Person:
Roderick, Ryan

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Email Address
Birth Date
Biography URL
https://www.husson.edu/directory/ryan_roderick.html
Term at University
2018 - Current
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Organizational Units
Job Title
Assistant Dean, College of Science and Humanities
Assistant Professor, College of Science and Humanities
Last Name
Roderick
First Name
Ryan
Name
Degrees Held
PhD Rhetoric, 2018, Carnegie Mellon
M.A. English and Composition Pedagogy, 2010, University of Maine
B.A. English, 2008, Drexel University

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2013 - 20193
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End date: 2019 × Start date: 2013 ×

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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Publication
    Constructing Adult Literacies at a Local Literacy Tutor-Training Program
    (2013) Roderick, Ryan
    This study investigates how literacy was constructed at an adult literacy organization’s volunteer tutor-training program. By drawing on qualitative analysis of training texts used during training, such as training evaluations, and data gathered from interviews with experienced tutors, it is possible to identify the assumptions about literacy constructed by the training program and tutors’ training practices. Tutors seemed to present mixed assumptions about literacy: students simultaneously were given authority over their own literacy practices and literacy goals, while a sentiment of universally valued reading and writing skills was also present in terms of achieving fluency.
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    Publication
    Self-Regulation and Rhetorical Problem Solving: How Graduate Students Adapt to an Unfamiliar Writing Project
    (2019-07) Roderick, Ryan
    Research on writing and transfer has shown that writers who have sophisticated rhetorical knowledge are well equipped to adapt to new situations, yet less attention has been paid to how a writer’s adaptability is influenced by their writing processes. Drawing on Zimmerman’s socio-cognitive theory of self regulation, this study compared the writing processes taken up by graduate student writers composing a research proposal for their final project in a tutor-training practicum. Findings from process logs, interviews, and drafts differentiated self-regulation strategies associated with varying degrees of success. The more successful writers framed problems in terms of potential solutions, used problems to set goals, and reacted to problems by creating a narrative of progress; in contrast, less successful writers avoided problems or framed them as dead-ends. Compared to the less successful writers, the more successful writers concluded the project with robust knowledge about research proposal writing. These findings suggest that self-regulation strategies may be linked to an ability to develop rhetorical knowledge and practices in the face of challenging writing situations.
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    Publication
    Improving Instructor Ethos through Document Design
    (2019) Wolfe, Joanna; Roderick, Ryan; Francioni-Rooney, Andrea
    Despite much attention given to visual rhetoric in Composition, there is evidence that most first-year writing instructors overlook document design, both in their instruction and in the documents they produce for their students. These instructors may be underestimating the role that visually informative prose (that uses document design features such as chunking and visual hierarchy) can play both in helping students understand assignment objectives and in establishing a student-centered ethos in their classrooms. To illustrate how visually informative prose helps shape student perceptions of instructors, 166 first-year undergraduates responded to two assignment prompts: a visually informative and a minimally designed prompt. Students perceived the instructor who wrote the visually informative prompt as more experienced, enthusiastic, and caring than the instructor who wrote the minimally designed prompt, and they found the task more interesting when it was presented in the visually informative prompt. These findings suggest that creating visually informative classroom materials is a relatively low-cost/high-payoff strategy that can positively shape students' perceptions of the instructor and assignments.