Research

I am interesting in how writing is used by people to accomplish tasks. More specifically, I spend time thinking, writing, and reading about people who bodily deliver writing, such as preachers, comedians, military personnel, and student-athletes. These people engage with a wide-variety of texts to accomplish work with and for their communities, and, I believe, by looking at these groups, writing teacher-researchers gain a stronger sense of what writing is and what it does.

I’ve spent a decade working with student-athlete writers, most commonly football and men’s basketball players. Looking at scripted plays used in these two sports are evidence of writing, I have studied how student-athletes learn and them enact scripted plays.

This line of inquiry led to a piece in Composition Forum on multimodality and college football plays; a piece on student-athlete writing tutoring appeared in the Writing Center Journal; a piece on threshold concept and student-athletes in Teaching English in the Two-Year College; and a brief exploration of the term ‘student-athlete’ in Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society.

My book, The Embodied Playbook: Writing Practices of Student-Athletes, was published with Utah State University Press in 2018.

Beyond college sports, I extend my thinking about the body’s role in composing to other areas of inquiry. I co-authored a piece with the performance artist, Lindsey Allgood, where we connected at the University of Oklahoma Writing Center. Our piece, “The Woven Body,” appeared in a special issue of Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning, and Academic Writing.

With Duane Roen and Trish Portanova, I co-edited the open-access collection Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing (WAC Clearinghouse / University Press of Colorado, 2018).

Most recently, I have turned my attention to research on the U.S. Army, specifically U.S. Army senior cadet writing instruction. With an Army major, I authored an article on conceptions’ cadets have of first-year composition classes was published in Teaching & Learning Inquiry. And my study of writing within an Army brigade headquarters was recently published in Composition Studies. This research is culminating in a book project tentatively titled Drilled Write: Becoming a Cadet Writer at a Senior Military College; the manuscript is under-contract with University Press of Colorado.

 

UNG cadet Logan Blackwell (a pseudonym) draws a map of his preferred writing space. Blackwell experience writing as a cadet at UNG forms a large portion of my book manuscript, Drilled to Write.