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Graduate Students’ Development of Academic Identities
The Goals and Mission of EnglWrit111
Rachel’s Teaching Reflection
When I started teaching this course, my research interests were still in development while I finished my last years of graduate coursework. Throughout this time, I cultivated a scholarly and pedagogical focus on what writing can do for people: how it impacts their everyday lives, shapes their understanding of the world, and serves as a vehicle for change. Charting this work means attending to the contexts and mediums that structure peoples’ writing and thinking. My research focuses on feminist rhetoric and activism, in which I primarily study the text production of online writers to examine how experiences of feminist discourse are shaped by digital spaces. In this research, my main focus is on the writers and how their online textual interactions impact their understandings of feminism and social activism more broadly. Now, this is also evident in my teaching, as I similarly ask my students to consider what writing can afford them and how they may enact change through writing within their own contexts.
One way I take this up in the classroom is through a unit focused on student activism. At the beginning of our second unit, I start class by posing the question, “Can students create change?” The answers are wide and varied but trend negative, with most expressing that students do not have enough power to effectively create change. We use this as an opening to discuss the history of the course. I explain that one reason why Writing, Identity, and Power exists today is because student activists advocated for it. I show them a timeline of archival material from the late 1980s, including pictures of student protests, documents from the Writing Program, and newspaper articles covering the controversy.
This first lesson sets the tone for the unit and provides a common touchstone as we explore the intersections of writing, identity, and power through the lens of student activism. From here, I assign readings that cover the broader history of activism at UMass Amherst (Bayrak and Reardon) and the role of student organizing in identity-based activism (Hoang). In discussing each reading, we maintain a strong throughline of examining the role of writing and other kinds of text production in order to investigate our broader questions.
For their last set of readings, students read about Gen Z activists and the work they are doing, paying particular attention to the role of technology in the work of these activists. We have class discussions about online activism, which culminates in the question, “Can students create change using social media?” In this discussion, students have the chance to combine everything they have encountered in this unit with their lived experience and personal beliefs in order to consider what they think can be accomplished using social media and digital technologies more broadly.
I value learning how my students see writing working in their own lives. They continue to bring up complicated, conflicting, and nonintuitive feelings about their own experiences of social activism, digital engagement, and writing in their everyday lives. These reactions have shaped my emergent research interests as I explore the individual experience of writing about social causes in online spaces. In turn, my students are highly engaged when we touch on these topics in our course as they get to draw on their own expertise as writers and technology users. In this unit and elsewhere, bringing my scholarly investments into my teaching has helped me to further develop as a researcher.