence for a need to focus industrial workplace writing research on all hierarchical levels, including the blue-collar laborer.
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Title: Writing memory : a study of memory tools in invention
Creator: Whittemore, Stewart Neal
Date: 2008
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Writing center theory and the idea of academic discourse
Creator: McCall, William W.
Date: 1996
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Writing as reconstitutive act : healing and self-expression in early Spanish women's writing
Creator: Goodin, Donna M.
Date: 2008
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Writing achievement : a cognitive developmental analysis
Creator: Wildfong, Susan C.
Date: 1981
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Writing Against the Frontier : Contested Memory and Indigenous Counternarratives in the Nineteenth Century
Creator: Luedtke, Aaron
Date: 2021
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation explores the effects of settler colonialism on Great Lakes Indigenous peoples throughout the nineteenth century. It argues that as settler societies dispossessed Indigenous peoples from their lands in order to gain access to natural resources, they engaged in a process of narrative erasure of those Indigenous peoples in order to justify the violence of dispossession. This narrative tool of settler colonists was also employed in assertions of what I call “frontier nationalism...
Show moreThis dissertation explores the effects of settler colonialism on Great Lakes Indigenous peoples throughout the nineteenth century. It argues that as settler societies dispossessed Indigenous peoples from their lands in order to gain access to natural resources, they engaged in a process of narrative erasure of those Indigenous peoples in order to justify the violence of dispossession. This narrative tool of settler colonists was also employed in assertions of what I call “frontier nationalism” to argue for the prominence of frontier societies in the public arena of print culture in an age when citizens of both the young United States and Canada were debating the characteristics of national identity. From territorial and colonial administrators like Lewis Cass and Sir Francis Bond Head to frontier novelists like Juliette Kinzie in Chicago and Major John Richardson in Upper Canada to antiquarian historians who wrote local and regional histories of the Great Lakes region, and ultimately to professional historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, Great Lakes authors constructed a narrative that celebrated the growth and progress of life on the frontier in a manner that mythologized the region’s Indigenous peoples out of existence. In the meantime, Great Lakes Indians evolved numerous strategies of resistance to both thwart dispossession and removal, and to disprove myths penned by settler society of Indigenous inferiority, incompatibility with progress and modernization, and the inevitability of Indian disappearance. Beginning with the Mohawk siblings, Molly and Joseph Brant, Great Lakes Indians developed understandings of various aspects of western culture that they adapted within their own cultural frameworks to battle the effects of settler colonialism throughout the nineteenth century. The Brants used their understanding of British legal tradition, private property rights, western plough agriculture, Christianity, literacy, and ultimately narrative construction and the public print culture to constantly prove to first British and later Americans that they were capable of adhering to western standards of “civilization.” Learning from the legacy passed on by the Brants, adopted Mohawk war chief John Norton, Mississauga chief Peter Jones, and Potawatomi chief Leopold Pokagon all used their own understandings of western expectations for Indigenous peoples to prove they were deserving of governmental exceptions to policies of Indian removal. Throughout the nineteenth century, Great Lakes Indians responded to the settler colonial violence of narrative construction and Indigenous erasure by turning to the world of print. John Norton wrote a history of the Haudenosaunee just after the War of 1812 that he intended for publication though it wound up on a shelf for over a century. Peter Jones also wrote a manuscript on the history of the Ojibwe people that he intended to publish, but because of his early death, it was later published by his wife. Leopold Pokagon’s son Simon earned the most acclaim in his lifetime, publishing numerous works including his novel, Queen of the Woods, and his Red Man’s Rebuke, which he printed on birchbark paper and distributed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This dissertation argues that these writings all serve as evidence of the survivance of Great Lakes Indians in the midst of a settler colonial impulse to eradicate Indigenous peoples from the landscape and historical memory.
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Title: Writers written : John Barth's characters as writers
Creator: Nikkari, Matthew R.
Date: 1990
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Wound ethylene production by fruit pericarp tissue of rin mutant tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill
Creator: Ketsa, Saichol
Date: 1980
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Would-be conquerors : Scottish historical approaches to Arthur, William I, and Edward I of England, 1380-1600
Creator: Purpus, Christine Ellen
Date: 1997
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Worldmindedness in voluntary world affairs organizations with implications for adult learning
Creator: Rentschler, Robert J.
Date: 1979
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Worldly teachers : cultural learning and pedagogy
Creator: Germain, Martha Hawkes
Date: 1997
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: World sources of energy and new energy resource development in Iran
Creator: Ashraf, Hooshang, 1933-
Date: 1977
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: World Wide Web site visitor studies techniques using server log file data
Creator: Russell, Randy Michael
Date: 1998
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Workplace social exchange : substitutes and neutralizers of LMX and TMX in team contexts
Creator: Wang, Chang
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The purpose of this dissertation is to develop an integrated theoretical model of the simultaneous interplay of social exchange relationships with a supervisor (leader-member exchange: LMX) and fellow team members (team-member exchange: TMX) in organizational contexts. The model extend current theories related to LMX and TMX by integrating ideas from self-determination theory, identity-orientation theory, and a theory of team types to describe how these two relational variables combine to...
Show moreThe purpose of this dissertation is to develop an integrated theoretical model of the simultaneous interplay of social exchange relationships with a supervisor (leader-member exchange: LMX) and fellow team members (team-member exchange: TMX) in organizational contexts. The model extend current theories related to LMX and TMX by integrating ideas from self-determination theory, identity-orientation theory, and a theory of team types to describe how these two relational variables combine to influence work outcomes. In 3 field studies, using longitudinal, multisource data from 815 employees on 111 teams, results show that a substitute effect in which high TMX buffers the negative effects of low-quality LMX on job satisfaction and job performance. Moreover, both a low relational identity and low authority differentiation within the team demonstrate a neutralize effect on the otherwise positive effects of high LMX. In contrast, both a high collective identity and high skill differentiation within the team show a substitute effect on the otherwise negative effects of low TMX.
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Title: Workplace disability management inventory : development of a screening instrument
Creator: VanTol, Brett Cornell
Date: 1998
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Working with : expanding and integrating the pragmatic method for a wicked world
Creator: Lake, Danielle
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation argues the burgeoning scholarship on wicked problems is both highly compelling and applicable to many of the public problems we confront. It is compelling because it articulates strategies for realizing a more comprehensive understanding of many of the problems we face today as a public; it is highly applicable because it provides us with a fruitful means of addressing these problems. The scholarship - as it stands in 2014 however - needs to be broadened and deepened,...
Show moreThis dissertation argues the burgeoning scholarship on wicked problems is both highly compelling and applicable to many of the public problems we confront. It is compelling because it articulates strategies for realizing a more comprehensive understanding of many of the problems we face today as a public; it is highly applicable because it provides us with a fruitful means of addressing these problems. The scholarship - as it stands in 2014 however - needs to be broadened and deepened, especially given how many dangerous wicked problems we face. The wicked problems field can be deepened by reviewing and consolidating its recommendations and through this work delving more deeply into a methodology that best supports collaboratively meliorating such problems. For instance, the various processes most recommended for tackling these problems - processes like bottom-up participation, to trans-disciplinarity, to situational and experiential learning - not only descend from the Pragmatic Method, but could also currently prosper from a more systematic engagement with Pragmatism, especially as conceptualized through a feminist lens where problems of power are systematically addressed. In the end, I argue effective responses to wicked problems require context-sensitive, dialogue-driven, action-based engagement models. Through a series of case studies the value of the recommendations within becomes apparent, suggesting there is a need to reimagine both the role of expertise and the boundary spaces between our institutions (as well as the structure of our institutions themselves). The potential for our collective future is quite exciting: potential to prepare future world citizens for engaging one another across their differences as well as the potential to encourage the re-envisioning of our institutions (and the creation of new) so they are more intentionally aimed at bridging our current, isolating gaps and thus fostering collective creativity and ingenuity.
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Title: Working relationships of county extension agents and teachers of vocational agriculture in Michigan
Creator: Omar, Ahmed Mohamed Mohamed, 1926-
Date: 1963
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Working on Coherence Wherever the Twain Shall Meet How Teachers Contribute to Policy Coherence Through Adaptive Responses To Related Demands of Evaluation and Professional Learning Community
Creator: Zuschlag, Dirk Frederick
Date: 2021
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Teacher quality is a perennially fertile field for education reformers. Among teacher quality policies, two of the more highly touted and widely adopted are state-mandated systems of teacher evaluation and formalized models of teacher collaborative teams, often known generally as professional learning communities (PLCs). Indeed, despite a substantial divergence in policy design and implementation process, many districts and schools have by now routinized the annual re-enactment of evaluation...
Show moreTeacher quality is a perennially fertile field for education reformers. Among teacher quality policies, two of the more highly touted and widely adopted are state-mandated systems of teacher evaluation and formalized models of teacher collaborative teams, often known generally as professional learning communities (PLCs). Indeed, despite a substantial divergence in policy design and implementation process, many districts and schools have by now routinized the annual re-enactment of evaluation and PLCs policies, thereby engendering a recurring challenge of “crafting coherence” (Honig and Hatch, 2004). Teachers in particular, both individually and in PLCs, must fashion responses to disparate demands, which interact to affect but not determine those responses. How teachers respond holds important implications, not only for the iterative implementation and effects of potentially incoherent policies such as PLC and evaluation, but also for larger teacher and school improvement efforts and outcomes.This explanatory multiple case study in two public high schools investigates teacher agentic responses to dual teacher quality demands within distinct but related PLC/evaluation structures applying a structure-agency perspective (Coburn, 2016). It addresses the following research questions: (1) How, if at all, do teachers adapt their agentic responses to performance evaluation and professional learning community demands as they respond to the structures of both; and (2) how, if at all, does the relationship between structures of performance evaluation and professional learning community shape teachers’ adaptive responses?Results show that teachers generally compartmentalize their respective responses to PLC and evaluation demands. Importantly, however, periods of compartmentalization are punctuated at points in the evaluation process. Punctuation occurs when structural opportunities open for teachers to advantageously adapt their response to one demand to serve their response to the other demand. Although teachers vary in the timing and form of punctuation, four identifiable types of adaptive responses emerge from teacher agentic action within the related structures administrators implement. A typology of these strategies is proposed based on the placement of each along two intersecting dimensions. When teachers employ the strategies, they can reduce the cost of evaluation engagement, while increasing the value of PLC participation. At the same time, teachers were in effect able to enhance the coherence of their responses.Further results show that related PLC/evaluation structures are characterized by a design orientation--primarily commitment or control (Rowan, 1990)—and a goal orientation--primarily external or internal relative to the PLC/evaluation structures. One case high school implemented related structures with control-external orientations, the other commitment-internal. It is these paired orientations as implemented that can significantly influence when and how teachers may use certain adaptive response strategies.The implications of these findings are discussed, including those that involve the application of structure-agency theory in education policy research, the understanding of how coherence may be crafted in routine, multiple policy implementation at the “street level,” and for the work of policy makers, practitioners, and researchers.
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