Preparing writing centers and tutors for literacy mediation for working class campus-staff

Writing centers work with writers; traditionally services have been focused on undergraduates taking composition classes. More recently, centers have started to attract a wider client base including: students taking labs that require writing; graduate students; and ESL students learning the conventions of U.S. communication. There are very few centers, however, which identify themselves as open to working with all members of the campus-community. Michigan Technological University has one such center. In the Michigan Tech writing center, doors are open to “all students, faculty and staff.” While graduate students, post docs, and professors preparing articles for publication have used the center, for the first time in the collective memory of the center UAW staff members requested center appointments in the summer of 2008. These working class employees were in the process of filling out a work related document, the UAW Position Audit, an approximately seven-page form. This form was their one avenue for requesting a review of the job they were doing; the review was the first step in requesting a raise in job level and pay. This study grew out of the realization that implicit literacy expectations between working class United Auto Workers (UAW) staff and professional class staff were complicating the filling out and filing of the position audit form. Professional class supervisors had designed the form as a measure of fairness, in that each UAW employee on campus was responding to the same set of questions about their work. However, the implicit literacy expectations of supervisors were different from those of many of the employees who were to fill out the form. As a result, questions that were meant to be straightforward to answer were in the eyes of the employees filling out the form, complex. Before coming to the writing center UAW staff had spent months writing out responses to the form; they expressed concerns that their responses still would not meet audience expectations. These writers recognized that they did not yet know exactly what the audience was expecting. The results of this study include a framework for planning writing center sessions that facilitate the acquisition of literacy practices which are new to the user. One important realization from this dissertation is that the social nature of literacy must be kept in the forefront when both planning sessions and when educating tutors to lead these sessions. Literacy scholars such as James Paul Gee, Brian Street, and Shirley Brice Heath are used to show that a person can only know those literacy practices that they have previously acquired. In order to acquire new literacy practices, a person must have social opportunities for hands-on practice and mentoring from someone with experience. The writing center can adapt theory and practices from this dissertation that will facilitate sessions for a range of writers wishing to learn “new” literacy practices. This study also calls for specific changes to writing center tutor education.

Radical Verses: Aku Päiviö's Literary Influence on the Finnish Working-Class

Aku Päiviö was one of the most influential voices of the Finnish labor movement in North America—a poet who also wrote plays and novels, and an editor who worked for a variety of newspapers across the United States and Canada. During the height of the Finnish socialist movement from around 1904-1916, Päiviö published a number of poems that identified with the actions and ideologies of the working-class. He also edited for newspapers such as Kansan Lehti and Raivaaja, further extending his literary reach. Despite his prodigious publications and influence, however, little of Päiviö’s writing has been translated into English. This paper celebrates Päiviö’s legacy with some English translations of his poems, specifically those commemorating the 1913-14 Michigan Copper Strike, and illuminates how various thematic and structural relationships in these poems relate to the ideologies and movements of the time.

Panel Discussion - Finns in the United States

“Book Notes with Four Authors from Finns in the United States: A History of Settlement, Dissent, and Integration” This panel presentation will highlight chapters in the newly released book, Finns in the United States, published by Michigan State University Press. Authors will discuss their contribution to the book, and highlight key aspects of their work. Finns in the United States has been touted as a fresh and up-to-date analysis of Finnish Americans, an insightful volume that lays the groundwork for exploring this unique culture through a historical context, followed by an overview of the overall composition and settlement patterns of these newcomers.

United States certificate programs in technical communication : a feminist-sophistic investigation

Technical communication certificates are offered by many colleges and universities as an alternative to a full undergraduate or graduate degree in the field. Despite certificates’ increasing popularity in recent years, however, surprisingly little commentary exists about them within the scholarly literature. In this work, I describe a survey of certificate and baccalaureate programs that I performed in 2008 in order to develop basic, descriptive data on programs’ age, size, and graduation rates; departmental location; curricular requirements; online offerings; and instructor status and qualifications. In performing this research, I apply recent insights from neosophistic rhetorical theory and feminist critiques of science to both articulate, and model, a feminist-sophistic methodology. I also suggest in this work that technical communication certificates can be theorized as a particularly sophistic credential for a particularly sophistic field, and I discuss the implications of neosophistic theory for certificate program design and administration.

Driver Safety in Far-side and Far-oblique Crashes: A Study of Patrol Vehicles in the United States of America

The dissertation titled "Driver Safety in Far-side and Far-oblique Crashes" presents a novel approach to assessing vehicle cockpit safety by integrating Human Factors and Applied Mechanics. The methodology of this approach is aimed at improving safety in compact mobile workspaces such as patrol vehicle cockpits. A statistical analysis performed using Michigan state's traffic crash data to assess various contributing factors that affect the risk of severe driver injuries showed that the risk was greater for unrestrained drivers (OR=3.38, p<0.0001) and for incidents involving front and far-side crashes without seatbelts (OR=8.0 and 23.0 respectively, p<0.005). Statistics also showed that near-side and far-side crashes pose similar threat to driver injury severity. A Human Factor survey was conducted to assess various Human-Machine/Human-Computer Interaction aspects in patrol vehicle cockpits. Results showed that tasks requiring manual operation, especially the usage of laptop, would require more attention and potentially cause more distraction. A vehicle survey conducted to evaluate ergonomics-related issues revealed that some of the equipment was in airbag deployment zones. In addition, experiments were conducted to assess the effects on driver distraction caused by changing the position of in-car accessories. A driving simulator study was conducted to mimic HMI/HCI in a patrol vehicle cockpit (20 subjects, average driving experience = 5.35 years, s.d. = 1.8). It was found that the mounting locations of manual tasks did not result in a significant change in response times. Visual displays resulted in response times less than 1.5sec. It can also be concluded that the manual task was equally distracting regardless of mounting positions (average response time was 15 secs). Average speeds and lane deviations did not show any significant results. Data from 13 full-scale sled tests conducted to simulate far-side impacts at 70 PDOF and 40 PDOF was used to analyze head injuries and HIC/AIS values. It was found that accelerations generated by the vehicle deceleration alone were high enough to cause AIS 3 - AIS 6 injuries. Pretensioners could mitigated injuries only in 40 PDOF (oblique) impacts but are useless in 70 PDOF impacts. Seat belts were ineffective in protecting the driver's head from injuries. Head would come in contact with the laptop during a far-oblique (40 PDOF) crash and far-side door for an angle-type crash (70 PDOF). Finite Element analysis head-laptop impact interaction showed that the contact velocity was the most crucial factor in causing a severe (and potentially fatal) head injury. Results indicate that no equipment may be mounted in driver trajectory envelopes. A very narrow band of space is left in patrol vehicles for installation of manual-task equipment to be both safe and ergonomic. In case of a contact, the material stiffness and damping properties play a very significant role in determining the injury outcome. Future work may be done on improving the interiors' material properties to better absorb and dissipate kinetic energy of the head. The design of seat belts and pretensioners may also be seen as an essential aspect to be further improved.

INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT OF ANTHROPOGENIC, CLIMATE, AND POLICY INDUCED CHANGES OF PHOSPHORUS EXPORT IN THE UNITED STATES LAURENTIAN GREAT LAKES WATERSHEDS

Anthropogenic activities have increased phosphorus (P) loading in tributaries to the Laurentian Great Lakes resulting in eutrophication in small bays to most notably, Lake Erie. Changes to surface water quality from P loading have resulted in billions of dollars in damage and threaten the health of the world’s largest freshwater resource. To understand the factors affecting P delivery with projected increasing urban lands and biofuels expansion, two spatially explicit models were coupled. The coupled models predict that the majority of the basin will experience a significant increase in urban area P sources while the agriculture intensity and forest sources of P will decrease. Changes in P loading across the basin will be highly variable spatially. Additionally, the impacts of climate change on high precipitation events across the Great Lakes were examined. Using historical regression relationships on phosphorus concentrations, key Great Lakes tributaries were found to have future changes including decreasing total loads and increases to high-flow loading events. The urbanized Cuyahoga watersheds exhibits the most vulnerability to these climate-induced changes with increases in total loading and storm loading , while the forested Au Sable watershed exhibits greater resilience. Finally, the monitoring network currently in place for sampling the amount of phosphorus entering the U.S. Great Lakes was examined with a focus on the challenges to monitoring. Based on these interviews, the research identified three issues that policy makers interested in maintaining an effective phosphorus monitoring network in the Great Lakes should consider: first, that the policy objectives driving different monitoring programs vary, which results in different patterns of sampling design and frequency; second, that these differences complicate efforts to encourage collaboration; and third, that methods of funding sampling programs vary from agency to agency, further complicating efforts to generate sufficient long-term data to improve our understanding of phosphorus into the Great Lakes. The dissertation combines these three areas of research to present the potential future impacts of P loading in the Great Lakes as anthropogenic activities, climate and monitoring changes. These manuscripts report new experimental data for future sources, loading and climate impacts on phosphorus.