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Category Archives: Graduate assistants


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Carter and Gallegos. Assessing Celebrations of Student Writing. CS, Spring 2017. Posted 09/03/2017.

Carter, Genesea M., and Erin Penner Gallegos. “Moving Beyond the Hype: What Does the Celebration of Student Writing Do for Students?” Composition Studies 45.1 (2017): 74-98. Web. 29 Aug. 2017.

Genesea M. Carter and Erin Penner Gallegos present research on “celebrations of student writing (CSWs)” (74), arguing that while extant accounts of these events portray them as positive and effective additions to writing programs, very little research has addressed students’ own sense of the value of the CSW experience. To fill this gap, Carter and Gallegos interviewed 23 students during a CSW at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and gathered data from an anonymous online survey (84).

As defined by Carter and Gallegos, a CSW asks students to represent the writing from their coursework in a public forum through posters and art installations (77). Noting that the nature of a CSW is contingent on the particular institution at which it takes place (75, 91), the authors provide specific demographic data about UNM, where their research was conducted. The university is both a “federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI)” and “a Carnegie-designated very high research university” (75), thus incorporating research-level expectations with a population of “historically marginalized,” “financially very needy” students with “lower educational attainment” (76). Carter and Gallegos report on UNM’s relatively low graduation rates as compared to similar universities and the “particular challenges” faced by this academic community (76).

Among these challenges, in the authors’ view, was a “negative framing of the student population from the university community and city residents” (76). Exposure in 2009 via a meeting with Linda Adler-Kassner to the CSW model in place at Eastern Michigan University led graduate students Carter and Gallegos to develop a similar program at UNM (76-77). Carter and Gallegos were intrigued by the promise of programs like the one at EMU to present a new, positive narrative about students and their abilities to the local academic and civic communities.

They recount the history of the UNM CSW as a project primarily initiated by graduate students that continues to derive from graduate-student interests and participation while also being broadly adopted by the larger university and in fact the larger community (78, 92). In their view, the CSW differs from other institutional showcases of student writing such as an undergraduate research day and a volume of essays selected by judges in that it offers a venue for “students who lack confidence in their abilities or who do not already feel that they belong to the university community” (78). They argue that changing the narrative about student writing requires a space for recognizing the strengths of such historically undervalued students.

Examining CSWs from a range of institutions in order to discover what the organizers believe these events achieve, the authors found “a few commonalities” (79). Organizers underscored their belief that the audience engagement offered by a CSW enforced the nature of writing as “social, situational, and public,” a “transactional” experience rather than the “one-dimensional” model common in academic settings (80). Further, CSWs are seen to endorse student contributions to research across the university community and to inspire recognition of the multiple literacies that students bring to their academic careers (81). The authors’ review also reveals organizers’ beliefs that such events will broaden students’ understanding of the writing process by foregrounding how writing evolves through revision into different modes (81).

An important thread is the power of CSWs to enhance students’ “sense of belonging, both to an intellectual and a campus community” (82). Awareness that their voices are valued, according to the authors’ research, is an important factor in student persistence among marginalized populations (81). Organizers see CSWs as encouraging students to see themselves as “authors within a larger community discourse” (83).

Carter and Gallegos note a critique by Mark Mullen, who argues that CSWs can actually exploit student voices in that they may actually be a “celebration of the teaching of writing, a reassertion of agency by practitioners who are routinely denigrated” (qtd. in Carter and Gallegos 84). The authors find from their literature review that, indeed, few promotions of CSWs in the literature include student voices (84). They contend that their examination of student perceptions of the CSW process can further understanding of the degree to which these events meet their intended outcomes (84).

Their findings support the expectation that students will find the CSW valuable, but discovered several ways in which the hopes of supporters and the responses of students are “misaligned” (90). While the CSW did contribute to students’ sense of writing as a social process, students expressed most satisfaction in being able to interact with their peers, sharing knowledge and experiencing writing in a new venue as fun (86). Few students understood how CSW connected to the goals of their writing coursework, such as providing a deeper understanding of rhetorical situation and audience (87). While students appreciated the chance to “express” their views, the authors write that students “did not seem to relate expression to being heard or valued by the academic community” or to “an extension of agency” (88).

For the CSW to more clearly meet its potential, the authors recommend that planners at all levels focus on building metacognitive awareness of the pedagogical value of such events through classroom activities (89). Writing programs involved in CSWs, according to the authors, can develop specific outcomes beyond those for the class as a whole that define what supporters and participants hope the event will achieve (89-90). Students themselves should be involved in planning the event as well as determining its value (90), with the goal of “emphasizing to their student participants that the CSW is not just another fun activity but an opportunity to share their literacies and voices with their classmates and community” (90).

A more detailed history of the development of the UNM event illustrates how the CSW became increasingly incorporated into other university programs and how it ultimately drew participation from local artists and performers (92-93). The authors applaud this “institutionalizing” of the event because such broad interest and sponsorship mean that the CSW can continue to grow and spread knowledge of student voices to other disciplines and across the community (93).

They see “downsides” in this expansion in that the influence of different sponsors from year to year and attachment to initiatives outside of writing tends to separate the CSW from the writing courses it originated to serve. Writing programs in venues like UNM may find it harder to develop appropriate outcomes and assess results, making sure that the CSW remains a meaningful part of a writing program’s mission (93). The authors recommend that programs hoping that a CSW will enhance actual writing instruction should commit adequate resources and attention to the ongoing events. The authors write that, “imperatively,” student input must be part of the process in order to prevent such events from “becom[ing] merely another vehicle for asserting the value of the teaching of writing” (94; emphasis original).


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Jensen and Toth. Graduate Education for Two-Year College Professionals. July CE. Posted 08/10/2017.

Jensen, Darin L., and Christie Toth. “Unknown Knowns: The Past, Present, and Future of Graduate Preparation for Two-Year College English Faculty.” College English 79.6 (2017): 561-92. Print.

In the July College English, Darin L. Jensen and Christie Toth follow up the latest update of the TYCA Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College with an examination “of the past and current status of graduate preparation for two-year college English faculty in order to imagine possible futures” (563). They include a current listing of institutions with graduate programs that prepare teachers for careers in two-year colleges.

The authors contend that “English studies graduate programs, . . . with some notable exceptions, do not yet meet their responsibility to prepare students to be two-year college professionals” (562). They contend that the “near-invisibility” of two-year colleges in English graduate education and the “institutional bias” some two-year faculty encounter (563) are “neither justifiable nor just” (562). They note that “more than 40 percent” of college English teachers teach in two-year colleges, which enroll “nearly half of all US undergraduates,” many of whom are from underrepresented groups (562). Jensen and Toth join Holly Hassel and Joanne Giordano in designating two-year college professionals as “the teaching majority” (qtd. in Jensen and Toth 563).

The authors contend that the field as a whole is unaware of the long history of two-year college teacher preparation. According to their research, the 1960s saw a proliferation of community colleges; a “damning portrait” of the teaching environment in these institutions from incoming NCTE president Alfred Kitzhaber, the authors write, led teachers in these colleges to begin to lay out the principles of their profession (565). Jensen and Toth note a number of important publications in the 1960s and early 1970s by two-year college teacher-scholars that enriched and documented an ongoing discussion in venues like major conferences (565).

The year 1971 saw the publication of the 1971 Guidelines for Junior College English Teacher Training Programs (564). Among the principles laid out in this document was the need to address the particular characteristics of the two-year student population, with an attention to the diversity of this population that, in the authors’ view, “anticipate[d] the 1974 document, Students’ Right to Their Own Language” (567).

Another important principle that emerged during this era was the mandate for actual classroom experience through internships under the guidance of experienced two-year college teachers (568). Jensen and Toth stress the document’s insistence that actual two-year college faculty are the appropriate authorities for designing suitable graduate training; moreover, the document asserted that two-year college professionals should be full-time members of all graduate faculties and that all constituents of such a program, including advisors, should be fully knowledgeable about the exigencies and opportunities of teaching at two-year institutions (568).

Another important document from this era was the 1978 “National Directory of Graduate Programs for Junior/Community College English Teachers,” compiled by Gregory Cowan and published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College (568, 569). This project located forty-three programs offering specific degrees. Many were “specialized master’s degrees, concentrations, or post-master’s specialist or certificate programs” (568). In addition, some institutions offered the new “Doctor of Arts” (DA) degree, meant as an equivalent to a PhD but with a stronger focus on teaching (569).

Twenty-seven other institutions billed their coursework as appropriate for teachers planning to teach at two-year colleges (569). The authors note that some of these programs indicated what “university faculty believed” was needed to teach at two-year colleges; in keeping with the principles articulated in 1971 Guidelines, the Directory noted which programs included input from actual faculty in two-year institutions and which required hands-on internships (570).

The authors report, however, that in ensuing years, most of these programs disappeared (570), partly because of a decline in the number of available jobs and the “adjunctification” of two-year colleges (570). They raise the possibility that the rise of rhetoric and composition as a legitimate scholarly career path may have affected the demand for specialized programs, but they contend that rhetoric and composition degrees do not necessarily meet the needs of two-year faculty (571).

Jensen and Toth find that during this period of “[r]etrenchment” (570), some community colleges undertook to design their own graduate programs. The authors identify three whose faculty published on their efforts (571). The programs reinforced principles highlighted earlier, such as the need for hands-on teaching and mentorship and the need for actual two-year faculty to lead in program design, but they also incorporated the need to prepare aspiring two-year faculty for the professional activities beyond teaching that the two-year college demands, such as attending department and committee meetings, becoming active in professional organizations, and pursuing a research agenda (572).

The 2004 Guidelines for the Academic Preparation of English Faculty at Two-Year Colleges, which has been “circulated widely within TYCA [Two-Year College Association]” (573), responded to the “specter of mass faculty retirements” as well as the labor issues surrounding the use of contingent labor by asserting that the need for properly prepared faculty remained unmet (572). Confirming the importance of professionalization “beyond the classroom,” the document pressed hiring committees to attend to the specific qualifications appropriate to two-year college faculty, even among adjuncts (573). The authors note their own use of the 2004 Guidelines in their own professional development and program design, but contend that ongoing labor conditions made this document “an aspirational rather than descriptive articulation of TYCA’s vision” (573).

“The Current Landscape” features results of the authors’ survey of extant programs claiming to offer graduate work suitable for two-year college faculty (573-77). Programs provide a range of options including master’s degrees and certificates. The authors find that curricular information on websites is often inadequate for full assessment. Many of the programs are housed in departments of education (574); some offer DA degrees under the auspices of “higher education” programs, which the authors state may be more appropriate to training administrators than teachers (574-75).

The authors note that many DA offerings have been subsumed under rhetoric-and-composition PhDs. This section addresses in detail strong models at four institutions: Murray State University, Marymount University, City College of New York, and San Francisco State University (575-77).

As they “imagine possible futures,” Jensen and Toth reiterate their claim that few programs address the needs of two-year college faculty; moreover, respondents to some surveys they cite report being discouraged from pursuing a two-year college career (578, 580-81). For the authors, this continued invisibility of the two-year college option in English graduate studies has major implications for all branches of the discipline. They cite the 2014 Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature to note the “disjuncture between English studies graduate curricula and the actual postsecondary landscape” (579). They claim that as the job market grows tighter, most English studies graduates are not qualified to teach in half the institutions in the United States (578-79). In addition, they warn that increasing numbers of undergraduates are doing their first two years of coursework at these schools ().

They see this disjuncture as a “moral failing” (584; emphasis original) in that the institutions for which teachers are not being prepared house the underrepresented populations for whom English studies purports to advocate. They underscore this failure in noting that, despite the dismal working conditions often characterizing two-year colleges, the CCCC Labor Caucus’s 2015 Indianapolis Resolution

makes no specific mention of two-year colleges, nor does it include TYCA on its list of professional organizations that might enact and enforce the resolution’s recommendations. (586)

Acknowledging that recognizing the importance of the two-year college mission will vary depending on the individual contexts of specific institutions (580), Jensen and Toth call on all English studies professional organizations as well as programs to make the two-year college career option available and visible, with input from faculty specifically engaged in these institutions, ideally as full-time graduate faculty (584-85). Because “isolation is vulnerability,” they charge rhetoric and composition with pursuing an “integrative rather than separatist approach” (583) in order to fully embrace the needs of “the teaching majority” (586).


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Jensen and Ely. An “Externship” for Teaching at Two-Year Colleges. TETYC, Mar. 2017. Posted 04/06/2017.

Jensen, Darin, and Susan Ely. “A Partnership Teaching Externship Program: A Model That Makes Do.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 44.3 (2017): 247-63. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.

Darin Jensen and Susan Ely describe a program to address the dearth of writing instructors prepared to meet the needs of community-college students. This program, an “externship,” was developed by the authors as an arrangement between Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska (MCC), and the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) (247).

The authors write that as full-time faculty at MCC, they were expected to teach developmental writing but that neither had training in either basic-writing instruction or in working with community-college populations (247). When Ely became coordinator of basic writing, she found that while she could hire instructors with knowledge of first-year writing, the pool of instructors adequately prepared to teach in the particular context of community colleges “did not exist” (248).

This dearth was especially concerning because, according to a 2015 Fact Sheet from the American Association of Community Colleges, 46% of entering students attend community colleges, while a 2013 report from the National Conference of State Legislatures notes that more than 50% of these students enroll in remedial coursework (250). Community colleges also serve the “largest portion” of minority, first-generation, and low-income students (250-51).

Jensen and Ely attribute much of this lack of preparation for teaching developmental writing to the nature of graduate training; they quote a 2014 report from the Modern Language Association that characterizes graduate education as privileging the “‘narrow replication’ of scholars” at the expense, in the authors’ words, of “more substantive training in teaching” (249). Such a disconnect, the authors contend, disadvantages both the undergraduate students who need instructors versed in basic writing and the graduating literacy professionals who lack the preparation for teaching that will ensure them full-time employment (248). They quote Ellen Andrews Knodt to note that the emphasis on teaching needed to serve community-college students suffers “almost by definition” from an “inferior status” (qtd. in Jensen and Ely 249).

Jensen and Ely’s research documents a lack of attention to teacher preparation even among resources dedicated to community colleges and basic writing. Holly Hassel’s 2013 examination of Teaching English in the Two-Year College from 2001 to 2012 found only “8 of 239 articles” that addressed teacher preparation (249). In 2006, Barbara Gleason “found fewer than twenty graduate courses in teaching basic writing across the country” (250). The authors found only one issue of TETYC, in March 2001, dealing with teacher preparation, and Gleason found only two issues of the Journal of Basic Writing, from 1981 and 1984, that focused primarily on professional development for teaching this student population (250).

Given these findings and their own experiences, Jensen and Ely designed a program that would be “activist in nature” (248), committed to the idea, drawn from Patrick Sullivan, that community-college teaching participates in “the noble work of democratizing American higher education” (249).

Jensen and Ely chose Gregory Cowan’s 1971 term “externship” over “apprenticeship” because of the latter’s “problematic hierarchical nature” (251). They abandoned a preliminary internship model because the graduate students were “not really interns, but were student teachers” and did not produce traditional papers (251). Subsequent iterations were structured as independent studies under Dr. Tammie Kennedy at UNO (251).

The authors explain that neither institution fully supported the project, at least partly, they believe, because the “low value” of community-college teaching makes it “a hard sell” (252). Dr. Kennedy earned no compensation and had no clear understanding of how the work counted in her career advancement (251-52). The authors received no reassigned time and only a $500 stipend. They emphasize that these conditions “demonstrate the difficult realities” of the kind of change they hoped to encourage (252).

Students in the program committed to eighty hours of work during a spring semester, including readings, partnering on syllabus and course design, student-teaching in every community-college course meeting, participating in planning and reflections before and after the classes, and attending a collaborative grading session (252). The externship went far beyond what the authors consider typical practica for teaching assistants; it more nearly resembled the K-12 preservice model, “provid[ing] guided practice and side-by-side mentoring for the novice teacher,” as well as extensive exposure to theoretical work in serving community-college populations (252). The graduate students developed a teaching portfolio, a teaching philosophy for the community-college environment, and a revised CV (251).

The authors share their reading lists, beginning with Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary and Burton R. Clark’s “The ‘Cooling-Out’ Function in Higher Education,” which they value for its “counterpoint to the promise of developmental education in Rose’s books” (252). Works by Ilona Leki, Dana Ferris, and Ann Johns added insight into ESL students, while Adrienne Rich’s “Teaching Language in Open Admissions” spoke to the needs of first-generation students (253). The authors drew from Susan Naomi Bernstein’s Teaching Developmental Writing in the first year; readings on the politics of remediation came from Mary Soliday and Patrick Finn ((253).

The program emphasized course design beyond the bare introduction offered in the graduate practicum. Themed courses using “an integrated reading and writing model” involved “vocabulary acquisition, close reading, summary, explicit instruction, and discussion” (254). Jensen and Ely stress the importance of “writ[ing] with our students” and choosing texts, often narratives rather than non-fiction, based on the need to engage their particular population (255).

Another important component was the shared grading process that allowed both the authors and the graduate students to discuss and reflect on the outcomes and priorities for community-college education (255). The authors “eschew[ed] skill and drill pedagogy,” focusing on “grammar in the context of writing increasingly complex summaries and responses” (255). Though they state that the time commitment in such sessions makes them impractical “on a regular basis,” they value them as “an intense relational experience” (255).

Throughout, the authors emphasize that working with the graduate students to refine pedagogy for the community college allowed them to reflect on and develop their own theoretical understanding and teaching processes (254, 255).

The graduate students participated in interviews in which they articulated a positive response to the program (256). The authors report that while the four students in their first two years constitute too small a sample for generalization, the program contributed to success in finding full-time employment (257).

Jensen and Ely conclude that the current structure of higher education and the low regard for teaching make it unlikely that programs like theirs will be easy to establish and maintain. Yet, they note, the knowledge and professional development that will enable community-college teachers to meet the demands forced on them by the “persistence and completion” agenda can only come from adequately supported programs that offer

a serious and needed reform for the gross lack of training that universities provide to graduate students, many of whom will go on to become community college instructors. 257


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Scott, Tony. “Unseeing” political economies in composition. CCC, Sept. 2016. Posted 10/27/2016.

Scott, Tony. “Subverting Crisis in the Political Economy of Composition.” College Composition and Communication 68.1 (2016): 10-37. Print.

In a special issue of College Composition and Communication on the impact of economics on writing education, Tony Scott examines the impact on composition studies of a disconnect between scholarship and practice. Scott argues that this disconnect has its roots in the prevalence in the current culture of “neoliberalism,” a mindset in which economic forces promote a permanent climate of fear and crisis. This climate relies on fear to facilitate the privatization of areas of daily life that were once part of the social and political domain.

To understand how norms of fear and crisis influence writing education, Scott recommends the use of “political economics study” (12). This methodology “examine[s] dynamic relationships between political processes, institutions, work, affordances, and everyday assumptions, relations, and behaviors” (12). It seeks to understand “how particulars relate to whole ecologies” (12).

As an illustration of how political economics influences relations between the particular and the whole, Scott adopts the metaphor of “unseeing” from China Mieville’s novel The City and the City, which depicts two populations living in immediate proximity to each other without “seeing” each other and recognizing the differences that define them (11). In Scott’s view, scholarship in composition “unsee[s]” the material conditions on which it depends and with which it co-exists (29).

Scott cites sociologist William Davies, for whom neoliberalism functions through “the pursuit of disenchantment of politics by economics” (15; emphasis original). This disenchantment takes the form of “direct, government-facilitated, private sector intervention into public services and social domains” (13). In such an economic environment, “market logics” and the view that markets can recognize and facilitate the most effective measures in all areas of daily life become the norm (14). Scott cites composition scholarship dating back to arguments by John Trimbur in 1991 that writing education risks succumbing to privatization because of factors like its reliance on powerless contingent labor and the size of the market it offers to for-profit enterprise (14).

According to Scott, neoliberalism promotes crisis in order to suggest that only the technocratic expertise of market experts and economists can re-establish stability. He contrasts the “classically modern model” of economic cycles, in which periods of stability rotate with downturns that will be corrected through innovation and critique (27), with neoliberalism’s need for a “perpetual” sense of “competitive uncertainty” in which “precarity” imposed by the elimination of various social support systems guarantees that individuals will see themselves as isolated, beset, and in need of a competitive edge, especially in monetary terms (28).

In this view, the resulting constant call for austerity attenuates social structures while empowering technocrats who argue that market forces are best positioned to control crises (28). An overall effect, Scott contends, is that neoliberal solutions to crisis supersede “more fundamental critique and change” that might challenge “status quo free market capitalism” (28).

Scott contends that composition studies has accepted the pervasiveness of crisis, citing its prominence in recent conference agendas, for example, the theme of “Risk and Reward” at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication. Scott argues, however, that such agendas provide “no explicit identification of what people fear or why” (20; emphasis original). Crisis begins to look like “its own exigency” (20).

Through an examination of arguments by scholars like Bruce Horner and Elizabeth Wardle, Scott locates the power of this mindset in debates about the role and value of disciplinarity. In his 1991 discussion, Trimbur worried that professionalization and academic status would lead compositionists to become “deeply implicated in the reward system, division of labor, and meritocratic order that have privatized literacy” (qtd. in Scott 13). Scott sees Trimbur’s concern borne out in the ongoing “exchange value” of publication and research (19). In Scott’s view, this meritocratic impulse has increasingly led to the isolation and disempowerment of scholars and experts in writing education, whose authority, Scott maintains, threatens the incursion of private forces into public domains (21). Although graduate students continue to receive the “official” curriculum that promotes ideas, theory, and theory-driven research, this work constructs scholars as “self-entrepreneurs” (18) at the same time that, in Horner’s words, they are

increasingly losing control over the means to the production of knowledge—now accomplished in ‘partnership’ with business and industry—and its circulation, in publications and in teaching” (qtd. in Scott 21).

Scott argues that graduate students simultaneously receive an “‘unofficial’ education” as they experience teaching as TAs and contingent faculty (18-19). The importance of this distinction, for Scott, is that the scholarship that provides exchange value in composition does not “see” the material landscape in which teaching actually occurs. This dissociation leaves the everyday practice of teaching open to the introduction of more and more commercial influence as technocratic ways of providing and measuring learning, for example through competency-based assessment, steadily remove teachers from the learning equation (17).

Scott’s premise is that scholarly conversations about the direction of composition often do not recognize how the material circumstances in which the scholarly ideas must be enacted are not configured to accommodate those ideas. For example, while characterizing Byron Hawk’s proposal that composition studies should “recover vitalism” in order to create “new ways of seeing invention and pedagogy,” Scott expresses concern that Hawk’s “study makes almost no mention of composition’s institutional contexts or terms of labor” (23).

Similarly, he sees in Sidney I. Dobrin’s proposal that writing studies divest itself of responsibility for pedagogy a path toward irrelevance. Scott contends that composition’s connection to pedagogy provides the support apparatus for research like Dobrin’s, which, without grounding in a realistic view of political economy, would appeal only to “a small, cloistered realm of rhetorical scholars” (24). Scott cites Wardle to point out that composition further endangers its authority through the use of non-credentialed teachers like graduate students, suggesting to policy makers that expertise is not needed to teach writing (21, 22).

Thus, Scott argues, composition scholars seem preoccupied with the crisis embodied by austerity and precarity but have not adequately come to grips with what is happening in classrooms as market forces take over teaching.

Composition does need disruptive new ideas, and those ideas can be fundamentally transforming when they engage composition work at the ground-level economies where it is actually being performed. (29)

Scott recommends more research on the effects of commercial software like plagiarism-detection programs and attention to the outsourcing attendant on increasing globalization, but he also advocates the development of pedagogies that unite teachers and scholars not only in promoting innovative ideas but also in implementing “the just, ethical work and learning environments that would need to be in place for them to be realized” (33).


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Obermark et al. New TA Development Model. WPA, Fall 2015. Posted 02/08/2016.

Obermark, Lauren, Elizabeth Brewer, and Kay Halasek. “Moving from the One and Done to a Culture of Collaboration: Revising Professional Development for TAs.” Journal of the Council of Writing Program Administrators 39.1 (2015): 32-53. Print.

Lauren Obermark, Elizabeth Brewer, and Kay Halasek detail a professional development model for graduate teaching assistants (TAs) that was established at their institution to better meet the needs of both beginning and continuing TAs. Their model responded to the call from E. Shelley Reid, Heidi Estrem, and Marcia Belcheir to “[g]o gather data—not just impressions—from your own TAs” in order to understand and foreground local conditions (qtd. in Obermark et al. 33).

To examine and revise their professional development process beginning in 2011 and continuing through 2013, Obermark et al. conducted a survey of current TAs, held focus groups, and surveyed “alumni” TAs to determine TAs’ needs and their reactions to the support provided by the program (35-36).

An exigency for Obermark et al. was the tendency they found in the literature to concentrate TA training on the first semester of teaching. They cite Beth Brunk-Chavez to note that this tendency gives short shrift to the continuing concerns and professional growth of TAs as they advance from their early experiences in first-year writing to more complex teaching assignments (33). As a result of their research, Obermark et al. advocate for professional development that is “collaborative,” “ongoing,” and “distributed across departmental and institutional locations” (34).

The TA program in place at the authors’ institution prior to the assessment included a week-long orientation, a semester’s teaching practicum, a WPA class observation, and a syllabus built around a required textbook (34). After their first-year, TAs were able to move on to other classes, particularly the advanced writing class, which fulfills a general education requirement across the university and is expected to provide a more challenging writing experience, including a “scaffolded research project” (35). Obermark et al. found that while students with broader teaching backgrounds were often comfortable with designing their own syllabus to meet more complex pedagogical requirements, many TAs who had moved from the well-supported first-year course to the second wished for more guidance than they had received (35).

Consulting further scholarship by Estrem and Reid led Obermark et al. to act on “a common error” in professional development: failing to conduct a “needs assessment” by directly asking questions designed to determine, in the words of Kathleen Blake Yancey, “the characteristics of the TAs for whom the program is designed” (qtd. in Obermark et al. 36-37). The use of interview methodology through focus groups not only instilled a collaborative ethos, it also permitted the authors to plan “developmentally appropriate PD” and provided TAs with what the authors see as a rare opportunity to reflect on their experiences as teachers. Obermark et al. stress that this fresh focus on what Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher call a “participatory model of research” (37) allowed the researchers to demonstrate their perceptions of the TAs as professional colleagues, leading the TAs themselves “to identify more readily as professionals” (37).

TAs’ sense of themselves as professionals was further strengthened by the provision of “ongoing” support to move beyond what Obermark et al. call “the one and done” model (39). Through the university teaching center, they encountered Jody Nyquist and Jo Sprague’s theory of three stages of TA development: “senior learners” who “still identify strongly with students”; “colleagues in training” who have begun to recognize themselves as teachers; and “junior colleagues” who have assimilated their professional identities to the point that they “may lack only the formal credentials” (qtd. in Obermark et al. 39). Obermark et al. note that their surveys revealed, as Nyquist and Sprague predicted, that their population comprised TAs at all three levels as they moved through these stages at different rates (39-40).

The researchers learned that even experienced TAs still often had what might have been considered basic questions about the goals of the more advanced course and how to integrate the writing process into the course’s general education outcomes (40). The research revealed that as TAs moved past what Nyquist and Sprague denoted the “survival” mode that tends to characterize a first year of teaching, they began to recognize the value of composition theory and became more invested in applying theory to their teaching (39). That 75% of the alumni surveyed were teaching writing in their institutions regardless of their actual departmental positions reinforced the researchers’ certainty and the TAs’ awareness that composition theory and practice would be central to their ongoing academic careers (40).

Refinements included a more extensive schedule of optional workshops and a “peer-to-peer” program that responded to TA requests for more opportunities to observe and interact with each other. Participating TAs received guidance on effective observation processes and feedback; subsequent expansion of this program offered TAs opportunities to share designing assigning assignments and grading as well (42).

The final component of the new professional-development model focused on expanding the process of TA support across both the English department and the wider university. Obermark et al. indicate that many of the concerns expressed by TAs addressed not just teaching writing with a composition-studies emphasis but also teaching more broadly in areas that “did not fall neatly under our domain as WPAs and specialists in rhetoric and composition” (43). For example, TAs asked for more guidance in working with students’ varied learning styles and, in particular, in meeting the requirement for “social diversity” expressed in the general-education outcomes for the more advance course (44). Some alumni TAs reported wishing for more help teaching in other areas within English, such as in literature courses (45).

The authors designed programs featuring faculty and specialists in different pedagogical areas, such as diversity, as well as workshops and break-outs in which TAs could explore kinds of teaching that would apply across the many different environments in which they found themselves as professionals (45). Obermark et al. note especially the relationship they established with the university teaching center, a collaboration that allowed them to integrate expertise in composition with other philosophies of teaching and that provided “allies in both collecting data and administering workshops for which we needed additional expertise” (45). Two other specific benefits from this partnership were the enhanced “institutional memory” that resulted from inclusion of a wider range of faculty and staff and increased sustainability for the program as a larger university population became invested in the effort (45-46).

Obermark et al. provide their surveys and focus-group questions, urging other WPAs to engage TAs in their own development and to relate to them “as colleagues in the field rather than novices in need of training, inoculation, or the one and done approach” (47).