Dr. Shauna Wight, assistant professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University, has been chosen for the 2016 James Berlin Memorial Outstanding Dissertation Award by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. This is Wight's first year at Southeast, but she started teaching in 2004 to middle-school and high-school students and transitioned to teaching college students after going back to school to receive her master's degree and Ph.D.

Wight completed her dissertation "Upward Bound is College Bound: Pre-College Outreach Programs Sponsorship of Academic Writing" through a Ph.D. program at the University of New Hampshire in 2015. While attending UNH, Wight spent two and a half years gathering research and doing field work to complete her dissertation. During that time, she followed five students who were involved in the Upward Bound program to see how the program influenced their academic writing.

"Those five students were the focus of my study because I wanted to give them a voice in my research," Wight said.

CCCC, the professional organization that gave Wight the award, supports the research and teaching of composition on a college level through improving conditions for learning in composition, communication and rhetoric. Every year, there is a high number of submissions from across the country for this award. According to the CCCC website, this award is given to a graduate whose dissertation adds something significant to the field's body of knowledge. Christina Ortmeier-Hooper, Wight's dissertation adviser and professor of English at UNH, was one of the people who ended up convincing Wight to do it. In an email interview, Ortmeier-Hooper said Wight's dissertation was one of the best she had read in years.

"Dr. Wight has a wonderful eye for detail in her research," Ortmeier-Hooper said. "Shauna is a very thoughtful scholar, and she was also thinking through how various theories of learning, academic achievement and student writing practices were playing out in the real lives of the high-school students."

Ortmeier-Hooper said she believed Wight had a very good chance of winning the award based upon her research, writing style and overall commitment to the project.

"The longitudinal nature of the project really showed her commitment to study the transition of these student writers as they navigated the various settings," Ortmeier-Hooper said. "I was impressed with the extent of her theoretical knowledge, combined with the rich portraits of the students that she gave to readers."

Even with the shock of receiving the award, Wight said she felt there were certain reasons as to why her dissertation stood out over the others.

"I think that one of the reasons my dissertation won is that it was timely, it's touching on conversations that are important," Wight said. "There's a lot of concern about making sure that students are prepared for college ... I think it touched a chord with readers because of other conversations in the field."

On the contrary, Ortmeier-Hooper said she thought Wight had an excellent chance of winning the award.

"Dr. Wight had done such excellent work, and it was a wonderful acknowledgement of her project's scholarly impact by other colleagues in our field from across the country," Ortmeier-Hooper said.

Wight will be honored at the CCCC Convention in Houston on April 8.