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Composing spaces: when students write on the walls
Schmidt, Joanna Marie
Schmidt, Joanna Marie
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8/14/2021
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Abstract
One challenge the field of Rhetoric and Composition faces when studying student writing is the ability to examine work that was not required of students for our research studies or writing that students are independently choosing to do on their own. However, a new interdisciplinary building (Rees-Jones Hall) at Texas Christian University, designed with over 15,000 square feet of writeable wall space provides students (and other visitors) the opportunity to see and collect self-sponsored writing practices. Writers express and debate with each other on the walls about social issues and promote causes they care about. They spend hours upon hours writing on the walls independently, in partners, and in groups, composing colorful texts that are as tall as they can reach and twenty feet long down a hallway. They compose immersive texts that surround themselves in 360 degrees of writing in study rooms. Using this building as a site of research, I explore what we can learn about these spaces and students’ self-sponsored writing practices by applying Gazi Islam’s Monological-Dialogical Axis, first applied to bathroom graffiti, to a corpus of over 1,800 images taken over an academic year in this university learning space. I demonstrate how the samples fit Islam’s Monological- Dialogical Axis and then extend the axis with additional categories and subcategories to reflect the unique texts found in a university setting. In order to provide deeper insight into students’ self-sponsored writing practices, I use survey results to provide additional quantitative and qualitative data to examine their conceptions of writing, their motivations for wall writing, and the benefits they see in this particular writing practice. From this data analysis, I make the case for how writeable walls makes writing more visible, and the self-sponsored aspect encourages non-writers to use writing outside of traditional curriculum. Further it provides students with a space they can compose around them for their needs. This work concludes with specific takeaways for writing teachers to consider for how we help students engage and transfer their existing writing practices, as well as how to create Invited Writing Spaces to help make writing more visible across a campus.
Contents
Subject
Rhetoric
Composition
Graffiti
Self-sponsored
Walls
Whiteboard
Writing
Composition
Graffiti
Self-sponsored
Walls
Whiteboard
Writing
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Journal Issue
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Dissertation
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English