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Graduate Students’ Development of Academic Identities
The Goals and Mission of EnglWrit111
Introduction
Graduate students in Writing Studies often experience a puzzling contradiction. We are learning the field and pursuing original research, often for the first time, while simultaneously teaching writing courses where we act as an experienced guide for students. In this article, we recount our experiences teaching EnglWrit111: Writing, Identity, and Power, an optional, 100-level composition class. Here, we reflect on multiple questions. As graduate students, how do we combine our roles as emergent researchers with our experience as veteran instructors when teaching first year writing courses? How might a course theme like “Writing, Identity, and Power” allow experienced teachers to bring their scholarship into the classroom? How does teaching inform graduate students’ scholarly identities, and how do graduate students’ scholarly identities inform their teaching? We analyze and reflect on how our experiences teaching this class allowed us to each bring in our own investments in community literacy, student activism, and digital circulation to the classroom in ways that informed both our pedagogy and our scholarship.
First, we briefly discuss how the field of writing studies has considered the development of graduate students’ scholarly identities, both as teachers and researchers. Focusing on the premise that graduate students can benefit from confluence between their research and teaching opportunities but recognizing that there are programmatic challenges to doing so, we offer our own teaching narratives, grounded in the context of our program’s teacher training and pedagogical emphases, to show how our research investments around writing inform our teaching and vice versa. We acknowledge that all instructors, including graduate students, bring their scholarly investments into their teaching practice, and we hope to offer insight about how to navigate this emergent-researcher/experienced-teacher duality.