Playing In The Prose: Writing Instruction And Underprepared Student-athletes In Division I-a Universities

Abstract

"Playing in the Prose: Writing Instruction and Underprepared Student-Athletes in Division I-A Universities," is a study that contributes to the continuedinterest in the pedagogical tools educators can use with underprepared writers.Student-athletes, especially those at a Division I-A institution are a specializedstudent group particularly when enrolled at a predominantly white institution andparticularly when they are academically underprepared to do the work required ofthem. Drawing from critical and feminist pedagogues Paulo Freire, Ira Shor, HenryGiroux, and Peter MacLaren, along with bell hooks, Susan Jarratt and LynnWorsham, I argue that a feminist version of critical pedagogy, relational pedagogy,envisions a composition classroom as a cultural studies lab that connects students'experiences with rhetorical ways of knowing and of relating to the world aroundthem. This classroom turned cultural studies lab becomes a site of struggle andresistance. A relational pedagogy encourages students to make their own choices,their own political agendas, as they perceive content, genre, structure, style, and evengrammar as rhetorical choices available to them, even though these choices areconstrained by the dominant culture and reader expectations.In a three-year ethnographic and longitudinal study, I examined the writingand the language of 45 underprepared writers in a year-long version of first-yearcomposition, the "stretch model" of composition. The dissertation's main focus is theteaching of writing to underprepared students, but second to this is the institution'sresponsibility to the students it admits. Case studies highlight the writing of threerepresentative students at different levels of preparedness and willingness to conformto institutional standards. Secondly, the dissertation highlights how, through the useof alternative assignments and relational pedagogies, students' writing abilityimproved.