Scaffolding the Language of Power: Companion Workbook

This workbook is a supplement to the textbook Scaffolding the Language of Power: An Apprenticeship in Doctoral-Level Writing. One of the features of the textbook is accompanying activities that are scaffolded and carefully sequenced to help students identify key ideas and generate text that can be used to build out the elements of each major dissertation task (e.g., problem statement, literature review, and so on). However, these are mainly offered in abbreviated form due to space limitations.

This supplemental workbook contains all the activities from the textbook in expanded form so that students can engage more fully with warm-ups, free-writes, analyses of mentor texts and examples, graphic organizers, and guided writing exercises. These activities are also accompanied with additional free-write prompts as well as bonus discussion questions for extended sense-making.

Individual chapters include:
1. Introduction: A Three-Pronged Approach to Writing at the Doctoral Level. This chapter provides discussion questions that help students make meaning of the three key ideas of the three main ideas that inform the book: critical perspectives on language, systemic functional linguistics, and sociocultural theory/scaffolding. Additional free-writing prompts are included that help students make personal connections to these ideas from their past and present experiences.
2. The Rules: Writing as a Pedagogical Act. This chapter provides discussion questions and personal connection prompts for the first “rule” of the Language of Power framework: doctoral writing is organized and scaffolded. Exercises are then provided for readers to practice five different organization and scaffolding strategies, including headings/chunking, road maps, topic sentences, signal phrases, and transitions/connectors.
3. The Rest of the Rules of the Language of Power. This chapter explores the remaining five rules of the “Language of Power” framework. Discussion questions and personal connection prompts are provided for each rule. Exercises are provided that help students practice key skills, including making well-reasoned arguments, identifying and using compelling evidence, writing with specificity and detail, synthesizing information, and developing original voice.
4. The Problem Statement. This chapter provides discussion questions regarding the problem statement and its purposes: to explain the problem, convince the reader that the issue is indeed a problem, and describe how the proposed study will begin to address that problem. Exercises are provided that help students articulate the particular problem that will be driving their study, with graphic organizers that break down each part of the problem statement, including the problem summary, the problem background, the rationale of the study, and the purpose statement. Writing activities are also provided that help students take the text generated from these organizers, craft them into problem statement sections, and edit them.
5. The Literature Review. This chapter provides discussion questions and personal connection prompts relating to the purposes and processes of the literature review. Activities and tools are provided for article analysis and pre-writing, as well as exercises in which readers analyze exemplars for writing moves. Graphic organizers and writing exercises are provided to help students create an overall schema for their literature review, identify and articulate gaps in the literature, build out levels of claims, and select and summarize exemplars.
6. The Theoretical Framework. This chapter provides discussion questions and personal connection prompts regarding the theoretical foundation of the dissertation and its purposes. Graphic organizers and writing exercises are provided to help students craft a rationale for using the framework, define their theories or perspectives, provide a background of the theory or theories, and discuss the key concepts of the framework.
7. The Methodology Chapter. This chapter provides activities that help students think through and describe their research design in clear and detailed terms. Exercises and graphic organizers are provided that help readers generate a description of their their methodology, participants and setting, data sources and procedures, analysis methods, trustworthiness, and positionality. Additional exercises are offered to help students map connections between their methodology, theoretical framework, and study purpose to ensure a coherent design.
8. The Findings Chapter. This chapter provides warm-ups and discussion questions for building out the “results” chapter of the dissertation. Activities and exercises help readers create an overarching organizational structure for their findings, anchor them with major assertions, support those claims with compelling evidence, and provide analytic explanation. Additional activities are provided to help students reflect on the ways that they purposefully scaffold their readers’ understanding throughout the chapter and the ways that they meet the trustworthiness criteria they created for themselves in the previous chapter.
9. The Discussion and Recommendations Chapter. This chapter provides discussion prompts to help students think through the purposes of the discussion and recommendations sections of the dissertation and begin generating text for both. Activities and graphic organizers support students to develop conclusions based on the findings, connect their findings and conclusions to extant literature, generate theoretical readings of their findings and conclusions, and draw out recommendations for addressing the initial problem they identified in the first chapter. Final exercises help students generate main take-aways and contributions, which they will use to develop their dissertation conclusion and abstract.

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Kathryn (Katie) Strom is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University, East Bay, Director of CSUEB’s Center for Research on Equity and Collaborative Engagement (CRECE), and co-founder of the Posthuman Research Nexus (a global organization that supports and connects scholars engaging in posthuman and other complexity perspectives). Dr. Strom’s research combines multiple critical and complex theories to study teacher learning and practice (particularly in support of multilingual learners), as well as to advocate more broadly for more relational, difference-affirmative ways of thinking-being-doing in education and academia. The latter includes her commitment to supporting doctoral students and early career scholars to successfully navigate the hidden curriculum of writing a dissertation and publishing afterward. A scholar of teaching and learning, Dr. Strom has used her knowledge of social justice, scaffolding, and systemic functional linguistics to develop lessons and workshops to support her doctoral students and junior academics in their writing over the last decade. Her most recent book, Scaffolding the Language of Power: An Apprenticeship in Writing at the Doctoral Level, turns these lessons into a comprehensive and interactive guide for doctoral-level writing. She is also the co-author of Becoming-Teacher: A Rhizomatic Look at First Year Teaching and Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives, along with many peer-reviewed articles and several special issues. Her most current work is in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute’s Network for Emergent Socioscientific Thinking (NESST), exploring ways to support educators and their students in shifting to the complex ways of thinking needed to create sustainable futures in the Anthropocene era.