Experienced Teachers, Emergent Researchers: Graduate Students Developing Scholarly Identities

Synthesizing and Looking Outward

In reflecting on our own approaches to this course, we illustrate how our shared experiences of scholarly and pedagogical development have manifested in different approaches to the curriculum. When tasked with accomplishing the same course goals, our research interests and understandings of writing prompt us to present the class to our students in distinct ways. We offer our thoughts here as possible suggestions for other graduate student instructors or writing programs, knowing that some changes offer fewer institutional obstacles than others. We have identified several aspects that have supported us in navigating this experienced-teacher/emergent-researcher dynamic.

An Institutional Culture of Sharing

When graduate students first begin teaching for UMass Amherst’s Writing Program, they are given access to a database that contains years’ worth of instructors’ materials, including activities, assignments, and lesson plans. The generosity that we experienced as new teachers illustrated a culture of sharing within our program that encourages experienced teachers to also share their materials, whether that is through adding to the database or passing on materials to individuals. This culture of sharing means that there is also a database for Writing, Identity, and Power instructors where we and those who came before us have shared their materials. As much as we have designed our own lessons and assignments, we are often drawing on a foundation laid by others.

In addition to offering starting places for instructors new to Writing, Identity, and Power, the resources show how other graduate student instructors have brought their own research interests into the classroom. These materials demonstrate ways of bridging the gap between teaching and research and encourage us to take risks in our own teaching by designing new assignments and activities grounded in our own research. Furthermore, the fact that we are teaching a course that encourages students to consider everyday forms of writing in a more critical way has helped, encouraged, and reaffirmed our research, which also centers on more “every day,” or nonacademic, forms of writing: community writing, online activism, discourse circulating on social media. Creating a set of resources from experienced teachers’ voluntary contributions might be the first step in creating a similar ethos of sharing at other institutions.

Mentorship and Training

All Writing, Identity, and Power instructors are experienced teachers who have taught for at least two years and have participated in a significant amount of training and professional development that addresses both the theory and practice of teaching writing in college. This includes a weeklong orientation, a year of weekly professional development meetings, a second year of monthly professional development meetings, and ongoing opportunities for pedagogical discussion and reflection. Additionally, this means that teachers of EnglWrit111 are further along in their own research when they are teaching these classes, meaning they are more likely to bring in their own emerging scholarly expertise into the teaching of this class. These are the conditions that have allowed us to develop our own versions of the course that take up these pedagogical commitments in different ways, informed by our own research interests.

Through our training, we have developed and refined our teaching philosophies, meeting with faculty mentors to receive explicit feedback and guidance on this. Furthermore, new instructors of Writing, Identity, and Power meet every few weeks with a writing program administrator to discuss their plans for the class and any challenges they’re facing. While this might be structurally difficult to implement at other schools, smaller, more manageable changes could include setting up systems for mentorship, where experienced instructors are paired with incoming graduate students, or optional feedback groups.

Changes to Writing Courses

While teachers naturally bring their philosophies into the classroom, there is also room to build this more intentionally. Courses that make space for experienced graduate student teachers to bring in their research interests are incredibly valuable as they prepare graduate students to think about how they would design their own courses, and it benefits students as it enriches teaching across different sections of a course, creating immersive and real opportunities for students to learn through writing, while still meeting shared learning objectives. We acknowledge that we have a lot of institutional support and history on our side in making opportunities like this possible for graduate students that other writing or graduate programs might not be able to implement easily, especially given that writing instruction, from developmental courses to first year writing, are under attack at different universities (Kim; Sullivan). Still, we wonder what possibilities for graduate student scholarly development open up when the roles of “teacher” and “student” that we occupy do not have to be at odds but instead can be, as they have been for us, opportunities for mutual experimentation, reflection, and learning.