Editor's Note

It is my distinct pleasure to introduce Issue 19.2 of Xchanges, the second installment of our most recent Graduate Symposium, which continues to explore the current state of graduate teaching experiences.

As my co-managing editor and friend, Dr. Jennifer Burke Reifman, wrote in the Editor’s Note of the first installment of the symposium, our initial idea for the recent symposium (made during an editorial meeting in late 2023) was set against what felt like a particularly tumultuous time for higher education—notwithstanding the reality that colleges and universities have often found themselves at the epicenter of ongoing cultural wars. In the short time since, however, the socio-political attacks on the foundational structures of higher learning have accelerated and intensified, as evidenced by the proliferation of anti-diversity legislation and educational gag orders taking hold across the academic landscape nationwide, among other developments. Perhaps most alarmingly, and even though no one is insulated from these attacks, the brunt of their force seems to be increasingly borne by those most vulnerable and precariously employed by higher education, including graduate student teachers—those same persons who are at the center of Xchanges’s mission.

It is precisely for this reason that I believe it is imperative, now more than ever, to amplify the voices of the authors included in this issue—to listen in earnest and with intent to their experiences. Moreover, it is precisely for this reason that I believe Xchanges serves a vital and uniquely situated role in both understanding the current disciplinary moment and in thinking about how those of us located within higher education might continue to work collectively toward the actualization of a more just future for academia writ large.

This issue extends the conversations that began in the first issue of the symposium (19.1) related to the unique complexities that inform the lived realities of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), including exploring innovative approaches to composition pedagogy. For example, in “It’s Not Just About Convenience: Multimodality and Transmodality in the FYC Classroom,” Tara Salvati explores how GTAs might productively incorporate mutli- and transmodal assignments into their teaching practices as a means to create a more equitable classroom experience for students. At the same time, Salvati remains attuned to the temporal and labor constraints that such a pedagogy necessarily applies to GTAs. Similarly, Kristen Venegas relates her experiences implementing empathy-based pedagogy as part of a first-year writing course in "Empathy for the Instructor." Venegas thoughtfully unpacks the nuances of such a pedagogical approach, both for its ability to enhance student engagement and the challenges it presents to GTAs.

Likewise, Keli Tucker, Kelsey Hawkins, Sasha Poma Mansure, and Sophia Minnillo examine how fellow GTAs can support localized, antiracist pedagogies by supporting students’ languaging practices in “Supporting Students’ Own Languages in the Writing Classroom: Adaptable Writing Assignments for Enacting Linguistic Justice in Local Contexts." The authors demonstrate firsthand how Students’ Right to Their Own Languages is arguably best understood not as a static policy statement, but as a dynamic and ongoing practice in the composition classroom. Lacey Hamilton's "Empowering Voices" serves as a valuable and compelling complement to Tucker, Hawkins, Mansure, and Minnillo. In this practice-minded piece, Hamilton offers a concrete introduction to linguistic justice-oriented pedagogies for GTAs interested in incorporating these instructional approaches into their writing classrooms.

In an act of extreme vulnerability and bravery, Cat Williams-Monardes traces the contours of trauma-informed pedagogy through her own experiences as a survivor of sexual assault, teaching with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In "Teaching With Trauma and PTSD: Navigating the Aftermath of Sexual Assault as a Graduate Student Instructor,” Williams-Monardes explores how the challenges of sexual assault and PTSD shape GTAs' academic lives as well as their uniquely situated relationships with students; in addition, she provides a concrete framework for productively enacting trauma-informed teaching practices.

In “Reclaiming Authority in the FYC Classroom as a Graduate Teaching Assistant: Using Feminist Pedagogies to Empower," Emily King examines feminist-informed pedagogies as an avenue for actualizing authority and embodied agency not only for students but also for GTA instructors. King smartly reads the authorial power of feminist-informed pedagogies against the liminal positionality occupied by many GTAs, thereby offering a rare insight into the student-teacher tension so frequently experienced by those in this position. In a similar vein, Barbara Green examines the fluid institutional identities and complex power dynamics that GTAs must constantly navigate in "Academic Leadership by Day, Student at Night." Green's experiences as a GTA who inhabits multiply-marginalized identities is especially enlightening for unpacking the inherent tension between student and instructor dynamics.

Student agency and authority are also at the center of David William’s thinking in “This Is How We Change Things: Promoting Student Agency Through Service-Learning in First-Year Composition.” In this piece, Williams makes the case for enacting service-learning pedagogies and localized community engagement as instructional vehicles that help empower students to see themselves as agents of social change. While Williams positions agency in student-centric terms, Anselma Prihandita turns to an examination of these same issues but through the lens of international GTAs and marginalized student identities in “Identity Work and Affect in the Fostering of Critical Consciousness: The Case of International Graduate Teaching Assistants.” Prihandita offers a nuanced analysis of one-on-one student interactions, exploring how these moments can be leveraged to foster critical consciousness in positive terms—toward empowerment and repair.

Finally, in a singularly unique piece, Taylor Wyatt provides a rhetorical reading of accommodation letters as a genre of writing and how they do, and don’t, intersect with accessibility in “Critical Imagining of Accommodation Letters for Transformative Access in the First-Year Composition Classroom.” Ultimately, Wyatt calls for viewing accessibility and its attendant tools, such as classroom accommodation letters, as a process rather than a discrete destination. This issue also features a Faculty Retrospective written by Dr. Kristine Acosta, which provides writers with encouragement and concrete advice for successful collaborative writing practices. Acosta's retrospective is a poignant reminder that, in an academic world that often valorizes individual scholarship, there is something profoundly powerful about thinking, working, and writing as a collective.

Reflecting on the collective draws me back to my initial thoughts from the introduction to this issue. Like David Williams (included in this issue), many of my colleagues and I also spend a great deal of time trying to strengthen the "connection between composition and justice, how the former can be used in pursuit of the latter" (1). Writing and rhetoric, as a discipline, have long been held at a strange distance in the academy, a place simultaneously a part of but always seemingly apart from the institution proper—a place not altogether dissimilar from the fringe liminality of graduate student teaching. This issue reminds me that justice infrequently, if ever, manifests itself from the inside the seat of power outward, but rather, that justice emerges from the demands for equity that start on the outside and force their way in. And that struggle, if it is to be fruitful, requires a coming together. The collective voices, therefore, in this issue remind me that hope resides in our shared commitment to meet the demands of the moment.

It’s my sincere hope that every reader enjoys and finds as much insight in reading this issue as I have.

-- manny piña, Ph.D,
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
Assistant Professor of English
Writing Studies Program Coordinator