Eodice, M., Geller, A.E., & Lerner, N. (2019). The power of personal connections for undergraduate student writers. Research in the Teaching of English, 53(4), 320-339.
Eodice, Geller, and Lerner’s article (2019) extends work they did in their study The Meaningful Writing Project (Eodice, Geller, & Lerner, 2016) by identifying that what makes writing meaningful for undergraduates is establishing a personal connection to their work. Because The Meaningful Writing Project (Eodice, Geller, & Lerner, 2016) has been so foundational to my own thinking and research, I love this article and am particularly drawn to their articulation of methods. Eodice, Geller, and Lerner (2019) spend considerable time describing their participants, rationale, and methodological approach (p. 324-5). They also discuss their survey and analysis in ways that could be a model for me later. I’ve started tracking my data analysis notes for the “extended work of writing center tutors” inspired by Eodice, Geller, and Lerner (2019). Eodice, Geller, and Lerner (2019) table of codes (p. 327-8) serves as an organizational tool for the findings that follow, since their findings use case studies to illustrate the codes that appear most frequently in their research. For example, their second finding, that “students find writing projects meaningful when they have opportunities to connect their writing to peers, family, and community members important to them” (Eodice, Geller, and Lerner, 2019, p. 331) is represented in Table 1 (p. 328) and supported in detail with a case study.
Further, Eodice, Geller, and Lerner (2019) draw on work by Engel, Lam, Meyer, & Nix (2012) that identifies how expansive framing “allows students to connect to certain kinds of personal resources, some of which are external or social–family and community members, friends, and peers–and some of which are internal or individual–development, authorship, future identities, self-expression, experience” (p. 334). The connections this work makes have me asking how I can use both Eodice, Geller, and Lerner (2019) and Engel, Lam, Meyer, & Nix (2012) in my understanding of how the writing center serves as a place where public pedagogy is cultivated.
Rhetorical Notes 