Antonio Byrd and Virginia M. Schwarz

PhD-granting programs at Research 1 institutions play a central role in training graduate students in the disciplinary knowledge that defines rhetoric and composition’s identity. [1] These programs certify who goes on to create and disseminate knowledge to the next generation of scholars. There are many important factors that differentiate Research 1 programs from one another, particularly in terms of region and program emphasis, but they have been shaped by a shared mission to prepare their graduates for conducting research at R1 institutions (Reznizki 208). However, we know the reality of the current job market: many R1 graduates will find jobs at other kinds of institutions, including community colleges, Hispanic-serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal colleges, liberal arts colleges, technical colleges, and public or private Research II institutions. These institutions do not prioritize research at the same level as R1 institutions and carry, at the least, a workload of 40% teaching. Consequently, graduates of R1s may not be prepared to teach their future students at these institutions. Two-year college scholars in rhetoric and composition have been making this argument for a long time. In Occupy Writing Studies: Rethinking College Composition for the Needs of the Teaching Majority, Holly Hassel and Joanne Giordino describe the difficulties that new faculty face teaching students at open-access institutions.

While the focus in scholarship is typically undergraduate students, these issues resonate with us as early-career [2] faculty who felt underprepared to teach graduate students. At an R1 institution, we had trained for careers teaching future generations of graduate students to become elite scholars, but our job market journeys landed us at two R2 institutions (Antonio’s institution would later achieve R1 status in spring 2025) where creative writing, literature, TESOL, and other areas related to English Studies dominate the graduate programs over composition and rhetoric. These contexts forced us to adjust our expectations and shift our mindsets away from training scholars in the discipline to training future technical writers, community college teachers, authors, and marketers. For us, this became a period of unlearning graduate education that has been difficult and is still ongoing.

In this article, we share our approach to horizontal mentorship and dialogic reflection, and collaborative reflection strategies that helped us not only unlearn but also reimagine graduate education for our new teaching contexts and students. These methods involve two layers of reflection: 1) reflecting on a course while teaching the course and 2) reflecting on the reflection months later. We describe the discoveries that these conversational methods enabled us to make as new faculty, especially in terms of challenging the default teaching practices we inherited from our own PhD experiences at an R1 and the values those practices represent. The results of our approach identify the instructional influences that didn’t serve our R2 students and identify new practices that are more aligned with our changing goals and values. Conducting reflections before, during, and after our courses designs as horizontal mentors helped us identify the shifts needed to better teach graduate students across English Studies in introductory composition pedagogy seminars. We believe these discoveries would not have been possible had we planned our courses in isolation.

In this article, we also discuss our institutional contexts and the structure of our respective graduate programs. Then we review literature on horizontal mentorship and dialogic reflection to show their potential value. We next describe the affordances of and revelations that emerged from engaging in these mentoring practices, focusing on specific instructional influences and rhetorical strategies for inventing composition pedagogy seminars that adjust to students’ needs. While we were critical of eliding marginalized scholarship in our curricula, we often repeated our own R1 education in our assumptions about who our students were, where they were going, and what they needed. After making these discoveries, we redirected our efforts further away from these learning goals, embracing a low-stakes activity that centered and learning in public. We hope our small case study will inspire newly minted PhDs embarking on academic paths outside of R1s to critically reflect on their own socialization and create strategic mentoring experiences for themselves.

The Problem: Unprepared for Our Institutional Contexts

Composition scholars and teachers strategize how to welcome graduate students into the discipline and prepare them for tenure-track life even as the cultural, social, and political context of academic training constantly shifts (Ives and Spitzer; Cicchi 87; Eble and Gaillet 4; Lauer 229–230). However, some graduate programs may only be preparing their graduate students for a career in academia, regardless of students’ intentions for graduate study and the dwindling number of tenure track jobs that pay a living wage. For those R1 graduate students who do stay in academia, many will not find or want jobs in institutions such as those where they graduated. Many MA and PhD students and especially MFA degree holders, will go on to teach in two-year colleges (Hassell and Phillips). Hassel and Phillips argue that “most doctoral programs are preparing students for a career in the academy” when we should focus on “investing our time and energy into preparing graduate students to be teaching-focused faculty with as much as if not more commitment than we do research faculty” (Hassel and Phillips 17). Graduate students may also apply to non-tenure track jobs, with seventy percent of faculty across disciplines being contingent (Colby). Sometimes, these are viable jobs and the best fit for a person needing job security, benefits, and retirement packages. Finally, many English graduate students build successful careers outside of academia in private industry or in nonprofit organizations.

Antonio, who graduated in 2019, teaches at the University of Missouri Kansas City , where the English Department offers Master of Arts, Master of Fine Arts, and PhD in Humanities degrees, but most graduate students study creative writing, literary studies, or digital humanities. There is no formal curriculum in composition and rhetoric at the graduate level, but students can take a few courses taught by two composition specialists and receive direct mentorship to build their expertise. However, graduate students rarely intend to study composition and rhetoric. Intellectual investment in composition pedagogy from graduate students during their first semester is not a given, and students may express reservations about how well they understand the discipline. However, graduate teaching assistants benefit from taking a composition pedagogy seminar course in their first semester of teaching as it pairs scholarship, history, and theory with the practical topics of required practicum meetings. However, other masters students take the course; some have no teaching experience and others are uncertain if they wish to live as professional writers who also teach college composition. Graduating masters students leverage their research and writing skills as industry professionals in publishing, marketing, healthcare, technical writing, or, in some cases, pursue doctoral studies out of state.

Virginia,who graduated in 2020, teaches at San Francisco State University, a Hispanic-serving Institution (HSI) and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI). The English department does not offer any PhDs but has MA degrees in composition, linguistics, literature, and TESOL, along with certificates in computational linguistics, immigrant literacies, teaching composition, and teaching post-secondary reading. Students enrolled in the composition MA must take Virginia’s introductory course as part of the curriculum, but graduate students across English studies or from other disciplines such as creative writing, education, or ethnic studies may opt into the course as an elective or to receive the teaching of composition certificate. Additionally, any graduate student who applies to teach first-year writing as a teaching assistant must complete this course. Similar to Antonio’s programmatic context, this curricular location means that the class embodies a range of student interests, goals, prior experiences, and demographic backgrounds. For example, in a typical section, students of color are the numerical majority, and many students identify as first-generation, returning students or working students. Students range from ages 24-64. Graduates of the MA or certificate programs often find jobs in community colleges as teachers, writing tutors, and administrators. However, many also find work as industry professionals. Like Antonio, Virginia serves a variety of graduate students and attempts to balance different student needs.

For faculty who have never taught graduate courses before, designing a course for a range of student groups can be a challenge. For example, graduate students across English Studies typically encounter rhetoric and composition for the first time, and their introduction may not extend beyond that semester. We did not account for the reality that our course might be a one-stop shop for the majority of the class. Additionally, the introductory seminar itself may serve dual roles: (1) teaching students historical and contemporary theories, teaching practices, and issues that animate composition and rhetoric and (2) supplementing or replacing practicums in teaching first-year writing. Getting graduate students across English Studies up-to-speed on current practices in teaching writing in order to meet the demands of large first-year composition programs can be a heavy lift for composition faculty. Additionally, the job market for all English graduate students is more complicated than the pipeline into academia we experienced, with many institutions investing in non-tenure track positions (Phillips). Therefore, curricula in this mixed-audience introductory course need to be responsive to the quickly-shifting realities of class membership and their reasons for enrollment. During the fall 2021 semester, our horizontal mentor meetings compelled us to slow down and consider the complexity of supporting students across English Studies.

Horizontal Mentorship and Dialogic Reflection as Method

To respond to these concerns, we practiced horizontal mentorship during the design of our courses and utilized dialogic reflections while teaching those designs. Before going into more detail about the content of these meetings, we first identify key interdisciplinary scholarship that suggests the benefits of horizontal mentorship and dialogic reflection for early career faculty. Mentorship among faculty, graduate students, and writing program administrators has been well studied in rhetoric and composition, although relatively recently (Eble and Gaillet 4). Often, mentorship fulfills practical goals such as helping junior faculty and graduate teaching assistants find footing in their professional identities and conceptualize how to navigate institutional politics. Some formal mentorships still follow patriarchal culture with a master/ apprentice model; however, feminist and critical race critics argue that this dynamic does not allow for authentic critiques of institutions, especially for marginalized teachers. Scholars of color may find that a “white middle-class mentoring model” will have “little to no culturally relevant guidance on how to succeed in graduate school or on tenure track” (Ribero and Arellano 335).

Scholars in composition and rhetoric have called for a feminist approach to mentorship instead. For example, Pamela VanHaitsma and Steph Ceraso advocate for informal horizontal mentorship, which eschews traditional vertical top-down mentorship between senior faculty and junior faculty. This mutual partnership occurs between faculty in the same professional positions and social identities: graduate student, adjunct faculty, or, like us, tenure-track (VanHaitsma and Ceraso 211). Ana Milena Ribero and Sonia C. Arellano likewise argue for and demonstrate comadrismo. This model “[builds] upon a trusting kinship relationship and functions among women with deep commitments to anti-racist work” (336). These mentorship models complement, not replace, official mentorship for early-career faculty. By removing the power dynamics of formal mentorship models, colleagues can have frank conversations about their teaching, research, and service, and their relationships with the department, university, and other colleagues. Horizontal mentorship, then, allows faculty to name and critique social inequalities felt at the intersections of their marginalized positions (VanHaitsma and Ceraso 214), and for marginalized scholars in particular, intersectional identities are “key to building mentoring relationships” (Ribero and Arellano 340). Both example models show the necessity of creating space for critiquing institutions and power dynamics with other colleagues and administrators. Horizontal relationships are simultaneously productive and healing to early-career faculty, and those faculty living out multiple intersectional identities that go unrecognized in white-majority departments.

The sample models above focus on how marginalized identities and professional status impact retention of graduate students and early-career faculty. But we also envision how horizontal mentorship covers a wide range of experiences for early-career faculty not necessarily tied to social identity. Without eliding the very real impact of bias, racism, and sexism on our colleagues, we note how horizontal mentorship helped us frame our shared experiences and resources as critical knowledge-making while designing our individual graduate courses. As we show in the analysis below, we were aware of power dynamics in our graduate education, within our respective departments, between us and graduate students, and within the discipline’s infrastructural scholarship, which may prioritize white male knowledge over Black and Indigenous knowledge. We attempted to critique and then re-invent these dynamics through our course designs. Horizontal mentorship and dialogic reflection revealed these efforts to us and allowed us to create new versions of our composition pedagogy courses.

Since we assisted one another in designing and teaching courses, our specific practices also draw from collaborative co-mentoring. M. Amanda Moulder and Sophie Bell explore this model of mentorship for first-year writing instructors. Their target audience for faculty collaboration highlights motivations for our own mentorship approach: experienced teachers “would benefit from continued collaboration to help reduce the isolation that so often hinders ongoing faculty growth and development. Furthermore, continued collaboration between experienced colleagues can bring faculty together across intellectual divides, create curricular coherence, and sustain reflective pedagogical practices” (Moulder and Bell 13). To build a productive and open relationship among peers, horizontal mentorship involves reflection about pedagogical practices and content knowledge. Dialogic reflection and teacher talk are useful tools for professional development in teacher education (Alford and Jensen; Saunders et al.; Rust; Cohen). Neville Hatton and David Smith explain that when teachers do dialogic reflection, they step back “from the events / actions leading to a different level of mulling about, discourse with self and exploring the experience, events, and actions using qualities of judgements and possible alternatives for explaining and hypothesizing” (48). Analysis of experience and events uncover “inconsistencies in attempting to provide rationales and critique” (Hatton and Smith 49). In examining dialogic reflection among writing center tutors, Mark Hall discovers that dialogic reflection promotes deep thinking about theory and practice as well as reveals “the values, assumptions, and beliefs which govern [teaching] practice” (Hall 84). This reflection assesses how well one has achieved one’s teaching goals after the lesson ends; it then allows the teacher to outline revised goals and approaches for the following class meetings. Dialogues with other teaching faculty, however, can enhance this reflection, as we demonstrate below.

Horizontal mentorship is not meant to supplant other forms of senior mentorship, which some early-career faculty are fortunate to receive. For example, a relationship with a peer at another university may not bring the vast institutional knowledge that senior faculty members can share with their early-career mentee. Understanding the ideologies and actions behind funding, relationships among other faculty, buy-in or lack thereof into certain programs, and other areas can help early-career faculty better navigate their institutions. Horizontal mentorship, then, works well within contexts where early-career faculty have significant decision-making freedom and space to process those decisions.

Composition and rhetoric has used reflection as a key pedagogical tool for student writers since at least the 1970s during the process movement. Kathleen Yancey notes that the discipline has gone through three generations of scholarship, from reflection as a cognitive practice to reflection for classroom practice and assessment, to the current generation. This third generation critiques and revises ideas from the previous moments with “appreciation of reflection in the higher-education community” (Yancey 9). Yancey writes:

Through the practice of reflection, we draw on what is culturally known and infuse, interweave, integrate it with what we as individuals know—cognitively, affectively, and socially—to make a new knowledge that draws from the extant but is not a replication of it, that is, instead, unique, a knowledge only each one of us can make as it is in dialogue with what is. Not least, that new knowledge, collectively enacted, changes the very cultures situating reflective practice. (11)

Although often framed as a tool for helping students learn writing and develop their writerly agency, reflection also benefits faculty. In the same collection edited by Yancey, Pamela Flash finds that WAC faculty’s group reflection about writing instruction can help them rethink their approach to curriculum design; they can remove unproductive pedagogical practices and reveal new approaches to addressing students’ questions about writing (231). In addition, composition and rhetoric has examined what reflection reveals about a new graduate teaching assistant’s understanding of writing pedagogy (Estrem and Reid 462–63).

In this article, we highlight dialogic reflection as an important tool deliberately used by faculty negotiating their R1 training within the context of programs and students of other institutions. By necessity and professional experience, we think through the shift to R2 institutions, although this practice applies to other types of institutional transitions. We submit dialogic reflection as a significant activity for pedagogical adaptability, “adapt[ing] teaching strategies to local student communities and working conditions” (Giordano et al. 8). Flexible approaches include responding to the individual needs of students, changing approaches to teaching, developing an ethical, flexible, and responsive understanding of how to design courses, employing a realistic approach to assessing student learning, and identifying and evaluating relevant disciplinary scholarship (Giordano et al. 9). We argue that dialogic reflection can be one tool to help new faculty close the gap between prior training and their experiences within their current local communities.

To conclude this section, we share our process for dialogic reflection and horizontal mentorship. In summer 2021, Virginia prepared to teach her graduate course a second time, and Antonio created his course for the first time. Virginia wanted to redesign her course from the ground up, sensing that her assignments and projects were one-off activities that felt disconnected from each other. Meanwhile, Antonio considered how his course could take on a critical orientation to the discipline by introducing scholarship from the voices of marginalized scholars and demonstrating that teaching writing is a political and cultural battleground. We had “analogous goals and work habits” and were “willing to make a real commitment” to each other. Thus, we were indeed the “right mentor[s]” for navigating new course designs (VanHaitsma and Ceraso 215). Our alliance also mitigated the isolation that so many early career faculty feel when navigating new course preps, new departments and institutional politics, and new students. In a supportive online and, months later, in-person, environment we cultivated a space of inspiration, knowledge sharing, and critique.

Between June and August 2021, we met six times on Zoom for 60-minute planning sessions. We recorded both audio and video of our conversations using Panopto, a platform for creating, hosting, and sharing videos. Zoom recordings were automatically uploaded to Panopto and auto-captioned. During these planning sessions, we discussed our respective processes for building our versions of the composition seminar within our R2 institutional contexts. We did not create any predetermined guiding questions, and we did not follow a consistent set structure. Joining together without a protocol allowed us to be nimble, flexible, and responsive to the messiness of course design. Conversations included uploading resources such as readings, syllabi, and social media posts on teaching and writing to a shared Google folder. In the fall, we added two more meetings in September and November to participate in dialogic reflection on how our courses were going. Similar to our planning sessions, these were unstructured conversations exploring common and diverging topics, from assessment to reading education for graduate students. In preparation for writing this article, we reviewed the transcripts of our conversations over 2022 and 2023 and held additional conversations about our experiential knowledge.

We demonstrate the affordances of following this process based on analysis of transcripts of our course planning and of our dialogic reflections about the courses we implemented. Analysis of these dialogic reflections was in itself another layer of dialogic reflection. While we had the opportunity to understand our course design in the moment, listening to the recordings a year later allowed us to engage in further metacognition. We suggest that dialogic reflection does not conclude after the course ends; if recorded using notes and/or audio/video, peer mentors can make further conclusions about their course design months later; this can allow them to reflect on the reflection to jumpstart the next iteration of their course.

First, we describe the instructional influences that came out of our conversations and helped us adopt ideas from each other to design a course. Second, we highlight the rhetorical strategies we used in designing our courses. The second round of dialogic reflection – our analysis or reflection of the reflection – revealed to us that while some rhetorical strategies for teaching graduate students honored our commitment to citation justice, others stubbornly upheld our tendency to professionalize and socialize students from across English Studies into our discipline. Readers will bear witness to two early career faculty pausing to take stock of what their pedagogical choices mean in the grander scheme of professionalizing graduate students in composition and rhetoric. We capture a moment in our careers not often described in scholarship: a journey not always examined in the teaching of new institutional contexts.

Instructional Influences of Horizontal Mentorship and Dialogic Reflections

Our simultaneous use of horizontal mentorship and dialogic reflection led us through a process of discovering new emerging priorities that we, in retrospect, may not have encountered working individually. The initial impetus for meeting over the summer of 2021 was to help each other design a composition pedagogy graduate seminar that focused on social justice; we wanted to introduce a critical orientation for graduate students new to the discipline; this was a complicated and dynamic mission to achieve in 16 weeks given the significant range of scholarship that demands Writing Studies do better. In analyzing our transcripts, we learned that social justice includes valuing the people in the room and being responsive to our contexts.

Throughout meetings, we often invented versions of the graduate students we would encounter in our classrooms and then interrogated those assumptions and planned how they could be integrated into our course design. For example, as our class rosters filled up, we both noted that graduate students came from across different areas of English Studies. Virginia considered the implications of this diversity as a positive, not necessarily a challenge. She explained in our conversation that it is “important that we do bridge building to make sure that they feel welcome, and they feel like they can belong, and that their expertise can lend something and offer something to rhetoric and composition.” She noted two specific disciplinary practices that seemed relevant and useful to writing courses: (1) creative writing’s approach to peer review and in-depth discussion about craft and (2) literary studies’ commitment to critical reading. “Those perspectives are so useful,” Virginia noted, “especially since we’re in this unique place where we’re all in the same room talking about a writing class… so I’m just imagining [that this can be a] good moment to make sure that people feel like the field of rhetoric and composition values their expertise.”

Antonio agreed, recalling the early days of his institution’s roll out of the new Writing about Writing (WAW) curriculum in fall 2020. That semester two creative writing faculty had to step in and help teach first-year research methods, the second sequence of the First-Year Writing program. They approached Antonio as a resource to help them conceptualize the course given that he had taught it the previous summer. His colleagues had not taught composition in years, so the curriculum was newer to them, especially given that they could not include literature, and they were only beginning to understand the WAW framework. Antonio assured them that their expertise in creative writing was the way to enter the new curriculum. “In that conversation,” Antonio explains, “that was one of the things that I actually had to bring up, first and foremost, is that your work as a creative writing professor still built into that kind of work, because they are really thinking thoughtfully about how to write and how to really connect with their [students].” Antonio transferred this experience into his graduate seminar. Graduate students should come to his class not only learning about a new discipline, but also thinking about how their area of English might work within composition, crossing boundaries without upending the work of first year writing. Antonio copied Virginia’s idea to assign 1990s debates about the place of literature in first year writing and works that imagined how creative writing and composition could be productive partners. The in-class discussions became fertile ground for testing disciplinary boundaries and identifying places for collaboration.

We focus on graduate student perception as an example of instructional influence because this perception shaped our pedagogical choices. As we show below, these assumptions conflicted with our graduate training, creating an uneasy mix of respecting and honoring student difference, presenting a critical orientation of the discipline, and leaning into the professionalization of graduate school. Echoing prior research on horizontal mentorship, we found horizontal mentorship and dialogic reflection to be change-making tools for uncovering what our priorities were. From course design to implementation and post course-design, we began a process of discovery that allowed ideas to emerge. The conversation helped us decide that we didn’t have to go the route of our colleagues, which prioritizes composition and rhetoric over some students’ interests in creative writing and literature (Macauley et al. 6) while we learned to incorporate their varied disciplinary focuses and literacy experiences. Together dialogic reflections helped us identify themes that allowed us to understand the class differently.

We Are Not Superheroes: Doing Grad School Differently; Doing the Discipline the Same

In this section, we describe key themes from our recorded dialogical reflections: Resisting R1 Education, Humanizing and Inclusive Design, and Not Critical Enough. Our analysis reveals that we created different pedagogical practices that eased the harms of graduate education and undermined its orientation toward white supremacy. However, despite self-described critical orientations and equity-centered aspirations, our innovative potential was limited by a pre-scripted web of prior socialization in our R1 education. We follow each definition with examples from our teaching practice.

Resisting R1 Education

This theme acknowledges the benefits of doctoral training at R1 institutions while respectfully refusing to reproduce the philosophies and outcomes that reify power structures. As we began designing our courses, we identified two areas from our graduate education that we thought were not a good fit for our own graduate students: centering white scholarship and defining writing and research as an individual achievement.

First, centering white scholars’ research as the foundation for composition and rhetoric did not resonate with our graduate seminars’ learning goals. Graduate courses aren’t just training grounds for future scholars; they also operate as locations of citational acts that respond to what came before and set up what comes after. Reading lists on course syllabi show students a representation of contemporary discourses, knowledge, and movements that matter. Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq and Jordan Frith argue that “citational practices do infrastructural work and are a discursive base upon which entire disciplines… are built” (11). They posit that published scholarship operates as infrastructure and suggest that we can analyze the infrastructure of our citation practices for the when of their presence – how they benefit some groups over others – and are ultimately responsible for shaping the architecture of research. Itchuaqiyaq and Frith point out that technical communication, and we would argue in composition and rhetoric as well, are facing a moment of infrastructural breakdown in which multiply-marginalized scholars have critiqued exclusionary citation practices.

During our dialogic reflection sessions, we both recognized that the citational infrastructures of our graduate education were incomplete. For example, Antonio shared that he had significant anxiety about not knowing enough about the discipline going into his first semester of PhD Land. Antonio “read a bunch of white people on that prelims reading list” available on the composition program’s learning management system over the summer. That comment reminded Virginia of a moment from when she taught the composition pedagogy seminar for the first time in 2020: “I went off in my class. I was so angry and shaking talking about our prelims list. I was mad… I was like, ‘This is how canons operate.’ And then I pointed out how there were no two-year college scholars or teachers on that list.” We found that excluding the voices of the marginalized is unacceptable partly because that meant our own lived experiences were excluded from what counts as knowledge. Virginia was a first-generation college graduate who attended, and then later taught for, community colleges; Antonio was a Black queer person whose literacy history was largely built on reading white authors. Reflecting on their encounters with scholarship brought up a felt difficulty (Takayoshi et al. 99). These exclusionary practices inspired us to find ways to address these curricular omissions.

Second, we resisted framing research and writing as an individual achievement. Although in doctoral study, graduate students learn to join a research community, the coursework itself can perpetuate individual achievement: reading scholarship and writing seminar papers solo. We had a moment of resistance to this learning structure while taking a course on classical rhetoric in graduate school; the readings included theoretical ideas that we and members of our cohort found difficult to parse. We joined two other members of our cohort to share the labor of reading; each person would self-assign a text to read and summarize for everyone in a shared Google folder. Reading in community helped each person focus on one reading rather than trying to stretch themselves across four or five texts that they had only a surface-level understanding of. This team reading was reflective of being in a research community. If a book or an article on Google Scholar lists hundreds of citations from other authors, it suggests many are reading and interpreting the same piece. Looking back at that experience, Virginia thought, “I didn’t need much more fun than reading a bunch of crap solo.”

Humanizing and Inclusive Design

Humanizing and inclusive design means creating inclusive reading lists, humanizing graduate educational experiences, and moving beyond rhetoric and composition’s canon texts. We felt a responsibility to introduce students to a different version of composition and rhetoric, one that enacted critical orientations toward the discipline. The opening history week represents this effort well. In addition to framing the course this way, Virginia brought in one week of historical field debates early in the semester so that students could situate their own beliefs about writing in the context of previous disciplinary conversations. She included pieces by David Batholomae, Peter Elbow, Gary Tate, and Erika Lindemann. These debates were followed by counter-histories like Iris Ruiz’s Reclaiming Composition for Chicano/as and Other Ethnic Minorities: A Critical History and Pedagogy, Jacqueline Royster and Jean Williams’ History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies, and Scott Lyons’ Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?. While Antonio intended to highlight the history of the field from the perspective of some well-known white scholars included in their doctoral program’s 2011 prelims list (i.e. James Berlin or Robert J. Connor), he later discovered Iris Ruiz’ scholarship as well. Ruiz offers a conceptual counter-narrative to white histories of composition by demonstrating how other colleges across the nation attempted to adapt composition to the needs of Black and Brown students. This opening to Antonio’s class, like Virginia, was meant to demonstrate upfront that composition is fraught with political and cultural conflict, and that writing teachers feel the legacy of their disciplinary pasts in their own ideologies about writing.

Our ethical citation practices extended to disrupting traditional assignments and reading practices of graduate school. Antonio used the learning management system tool Hypothesis for collaborative social annotations, breaking the tendency to read in isolation between classes. Because his students would meet once a week, Antonio reasoned that students could read and respond to each other’s annotations before class, and they could jump in and out of the articles throughout the week but feel less pressure to finish reading the entire text. Antonio would have a frank conversation with his students about reading in graduate school. He shared Casey Boyle’s 2016 blog post on how to read texts more ethically. Boyle writes, “It’s not about coming to an exhaustive knowledge of what one has read but being able to choose a reading within a text one encounters. The key here is to equate reading with response. One cannot respond to everything in a text but one chooses a point of entry, an item or two to leverage a response.” Antonio agreed that reading should be an ethical pursuit, one in which the reader seeks to productively engage with their ideas, not merely read for completion.

Community and knowledge recognition were the main goals of these different approaches to reading. However, these reading practices risked focusing on knowledge from the texts that denied students’ own lived experiences and insights from other areas of English Studies. Thus, Antonio and Virginia structured class discussions and activities in a way that invited students’ views to bring their lived experiences (as teachers and otherwise) to the texts themselves. Most importantly, we asked students to think across boundaries of the discipline, pondering how one theory in Writing Studies applies to their area of study and vice versa. Debates over the place of literature and creative writing in first-year writing especially led to animated conversations among students. To reinforce community and lived experience, Authors 1 and 2 encouraged students to adopt ethical citation practices among themselves in their research projects and other assignments. Antonio explained, “It means that you have to pay more attention when you’re in the seminar.… So when I say cite your classmates, that means not only what they may write, like in discussion posts or whatever, but be paying attention to what they say during our seminars.” We viewed students as experts and were open to utilizing their interests in creative writing or literature to engage in composition pedagogy.

Critical orientations toward the discipline, and our own training, persisted from reading selections, approaches to reading, and drawing on learning as community-oriented rather than individual. These were efforts to “do” graduate education differently. However, our dialogic reflections also left us dismayed: As we reviewed our transcripts and discussed the execution of our course plans that Fall semester, we noticed that we had simply found new ways to repackage professionalization into rhetoric and composition.

Not Critical Enough

As new R2 faculty, we knew we needed to imagine new reading lists and curricula different from what we had experienced as graduate students. At the same time, revisiting our dialogic reflections revealed how deeply our R1 socialization ran. After listening to our conversations, we discovered that we adopted a mission of professionalization, meaning that while we changed the texts, we did not change how we used texts, nor did we question the larger purpose of our courses. Specifically, we repeated core assignments that emphasized the centrality of composition, research and publication, and teaching first-year writing. We failed to fully consider the lives and goals of students across English Studies. In this section, we detail what our dialogic reflections revealed: we were not critical enough. We still lapsed into the R1 professionalizing mission that prioritizes disciplinary fluency over other knowledge which prepares graduate students for specific academic careers. We recognize this mission in the following examples: (1) discussion questions, (2) course assignments, and (3) guest speakers.

Antonio laid out his professionalization mission on day one. He shared that his intent was for students “to get to know each other and then afterwards we’re going to read [‘An Open Letter to My Students’ by Kris Shaffer] and pair it with Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing” (NCTE). Antonio shared these readings with his graduate students and then asked them to reflect on the following: 1) what in the letter resonated with them as teachers, 2) what principles they felt strong in 3) what they needed to learn more about and 4) what they learned about teaching in general from the two documents. This was an intended path toward helping students developing a teaching philosophy. At the end of the course, students would revisit the statement on professional knowledge for teaching writing and note where they had improved or acquired some of the principles since the start of the semester. These questions would have the most impact for graduate teaching assistants in their current classrooms but hit differently, or not land at all, for non-teaching graduate students. In the transcript, Antonio announces a contradictory purpose for the open letter: It would be “a good way to get at what their initial thoughts are on their teaching philosophy and their relationship with their students because they’ll all be teaching by then, this is the first week of classes.” How might other students enter this conversation? The open letter may resonate with graduate students as students. Through conversations with Virginia, Antonio began to question the assumptions he was making about his students and whether he was serving them equally. There are better questions, perhaps, such as “what if a teacher had given you this open letter?” or “what insights might you learn about teaching, education, and being a student in higher education?” Such questions would steer away from professional teaching and ask students to think about relationality within the context of education, making their own experience a foundation for analyzing the practice of teaching itself without the pressure to apply it to teaching practice.

Furthermore, the class structure prioritized practices important to professional teaching. For teachers, Antonio asked, “What happened this week in your classroom? Triumphs, struggles, and cool teaching ideas?” For students, with overlapping relevance to graduate teaching assistants, “What teaching did you see in your class, online or in-person? Or share what you’ve learned from your classes, life, or work!” Antonio had designed the course around graduate teaching assistants first and then seemingly remembered that other students existed. Adding a question tailored to non-teaching students as an afterthought felt like, taking inspiration from disability studies, a retrofit, “highly temporary yet also relatively unimportant” (Dolmage 70). The question attunes students to a hierarchy of graduate teaching assistants being more important than non-graduate teaching assistants. The second question tries to close this hierarchy between graduate teaching assistants and non-teaching students. However, the question still signals the de-prioritization of non-graduate teaching assistants’ learning. The practice of retrofit suggests how to control a classroom space, and the space in students’ minds, to hide the inconvenience of having non-teaching assistants in the classroom. Antonio isolates non-graduate teaching assistants; their learning becomes an add-on into a course design that prioritizes teachers and their teaching practice.

Finally, Antonio used common writing genres in academia as a socializing tool. Similar to Virginia , Antonio assigned a semester-long conference presentation as the course culminating project. The motivation for the conference presentation was two-fold and grounded in professionalizing all graduate students into Writing Studies scholars. First, most of the students were fresh out of their bachelor’s degree or were returning to school for a master’s degree. “I assumed they were not familiar with conference presentations as a writing genre,” Antonio explained to Virginia, since “so many of my grad students had never done it before. So I remember one grad student in particular, she had a lot of questions about what this exactly looks like… So it was kind of training them and preparing them for an actual conference to actually go to.” Antonio repurposed Staci Perryman-Clark’s CFP for the 2022 Annual Convention of College Composition and Communication, “The Promises and Perils of Higher Education: Our Discipline’s Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Linguistic Justice.” Her call aligned with Antonio’s critical orientation toward the discipline. Antonio allowed collaborative panel proposals and individual proposals. This arrangement, Antonio thought, “reflects the experiences [of going to conferences], but the next proposal that comes out for whatever conference that they want to do in the future.” Students proposed 4000 character-proposals, as expected in the 2022 CFP, because it’s “good practice because you know conference proposals and panels are always different every year. So I think this would be useful.”

Like Antonio, Virginia chose professional conference presentations as the semester-long course project. During Virginia’s first year of teaching, prior to her collaboration with Antonio, Virginia had developed short one-off assignments that required little time and energy to complete, such as attending a webinar about teaching and then telling the class about it. Virginia was already privileging the teachers, especially composition teachers, in her design. The following year, working alongside Antonio, she wanted more meaningful course projects for students that required engagement with the field on a deeper level. Virginia adopted the conference assignment from Antonio, modeled from Staci Perryman-Clark’s 2022 CFP. This assignment consisted of drafting proposals, conducting library research, and designing end-of-semester presentations.

Though at the time, it felt radical to engage students in “real genres” rather than academic busy work, there were several ways the conference assignment reflected Virginia’s R1 biases and did not work well in an R2 context. This conference assignment only met the needs of graduate students who had a desire to teach writing, participate in the discipline, and present at national conferences. Virginia also assumed that everyone in the class already knew what a conference was, so she failed to explain the genre and show a variety of examples. These assumptions created what some students felt was a high-stakes, anxiety producing assignment. “A couple students cried,” Virginia shared, “because they were so stressed out about the thought of having to present at a conference that one student dropped the class. That they were presenting at an actual conference. Yeah I think I didn’t do a good job of saying this is not a real conference.” Conferencing as a professionalizing mechanism made students uncomfortable. On one hand, teachers might expect resistance or skepticism from students when we attempt something new. However, perhaps a national conference is not the most productive genre for graduate students in a beginning-level, introductory course. Virginia explains, “And so I think I didn’t take into account that some people have never been to any kind of conference before, and that can be really scary and intimidating. And after that I shared, for me, it took me seven years of going to academic conferences, before I felt comfortable presenting.” While graduates from the MA program do complete a capstone and present their work in a department-wide celebration, this type of conference typically comes at the end of their studies and relates to their area of study and expertise, not necessarily in teaching or in composition.

Virginia’s R1 training also animated her orientation towards and selection of guest speakers. This was another moment where she thought she was being critical and adapting to her new context: she wanted to move beyond academic articles and organizational statements to include “real voices” in the class and more human interaction. However, most of the speakers that Virginia invited talked about their composition teaching practices or their research on teaching composition. Even the speakers that she invited with impressive expertise in other disciplines talked about their work through the lens of designing undergraduate writing syllabi. She shares, “the reason why I like people visiting classes [is that] I’m trying to introduce students to, like, scholars in the field.” For Virginia, these speakers brought important nuances to class concepts and texts, but their presence also sent messages to graduate students about what it means to speak and write as a researcher and how to present and think about ideas. Virginia also wanted students to be well-connected to scholars in writing studies, which is important for R1 students who will potentially enter a small job market and then potentially stay in the field for a long time. However, the most valuable R2 connections are often local professionals and experts in areas across English studies. Virginia wanted this introductory course to help students secure jobs as academics and as compositionists, an R1 goal that was difficult to unlearn.

Doing Composition Instead of Being Composition(ists)

Looking back on our conversations and considering what we did in practice revealed that we are best positioned to present 50+ years of writing research as a resource for English Studies. We realized that we could have students reflect on the cultural and political issues regarding teaching writing while also pulling the most useful concepts from our field for their own areas of study. Presenting composition studies as a resource positions graduate students across English Studies as doing composition, not being composition(ists). For us, this was a significant paradigm shift that helped us work beyond our own Research 1 doctoral training to better serve the graduate students we currently work with. What do we mean by doing composition? For composition and rhetoric faculty in R2 institutions, this means most mentorship extends beyond apprenticeship; consequently, we needed to adapt our expertise to graduate students’ professional goals and lived experiences.

Leveraging our expertise in composition to serve other people and other disciplines may make some uncomfortable, especially in the context of recent movements to codify who we are and what we do as a discipline (Adler-Kassner et al. 2). It would be useful for teaching assistants to have disciplinary knowledge, but all graduate education is contextual. Thus, taking a resource position matters in some contexts but not others. Critical orientations must also consider the strategic application of “service.” In composition and rhetoric, we must be willing to support a range of students and their interests. At R2 institutions, we may teach and mentor outside our own experiences and must understand graduate education as rhetorical work.

What does doing composition look like from a mentor lens? In the second iteration of his course design, Antonio decided to broaden the definition of “teaching writing.” In his syllabus, Antonio explained that teaching writing cuts across different subdisciplines: literary studies, creative writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, and professional and technical communication. Each engaged in writing pedagogy of some kind, and all five of these areas (first year composition included) can draw on findings in composition and rhetoric to enhance their pedagogy. Doug Hesse argued a decade ago that creative writing and composition had more in common with each other than first thought. To solidify that “everyone is a writing teacher,” Antonio invited one guest speaker from creative writing, literary studies, and composition to visit his class to speak about how they taught writing. These guest speakers were not meant to professionalize or socialize students into any of these representative fields; the goal was to show teaching’s different dimensions and diverse approaches and philosophies. Students could take inspiration from these talks as they saw fit.

Another teaching innovation that came out of our double-layers of dialogic reflection was experimentation with digital gardens as a tool for doing composition. Digital gardens are “a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organized by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory—notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete—notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time” (Appleton). In our experience, we find that graduate education in Writing Studies prematurely pressures students to assert some level of expertise: such as developing seminar papers, conference presentations, and in some contexts, forms of digital scholarship that reveal the specter of fully formed thoughts. We know that the seminar paper was hastily put together and the conference presentation was equally hastily put together. But at the heart of these genres, writing is projecting the impression of complete thought. Digital gardens, however, rest between “chaos streams” of knowledge and “cultivated performance” in a space of “learning in public” (Appleton).

The digital garden removes presumed knowledge of graduate students from across English Studies and welcomes them to try out ideas as they learn composition theory, history, and practice. It’s a safer space that allows for half-baked ideas, exploratory notions, or evergreen arguments that could turn into more complete articles or conference presentations. Students new to the discipline can fail and be imperfect as they react and reflect on the course readings. They also can use the affordances of multimodality to draw on their own experiences and curiosities to share how they notice connections between their programs of study and composition. In this case, the readings become a jumping off point for further exploration. Through the digital garden, we ask students to engage with scholarship, but we also offer a supportive space for them to define that engagement for themselves.

Conclusion

Our experiences practicing horizontal mentorship and dialogical reflection represent one case study of professional support for early-career faculty. Nevertheless, we offer two implications for moving forward. First, our stories and reflections suggest that doctoral programs at R1 institutions should address careers at different kinds of colleges and universities. While the recent job market might heighten this imperative, faculty mentors could start the conversation about various career options early on, either as ad hoc mentor conversations or, ideally, built into a graduate seminar. Writing Studies has a range of scholarship that unpacks the labor of adjunct faculty and full-time faculty at open-access and teaching institutions, such as the Teaching English in the Two-Year College journal, Sixteen Teachers Teaching Two-Year College Perspectives, and Reaching All Writers: A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving College Writing Classrooms. Programs may also develop partnerships with two-year colleges, open-access institutions, and teaching institutions; testimonies from teachers at these institutions could encourage dialogue and ideation of the future job market for students. This idea would be inclusive of HBCUs, Tribal Colleges and Universities, liberal arts colleges, and technical schools. Finally, faculty can speak to students about their approach to mentorship: a kind of meta-conversation that illuminates to them why their mentor has chosen a particular approach. These moves would help R1 professors mentor across difference and prepare graduates for a range of students and contexts.

Second, for graduates entering new teaching contexts, developing an ongoing co-mentoring relationship with a colleague could be a way to understand our own socialization and imagine new practices. For example, pairing dialogic reflection with horizontal mentorship could create space for identifying unconscious decisions that we inherit from our own education. These decisions often reflect and reproduce values that misalign [3] with the intentions, goals, and purposes of the individual programs we land in as faculty. For example, our previous iterations of the composition pedagogy seminar weren’t terrible; students did get a contemporary glimpse into the discipline, while graduate teaching assistants could make connections between their pedagogy, their professional learning meetings, and the course. However, after taking stock of our values, the interests of our programs, and the makeup of our students, we found that we needed an alternative purpose for the class: using composition as a tool to support students’ positions in other areas of English and careers other than teaching. Even then, as we found through our ongoing conversations, breaking from those practices is hard work. In these moments, we continued to conceptualize all graduate students as teachers and writing scholars, highlighting gaps in our own knowledge and the need to develop a holistic view of students in future iterations of our courses. Radical–and ethical–teaching and liberation to us now means interrogating and critiquing ourselves in relation to what our students need.

Notes

[1] Our “dappling” in multiple research methods and lines of inquiry makes it difficult to define with certainty which would be accepted. For efforts to unify what we do and know as a discipline, read Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (Adler-Kassner et al.) and Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity (Rita Malenczyk et al.).

[2] We are using the term “early-career” to mean faculty who are beginning their first full-time job in a new context after completing a PhD program. We acknowledge that professionals in the discipline have various timelines and paths; for example, some return to graduate programs after years of teaching experience and may not necessarily identify as “early career” after the PhD.

[3] Notice that we write “misalign” rather than “undesirable” or “biased.” This signals the contextual nature of graduate training and what we carry with us after finishing such training: We recognize all too well that indeed a critical orientation is necessary for bigoted values and practices that go unobserved or unacknowledged in graduate programs, but there are also values that in practice are benign.