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Graduate Students’ Development of Academic Identities
The Goals and Mission of EnglWrit111
Jackie’s Teaching Reflection
My research and my teaching are deeply intertwined; in both, I emphasize the importance of attending to circulation, especially when writing in digital spaces. Through my scholarship, I aim to offer activists and others approaches to address moments when other actors hijack their digital rhetoric for their own purposes. In the age of virality, personalized web experiences, and black-boxed sorting algorithms on social media, understanding as much as possible about how our and others’ rhetoric moves online is essential for those who are using digital spaces to advocate for change because, just as those writers have the potential to affect change, other actors have the potential to disrupt or redirect those writers’ attempts. I believe that the writing classroom is a space where students should learn how to leverage digital spaces for socially just purposes; therefore, the writing classroom is a space where students learn how to navigate rhetorical ecologies to advocate for the causes they believe in.
In Writing, Identity, and Power, one assignment I designed asks students to identify an academic writing policy they have been affected by and create a text that advocates for some type of change to the policy they chose. Examples include assignment sheets, school policy documents or handbooks, standardized testing materials, and state or national standards for the teaching of writing. Through this assignment, I aim to help students identify what policies have structured their experiences with writing in academic settings, reflect on the impact that those policies have had on themselves, and examine how they, as agentive writers, can write and circulate texts to advocate for change to those policies. While we might not delve deeply into digital circulation in this course, attention to the potential audiences of their texts in the ecologies students are entering prepares students to more effectively advocate for change online and the assignment more generally builds into the course’s objectives of understanding how writing fits into systems of power.
While the students learn about circulation and audience from their classmates and myself, I learn more about circulation and my research more generally from my students’ insights during class. The first time I taught Writing, Identity, and Power, one of my students approached me during the beginning of the unit saying he wanted to do something different that he believed was not an actual genre, a satirical newscast on standardized testing. After assuring him that that was in fact a genre, I asked him why he chose it and he mentioned that he was trying to reach a wider audience of parents and older students and that, in his experience, if something is funny while giving a message, people are more likely to not only listen to it, but to share it more widely on social media. Several years later, as I was coding my dissertation data, I found a category of actors in the activist ecology I am studying, information brokers, who were doing something similar to what my student described, although with different intentions. These actors used entertainment in the form of gossip or humor to intensify the circulation of activist rhetoric for views and attention, and they were actually spreading the rhetoric further than many of the activists in my data.
Graduate student instructors are in an interesting position when it comes to learning from their students. While they may be experienced teachers, they are less experienced researchers, which means that these moments of learning from students can shape the early foundations of how they understand their own research. Courses that offer more experienced graduate students a space to incorporate aspects of their research and investments in writing studies create opportunities for graduate students to learn from their students in ways that shape who they become as researchers in their field.