Writing Teacher Assistant Identity and Discourse: Tensions as Learners and Teachers

• In Event: Roundtable Session 66
  In Roundtable Session: Tensions Between What We Know and What We Do: Research Praxis in Higher Education

Abstract

Seminal studies in composition concerned with cases of individual writing TAs have looked at changing teacher beliefs towards writing pedagogy and how TAs own theories and practices on writing pedagogy evolve and change (Barr Ebest, 2005; Bishop, 1990; Farris, 1996). These studies continue to highlight the importance of case study research on writing TAs, but do not explicitly connect local and individual actions to discourses of training and professionalization. My paper furthers research in composition and teacher education by bringing together scholarship on TA training (Austin & Wulff, 2004; Colbeck, O’Meara & Austin, 2008; Nyquist & Wulff, 1996) and student teacher identity (Alsup, 2006; Britzman, 2003; McWilliam, 1994): interrogating the immediate professional and personal concerns made on individual writing TAs using theories of training discourses that represent particular values, beliefs, and power dynamics. The objective for this study is to interrogate the local ethnographic cultural positions of writing TAs as they navigate and negotiate the discourses that constitute and are constitutive of them.

To research writing TAs’ experiences as professionals, I engage methodologically with feminist poststructural education scholars whose work (Aslup, 2006; Britzman, 2003; Lather, 1991; McWilliam, 1994; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000) interrogates student teacher identities as they are acting within and constructed by various types of discourse related to teacher education and the forming of a professional identity. I examine contradictions and changes in how writing TAs describe their experiences and what these realities tell us about the particular ideologies that are made available within a specific institution, discipline, and writing program. To date, little research has analyzed the experience of writing TAs using this specific methodology.

I rely on Interactive Interviews (McWilliam, 1994), Document Collection (Syllabi, Teaching Observation/Report, Wiki-Posts), and Writing Colloquium Observation to present case studies of writing TAs who are both new to the institution and new to teaching first year writing, writing TAs who are new to the institution and experienced first year writing teachers, and writing TAs who are familiar with the institution and new to teaching first year writing.

This paper makes comparisons between groups of TAs who are at different stages of interaction within professional discourses of the institution, disciplines, and writing program. Results suggest that the overarching discourse to better prepare academic professionals for the changing environments of universities and hiring institutions outside academia should center more intensively on teaching because as Weisbuch (2004) claims “teaching beyond all classrooms anywhere is a definition that might provide some life to the tired notion of service” (p. 227). The next generation of faculty should be progressively prepared to teach beyond the academic institution they were trained in so they are able to assume positions that are actually going to be available to them as well as serve the larger community that needs it. Teaching skills are important and marketable as “term and part-time appointments rather than traditional full-time tenure-stream positions” (Austin & Wulff, 2004, p. 10) are going to be more available.

Author

• Kathleen McMonigle Smyth, University of Utah