Breaking Away from Binaries: Teaching Writing with Critical Realist Sensibilities

Abstract

This dissertation is an action research study carried out in two multilingual sections of a first-year composition course that were taught over the course of two academic quarters. The two sections represent two research cycles. In the first research cycle, I discuss the construction of the course syllabus and examine the relation between three approaches to teaching writing that were integrated into the course: translingualism and English as a lingua franca (as part of critical or progressive pedagogy) and intercultural rhetoric (as part of pragmatic pedagogy). In the second research cycle, I look at the relation between these two pedagogies and explore the possibility of a middle ground approach that views the two pedagogies dialectically rather than dualistically. Ultimately, I argue that an approach called critical pragmatism can serve this role, and I lay out possible components of said approach in contribution of this reconciliatory effort. For the purpose of data collection, I utilized various research methods, including interviews with students, feedback surveys, fieldnotes, and student work. And in performing a detailed analysis of the complete data set, I employed two analytic strategies: one is called template analysis while the other is called dilemma analysis. Finally, as an overarching theoretical framework, the study adopts a philosophy called critical realism. Keywords: Composition studies, critical pragmatism, critical realism, action research, template analysis, dilemma analysis