Dr. Ellis-Lai is passionate about helping college students develop the skills and understanding to conceive of themselves as scholars and writers.
She has presented several papers on this topic at national conferences, including “Portraiture Writing: Helping Students Write Themselves into Academia” and “Preparing Undergraduates for IRB-Approved Research During Study Abroad” at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research, as well as “Fostering Undergraduate Research,” “Ethnographic Research, Cultural Survival Skills, and College Persistence,” “Seeking Consent: Boundaries of Intimacy and the IRB,” and “Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Ethnographic Research Projects in First Year Composition” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
In addition to presenting at conferences, Dr. Ellis-Lai has served on the editorial board of Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric, a national, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. In this role, she mentored young college students as they prepared their own articles for publication. She is proud of her Honors College students who have published their seminar papers in the Texas State Undergraduate Research Journal at Texas State University.
Several of Dr. Ellis-Lai’s first year Honors students have traveled to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research with her to present the original research they conducted in her class. Many of her other students, including all of the senior thesis students she supervised, have presented at the Honors College Undergraduate Research Conference & Thesis Forum at Texas State University. A majority of the students who publicly presented their undergraduate research from Dr. Ellis-Lai’s classes have continued on to graduate programs in English, government, anthropology, history, business, the sciences, and other disciplines.
One student, Lindsey Robertson, created this short video for future Honors students to describe what she learned in Dr. Ellis-Lai’s Honors course called “Portraiture.” In this course, students learn to use the qualitative research methodology of Portraiture to carry out their own original research projects.
Dr. Ellis-Lai’s longitudinal, qualitative study on the academic identity development of her first year writing students across three years of their college education became her dissertation, Close Confidences: Students’ Experiences of Relational Pleasure, Reflective Competence, and Self-Authorship in First Year Composition Research Writing.
This dissertation explores students’ perceptions of their own scholarly development, starting in first year college writing courses. Using a mixed-methods approach – including ethnographic, case study, and teacher-research methodologies – she explored stories her students told about their research-writing experiences in their online research journal blogs, in their final research papers, and over the course of multiple follow-up interviews. The student participants involved in this dissertation research all noted that their own research participants from their ethnographic projects for class offered them an impressive level of trust and engagement during their recorded and transcribed conversations.
Dr. Ellis-Lai began to refer to this sense of mutual trust and engagement in interviews between the student researchers and their participants as a series of “close confidences” which then served as an overarching metaphor for the main findings of Dr. Ellis-Lai’s dissertation. This research explores the ways college students experience a motivating sense of relational pleasure when conducting their own ethnographic interviews, a heightened sense of competence in their own scholarly abilities after completing their research-writing projects, and a newfound shift in thinking of themselves as scholars. Borrowing a term from the field of adult-developmental psychology, Dr. Ellis-Lai uses the term “self-authorship” to describe the ways students actively author their own scholarly identities in parallel as they learn to design, research, and compose in-depth ethnographic projects of their own.