Introduction

As long-time graduate professors and program directors (Becky for the MA program in Rhetoric and Composition at Texas State University and Deb for the University Writing Center), we’ve been privileged to work with, mentor, and guide graduate students as they become part of the academic community. Truth be told, however, we were never really taught in any kind of formal way how to mentor and guide. When one of the editors of Xchanges reached out and asked us to write a short piece on what we wish graduate students knew, we began to reflect on how we’d be mentored—what worked and what didn’t, actions and advice with positive impacts versus those with neutral or negative. We also thought carefully about what graduate students had shared with us over the years, including their fears, challenges, and triumphs and the often-damaging narratives they carried with them into the graduate school experience. When we merged these two domains—what we’d experienced ourselves and what we’ve since learned from our own graduate students—we decided that what we really want graduate students to know and learn is this: how to be okay with “not knowing” or understanding, and how to use that “not knowing” to lean productively into discomfort.

I (Becky) often tell graduate students about a formative experience I had in my own first days as a graduate student when, anxious about not understanding much of anything in my French feminist theory class, I received guidance I think they might also benefit from. I was terrified to talk to my professor about how little I understood when I read Derrida or Kristeva or Lacan. But I somehow knew I had to tell her how lost I felt, how the words blurred on the page when I tried to comprehend them, and why I never talked in our class of MA and PhD students who all seemed to grasp the material so well. Now, this professor was a well-known published scholar in French feminist theory, so I prepared myself to hear her tell me I wasn’t cut out for graduate school, one of my biggest fears. Instead, she explained that knowing where to start a class is always difficult and the professor does so knowing that some are going to fall right in (e.g. PhD students who’ve studied theory before), while others, understandably, will be reading specific theories for the first time. The key was to know that I was learning, even when it didn’t feel that way. She explained that one of these days after I’d done more and different kinds of reading and writing and when I’d experienced the world in different ways, the pieces would fall together and ideas that seemed impossible to grasp at one point would be clear. You’re right where you need to be, she said.

I didn’t really believe her, but I continued to read and interact with the material to the best of my ability. On another level, mostly unconscious, I began to change the negative internal narrative I held about myself as a budding academic (I’m an imposter) and learning in general (it’s a one and done, right?). And, lo and behold, a couple of semesters later, the theory picture did become clearer. On one hand, my professor was telling me to be okay with not knowing by having faith in the learning I was doing but couldn’t really see: learning not as a single “event,” but as a life-long process dependent on multiple contexts. But she was also telling me, in not so many words, to lean into my discomfort and to engage with rather than run from it.

Unlike Becky, I (Deb) was told I was subpar—multiple times. After undergraduate graduation, I’d worked as an assistant manager in fast food for about a month when I decided to take my working-class self to a local English department to see if I could enroll in a creative writing class as a non-degree seeking student. The Director of Graduate Studies convinced me to apply for the master’s program even after I detailed reason after reason I was unqualified, despite having a degree in hand. I did and was accepted. Our first assignment in "Foundations of Graduate School" was summarizing a work of Derrida’s in no more than 250 words. Ummm. What am I even reading? Then, I received the paper back with, “This is not graduate student writing!” scrawled in red marker across the front page of my first paper. Clearly, I was accepted just because it had been July and they needed teaching assistants to staff 16 sections of first year writing. I sat completely still as people left the room. I can’t move. On her way out, one of the most impressive classmates stopped, “You should smile more. People think you’re mean.” I began to listen to this playlist–akin to Becky’s narratives–on repeat, adding more messages each day. Who do you think you are? This is what you get for rising above your station.

That playlist made me ill, and I found it increasingly difficult to breathe no less think or do my work. Never mind that my professor was practicing questionable writing pedagogy, such comments mixed into damaging playlists of my own. Still, while I didn’t completely understand this heady world of academe, to survive I had to find a way to lean into who I was—to draw from my so-called “station” in life, despite daily discomforts of feeling my class and of others pointing it out. You see, I am a blue-collar Chicago south(west)sider (suburbanite). When that cold Chicago wind burns, you can’t feel your toes, the pipes freeze, a car breaks down, or the furnace doesn’t work, you keep your head down and you keep going or people are at risk. This disposition already served me academically, and I could call upon it in graduate school. You graduated college despite your HS guidance counselor: “don’t bother applying, you won’t make it past 1.5 years” [based on family income and education]. I began remixing my playlist, sampling in seemingly negative messages as useful bits. Okay, Deb. Become familiar with this new soundscape. By first leaning into me, I was slowly able to depersonalize messages from myself and others, which enabled me to sit in the discomforts of not knowing while I explored and learned.

For both of us, leaning into discomfort requires curiosity and action. For example, we both talk candidly about the discomfort students will probably feel at some point when reading something they don’t understand, that challenges their beliefs or asks them to think about a situation from a new perspective. In such cases, leaning into discomfort means continuing to engage with readings we don’t understand, opening up classroom conversations about our lack of understanding, and actively listening to others who have experiences we don’t have. Leaning into discomfort might also involve participating in or even starting informal learning and support communities with people in and outside of our programs. We understand and talk about the fact that some students will find this counterintuitive or “wrong”—uncomfortable. This isn’t surprising given that so often we experience academia as a solitary endeavor—good students don’t need others or collaboration is cheating—even as we know that learning is inherently social. I (Deb) befriended the classmate who told me to smile, or, rather, I didn’t resist when she befriended me. She loved talking about ideas and theory, which we came to do for hours. She’s so excited! This is interesting—and fun. Another classmate and I discussed potential exam questions, wrote out possible answers, and then reviewed them together. We make each other better thinkers and writers—and we get to hang out all day to do it! I wanted more. The growing mixes of scholars, theories, pedagogies, and all that I could explore were enriched by colleagues and friends coming to share food, walks, parks, compassion, confidences. And as Becky might be able to tell you, I still suffer from awkward discomfort, but I learned I can use it as a starting place when I feel it as a stopping place.

We understand that advice for graduate students is plentiful. Even a quick internet search uncovers the overwhelming number of books, articles, tip sheets, and the like telling graduate students what they need to do to succeed. We wanted to dig a little deeper, to name the kinds of things we believe subsume all the other excellent pieces of advice. Yes, we can tell students how important it is to “keep up with the reading” or “participate in class.” But if we don’t accompany that advice with the equally important understanding that it’s okay, preferable even, that reading and discussion sometimes confounds or causes us anxiety, then we aren’t sharing the most important part of the story. Being a graduate student is challenging for all kinds of reasons. We don’t want to sugarcoat that. But we hope you will take to heart how important it is to have faith in yourself as a learner even when, especially when, you feel lost or uncomfortable.

We hope you will take to heart that learning is a process for every one of us and that it often asks us to lean into discomfort and meet it with curiosity.

We hope you will take to heart that your experiences matter and that you can (and should) use them to develop narratives or playlists that will help you find your place in and reshape the academy.

Because the truth is that you are right where you need to be.

Introduction

The term “digital” has become almost a buzzword in higher education: the assumption being that if students are doing things that are “digital,” they must be preparing to enter STEM fields. This makes university administrators happy as they can advertise degree outcomes that align with the industries that dominate our media’s discourse which often emphasizes STEM over the humanities. But when we introduce multimodal writing into the composition curriculum, the digital domain is where our expectations first land, flattening the value that the multi plays. After completing my year of teaching Composition I & II at a large R1 public institution in the southeastern U.S., I witnessed a lack of support that is specific for multimodal assignments. While there is administrative support for including multimodal writing into the curriculum, the literature reveals a continuing lack of technical support to make these projects attainable for all levels of instructors (DePalma & Alexander, 2018; Eidman-Aadahl & O’Donnell-Allen, 2012; Flynn, 2018; Lee, 2018). My experience as a Graduate Teaching Associate (GTA) reaffirms these perceptions as I struggled to engage with university resources and the ability to access training opportunities. This article contextualizes the narrative of my approaches in teaching multimodal composition to provide specific recommendations for graduate program administrators and faculty.

Introduction

As an international graduate student and a second language user of English, I understand how important a writerly voice is in my own writing process. I initially assumed that English-speaking students already possessed distinct voices of their own. However, when I began teaching writing at a Midwest research university, I quickly discovered that most first-year writing students tended to mimic the voices of the authors they read. The reading materials, authored by a diverse array of writers, both English and non-English, significantly influenced the students’ writing. Recognizing this pattern, I realized that merely imitating these voices would not serve my students well in the long run. If they aim to voice their opinion, they will first need to develop their “voice.” On this note, I felt a strong imperative to teach them how to develop their own unique voices in their writing.

After Fall 2022—the term I joined the department as a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant—I had an idea about designing an assignment. The first thing I wanted to do was to get to know my students better and personally. They are not numbers, but people. They are people with no tabula rasa, but a diverse range of stories. I wanted to hear their stories to help them write on what matters to them. Also, as an international Muslim female student of color, I was somehow suffering from an identity crisis. I set foot on the land of duality where my minority identity mattered to me as much as my identity as a writing teacher. On these notes, I developed an “Identity Narrative” assignment.

In a typical college composition course, students write a literacy narrative paper in which they narrate stories about any kind of literacy they have developed since childhood. When writing about their literacy, students often draw upon authentic and personal experiences. The nature of the narrative assignment is designed to bring out students’ agency and voice in their writing. Current scholarship is concerned with how students write about writing in their literacy narrative papers (Carpenter and Falbo). Eldred and Mortensen note, “When we read for literacy narratives, we study how the text constructs a character’s ongoing, social process of language acquisition” (512). I concur with Mary Soliday that “in focusing upon those moments when the self is on the threshold of possible intellectual, social, and emotional development, literacy narratives become sites of self-translation where writers can articulate the meanings and the consequences of their passages between language” (511).

While the literacy narrative, a well-researched and widely discussed genre in composition studies, helps students bring their literacy visions into their pages, it is not directly addressing concerns related to their identity which, I believe, has a great impact on their writerly voice. Recent articles also explore how creating better writing assignments help students meet the larger course learning outcomes (Rank and Pool). Keeping the importance of assignment design in mind, I have created a unique narrative assignment titled “Identity Narrative” for my writing students, which primarily aims to help them find their writerly voice through the understanding of their identity.

The “Identity Narrative” assignment, like most narrative assignments, aims to help writing students develop their own unique writing voice and style while enhancing their genre awareness and rhetorical understanding. It is unique for its ability to encourage students to critically reflect on their identities and their connection with their writerly personas. The assignment does not intend to replace the literacy narrative assignment; rather, it aims to be the first narrative assignment in a composition course. This approach allows students to initially discover their own writerly voice, rooted in their identity and self-perception, and subsequently use that unique voice in later assignments. Therefore, my paper including my assignment add nuanced contributions to the scholarly discourse on writerly voice and student identities, focusing on expanding the conversation rather than merely identifying gaps. My purpose is to introduce a new assignment into the vibrant field of our discipline. This paper presents a unified concept of a writer’s voice by demonstrating how the “Identity Narrative” assignment helps students reflect on their personal stories, backgrounds, and identities, thereby developing their unique writerly voices. This research is significant and valuable for writing instructors seeking to enhance their syllabi and course content by designing assignments that are both useful and impactful for students.

Introduction

Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) and Rhetoric and Composition (RC) scholarship often claim instructors must possess—and teach—discourse-specific knowledge so students may learn how to write for their disciplinary genres and contexts. Lora Anderson writes in her introduction to Rewriting Work that acknowledging the “place[s]” where writing happens is an essential prerequisite to engaging with TPC scholarship and pedagogy given that place and context are integral to “identities and ideas about expertise” (11). Similarly, Lisa Melonçon argues TPC scholarship must intentionally “consider the material dimensions of context” by focusing on how, why, and where writing happens in workplace settings (47). These studies stress the importance of crafting a curriculum that teaches the nuances of genre, audience, and rhetorical situation so students may expand their understanding of the myriad reasons for how and why people write across contexts. This socialization often requires interaction with that community and their genres, a sentiment that is reaffirmed by RC scholars, such as Anne Beaufort. Although Beaufort calls for general writing instruction to focus on discourse theory to prepare students to write for their various discourse communities, Beaufort questions: “[C]an a teacher of writing teach one to write for a discourse community the teacher is not a part of?” (58). While this is a useful question for all instructors to think through, it is a particularly important question for graduate students that serve as professional writing instructors. Most Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) do not have TPC-specific training or experience at the onset of their teaching careers; instead, GSIs are typically only trained in composition, resulting in mixed success achieving TPC course objectives (Doan). This lack of training catches GSIs in what Mary Louise Pratt identifies as a “contact zone,” a space where differing expectations for writing between instructors, students, and administration “meet, grapple and crash with each other” (34). In our experience as GSIs in the TPC contact zone, graduate students “grapple” and “crash” with the expectations that come with performing as “expert” educators, providing expected assessment, and navigating a less-than-familiar administration.

Our article adds to the above existing conversations by acknowledging that awareness of discourse-specific features is integral to teaching writing courses, while also acknowledging, as Sara Doan notes, that often “instructors do not have the requisite content knowledge or the time to plan their pedagogies around these evolving content areas and best practices” (20). Echoing Beaufort’s question: How might a teacher design a course, specifically a TPC course, around social situations and context if the instructor is unfamiliar with the vast rhetorical situations students are writing for in the workplace? Additionally, how might a teacher design a course wherein enrolled students are writing for vastly different discourse communities?

What follows, then, is an overview of our experiences teaching TPC courses as GSIs at our urban, Midwestern, Research 1 institution. The two courses we describe—Technical and Scientific Writing and Business Writing—are prerequisite courses, required for students across tracks before enrolling in their capstone or senior seminar course, and they are often taught in an asynchronous, online modality. Students can also opt to take these as electives, and they are therefore treated as general “catch-all” courses for how to write professionally. As our experiences detail, we often teach students in our TPC classrooms who have experience writing for “real world” contexts through their co-ops or internships, and our students’ writing experiences differ dramatically depending upon their discourse community’s writing practices.

Going into teaching TPC, we each expected that we were prepared to teach the genres of technical writing and professional writing given our teaching training in First-Year Composition (FYC), which provided us with knowledge about genre and discourse theory. However, we found our students often had institutional writing experience for professional discourse communities that we, as their instructors, were unfamiliar with. As GSIs, our TPC pedagogy was initially framed through our FYC training, and so, when we entered the contact zone of the TPC classroom, there was a clash between our graduate teacher training and the expectations of the classroom, namely the expectation that we would know how to write for and assess writing for every single discourse community a student participates in. Our experiences echo Sara Doan’s findings in her 2022 study of TPC instructors where she noted that “less experienced instructors typically relied on terminology from composition or classical rhetoric,” resulting in “problems that arise when rhetorical concepts are not used effectively for teaching TPC” (21). In our experience of the TPC contact zone, GSIs are expected to teach TPC genres using their existing knowledge of composition despite the fact that students’ social situations and discourse-specific expectations for writing do not look the same and that instructors often have little to no context for the various professional writing contexts and genres our students write for and within. Following Jamey Gallagher and Kris Messer, this article questions how we teach discourse-specific TPC writing instruction to students “who are already in the real damn world” (147). Teaching GSIs to shift from a FYC focus on “rhetoric as argument” to the problem-solving ethos necessary for TPC courses would help them better equip their students to enter the workforce as adept writers.

To answer the question of how to shift this focus, we use an autoethnographic narrative method to relay our personal experiences of different challenges entering the TPC contact zone. Across our narratives, we consider how GSIs can be supported in developing a pedagogy that is not driven by “what we think is expected of people in the work world” (147), but rather is built around the contextualized rhetorical skills that students’ careers ask of them. Such an approach limits our ability to make claims about TPC outside of our local context. To account for this, we place our experiences as GSIs teaching TPC into conversation with existing TPC and FYC pedagogies, ultimately identifying these challenges as having structural solutions that can help new instructors bridge the gap between the rhetorical contexts of these two subfields. Though approaching the TPC curriculum with previous coursework on genre theory, Anna and Katie both detail that our FYC training does not always adequately prepare instructors to teach professional genres. Further, while we assumed we might be able to transfer our knowledge of teaching FYC into TPC, Brooke details the difficulty in assessing and engaging with student work when our students are a different audience than the students we teach in FYC. Finally, while we lack specialized training in teaching TPC courses, Alex describes the challenges in making programmatic changes to support writing program administrators (WPA) to bridge the gap between programmatic goals and individual instructors’ realities. We conclude our article by describing our solutions towards preparing instructors, particularly GSIs, to teach these courses.

Introduction

When I accepted an offer to a master’s program in English, though I knew that the graduate teaching assistant (GTA) assignment was a mandatory and inevitable part of the assistantship, my main strategy was, candidly, to pretend that I would not in fact be in front of the classroom in just one year’s time. I was creeping back into the academic world after five years in student affairs, and was used to operating, even decentering, myself in favor of providing service and experience to the tens of thousands of students under our division umbrella. I was not student-facing in my position. The idea of teaching was intimidating at best and terrifying at worst, partially because in my prior role, I had a degree of anonymity. At this point, I still had a foot in the closet, though my partner and I were celebrating over ten years together. But I had never publicly identified myself as a lesbian, or even queer. However, my own sexuality was not the primary reason I was so concerned, though it certainly did not help. My impressions of what it meant to teach writing were flush with assumptive dread: I imagined that I would be required to teach strict grammar protocols, that I would need to subjectively assign numerical grades to assignments I did not have any expertise or interest in, that I would become the cliché of the underprepared, ineffective college instructor teaching a subject that my students did not want to learn and did not care about. I was prepared to take on teaching as a survival mechanism, something to grit my teeth through in order to get to the other side of the degree.

I recognize that this paints a grim picture of my earliest foray into the role of graduate instructor of writing. I illustrate this early memory of identity formation not because I wish to lament those first recollections, rather because I want to recognize the precarity and uncertainty that is so deeply entwined with the experience of being a graduate student in front of the classroom (Howard-Hill, 2023). If you were to approach me today, four years later, I would introduce myself as someone who loves the art and science of teaching. Someone who recognizes that my instructor-hood is an essential and inextricable part of my identity. Yet, I would also readily tell you that the process of ownership and claiming of that identity was fraught, deeply difficult mentally and spiritually, and required thorough remaking of my perceptions and assumptions about the classroom, the field, and my own positionality. At the time, I feared the breadth of the field, what I didn’t know, and the expertise I definitely did not have. Now, I see that breadth as part of what makes this field, and teaching in this field, so special: the heterogeneity of teaching first-year writing holds more power than I could have anticipated.

In short, it was more difficult than I anticipated to find myself in the classroom, and my struggle in the process of learning to teach was not unique to me in my program. I was lucky, in some ways, to have found the magic I did in teaching. Some around me were not so lucky. And so, I call on programs, and mentors, of GTAs in first-year writing to think through how identity in the classroom can be encouraged and fostered---but more importantly, I ask how we might be sensitive to those GTAs whose identities are still evolving, even fraught, and how we might frame the classroom as a place of (un)growth.

In forming my identity as an instructor, I ended up inadvertently entering a process that might be called (un)growth: in essence, un-learning my assumptions, un-learning my hesitations, un-learning my fears in favor of embracing becoming. This process was unintentionally tracked, accidentally archived, in assignments from classes, but also scrawls in notebooks, jotted down scholar names on dog-eared pieces of paper to look up later, early drafts of syllabi and assignments that represent a found-ecology of (un)growth. As graduate students, we’re in a constant state of becoming, somehow trying to embrace an eternal beginner’s mindset while meeting external expectations of rapid matriculation into expertise. Though I’m still not fully settled in my identity as a teacher, looking back over the work I was doing, where my mind was dwelling, what I was considering as I was learning to teach allowed me to design a coding strategy where I could see, even in my obvious uncertainty and confusion in this archive of work, snippets of what I cared about, and what I valued, as an instructor.

As Cicchino (2020) notes, approaches to teaching graduate students to teach writing vary widely. As a larger discipline, the conversation around teaching writing, and teaching others (especially graduate students) to teach writing, let alone how we do so with stewardship to graduate student experiences, care for undergraduate student success, and without entirely eviscerating the already overly scheduled life of the WPA or professor charged with disseminating this information in too little time, is, naturally---complicated. Thus, I understand that in asking for more attention to identity, and more consideration to those in marginalized positions, the natural reaction might be to say we wish we could, but we have little to no extra capacity to do so. In this piece, I’m not necessarily arguing that more time needs to be devoted to teacher training, or that the curriculums of GTA education need full overhauls. Rather, the existing conversation around teacher training can always, and, especially in the continuously fraught picture of higher education, should always be challenged to think through how we can ask graduate students to do the work of forming a teaching identity.

At my university, a large R1 with over 100 sections of first-year writing per semester, our approach to GTA education has seen several revisions, even in my time as a graduate student. In my era of first learning to teach, we all took a mandatory pedagogy course, tutored in the writing center for our first year, observed a section with an experienced instructor, and in our second year of the two-year program, taught independently with a supportive practicum course each semester. As a PhD student now, I teach two sections each semester independently. My university has a robust teacher training program, one I am grateful for, and I recognize that this is not the case in every institution. My hope for this reflective work is that it speaks to other GTAs who might connect with my experience, regardless of whether they are in an intensive teacher training program, or find themselves going through the process very much alone. In this piece, I share an autoethnographic mapping of (un)growth as an instructor and graduate student: each archival snippet a glimpse into a pedagogical evolution, that I have paired with practicable strategies for graduate students who may be interested in teaching outside the lines of convention in favor of the radical world of boldly queer pedagogy. Whether the reader is early in their teaching journey, or nearing the end of their graduate tenure, these vignettes are designed for applicability, and, more critically, as an offering for those who might feel isolated, lost, or otherwise uncertain in the classroom.