CCCC March 2013 Las Vegas NV.
Donna Qualley with Justin Ericksen, Leon Erickson, Samuel Johnson,
LeAnne Laux-Bachand, Michelle Magnero, and Aimee Odens
PANEL TITLE: Aligning Expectations: The Integrative Mission of Composition as a Teaching Subject
PRESENTERS TITLE (Re)Aligning Expectations: Graduate Student Teachers as Agents of Integration
DONNA: The first year writing program is one of the few places at our university “where not only writing,
but teaching gets talked about in serious and critical ways.” And yet, the first year writing course and the
people who teach in it are off the radar and largely invisible. Almost no one outside of the program—
students, faculty, administrators—knows what kind of work gets done here or what the first year writing
course attempts to set in motion. On the one hand, the course is assumed to be necessary—it is the only
requirement that all students must take. On the other hand, it is seen as largely irrelevant to the
disciplinary work of the rest of our liberal arts university.
Today, we’d like to build on Joseph Harris’s well known observation about composition as a
teaching subject to explore how a first year writing program might serve a larger and more visible
teaching mission within the university, one that could uncover tacit assumptions and help integrate and
align writing expectations.
Rebecca Nowacek uses the term “genred discursive space” to refer to the “entire constellation of
associated relations. . .within which individuals operate and make meaning.” This constellation of both
tacit and explicit associations includes knowledge, ways of knowing, identities, and goals. The first year
writing program and the graduate student teachers who teach in it comprise the most “pliable genred
discursive space” in our university. The program functions as a kind of way station where everyone
(except for the single resident WPA) passes through en route to somewhere else. The course is taught
almost exclusively by MA-level graduate students who have come to study literature, creative writing, and
sometimes teaching.
However, the constant movement of new teacher-learners through this space, where the flow of
knowledge, ways of knowing, identities, and goals are always in flux, gives rise to a culture where both
individual understanding and programmatic approaches to writing, learning, and teaching are continually
examined, re-articulated and re-designed.
Unlike disciplinary faculty, our teachers rarely become “resident” experts, working as “agents of
integration” for their students. Instead, they become “handlers,” learning to create the pedagogical
conditions for students to hopefully become agents of integration for themselves. To what extent, then,
might these non-resident writing experts also be uniquely situated to serve as handlers for disciplinary
writing faculty so that they might become more effective resident writing experts and agents of integration
for their own students?
Just as composition gave Harris “a way of imagining teaching as an integral part. . .of [his] work
as an intellectual,” it also does so with our graduate student teachers. Teaching (writing) becomes a
fundamental part of their graduate study and contributes to their understanding of themselves as readers,
writers, and creative intellectuals. The constant movement of teacher-learners through this space keeps
conversations fluid, reflective, and ongoing.
JUSTIN: The impetus for this reflective and ongoing conversation is established during our weeklong
training for new and returning graduate student teachers just prior to fall quarter immediately debunks the
popular myth that anyone can teach writing, and sets a clear tone that teaching writing, while enjoyable
and rewarding, is serious business and requires intense study as a teaching subject. We are immersed in
the ongoing scholarly conversation, and then replicate that conversational dynamic in our own
preparation and interactions with each other.
AIMEE: Conversations between graduate student teachers begin at orientation week, certainly, but we
continue to interact throughout the year. On the more formal end, we meet weekly for staff meetings,
checking in about how our classes are progressing and making curricular changes as a group. Each
quarter we participate in paper readings, trading advice about evaluation and offering feedback to help
develop programmatic expectations for student writing. But we also collaborate informally, too.
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SAM: One example of that kind of informal collaboration occurs in the shared graduate student teachers’
computer lab, which is centrally located among both graduate student teachers and faculty offices in the
department. The lab is often a site of not only practical teaching and writing discussions, e.g. “what
handout do you use for linking strategies,” but also more critical discussion, e.g. “how well did the reading
for risk and reading for ratification strategy take? How would you change it?” The mix of locations for
these kinds of discussions keeps teaching and writing constantly on our minds.
DONNA: The heightened sense of meta-awareness that comes from being both learner and teacher
assists graduate student teachers in their own transitions to graduate school and also positions them to
help their students enter the new genred discursive spaces of first year writing.
MICHELLE: Teaching first year writing has allowed me to come to a new understanding of what it means
to participate in a conversation with other scholars. Before becoming a graduate student teachers, I
tended to associate “academic writing” with literary analysis because of my training in literature. My
understanding of academic writing was based on literary textual analysis, not on the goal of making a
contribution to a larger discussion that the 101 program emphasizes. As my graduate literature courses
have trained me to write seminar papers that contribute to the larger field of English studies, in my
teaching of first year writing I have come to stress the idea that the rhetorical strategies and habits of
mind introduced in 101 can act as foundational strategies for entering into a variety of academic
discourse communities.
LEANNE: I see the habits of mind introduced in first year writing at work in my creative writing courses. I
noticed that among my creative writing classmates, the only instances of not revising - of turning in
essentially the same work for a revised second draft - occurred with graduate students who weren't also
teachers. I wonder if those of us who are graduate student teachers are so conditioned now to encourage
and expect significant revision in our English 101 students' writing process that we have adopted this
habit of mind - and practice - in our own work.
JUSTIN: And speaking of our own work, before teaching 101, I never consciously considered how I wrote
or how my writing would be read. However, exposure to works such as Joe Harris’ Rewriting: How to Do
Things with Texts, and Laura Micciche and Allison Carr’s “Toward Graduate Level Writing Instruction”
offered tools to think about my own writing. Teaching these writing moves myself gave me an opportunity
to immediately put this thinking to use in practical ways. In addition to being more conscious of my writing
choices, I have greater audience awareness. Now that I understand writing from the teacher’s
perspective, I am able to actually envision my professor sitting down to read my essay, and can inhabit
their reactive mind to some degree. In turn, I can then offer that sense of awareness for students to
integrate in their own writing.
AIMEE: Teaching writing continues to develop my understanding of how to write well in the humanities.
Like Justin mentioned just now, teaching Joseph Harris’ writing moves for working with sources forces me
to be mindful when considering how and why I am including secondary sources in my work. I encourage
my students to push beyond merely supporting or “authorizing” their position with sources; in my own
writing, I have seen the strength and impact of my arguments develop as I learn to use sources as a
pivoting point to say something more, something different.
SAM: The meta-awareness generated by being both teacher and learner allows for some great moments
of integration for both me and my students. For me, I am able to better understand the kinds of
expectations my professors have of me and my writing because I can understand the motivation behind
their decisions. That is, teaching first year writing enables me to gain what Pat Hutchings calls
pedagogical intelligence. Even if I disagree with the motivations of my professors, my pedagogical
intelligence still puts me at an advantage since I can recognize those motivations. For my students, my
willingness to situate myself as a fellow learner and as someone in a similar situation to them creates an
environment that they can begin to gain their own pedagogical intelligence.
LEON: Yes, being both learners and teachers simultaneously has advantages. This heightened metaawareness that emerges from this fusion of teacher and student identities engenders more extensive
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reflection that engages and connects the academic, professional, and personal together. This reflective
meta-awareness reminds me that my students and I are both entering new discourse communities; my
students are new to college and I am new to graduate school. Entering a new discourse can often be
scary, nerve inducing, and stressful. (I know it was for me). As a graduate student teacher, I am in a
unique position to empathize with the challenges of learning to negotiate new identities. Thus, my dual
position as student and teacher enables me to work effectively in the role of “handler” that Donna
mentioned at the start of this presentation. Nowacek uses this term to describe the ways in which
teachers help students become their own agents of integration. I try to create spaces through
assignments and classwork for students to make and convey connections, but also to reflect on the
significance of these connections for themselves.
AIMEE: My individual understanding of teaching has been (re)examined this quarter since I am
simultaneously teaching ENG 101 and interning for a 300-level literature course. While discussing future
course design, the professor I’m working with shared that she frequently reuses entire courses, changing
little regarding reading lists, assignments or final projects. This surprised me since I see such value in
teaching a dynamic, evolving curriculum. I hadn’t realized that the work we do to re-imagine our courses
each quarter doesn’t necessarily happen in other courses.
JUSTIN: One possibly useful way to think about how our integrative status keeps our work dynamic and
evolving is the way in which James Paul Gee’s concepts of learning and acquisition inform our dual roles
as students and teachers. We don’t learn pedagogy and subsequently acquire the knowledge through
experience. Instead, we shift from learning to teaching on a constant and frequent basis. Our hybrid
identity also allows us to shift into student mode even while technically acting as a teacher. Consequently,
we can speak to our students as peers and have conversations about teaching and learning through
transparent dialogue. Our hybrid status, complemented by transparent dialogue, may offer a unique level
of access and insight to student thinking, including what works, and what doesn’t work.
LEON: In addition, I think we also acquire the knowledge of what and how much we can ask from both
our students and ourselves. As graduate students, we are often high-performers. At first, we expect the
same sort of motivated output from our students. I know that when I first started teaching I expected
students to perform all assigned readings, to contribute to class discussion in meaningful ways, and to
construct essays that demonstrated a thorough understanding of the course readings. In addition, I just
assumed they would show up on time, stay organized, and generally behave as professional students.
Once I became immersed in the classroom, I quickly realized that I needed to adjust my expectations. As
Justin has suggested, the very nature of being a graduate student teacher allows for a sense of empathy.
My ability to understand the student’s needs eventually enabled me to create a new classroom
atmosphere that encouraged my outcome goals instead of demanding them. In order to arrive at this
position, I had to experience--with my students--the stress of the demands that I was putting on them.
Just as I needed time to find my way to this new way of thinking, I realized my students also need time to
acquire the habits of mind and skill sets that I am teaching.
LEANNE: And since most of us teach first year writing for 6 quarters in a row, we realize both our
students’ limitations and the constraints of what can be accomplished in a ten-week course. We learn to
privilege certain writing moves and ways of working with texts.
MICHELLE: As an first year writing instructor, I have come to understand that the teaching of writing
involves privileging what, as Harris suggests, texts do rather than emphasizing their textual content. This
suggests that first year writing instructors are in an ideal position to start conversations with faculty who
teach writing proficiency courses at our university about the texts they teach, why they teach them, and
how the rhetorical features of these texts can be useful in classroom writing instruction.
DONNA: The fact that our entire faculty consists of people acknowledged to be learners rather than
certified knowers or what Nowacek refers to as “resident experts” offers us some advantages for working
with first year students. We want to be clear however. We are not saying that non-credentialed graduate
students are the best people to teach writing to undergraduate students. What we are suggesting is that
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resident experts could benefit by continuing to be reflective learners themselves and engaging in
conversations with others about writing.
JUSTIN: Right. By not trying to position ourselves as resident experts we may open lines of
communication that allow for integration between students and faculty, and across disciplinary lines.
While lacking the permanence of resident experts, our transitory interactional expertise, derived from
simultaneous learning and acquisition, offers a model for both students and faculty to think of themselves
as evolving and dynamic learners. This thinking and adapting on a constant basis guards against
privileging a static or monolithic “knowledge” that is sometimes associated with resident expertise.
MICHELLE: Unlike resident expert faculty, who hold their positions for the long-term, graduate student
teachers are more like renters. We occupy our positions for the short term. While renters typically leave
the space as they found it, many graduate student teachers seek to transform the space of the first year
writing program for future graduate student teachers. As Aimee has already suggested, perhaps one of
the most powerful ways that we do so is by re-designing our courses and assignments each quarter. This
continual re-imagining helps all of us re-think what we are doing and holds the potential for grandfathering
in certain strategies or activities from year to year. For example, I have developed a useful strategy for
teaching this year’s university-wide reading book, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
A particular challenge to teaching this 300 + page text is that students tend to want to focus on what the
text says rather than on what it does rhetorically. While some graduate student teachers have elected not
to teach the text at all, I chose to address this issue by creating writing prompts for 1-page blog posts. I
provide passages from the text and construct a specific question that students respond to using the
writing moves and strategies that we have been learning. As a result of this practice work, I have noticed
that students’ incorporation of The Immortal Life into their longer essay assignments now focuses more
on critical analysis and less on summary. I’ve shared my approach with colleagues who will be returning
to teach next year. After Donna visited my class this quarter, she adapted my approach to focusing on
specific passages with her own 101 students. I will write up the assignment to include with the new
curricular materials for next year’s course.
DONNA: Rebecca Nowacek’s metaphor of “agents of integration” suggests that successful acts of
transfer are rhetorical acts that involve both “seeing” connections and “selling” them to others. Although
Nowacek uses this term to describe transfer, we think the notion of making and conveying connections
basically describes the intellectual and rhetorical work that is the focus of many composition courses and
of our first year writing course, in particular. As you can see from the handout, the first year writing course
is basically about learning to make and convey connections. If agents of integration, as Nowacek
suggests, are individuals who are actively working to perceive as well as to convey connections to others
between previously distinct contexts, might a first year writing program serve a similar role within the
university community?
LEON I don’t think we can overstate the importance of enhancing student engagement by cueing them to
recognize connections between their lives and studies. Connections that resonate with students’ personal
experience grab their attention and create a lasting impression. Once we cue students to make personal
connections with course content, they often seem amazed at how easy it is. In addition to empowering
them, however, another great advantage of cueing students to look for connections is that it creates a
self-perpetuating momentum – once they start seeing connections, they start seeing them everywhere.
They’re addicted. Their lives are more “integrated.” For example, one of my students applied James Paul
Gee's concepts to the ideology of her dance squad, the specific language used to describe and talk about
dance, and the ways in which her knowledge of dancing as a discourse could inform other areas of her
life. Not only does this student make connections, she conveys, or “sells” them as Nowacek says, in
sophisticated ways as she demonstrates her ability to draw connections between contexts, that of a
dancer and that of a student engaging with a difficult reading. Connection making becomes a habit of
mind valued across academic disciplines, and once it becomes a habit of mind, perhaps it can bridge
distances from 101 to other disciplines. Might knowledge about the first year writing program help prime
and cue connection making for faculty who teach writing in the university?
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LEANNE: In addition to first year writing’s capacity to cue connections for our students, as Leon has just
shown, an example from my own experience suggests that knowledge about first year writing programs
can cue connection making for faculty who teach writing: I recently ran into a psychology professor who
learned about English 101 from attending an interdisciplinary retreat with me and another graduate
student teacher. He said he recently drew a diagram about the stages of writing at a university for one of
his classes, and he started the diagram with English 101. Before meeting members of the first year
writing program, I am sure this professor would have begun his drawing in a different place.
In Lives on the Boundary, Mike Rose discusses how graduate school trains future professors to
become ever more specialized – ever more committed to their disciplinary knowledge, their turf, and
consequently less likely to see places like the tutoring center as an academic partner or site of
knowledge. But as MA graduate student teachers of writing, any specialization we’re undergoing is in
tandem with being teachers of context awareness, teachers who keep multiple sites of knowledge in mind
in our classrooms. Another way we can help prime connection making for writing faculty is to become
writing faculty who remember these sites of knowledge – including the first year writing program.
OVERHEAD Positioned as it is at a transition point for students entering the university, the FIRST
YEAR WRITING course is uniquely suited to engage, develop, and intervene in students’ purposeful
reflection on their learning and application of this learning to new contexts. If we see FIRST YEAR
WRITING as a potential site for disrupting the maintenance of strict domain boundaries. . .we must
intervene at the very beginning of the course in order to make possibilities and processes of domain
crossing explicit and clear” (Reiff and Bawarshi, “Tracing Discursive Resources: How Students Use
Prior Genre Knowledge to Negotiate New Writing Contexts in First-Year Composition” 331).
DONNA: Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi see the first year writing course as a site of intervention for
utilizing and also disrupting strict domain boundaries of genre. They examine how first year students draw
on prior genre knowledge to negotiate the new kinds of writing they encounter in their first year writing
courses. As we have suggested, this site also functions to examine and disrupt graduate student
teachers’ antecedent knowledge of writing and teaching. Might is also be a site to intervene and disrupt
assumptions about writing within the university?
MCHELLE: One possible strategy of intervention that could disrupt assumptions that university
administrators and other university stakeholders have about the first year writing program is the use of not
talk. According to Reiff and Bawarshi, “not talk” is the articulation of what a genre is vis a vis what it is
not. I have been successful using “not talk” in my first year writing classes to help students understand
the differences between, for example, the first year writing genre of the critical inquiry essay and the high
school genre of the five paragraph essay. This suggests that not talk could, for example, be a method we
use to help create a dialogue between first year writing and administration. Such a dialogue might begin
by explaining how first year writing is different than a grammar course.
SAM: In another effort to extend the conversation about first year writing, I work to provide a clear
representation of how first year writing fits into my students’ larger university experience. I am interested
in creating an environment that not only encourages conversation about that goings on in our particular
class, but one that also encourages conversation about the larger role of writing and critical inquiry in the
university. For example, by introducing James Paul Gee's notion of discourse to first year writing students
they are able to make realizations about the discourses at work in their lives, including this class. These
realizations will frequently lead to open conversations about their experience in first year writing and how
that experience relates to their other/previous classes. This kind of conversation can create a great deal
of meta-awareness and pedagogical intelligence with regard to first year writing and its larger role in the
university. By extension, this is the exact kind of conversation that could be brought to the resident
experts and other stakeholders in the university in the hopes of creating a greater understanding about
the first year writing program. That is, while we provide the space for our students to see the larger role of
first year writing in the university, we must also provide a space for university stakeholders to see the
larger role of first year writing in the university.
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JUSTIN: As we’ve discussed, and as Carmen’s data confirms, the larger role of First year writing in the
university is misunderstood, and I for one can certainly relate to that disconnect. My personal
understanding of writing and the teaching of writing was disrupted immediately upon arrival. I arrived at
campus believing that teaching writing would focus on mechanical correctness and writing conventions,
rather than critical inquiry and writing as thinking. My original expectations and understandings of
what/how we would/should be teaching were fairly similar to those of the university faculty and
administration in Carmen’s research. My thinking was essentially “the greatest ideas in the world are
useless if a writer lacks the basic skills to convey them effectively.” However, my views evolved quickly
due to frequent conversation and continuous training on writing as a teaching subject. I think the
misaligned expectations of other stakeholders could perhaps be similarly transformed with even minimal
outreach and interdisciplinary communication.
If other university stakeholders had a clearer understanding of our goals and practices, they might
be better positioned to extend our work within their respective disciplines. This outreach on our part could
enable additional boundary crossing and remind all stakeholders that we share the same fundamental
goals – that in spite of specialization, we’re on the same team and should remember that and act
accordingly!
AIMEE: Carmen’s data demonstrates that, at this point, we’re still a ways away from a clear
understanding across the board. I agree that even a small push could have a big impact. I can imagine,
for example, putting together a panel where representatives of ENG 101 speak alongside other faculty
members discussing the kind of writing they do in upper-level discipline-specific courses. This kind of
event would offer us an opportunity to begin a conversation about how to better ‘bridge’ between our first
year writing course and upper-level writing intensive courses.
LEANNE: At the three-day, summer retreat I mentioned earlier, a fellow graduate student teacher and I
shared experiences, lesson plans, and social time with writing and service learning faculty from the
university. I have continued to meet regularly for happy hours with these faculty, who teach Spanish,
math, art history, kinesiology, media communications, international relations, economic anthropology, and
more. Because of our focused time together in the summer and the opportunities for continued interaction
over the year, each one of them now knows more about English 101 at Western than they did before.
Nowacek observes that “it is remarkably difficult to build and maintain a pedagogical space to discuss the
role of writing in the disciplines” (124). I would suggest that retreats such as this one – which are multiday, involve working in close proximity, and get people talking about writing concretely because they’re
working on building their own upcoming fall courses – build just such a vital pedagogical space. What if all
writing faculty across departments were encouraged (or even required) to attend retreats such as this
one? If they were – and if 101 graduate student instructors continued to attend too – this could spell longterm increased awareness of 101’s place in the university.
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Audience Questions
1. Nowacek asks, “How do institutional structures affect student and teacher’s perception of transfer”
and “how are perceptions of transfer related to institutional structures –for instructors as well as
students?” (36).
 Could we replace “perceptions of transfer” with “expectations of writing” and ask the same
questions? “How do institutional structures affect student and teacher’s expectations of writing?”
and “how are expectations of writing related to institutional structures –for instructors as well as
students?”
2. Nowacek observes that “it is remarkably difficult to build and maintain a pedagogical space to discuss
the role of writing in the disciplines” (124).
 What if we were to imagine building and maintaining a more pliable genred discursive space
along the lines of the first year writing program—a dynamic space where the flow of knowledge,
ways of knowing, identities, and goals were always in flux? What might it look like?
3. If institutions were to seriously consider how first year writing could play the role of handler” for
disciplinary writing, what changes might we make in terms of the professional and educational
development for faculty who teach writing at the upper-division?
4. If institutions were to seriously consider having non-resident writing experts in first year writing serve
as handlers for disciplinary writing faculty, given the transitory nature of these faculty, what changes
could we make to everyday material conditions to assist in that process?
5. Nowacek reminds us that in most universities, “the activity system of the general education classroom
is divorced from the activity system of the disciplines,” and while “pedagogical and curricular [and
perhaps extra-curricular] structures are needed to facilitate transfer,” it is “remarkably difficult” to do
so (124-125).
 What measures have others in the audience taken to align writing expectations in general
education and create a common vocabulary to discuss these issues at their home institutions?
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