Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Teaching experience: New writing instructors in a college program
Abstract
This participant-observation study traces the ways in which six new Teaching Assistants in a one-semester teacher preparation program came to view and enact their roles as teachers and writers. As they attempted to determine, in a new context, what counted as writing and what experience was relevant, they identified some points of tension that they tried, over the course of the semester, to resolve. In effect, they reproduced some of the dichotomies prevalent within English studies, particularly within the discipline of composition. These included oppositions between general and local knowledge, between individual authenticity and social efficacy, between "soft" stories of experience and "hard" academic analysis, between validation and critique of experience, between writing as job skill and writing as liberal art, between public and private writing, and between poetic and rhetoric. After sketching the context of the discipline, university, department, writing program, and teacher preparation program, this ethnographic account looks closely at how each TA drew on background experience, observed the new context, tried out new teaching and writing practices, connected theory with practice, and dealt with points of tension that each found particularly troubling. The study reaffirms the importance of experience and reflection on experience for critically conscious teachers of writing. It also suggests that a teacher preparation/writing program that emphasizes experience and practice (as writers and teachers) must take into account the widely varying experiences of graduate student-teachers, help them place these experiences into a theoretical and political context, and emphasize negotiation and dialogue rather than conversion or choice between opposed poles. The TAs in this study were not initiated or converted into their roles as writing teachers; but rather they negotiated and invented these roles in an active process. With varying degrees of success, they dealt with gaps and contradictions between discourses they had accepted as authoritative in the past, and the new discourses they encountered in graduate study and the writing program.
Subject Area
Language|Teacher education|Language arts
Recommended Citation
Boardman, Kathleen Ann, "Teaching experience: New writing instructors in a college program" (1992). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9233393.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9233393