This dissertation was developed in response to a long-standing imperative for teachers and scholars of writing: the need to meet students where they are (technologically) and keep up with emerging writing technologies. Said differently, when an emerging writing technology comes on the scene, teachers of writing tend to develop theoretical and pedagogical approaches for students' use of that technology in the writing classroom. While the imperative to keep up is well-meaning, the attempt can feel futile or, at the very least, pedagogically frustrating. This frustration is often fueled by permanent innovation, or when a culture’s technological innovation outpaces its ability to adapt to and for those technologies. To address the ever-evolving difficulties inherent within the relationship between writing, developing technologies, and teaching writing, this dissertation offers the field of Composition a path through the futility and frustration represented by keeping up. I call this intervention Composition’s “Technological Boneyard,” or more simply, “the boneyard.” The boneyard is first and foremost a metaphor, an imagined dumping ground that contains the obsolete, trashed, and forgotten technologies of writing that Composition has used and discarded in its move toward its raison d'être: the study and teaching of writing. Brimming with obsolete and discarded technologies of writing—like the first personal computers, floppy and hard disks, keyboards, and early mobile devices—the boneyard allows Composition to (re)investigate its technological and techno-pedagogical history, as well as its current relationships with developing technologies and writing. Through two qualitative case studies, this dissertation investigates the technologies in the boneyard and considers how abandoned, obsolete, and forgotten writing tools have shaped (and continue to shape) the teaching of writing in higher education, as well as Composition’s own history.

Research regarding graduate teaching assistant (TA) training in the composition practicum is a popular topic in composition scholarship, covering topics about TA resistance, theory and practice, and reflective practices; but research about international TAs (ITAs) has not been frequently discussed. Research about ITAs exists in the university at large; however, it does not specifically address the needs of ITAs in a composition practicum, where training is typically longer and is specific to writing pedagogy. To meet this need, this dissertation employed a qualitative interview study with semi-structured interviews and surveys to discover how TA mentors who teach ITAs and ITAs themselves view the composition practicum and how it can be improved for ITAs. Through participants’ stories and experiences, this dissertation highlights ways writing programs might rethink their composition practicum for ITAs and offers a starting point for researching ITAs in composition TA training. Ultimately, this project uses ITAs’ and TA mentors’ voices to offer programmatic suggestions that benefit ITAs in the composition practicum.

The position of Dean of Women was created in response to novel exigencies rising from women’s acceptance to coeducational institutions of higher learning in the late nineteenth century. While these early women administrators had a profound impact on women’s higher education in the United States, their work has received relatively little attention. In response to this discriminatory erasure, this dissertation applies feminist historiographical approaches and qualitative methods that center these women and their rhetoric within the historical narrative. In particular, this dissertation explores, synthesizes, and analyzes the archived rhetorical documents produced by the National Association of Deans of Women (NADW) and Evelyn Jones Kirmse, an early University of Arizona dean of women, between 1922 and 1942. By privileging the rhetoric of these women and positioning them as authorities of their own experience within hegemonically masculine coeducational systems and administrations, this dissertation brings to light their own theories, debates, and arguments concerning how to best make room for women in higher education professionally, physically, and intellectually. While positing the complexity and efficacy of their rhetoric, this dissertation also marks critical ideological negotiations within the deans’ arguments in response to socio-cultural shifts and opportunities born of the Progressive Era. By locating paradoxical navigations of traditional essentialist values and burgeoning progressive ideas within the deans’ rhetoric, this dissertation provides an important illustration of the awkward stage of growth within feminism’s development. It provides insight to deans of women’s own rhetorical explorations on how their identity and success should be constructed, attained, and measured in the new academic territory of coeducation.