Date of Award
5-2026
Culminating Project Type
Thesis
Styleguide
mla
Degree Name
English: M.A.
Department
English
College
College of Liberal Arts
First Advisor
James Heiman
Second Advisor
Matt Barton
Third Advisor
Michael Dando
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Keywords and Subject Headings
Autobiography, Bilateral, Critical Reflection, Hermeneutic, Ideology, Rhetoric, Social-Emotional Learning, Social-Epistemic, Triadic Semiotics, Unilateral
Abstract
This thesis tells the story of how a first-year English instructor came to practice the same critical thinking about themselves that they expect of their students. I first became interested in questions of student motivation as an undergraduate tutor where I discovered behavioral barriers to student learning, so upon hearing about the practice of social-emotional learning (SEL) common to K-12 education, I wanted to find out if SEL had an application in a college context. After learning that SEL is most effective when instructors practice it themselves, I began reflecting on the journal entries I had made during my first and second semester teaching, looking to see if and where I was practicing these competencies. I found that I was already practicing many of them, but that it wasn’t enough to influence students. It was only through a willingness to question the assumptions I had about these experiences through Stephen Brookfield’s concept of autobiography that I was able to recalibrate these emotional competencies into the living and dynamic rhetorical context of a classroom. I draw primarily on the work of James Berlin, Wayne Brockriede, and Ann Berthoff to identify ways my teaching style unconsciously encouraged compliance through a unilateral relationship and how my ignorance of the hermeneutics involved in semiotic knowledge construction ignored student experience. I then reexamine these reflections to further reflect on the rhetoric involved in extending the kind of authentic invitation that makes education possible.
Recommended Citation
Nagel, Alex, "Composing the Composition Teacher: Unifying Rhetoric Through a Critical Reflection of Social-Emotional Competencies" (2026). Culminating Projects in English. 69.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/eng_etds/69
