(Re)Making/(Re)Marking: Genre and Markup in the Writing Classroo

This dissertation presents the study of a novel approach to rhetorical genre studies (RGS) pedagogy through a framework I call explicit collaborative modeling, which asks students to use networked, digital writing practices---schema building and text encoding with eXtensible Markup Language (XML)---to study, represent, critique, and produce a range of writing genres. The project rests at the intersection of three conversations: rhetorical genre studies, digital writing, and the digital humanities. At this intersection, this study asks: What can this novel form of digital writing reveal about how students make and make sense of genre knowledge? What can we learn about genre by interfacing with it through XML? What can we learn about this writing technology by using it to represent genres?;The dissertation seeks to answer these questions by drawing on qualitative data gathered from students' individual and collaborative writing, interviews, and reflective teaching journals to examine how students used XML to literally mark and remark upon their writing as they worked to make and remake their understandings of genres in the classroom. Doing so, this project intervenes variously to the three fields identified above. It advances explicit collaborative modeling, a novel RGS pedagogy, that serves as a way to explore the effectiveness of RGS pedagogies writ large. The study offers collaborative and individual case studies of students and examines the affordances and limitations of explicit collaborative modeling as a tool for developing genre knowledge and facility and for making visible key tensions in genre work. Though this approach uses XML and schema building, this model is not meant to be prescriptive, but rather serve as an example that indicates one way RGS teachers might put students' conceptual understandings of genres in conversation with one another. By advancing this pedagogy, the study extracts pedagogical insights for RGS teachers and teachers of writing more broadly. The principle contribution in this regard is the pedagogical concept of procedural design, an approach to teaching that recognizes the rhetorical role of procedures as they are enacted in the writing classroom and seeks spaces to invite students to intervene in them.;The project provides situated, process-oriented views of how students---individual and collaborative---negotiate their understandings of genres through the writing technologies of XML encoding and schema building. Doing so, the project adds to the literature in writing studies and digital humanities on the ways in which technologies (whether acknowledged or unacknowledged and digital or analog) mediate rhetorical possibilities for students, and how students work to negotiate their individual and collaborative writerly positions and identities within the mediated spaces of writing classrooms.;This study is held together by an approach to teacher research that is supplemented with rhetorical theories of usability and participatory design. I argue that these supplements to teacher research can enable researchers to better examine the technologies introduced into their classrooms and to leverage them to facilitate the goals and ethics of teacher research. As digital tools and environments become increasingly ubiquitous, as screens and interfaces become increasingly invisible, it is crucial for writing studies scholars to spur awareness and critique of these systems if we are to effectively prepare students to participate in and shape new environments for communication.