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Contents
Brooke’s Narrative
When I was asked to teach Business Writing for the first time, I immediately thought back to my time in undergrad as a marketing intern and assistant webmaster and hoped that would translate to expertise in the classroom. I was surprised to learn that my limited experience in the business world was vastly more substantial than many of my graduate student peers, and, furthermore was shocked that so many of my students had significantly more business writing experience than I did through co-ops and internships. I was confronted with the question: If my students have more experience writing in their fields than I do, how am I meant to teach them something new and useful? Furthermore, how am I meant to assess them on their work beyond noting grammatical and syntax errors?
Critical pedagogy and contract grading seemed like one possible answer, particularly as a contract grade seemed to mirror the business environments where so many of my students would be employed. So, I constructed a class that allowed students to use their own expertise in constructing assignments and responding to prompts. I designed an engagement-based contract grade that used similar language as a job contract might and held regular check-ins with students the way that a boss might with a new employee. I received incredibly positive feedback from my students, even the ones who weren’t sure why the class was required for them at this stage in their careers. I drew on my own expertise in rhetorical situations, writing for an audience, as well as my limited experience writing in a business setting where that was useful.
However, after spending two semesters using engagement-based contract grades, I was told that this grading scheme was a threat to the standardization required by other schools within the college and was asked to no longer use contract grading when teaching these courses. I felt incredibly frustrated, not least by the fact that I had been teaching this way for a year before anybody noticed, and I was provided no additional assistance for how to shift my syllabus for future teaching semesters. This is not to paint anybody or any program at my university in a negative light; I mention this anecdote because, based on my conversations with other TPC graduate instructors, this lack of ongoing teacher education and support is a systemic issue, not a program-specific one.
Now that I have taught these classes repeatedly, I am much more adept in translating my experience teaching composition classes, but with additional teacher training opportunities that focused on “the high-order concerns of the TPC classroom: purposeful content, ethical reasoning, and audience awareness,” I might have walked into that first Business Writing class with a better awareness of my audience–the very skill that business and TPC writing classes are meant to teach (Doan 22). Believing that English composition classes share many of their goals with TPC classes is a misconception; the teachers certainly need overlapping skills, but teaching FYC well does not de facto mean that one can successfully teach TPC courses. This view deeply undercuts the value of TPC courses and inadequately prepares teachers to be successful with a very different audience than they are used to teaching. One solution would be to offer a course for graduate student teachers focused on teaching TPC as well as FYC, as the existing courses for new graduate student teachers typically focus solely on FYC pedagogy and assignments. This added education on how to teach TPC courses would benefit the undergraduate students being taught as well. However, as Alex explains below, programmatic structures, curricula, and larger institutional cultures surrounding writing create challenging conditions for supporting GSI teacher training.