| This dissertation examines the various rhetorics of “hybrid” inquiry, or empirical work in composition and rhetoric that employs both qualitative and quantitative methods. I adopt perspectives used most frequently in rhetoric of science and genre theory in order to understand the ways in which composition research may be driven by material, contextual, and social factors. I argue that the field's competing assumptions about research have guided the creation of both the experimental and ethnographic traditions, which present methods as universal rules that guide practice rather than rhetorical responses to both local and disciplinary constraints. To view qualitative and quantitative methods rhetorically, rather than technically or procedurally, requires that one see both not as isolated means for achieving divergent truths but as points along a continuum of research styles.; I conduct rhetorical case studies of hybrid research on writing in three areas: teacher response to student writing, teaching academic argument, and teacher-student conferencing. In chapter 4, I adopt Myers' (1990) definition of narratives of science and narratives of nature to show the different rhetorical patterns that hybrid research can take. In chapter 5, I examine one instance of teacher research on gender and argument, highlighting the ways in which the author's text resists the dominant narrative strand of teacher research in composition. In chapter 6, I consider intertextuality in a hybrid study of writing conferences that later became a book.; The dissertation ends by reiterating the need for composition studies to adopt a more explicitly rhetorical and situated perspective on research methods. Hybrid research, like any form of inquiry, is located within competing disciplinary histories, and its use is driven by material, social, and institutional factors of which we are only now starting to be aware. Because of the increasing need for researchers in composition to justify pedagogies, curriculums, and even the study of writing itself to outside audiences, we would do well to consider these rhetorical goals when we conduct our own research and write it up. |
