Doctoral Candidate, Joint Ph.D. Program in English and Education
she/they
About
Profile
Adelay has taught writing courses for ten semesters in the University of Michigan's English Department Writing Program, including seven sections of English 125: Writing & Academic Inquiry (first-year writing); two sections of English 225: Academic Argumentation; and one section of English 229: Professional Writing. In spring of 2022, Adelay was a winner of the David and Linda Moscow Prize for Excellence in Teaching Writing. Adelay is also a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT-200).
Adelay is a member of the Heterodox Academy and a former steering committee member of the Language and Rhetorical Studies (LangRhet) interdisciplinary workshop through the Rackham Graduate School. 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 Master's degree course taught by Claude Hurlbert, author of National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition (2014), I have examined English in linguistic, ideological, critical, pedagogical, and disciplinary terms alongside scholarly and embodied explorations of violence, trauma, and grief.
Language is the foundation of all human social systems; thus any efforts aimed at radical (i.e., from Latin "radicis," meaning "root") progressive change must take language into foremost consideration. As a scholar dedicated to social justice education in the field of composition and rhetoric, I am interested in collaboratively building more knowledge about how and why language affects our world: both globally and in more specific contexts of disciplinary research and theory.
My 14-year teaching career has revolved around language and rhetoric. From leading public school EFL curricula and teacher education in South Korea to college level writing courses at U-M, it has been my delight and duty to illuminate how language and rhetoric enable people to co-construct meaning and manifest tangible changes in our social and material worlds. My empirical research-based dissertation explores how emotions mediate all communication, including the ways teachers and students discuss social, political, and ideological differences in the first-year writing classroom. As young adults in their earliest years of independence, first-year writing students are earning credentials and gaining experience in a learning-oriented context where their articulation of their own ideas is the primary focus. These students have access to a wide range of knowledge and an opportunity to evaluate whether and how their home communities' values and perspectives resonate with what they are learning. In 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 views as well as discussing differences like class, race, and gender) in the course and beyond; how they react 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 inquiry into divisive social 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 language prompts people to cross-examine or double-down on their beliefs when disagreement arises? Many nations including the USA are rife with conflicting ideologies (e.g., in discourse about identities, rights, and ethics). As it often goes, this genuine question leads to scores of other questions and my own intuitive reactions:
- Why are so many people suspicious of scholarly experts, of social justice, and of colleges? While many scholars argue such skeptics just don’t care about facts, I’m curious about skeptics’ own reasons for resistance. My research involves rhetorical listening (Ratcliffe, 2005) and rhetorical empathy (Blankenship, 2020) to explore good-faith discussions about disagreements across differences. Writing studies research on emotion (e.g., Micciche; Winans; Stenberg; Worsham) provide a framework to understand emotions as largely unconscious yet profound modes of persuasion.
- How can scholars write in ways that invite more readers into our discourses? Many academic texts are inaccessible outside of higher education credentials due to paywalls and jargon. If we scholars 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.
- How could comp/rhet help heal U.S. national tensions and culture war? Embodiment research demonstrates how ideas, choices, judgments, etc., are profoundly affected by people's emotional states. 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 motivations and the intentional and unintentional effects of spoken and written language can help us find paths out of social dilemmas.
