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Graduate Students’ Development of Academic Identities
The Goals and Mission of EnglWrit111
Graduate Students’ Development of Academic Identities
We do not claim to give a comprehensive overview of research on graduate student education; instead, we aim to highlight a few central themes that are especially influential to our and our peers’ experiences as graduate students. Across different disciplines, much attention has been given to the question of how graduate students develop academic identities, particularly when it comes to their relationship to research and publication (Carr et al.; Coffman et al.; Culpepper et al.; Inouye and McAlpine). In particular, a narrative of apprenticeship and enculturation has emerged, focusing on the often opaque and idiosyncratic ways graduate students learn writing, research, and disciplinary norms from mentors and begin to model and replicate the conventions of their fields, including choices of research topics, use of accepted methods, ways of writing about their research, and more (Belcher; Casanave and Li; Curry; Reed, “Importing”). Within writing studies especially, critiques have been levied at “the traditional model of apprenticeship” for how enculturation processes reproduce inequities, particularly for students of color, and disciplinary norms without pushing for more than “incremental” advances in knowledge-making (Madden 16). Following calls to focus more on what is revealed by the lived experiences of graduate students (Madden et al.), we focus in particular on the role of teaching in graduate student’s emerging scholarly identities.
When it comes to graduate students’ development as writing teachers, we are interested in where graduate students find opportunities to create reciprocity between their teaching and research and how programs open up these possibilities. This is why we value examples of graduate programs that work closely to support graduate students as both their researcher and teacher identities are developing, such as our own. We recognize that there have been conflicts between graduate student instructors and professors who disagree on what should be taught, as well as concern over a lack of standardization across sections of the same course (Brown and Conner; Fleming; Reed, “Enacting” 116-117). We are not suggesting that graduate students should have full control over the curriculum of courses they teach, and we are not recommending that any graduate program overhaul their teaching structures; instead, we wish to show that this negotiation of teaching and research is already happening and highlight what is afforded when a program makes space for this work. We recognize that an important stage of graduate students’ professional development occurs when they develop teaching philosophies informed by their scholarly investments in writing studies, which they bring into each of the classes they teach.
Recognizing that most post-graduate academic jobs in writing studies have a heavy teaching focus, including requirements to teach first-year writing, we want to highlight how graduate students can make the teaching we do in our programs opportunities for our own scholarly development, including bringing our research interests into the classroom. We have found that, as we advance in our graduate studies to perform original research, part of this process involves identifying personal investments in what writing is and can do and, consequently, how we think it should be taught. We provide some background about our own program’s context and show how this has shaped how we bring our emerging scholarly investments into our classes. In addition to the standard teacher training of our home university, we identify teaching EnglWrit111 as pivotal to our own academic identity development.