About
Profile
Adelay has taught writing courses in the University of Michigan's English Department Writing Program since 2017, when she began her doctoral studies in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education. In spring of 2022, Adelay was a winner of the David and Linda Moscow Prize for Excellence in Teaching Writing. She is also a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT-200).
Teaching Experience at U-M:
Adelay is a member of the Heterodox Academy and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). She is a former steering committee member of U-M's Language and Rhetorical Studies (LangRhet) interdisciplinary workshop. Adelay's scholarly writing is featured in Bruce and Rafoth's (2016) Tutoring Second Language Writers.
Paradigms, Research, & Praxis
The central question driving of my work is from Mary Rose O'Reilley's (1993) The Peaceable Classroom: "Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?" Since stumbling upon that question in a course taught by Claude Hurlbert (author of National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition), I have examined English in linguistic, ideological, critical, pedagogical, and disciplinary terms alongside scholarly and embodied explorations of violence, trauma, and grief. My dissertation focused on the rhetorical meanings of emotions and how college writing students can navigate and leverage emotions to motivate learning, increase understanding, and thereby improve their writing. It is my delight and duty to illuminate how language and rhetoric enable people to co-construct meanings and enact change in the world via communication.
The way I see it, college writing students are earning credentials and gaining experience in a learning-oriented context where their own voices and ideas are the primary focus. These students have access to a wide range of knowledge and an opportunity to evaluate whether and how their instinctive values and perspectives resonate with what they are learning. Through classroom interactions, interviews, and surveys, I explore:
- what beliefs and attitudes students bring with them to college;
- what they notice about the ways people discuss differences (i.e., discussing different perspectives as well as social differences like class, race, and gender) in the course and beyond;
- how they react and respond to those discourses about difference;
- and how their impressions of and responses to such discussions shift over time.
I'm also interested in how educators can support students' critical thoughtfulness about divisive social issues, including political issues, and how educators' rhetorical choices when discussing difference may clarify or obstruct learning for their students.
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On a broader scale, I wonder what kind of communication prompts people to double-down on their assumptions or cross-examine their assumptions in good faith when disagreement arises? National political discourses are more polarized than ever, so who is acting with integrity and humility?
My embodiment-based research demonstrates how ideas, choices, judgments, etc., are affected by emotional states. Writing studies research on emotion (e.g., Micciche; Winans; Stenberg; Worsham) provide a framework to understand emotions as largely unconscious yet leading modes of persuasion. Emotions like fear, frustration, contempt, and disgust literally and rhetorically flood the body and inhibit healing. In a cultural moment characterized by "toxic rhetoric" (Duffy, 2019), paying close attention to our own rhetorical motives as well as intentional and unintentional effects of language can help us find paths out of social dilemmas. My research therefore involves rhetorical listening (Ratcliffe, 2005) and rhetorical empathy (Blankenship, 2020) to explore good-faith discussions about disagreements across differences.
"If we want to manifest any kind of better world, it would be useful to publicly negotiate—in good faith and humility (e.g., Shotwell, 2016)—all ideas intended to impact the public." –Adelay
