If service education is to avoid the many cultural pitfalls that have been signaled to date in the literature, it seems crucial that town-gown articulations be nurtured as organic, reciprocating, knowledge-producing endeavors that position the ethnographic encounter at their epistemological center. For these articulations to be organic, they must grow from encounters between graduate students… Continue reading Service Education as (Auto?)-Ethnographic Encounter by Jim Henry

A few years ago I served as a graduate assistant in an experimental course for freshmen at Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk, Virginia. New Portals to Appreciating our Global Environment (NewPAGE) united faculty and graduate students across disciplines to tackle instruction on pressing global issues such as climate change, health, sustainable development, and environmental… Continue reading Courage, Commitment and a Little Humility: The Path to Civic Engagement by Jennifer J. Kidd

In the spring of 2007 I helped organize a research cluster with three other graduate students at the University of Washington that focused on the question of public scholarship for academics. We formed the group Students Writing in Public (SWIP), and, taking it as given that public scholarship is of value because it extends the… Continue reading Does the Academy Need an ‘Extreme Makeover’? by Allison Gross

“What does public scholarship look like at the graduate level?” “What do publicly engaged graduate students want? What are their pressing concerns?” “How do graduate students get into publicly active work?” “What are publicly active graduate students doing?” Link to PDF

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After reviewing some of the manuscripts for this issue, we, as editors, thought it would be appropriate to interview Steve Parks’ regarding his perspectives on graduate students and community projects. Steve has worked with graduate students for many years, including Jessica Pauszek, our Assistant Editor. He was also the past editor of this journal for&hellip; Continue reading Interview with Steve Parks by Willma Harvey, Cristina Kirklighter, &#038; Jessica Pauszek

Recent interest in reflective writing in the classroom is tied to the suggested links among reflection, metacognition, and learning transfer. There is still a limited understanding, however, about the distinguishing features of reflective writing and how teachers might identify and use these features to teach effective reflective practices and to interact with student reflective writing. This study uses Gorzelsky et al.’s (2016) taxonomy of metacognitive behaviors to examine the end-of-semester reflective essays of undergraduate students enrolled in a first-year writing course at a large midwestern university. The authors identify and describe a feature of student reflective writing involving the use of emotional language and, working from their findings, suggest a teaching strategy and set of classroom activities aimed at leveraging students’ emotive expressions in ways that foster metacognitive awareness.

Organized into ten chapters and an epilogue, the book focuses on recurrent themes that the research uncovered: organizations’ motivations for taking part in service learning partnerships, issues of timing, fit, management, communication and diversity. Chapters One, Ten, and the Epilogue are written by the editors, while the individual chapters are authored by the graduate students&hellip; Continue reading Review of The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning by Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth A. Tryon reviewed by Paula Mathieu

Research on writing and transfer has shown that writers who have sophisticated rhetorical knowledge are well equipped to adapt to new situations, yet less attention has been paid to how a writer’s adaptability is influenced by their writing processes. Drawing on Zimmerman’s sociocognitive theory of self-regulation, this study compared the writing processes taken up by graduate student writers composing a research proposal for their final project in a tutor-training practicum. Findings from process logs, interviews, and drafts differentiated self-regulation strategies associated with varying degrees of success. The more successful writers framed problems in terms of potential solutions, used problems to set goals, and reacted to problems by creating a narrative of progress; in contrast, less successful writers avoided problems or framed them as dead-ends. Compared to the less successful writers, the more successful writers concluded the project with robust knowledge about research proposal writing. These findings suggest that self-regulation strategies may be linked to an ability to develop rhetorical knowledge and practices in the face of challenging writing situations.

A team from the University of Dayton, consisting of undergraduate students, a faculty facilitator, and practitioner partners, conducted an innovative oral history project documenting the experiences of ordinary people who lived through the unrest following Michael Brown’s death in 2014. The Moral Courage Project, as it was called, sought to investigate the spectrum of stories&hellip; Continue reading Listening to Ferguson Voices, Finding the Courage to Resist by Joel R. Pruce

In keeping with the recent global turn in literacy and composition studies, this article explores rhetorical agency in an English-medium Indonesian PhD program. Drawing from the critical reflective lens teacher ethnography allows, the author highlights how graduate students at this Indonesian, yet international site negotiated both textually and extra-textually with the critical pedagogy she developed, while she also questions some of her initial assumptions concerning genre, audience, and rhetorical agency. Overall, the data presented here indicates that rather than focusing solely on textual form as a site of critical agency, teachers and scholars should also take into consideration the ways writers appropriate and circulate knowledge to the diverse audiences in their lives, across multiple genres and languages—and as time unfolds. Broadening the lens to account for such translingual agency might also benefit U.S.-based graduate writing pedagogies, the author ultimately suggests.

This article considers how graduate educators can best prepare their students for writing and publishing academic scholarship, drawing on interviews performed by the coauthors with twenty published scholars from rhetoric and composition. The article also includes specific, practical strategies for academic publishing drawn from the interviews.

Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.

Online learning modes can provide convenience and flexibility to students. But communicating the value of online education in technical and professional communication should not end there. Program directors should rearticulate the narrative about the value of online graduate education beyond flexibility and convenience by reevaluating the ways that program assessment is designed and implemented. This pilot study suggests that a community of inquiry framework can help to communicate the value of the online learning environment to a variety of stakeholders, including prospective and current students, administrators, instructors, and potential employers.

This report, produced by the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), provides guidelines for preparing future two-year college English faculty. The document, which aligns with the “CCCC Position Statement on Preparing Teachers of College Writing” and TYCA’s “Characteristics of a Highly Effective Two-Year College English Instructor,” presents recommendations for those who train future two-year college English professionals: directors and faculty of English studies graduate programs. These guidelines also provide graduate students who are interested in two-year college teaching careers with recommendations for a combination of relevant coursework and research, professionalization activities, and hands-on experiences that will prepare them to be engaged two-year college teacher-scholars.

A common challenge facing those who prepare graduate students to teach writing online is the need to help those students connect online writing instruction (OWI) theory with their classroom practic...

This study addresses the current debate about the beneficial effects of text processing software on students with different working memory (WM) during the process of academic writing, especially with regard to the ability to display higher-level conceptual thinking. A total of 54 graduate students (15 male, 39 female) wrote one essay by hand and one by keyboard. Our results show a beneficial effect of text processing software, in terms of both the qualitative and quantitative writing output. A hierarchical cluster analysis was used to detect distinct performance groups in the sample. These performance groups mapped onto three differing working memory profiles. The groups with higher mean WM scores manifested superior writing complexity using a keyboard, in contrast to the cluster with the lowest mean WM. The results also point out that more revision during the writing process itself does not inevitably reduce the quality of the final output.

Intended to contextualize and elaborate on the Two-Year College English Association's 2016 Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College, this article examines the history, current status, and possible futures of graduate preparation for two-year-college English professionals. It traces the five-decade history of efforts among two-year-college English faculty to articulate the distinct demands and opportunities of their profession and to hold university-based graduate programs accountable for providing meaningful preparation for future two-year- college teacher-scholars. Based on our survey of this history and the current landscape of graduate education in English studies, we argue that transforming graduate programs to meet the needs of the teaching majority will require embracing the four principles articulated in TYCA's 2016 Guidelines: develop curricula relevant to two-year-college teaching; collaborate with two-year-college colleagues; prepare future two-year-college faculty to be engaged professionals; and make two-year colleges visible to all graduate students.

This article describes graduate mentorship experiences at the Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) research center at Michigan State University and offers a stance on graduate student mentorship. It describes WIDE’s mentorship model as feminist and inclusive and as a means to invite researchers with different backgrounds to engage in knowledge-making activities and collaborate on projects. Additionally, the article explains how WIDE enables growth for its researchers, teachers, and leaders. To illustrate these ideas, the authors provide multiple perspectives across faculty mentors, former graduate students, and current graduate students in order to discuss how WIDE researchers practice mentorship and how this mentorship prepares students for future work as scholars and researchers. Finally, the article suggests ways other research centers can adapt WIDE’s approach to their own institutional context.

Gaining access to interdisciplinary research sites poses unique research challenges to technical and professional communication scholars and practitioners. Drawing on applied experiences in externally funded interdisciplinary research projects and scholarship about interdisciplinary research, this article describes a training protocol for preparing graduate students to understand the dynamic nature of access in interdisciplinary work as well as to develop a capacity for making a case about the value of their expertise in interdisciplinary research contexts. The authors situate the training protocol in the context of three distinct phases of case-making (individual, relational, and speculative) and note how the conditions for negotiating access vary within and across these phases. The authors conclude by describing implications to graduate students and faculty for theorizing access in this way and developing training to support graduate students’ negotiation of access in interdisciplinary work.

In an effort to expand the range of ways graduate programs prepare students to be scholars and practitioners in technical and professional communication, this article argues for a fresh direct reengagement with stories, storytelling, and narrative as valuable ways of studying and effectively producing the varied texts of the workplace. The previous call for acknowledging the value of narrative traces back almost 30 years, and story is still being used in a variety of compelling ways, even as an overt regard for narrative has not been sustained. What may be lacking is a systematic way to transform assumptions about stories as informal anecdotes into stories as data for rigorous analysis. David Boje’s antenarrative theory and method offers technical and professional communication graduate students, scholars, and practitioners just such a compelling and timely position from which to consider workplace processes and products.

To address graduate writing pedagogy in technical communication, this article reports on a study of 14 award-winning dissertations in the field. By treating dissertations as cultural artifacts constitutive of the educational contexts in which they are authored, this study reads dissertation methodology sections as research narratives to understand how we prepare new scholars and to examine the changing nature of what we value in the field.

The author proposes three ways that engagement with religious rhetorics in undergraduate writing courses might enable teachers of rhetoric to cultivate writers’ civic capacities. To give readers a sense of what courses on religious rhetorics that aim to improve writers’ civic capacities look like in practice, DePalma discusses three undergraduate writing courses recently taught in different kinds of institutional settings and the kinds of learning that occurred as a result of students’ engagement with religious rhetorics in those courses.

This article argues that composition should be involved in the study and teaching of graduate level writing. It goes on to argue that independent consulting offers a viable way for compositionists to share expertise with graduate students and programs, as well as to expand opportunities for participation in the profession.

Using the British Academic Written English corpus, this study focuses on the use of grammatical complexity features in university level texts written by first language (L1) English writers to demonstrate knowledge and perform other specialized tasks required of advanced academic writers. While the primary focus of the analysis is on writing development from first-year undergraduate to graduate students, we also consider interactions with discipline and genre. The study goes beyond most previous work on grammatical complexity in writing by investigating the use of phrasal as well as clausal features. The results show that as academic level increases, the use of phrasal complexity features in writing also increases. On the other hand, the use of clausal complexity features in student writing, particularly finite dependent clauses, decreases as academic level increases. Results further indicate that the extent of the differences across level is mediated by discipline and genre, reflecting patterns observed in research on disciplinary variation in professional academic writing.

For over a decade, a particular transnational educational migration trend in Korea, known as jogi yuhak or “Early Study Abroad,” has been sending thousands of pre-college students to various parts of the globe (e.g. U.S., Canada, Australia, Singapore) with hopes that young Koreans will acquire “native-like” English and become “global elites.” Many of these students then enter U.S. universities that are built upon liberal ideals of diversity and individualism in theory, but offer in practice an indifferent climate towards racial and linguistic difference. Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study of Korean undergraduate students at the University of Illinois, the U.S. public higher education institution with the largest number of international students, the author examines interviews, observations and artifacts collected from the Korean Student Association (KSA), a registered student organization with over 100 staff members mostly with jogi yuhak experience. As the global university offers a rather unfavorable academic climate for racially and linguistically diverse students as well as heightens the failures of literacy as a way to “global elite.” It is in this context that KSA members work to build, reestablish, and preserve their identities and create conditions of respect through practices of localization: The students foster their “Koreanness” not only through Korean language use but also through institutionally rebuilding Korean social practices and networks strained by their many years abroad. Students are able to negotiate their liberal, or rather neoliberal college dreams in seemingly Korean ways of language and literacy that ultimately help them ground their identity as U.S. college students.

This article links language requirements in rhetoric and composition graduate programs to a dominant monolingualist ideology in composition studies. It argues that future faculty can be best prepared to conduct disciplinary work in the context of linguistic heterogeneity through a variety of collaborative pedagogical practices that reflect and advance a “translingual” language ideology.

This essay advances a new pedagogical approach to engaging with archives in undergraduate courses. Through this approach, students not only examine traditional archival materials from the past, but also create new online archives of present-day sources they identify as related. Rather than training undergraduate students to become archival specialists, this pedagogy invites them to inquire into the relevance of archival materials to their own everyday lives and composing practices in digital spaces.

This article explores The Crisis magazine as a framework for students to gain a better understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of the works produced during the Harlem Renaissance. Ortega’s essay details the benefits of archival research for undergraduate students and specific ways in which to use The Crisis as a teaching tool in an interdisciplinary curriculum. Finally, her essay examines the ways in which The Crisis helps facilitate an understanding of canon formation during the Harlem Renaissance.

This commentary is an afterword and response to a cluster of essays on graduate education edited by Leonard Cassuto. Arguing for reform of the academic job system in which most PhDs will become contingent faculty members, the commentary engages principally with the work of David Downing and Marc Bousquet.

This article reports on the findings of a pilot study conducted in 2011 that investigated technology-pedagogy preparation for graduate students in PhD-granting rhetoric and composition programs in the United States. The study aimed to answer two questions: (1) Are rhetoric/composition doctoral programs preparing their students to teach with technology?; and (2) If so, how? Based on our findings, we believe it is futile to prescribe one approach to techno-pedagogy preparation and insist that techno-pedagogy needs to be both dispersed and integrated throughout English studies graduate curricula.

Drawing on nearly a decade of experience at the University of Washington, the authors argue for a reorientation of graduate curricula and pedagogy through publicly engaged forms of scholarship. Recognizing that the claims mobilized around public scholarship are necessarily local and situational, they suggest that public scholarship is best understood as organizing language that can align and articulate convergent interests rather than standardize or normalize them. This approach to public scholarship cuts against the disciplinary-professional mandates of most graduate curriculum since it requires both diversified forms of professionalization and pragmatic commitments to institutional change.

The authors call for more flexible dissertation projects but also argue that problems with graduate education range far wider than the doctoral dissertation. Many faculty resist the idea that the humanities can train students in skills that are useful, even marketable, outside of higher education. Graduate programs must find ways to stress these transferable skills and do better at preparing students for nonprofessorial jobs within and outside academia—including taking new approaches to the dissertation requirement. Humanists who take refuge in the seemingly high-minded idea that the humanities are only valuable for their own sake, or because they lack utility, make it harder to address these issues.

This response to the articles collected in this cluster observes that many analysts have constructed a “survivor” discourse surrounding graduate education, offering solutions at the level of individual choice and agency. The author argues instead for the critical importance of addressing academic employment structurally.

This article argues that graduate education often does not fully prepare students to take on the role of faculty member after graduation because it does not make students aware of the importance of faculty responsibilities such as service. It also suggests that the increasing importance of assessment in education indicates that assessment should be an essential part of training future faculty. This argument is explored through a graduate-level assessment course that required students to conduct assessment research for their department and university not only to give students real experience with assessment but also to make them aware of faculty responsibilities beyond the classroom. These students were interviewed twice during the course and reported that they felt that learning and applying assessment research allowed them to develop practical professional skills and broadened their knowledge of academic opportunities for conference presentations and publication.

This essay takes the contrarian point of view that graduate study in the humanities should be thought of as an avocation rather than as a vocation. While we have a responsibility to professionalize our graduate students, it is also incumbent on us to continue to redefine what we mean by professionalization so that it both refers to a variety of employment outcomes and addresses that most old-fashioned of subjects: the pleasures of intellectual labor.

The authors invite English studies faculty to reconsider traditional graduate seminar pedagogies in light of the changing academy and evolving professional identities. Recommendations include balancing currently conventional methods that may emphasize lecturing, content coverage, or scholarly production with a workshop-style focus on writing, teaching, and metacognition. Examples from several graduate classroom experiences are provided.

The norms of professionalization, viewed through a queer lens, are seen as a means to regulate affect and to banish queer forms of pleasure—much to the detriment of the academic profession. A queer, medievalist approach may help us with the project of building happier doctoral student selves. By looking at the indeterminancies and contradictions within medieval theories about “professions,” and by examining the queer valences of the first recorded use of the word professionalism (1856), we might open up spaces within our doctoral programs for productively “unprofessional” behavior.

This article makes the case for expanding our conception of what it means to provide “professional training” to PhD students in departments of English. Rather than focus exclusively on placing students in tenure-track academic appointments, departments should prepare them simultaneously for careers both inside and outside the academy by focusing on the broad range of skills inherent to doctoral training. Such an approach not only will empower graduate students but also may transform the academy itself.

What methods do graduate students take up for their dissertation projects? This article shares findings from distant reading of 2,711 abstracts, suggesting that humanist approaches predominate within the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition, but not without some methodological pluralism. A large number of studies outside the consortium are also considered.

Reviewed are: Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus, eds. Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities Jay Jordan First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground Jessica Restaino

This article uses corpus methods to examine linguistic expressions of stance in over 4,000 argumentative essays written by incoming first-year university students in comparison with the writing of upper-level undergraduate students and published academics. The findings reveal linguistic stance markers shared across the first-year essays despite differences in students’ educational context, with greatest distinctions emerging between first-year writers and all of the more advance writers. The specific features of stance that point to a developmental trajectory are approximative hedges/boosters, code glosses, and adversative/contrast connectors. The findings suggest methodological and conceptual implications: They highlight the value of descriptive, corpus-based studies of incoming first-year writing compared to advanced academic writing, and they underscore the construction of academic stance—particularly via certain stance features—as a process of delimiting one’s stance in a way that accounts for the views of others.

This is a corpus-based study of a key aspect of academic writing in one discipline (biology) by final-year undergraduates and first-, second-, and third-year graduate students. The papers come from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, a freely available electronic database. The principal aim of the study is to examine the extent of variation in citation practice in the biology subcorpus. To that end, it explores citation practices from a number of perspectives, including the distribution of integral versus parenthetical citations, the choice of reporting verbs, the effect of citing system, and the occurrence of selected features such as the use of citees’ first names. Results show little difference between the undergraduate and graduate papers, some effect of the citing system, and a somewhat richer intertextuality in the “evolutionary” as opposed to the “molecular” biology papers. Overall, this is an impressive body of student work from the viewpoint of textual variation in citation practice, but it should be remembered that the corpus consists of only “A” papers from a flagship research university.