A. Nicole Pfannenstiel and Leonora Foels

Introduction

As instructors within graduate programs, we see students “struggle” with writing. In her work on graduate writing support, Sarnecka points out that when instructors don’t transparently discuss that writing is difficult students believe it should be easy. We are purposely using “struggle” in quotes. The “struggle” is often understood by students and faculty as imposter syndrome, and/or as underprepared students enrolling in graduate programs, and/or graduate program design lacking necessary transparency in skill and disposition growth to meet the needs of today’s learners existing within the current workforce. The context of learning has shifted; we argue that graduate education needs to fundamentally shift as well.

We have seen students understand the values of disciplines and subdisciplines. We have also seen students misunderstand their goals, assignment goals, audience goals, conference goals, and more as they develop and practice as writers. We have seen students misunderstand the role of feedback and peer review within writing cycles. We are approaching the support of graduate writers across disciplines from a constellation of pedagogies, that includes and centers Pedagogy of Vulnerability (Brantmeier and McKenna) because pedagogy of vulnerability “repositions knowing and coming to know in a co-creative, dialogical, and communal process of discovering and generating knowledge” (4). Said another way, we have seen students struggle with the risks available to them in situations and the stakes for those risks, but we argue that centering vulnerability acknowledges that writers are vulnerable beings. Vulnerability is always already present in the situated risks and choices available to a writer, but it is underexplored in the literature. We argue pedagogies that transparently discuss intellectual risk-taking and failure should include discussions of vulnerability as ever present. As will be discussed below in “Managing Vulnerability,” as human beings in society we are all vulnerable. To take intellectual risks, and, to understand the intellectual risks available within a given situation, we must recognize the vulnerabilities of our identities within a context as a starting point to learning, as a starting point to intellectual risk-taking. Every intellectual risk taken, requires the writer to be vulnerable.

A theme across these “struggles” is that graduate students are expected to develop ideas and develop as writers through feedback, but they often misconstrue the constructive feedback. The feedback is seen as a personal attack. The feedback is used to justify their sense of failure. Their understanding of the feedback can feed into imposter syndrome. We revised this article multiple times as our pedagogical understanding and application of vulnerability grew. We revised based on peer and editor feedback, comments coming from subdisciplinary experts in intellectual risk-taking and rhetorical theory, but with less exposure to rhetorical vulnerability. Through our work as interdisciplinary collaborators, we reflected on the feedback and used this opportunity to recognize ourselves as vulnerable and our vulnerability as writers that led to taking further intellectual risks in this article. We appreciate the feedback from peers and editors as it contributes to our ability to work within and through dialogue as part of our knowledge building process. We share this here as a reflection on rhetorical vulnerability to emphasize the vulnerability is not isolated to graduate students and learners. Vulnerability is an asset to cultivating knowledge, and valuable to all learning and critical thinking (McKenna and Brantmeier). We are leaning into our vulnerability (Brown).

While there is some discussion in the intellectual risk-taking literature on how teachers can and should share their experiences with feedback, their own failures (here failure is the number of revisions we made and the number of revisions asked for by the editors), in practicing vulnerability we also share the way the revisions as co-authors developed our knowledge, the way our revising processes as co-authors are experienced, the ways revision comments from editors co-construct knowledge building our own professional learning processes and helping us further contribute to both of our disciplines, and impacts how we create space for our graduate learners to experience intellectual risk-taking. We, as reflective pedagogues, share more than just risks taken and failures experienced, in being rhetorical beings (identity) we share and practice the multitude of ways knowledge is co-created. As interdisciplinary co-authors, we find this sharing and practicing makes our classrooms and work with all learners more meaningful. Here, we share an approach to recognizing the inherent vulnerability in all risk-taking as a way for other teachers and learners to recognize vulnerability as empowering.

This problem is exacerbated by the narrow focus of most graduate writing pedagogy: supporting doctoral dissertations. Increasingly, graduate work does not involve dissertating. A Chronicle of Higher Education 2024 report titled The Future of Graduate Education: Navigating the Shifting Landscape points to growing graduate enrollment trends. Notably, this 2024 report focuses on both master’s and doctoral level programs. Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch similarly argue that attention to master’s and non-Ph.D. doctoral programs is critical to develop programs that meet learner needs, a point also made by the Council of Graduate Schools (see also Henderson and Cook for more in general, and Cui, Zhang, and Driscoll for work in the writing center). Similar to our findings, this research emphasizes the lack of research on graduate education beyond dissertation writing. Collectively, we find that published research exploring dissertation writing made large assumptions about the applicability of those findings toward all graduate programs.

A work published after we collected data for this article, Writing Together: Building Social Writing Opportunities for Graduate Students, illustrates this issue. Of the 14 chapters overviewing writing support programs for graduate learners, 9 programs focus on doctoral dissertation completion writing support. That means 65% of the book focuses on just one type of support—dissertation completion writing support—for graduate learners. Said another way, the majority of this book offers approaches to support dissertation completion as opposed to general graduate student writers. To be clear, we would highly recommend Writing Together for educators interested in offering writing support to graduate learners. The chapters offer a breadth of programs and resources for educators shifting their attention to graduate pedagogical growth. The collection further demonstrates the ongoing focus on dissertation completion as THE topic when discussing writing growth. This scholarly gap means a majority of graduate scholarship ignores intellectual risk-taking outside of dissertating for graduate students. Beyond dissertation completion, very little scholarship explores how graduate learners navigate classroom writing, especially in terms of intellectual risk-taking and failure.

In their 2024 work, Commer et al. noted that “any theory about how risk or failure can animate pedagogy must respond to the inherently subjective nature of these concepts while also recognizing social structures ensure that their consequences fall unevenly” (79). Extending their mostly undergraduate focus to graduate student realities, we argue the situated nature of risk-taking remains hidden and undiscussed in graduate programs. Specifically, we argue that without vulnerability in conversations of situated risk-taking, we cannot create spaces for learning, we cannot empower graduate learners to co-construct knowledge but will instead “quickly become a mechanism for delivery of content” (McKenna and Brantmeier 7). This, then, is the harsh reality of graduate programs: students must meet the challenge of needing to adapt, with little to no support, while upskilling personal accountability for their own learning alongside rigorous curricular design.

We, and other graduate researchers, contend that the landscape of education has changed. To help graduate learners navigate skill and disposition growth (specifically writing) within courses, within professionalization experiences, within career development and personal learning growth, we see the need for overt discussion of vulnerability that allows for situated risk-taking. As educators and researchers we speak from vulnerable places that include our own privileges, our own passion for teaching/learning/course design, and our own commitment to graduate students that influence our practice of pedagogy of vulnerability and inclusive practices. It is from that vulnerable position that we are able to start identifying the intellectual risks we foster within our graduate learner spaces (inside and beyond the classroom). This means, the work of considering the situated risks and the practices surrounding intellectual risk-taking belongs to all of us within the system of higher education. All educators, at all levels but especially within graduate education, have a responsibility for making situated risks more transparent within their curriculum to model disciplinary thinking and the function of higher education.

Our article describes how we take up the responsibility for teaching graduate students about situational, intellectual risks derived from a place of vulnerability. We are always rhetorical vulnerable beings in society, here we discuss how intellectual risk-taking must embrace the discomfort that comes with vulnerability to be comfortable and confident with risk-taking. Our approach focuses on supplemental writing support that centers the graduate learner and “recogniz[es] that the training of graduate students in academic writing is a form of academic professionalism that will support their development throughout their careers in academe, industry, or anywhere” (Quynn 29). We offer our approach as an example from the perspective of a small public institution, with no Ph.D. programs, and with no centralized supports centering graduate learners. As interdisciplinary colleagues invested in bringing transparency to graduate writing instruction, we see ourselves as extending intellectual risk-taking conversations directly to writing within graduate learner spaces (building upon Commer et al. 80).

We see our work at Millersville as a starting point for graduate faculty both within and beyond Writing Studies to consider both the subjective nature of risk and failure for changing populations of graduate students specific to individual learning situations, and, how those risks fall unevenly across the changing populations entering our graduate programs. We argue for the need to extend pedagogical/scholarly explorations of situated risk-taking and failure to graduate writing situations (inside and beyond the classroom), for all faculty within all graduate programs to consider how the writing requirements within graduate programs require students to be vulnerable, and that work both requires students to be vulnerable and explore intellectual risks.

Managing Vulnerability

Since the 2010s, rhetoric, composition, and writing studies scholars have explored failure pedagogies (Carr; Rickly and Cook; Feigenbaum; Eckstein, Finaret, and Witenack). Many of these failure pedagogies explore failure to understand and theorize the approaches writers make within rhetorically situated writing decisions—intellectual risk-taking/academic risk-taking (Commer et al.; Kelty and Bunten). Within the failure research, there is also little focus on graduate learners/writers, and little discussion of how instructors transparently deliberate intellectual writing-based risks within graduate courses. LaFrance and Corbett point to the lack of robust discussion of failure within transfer research, and lightly touch on the limited research on graduate writers through their autoethnography. Rosenblum and Harris (2024) draw from bell hooks to argue that “inviting failure can potentially perpetuate the inequalities it promises to challenge” (32). A common pedagogical praxis suggested by failure pedagogies is to share our own failures. As women in academia, Rosenblum and Harris, who also occupy precarious positions within academia leading to multiple marginalizations, note that “we all must pass if we are to survive in academia” (44). In sharing their experience with failure pedagogies, we read Rosenblum and Harris through the lens of inclusive teaching mindset (Hogan and Sathy). As educators we need to consider: Who has the most space to fail, and who has the most to lose in failure? We see inclusive teaching mindset as intentionally centering the vulnerabilities of students as they explore situated risks as developing graduate writers.

For graduate learners with prior academic success, it is too often assumed students will understand the professional development and transferability of writing skill development, successful completion of undergraduate education presumes student facility with knowing the “situated nature of risk-taking” (Commer et al. 81). Hogan and Sathy describe inclusion as “a culture in which all learners feel welcome, valued, and safe” (7). When instructors believe that “graduate students can’t write,” they shift to a deficit model—this is often accompanied by beliefs that students are lacking, missing something from their undergraduate education that they ‘should have had,’ or, that institutions are lowering the bar by which students are admitted into graduate programs.

As graduate instructors, we see transparent discussion of how we are all always vulnerable helps students see how vulnerability is an act “of dialogue in dialogue, and through dialogue” as the pathway to knowledge building (Cremin and Kester 25). We see the essential goal of graduate education, across all disciplines, is to co-create knowledge to engage in dialogue that “place(s) ourselves in a position of consumption, reproduction, and critique” (25). As humans, educators, learners, students, we cannot take intellectual risks outside of dialogue, writing, exchange. For us, that means we cannot take a risk without being vulnerable. We see vulnerability as a precursor to intellectual risk-taking, as intersectional and symbiotic with dialogue and writing, the exchanging and co-creating of knowledge.

In building from ever-present vulnerability, we build a social learning environment that centers transparent discussions of writing (our reading of inclusive practices from Hogan and Sathy) to empower graduate learners. This also provides us space to challenge misconceptions surrounding the writing process that graduate learners bring to these writing spaces as an important part of the dialogue (Canagarajah and Lee).

These shifts are especially salient for graduate learners, a population we have not found discussed within the failure and/or intellectual risk-taking pedagogical conversations. Most students entering master’s and doctoral degrees have earned at least a bachelor’s degree. They can demonstrate success in higher education with credentials and college level GPAs. When graduate writers fail, they have a lot to lose from that failure, including their identity as a successful college graduate who entered a graduate program. In many cases, failure is more significant because graduate learners arrive with success experiences in higher education. When graduate writers rely on their undergraduate approaches, and don’t see the same successes, they are less likely to take meaningful intellectual risks that will lead toward growth, and they are likely to remain silent and not seek support for their own growth. Thus, graduate writers occupy precarious positions, they experience multiple identity marginalizations connected to failure. Given the limited research in graduate pedagogy, inclusive teaching mindset can help educators explore where intellectual risk-taking offers an approach to actively explore what it looks like to work from spaces of vulnerability as graduate students learn to take scholarly intellectual risks within academia.

Our work began with Marback and Riche’s explorations of rhetorical vulnerability. As we have collaborated and built programs to support graduate learners, we pedagogically explored how to recognize rhetorical vulnerability with and beyond our classroom spaces to foster co-creating knowledge. This led to explorations of inclusive practices, and more recently, pedagogy of vulnerability. We had to recognize the intellectual risks available to us, as always vulnerable beings. This self-reflection demonstrated how we are in dialogue with ourselves, and how our self-reflective practice through dialogue helps us work from within vulnerability to recognize and take intellectual risks. But it’s intellectual risk-taking as a rhetorical move that helps connect these ideas, it offers a way to name and recognize a rhetorical practice within dialogue and writing. We can work with students on their writing, and help them name when they chose to take an intellectual risk, and when they didn’t. We can help them understand why they saw the choices available to them. We can help our colleagues understand graduate writers not as deficient, but as learning and growing from their vulnerabilities, as able to take intellectual risks when they are aware of themselves as rhetorically vulnerable.

When instructors approach graduate learning with an asset-based mindset, as part of an inclusive practices mindset approach to intellectual risk-taking, graduate instructors benefit from considering (with a shocking lack of research and study on the subject) how they “are taking a kind of calculated risk, hoping to achieve a desired outcome” (Riche 91) when they bring transparency to writing skill development. Graduate instructors must also understand and explore alongside their students what “calculated risk(s)” and “outcome(s)” look like in writing at the graduate level beyond the dissertation. This is made more possible through an inclusive practices mindset approach to intellectual risk-taking, an approach that proceeds from an asset-based mindset instead of a deficit mindset.

To summarize, we argue that inclusive teaching mindset offers important reminders about transparency—transparency in skill growth and development, transparency in transferability, transparency in course structure decisions that are very different at the graduate level. Due, in large part, to the lack of research on supporting graduate writers outside the dissertation completion stage, most notably the lack of research supporting master’s and non-Ph.D. level students, intellectual risk-taking approaches benefit from awareness of and attention to rhetorical vulnerability. Both graduate instructors and students bring varying vulnerability to the learning spaces. To foster understanding of intellectual risk-taking as part of rhetorical writing practices, both students and instructors must be aware of and manage their vulnerability. For our purposes here, that means that both we and our students come to learning spaces with varying experiences with vulnerability, and varying ways of affecting and being affected by rhetorical moves within a writing classroom. We are rhetorical beings, affected by the contexts and ways of knowing surrounding us, vulnerable to the rhetoric surrounding us. Part of becoming informed rhetors is through managing vulnerability (Riche). When graduate writers fail, they have a lot to lose from that failure, including their identity as a successful college graduate who entered a graduate program. In many cases, failure is more significant because graduate learners arrive with success experiences in higher education. When graduate writers rely on their undergraduate approaches, and don’t see the same successes, they are less likely to take meaningful intellectual risks that will lead toward growth, and they are likely to remain silent and not seek support for their own growth. Thus, graduate writers occupy precarious positions, they experience multiple identity marginalizations connected to failure. Given the limited research in graduate pedagogy, inclusive teaching mindset can help educators explore where intellectual risk-taking offers an approach to actively explore what it looks like to work from spaces of vulnerability as graduate students learn to take scholarly intellectual risks within academia.

Zachary Shore’s focus on how to read, write, and research as core skills (see Grobman and Ramsey for a discussion of the concept core skill) graduate students need to upskill while early in their graduate program highlights the need for transparent attention to the development of these skills (Hogan and Sathy). In developing our framework, we recognize that the further development of these core skills could be seen as remedial to graduate learners, which could impact their vulnerability or highlight a student’s lack of experience with vulnerability (a rhetorical position with impacts on one’s ability to learn). Intellectual risk-taking can lead to feelings of self-doubt in one’s core skills which can lead to isolation. While discussing Marback’s theory of rhetorical vulnerability, Riche notes that “my existence as a rhetorical being necessitates my existence as a vulnerable being” (85). Both Marback and Riche emphasize that rhetorical being is both affecting others through language and writing and being affected by the language and writing of others. Marback argues that vulnerability is a necessary condition for social life, as social creatures existing within a society humans are vulnerable to the persuasive rhetoric of others, and humans develop rhetorical moves to recognize and respond to rhetorical persuasion. We note that Marback and Riche approach rhetorical vulnerability, not as a way to mitigate or lessen vulnerability, but as situatedness that is always present. As rhetorical beings, we are always vulnerable. We argue that rhetorical vulnerability offers a way to consider how prior experience with contexts allows individuals more freedom and space to be creative and destructive—not just creative and destructive as verbs and doings, but as identities taken up and explored alongside a context and others, as deliberative choices and dialogues within a given context.

This emphasis within rhetorical vulnerability on how prior knowledge and contextual identities are part of who we are as rhetorical beings is especially important at the graduate level. In describing the focus on deliberation and process of choices as central to their view of intellectual risk-taking, Commer et al. state “emphasizing deliberation helps students recognize an expanded array of stakes and develop their rhetorical and metacognitive capabilities” (79). At the graduate level, there are different tensions impacting a space where instructors help students recognize the breadth of argument possibilities and stakes.

After developing this framework and collecting the data we present in the next section, Writing Together was published. There are similarities between the framework we offer here and chapters in that book. However, there are differences in the central focus of the writing supports programs—here we develop an inclusive practices mindset informed intellectual risk-taking approach, the chapters in Writing Together draw from social writing theories to inform their designs. We want to again highlight that we designed this framework to fill a much needed gap centering supports, especially writing supports, for master’s and non-Ph.D. graduate students. This means our framework actively rejects the “fixation on supporting writing only as a response to perceived graduate student inefficiency” (Cayley, Coll, and Aureliano Newman 1). Additionally, we have used inclusive practices to highlight why rhetorical vulnerability is useful additional to intellectual risk-taking pedagogies.

This framework grew from our own experience working with professional development, and our extensive work with Instructional Designers at our institution. It began as pedagogical revision within a graduate course taught by Nicole, centering transparent writing skill development that included awareness of vulnerable positionality and intellectual risk-taking alongside the rich theory and thinking work of a graduate seminar. Leonora and I then modified the framework to offer one-hour and three-hour writing workshops to social work graduate students attending a residency day on campus.

Inclusive Practices Informed Intellectual Risk-Taking Framework

Our framework includes the following seven steps, described in greater detail below:

1. Complete a pre-survey to establish baseline understanding of core skills (writing, reading, and research)
2. Generate, as a group, writing practices and processes to name, describe, and explore writing, reading, and research especially the interconnection
3. Draw your writing process
4. Share out instructor drawing
5. Share out student drawings, instructor helps students make connections between their drawing choices and the group brainstorm to practice naming skills
6. Introduce new, graduate specific, writing, reading, and research skills
7. Complete a post-survey to help students recognize their own growth

Step One begins by asking graduate learners to describe their understanding of writing, reading, and research as graduate core academic skills. Through a series of open-ended questions, the survey asks learners to dialogue with themself, and with the systems that inform their understanding of graduate education as pre-reflection that prepares students to work from places of vulnerability.

Two of the questions we typically ask: 1) to me writing is…; and 2) to me scholarly writing is… These open-ended questions prompt them to begin exploring their own understanding of scholarly writing. Asking students to define writing separate from scholarly writing prompts thinking about situatedness, even if/when students don’t have the rhetorical language for naming context and audience differences. In establishing a baseline understanding, we are preparing students for the intellectual risk-taking work of “exposing oneself to uncertainty and question one’s own and others’ assumptions” about writing, specifically academic writing (Kelty and Bunten v).

Step Two: we work with graduate learners to generate a shared understanding of writing practices and processes (including individual, disciplinary, and universal ideas). In this step, our inclusive mindset practice invites students to co-construct and expand their understanding of intellectual risk-taking. We are fostering a space that welcomes vulnerability and invites dialogue about intellectual risks available within contexts.

Students are asked to name, describe, explore, and share practices, skills, and ways of describing academic writing, reading, and research. Because this step immediately follows the pre-survey, this collaborative dialogue operates as the “share” portion of a think-pair-share activity. This approach centers collaboration and co-constructing knowledge, vital approaches to modelling working from within vulnerability as graduate writers. This sets the foundation for mutual understanding of language and practices that support good graduate writing and the growth that always aligns with that work. Equally important, this process provides time and space for individual thinking and self-reflection, a core part of an inclusive practices approach to think-pair-share.

We typically record student responses on a classroom chalk board (if in-person), or digital white board (if online) as it is generated, with ideas built upon through the class dialogue. This class dialogue which demonstrates common ground, co-creating common vulnerabilities. We then validate feelings of vulnerability, empowering learners as always taking intellectual risks based on their comfort with vulnerability as writers. It is important that this first group generation activity centers the group’s lived experiences, and general understanding of academic writing, reading, and research. It is also important that we reinforce that writing is always vulnerable, the goal is not to mitigate or lessen feelings of vulnerabilities but to feel comfort and confidence taking risks from within their vulnerable positions.

Step Three: we love creative knowledge constructing activities. We ask students, regardless of modality, to draw their writing process—using as few words as possible. In face-to-face settings, we provide colored markers, colored pencils, and white paper to graduate students. In online settings, we ask students to use whatever materials they have available to them. As students draw, we draw alongside them, modelling not just inclusivity, but our willingness to work from within vulnerability as members of a community of learners alongside our students.

Most learners have never drawn their writing process, meaning this activity provides space for all learners including instructors to experience a vulnerable intellectual risk-taking activity. As they draw, by design the activity prompts reflective and metacognitive thinking. Graduate students plan their overall drawing based on an overly large list of ideas available in a shared space. They base their drawing on their lived experiences with reading, writing, and research as core skills. Graduate students reflect on their own thinking (reflective and metacognitive) to determine which elements they want to represent their writing process, and then determine how they want to represent their writing process with few to no words (risk-taking).

Step Three is the beginning of illuminating the relationship between rhetorical vulnerability within contexts, and, active intellectual risk-taking within those contexts. Part way through drawing time, we remind students to augment their drawing with our shared ideas so the drawing reflects a revised writing process.

Step Four: after giving students 5–15 minutes of drawing time, we then discuss managing vulnerability and intellectual risk-taking connecting the group generated ideas from Step Two with our own drawings in Step Three. This means we share our drawings, being vulnerable while discussing vulnerability. To model the thinking work, we connect the ideas from the group generated list with the risks we took in our drawings. We use our connections to help graduate learners recognize that making knowledge is always from a position of vulnerability, where we are actively working to take intellectual risks that help us grow too.

Step Five: we then invite students to share their drawings (allowing time for as many shares as possible given time constraints). We engage in group dialogue of the drawing to establish trust, to build rapport, to foster awareness of the role of vulnerability in contexts as we take risks. Our goal is not to mitigate vulnerability; our goal is to leverage the power of vulnerability to help learners take meaningful intellectual risks in contexts as graduate writers.

In sharing their choices, students practice naming and describing the intellectual risks they took to create their drawing. Some will point to shapes and colors, others to patterns, then connect this imagery to ideas from the group generated ideas that resonated with them in their understanding of their own writing process (prompting the sharing of their reflective and metacognitive thinking). As students actively build connections between their drawing choices and the named skills, they breathe life into their writing process. They describe skills for their peer audience, practicing audience aware argument construction. They increase facility with vocabulary about their skills and writing processes.

Step Six introduces new graduate specific, writing, reading and research skills which is deceptively vulnerable for instructors, introducing new. As mentioned throughout this article there is a significant lack of research surrounding supporting graduate writing, especially outside dissertation completion. As academic writers ourselves, we must name and explicate specific writing skills that will benefit graduate writers. As we discussed in the theory section, we are urging instructors to use inclusive practices mindset as they approach intellectual risk-taking, while recognizing our vulnerabilities persist no matter our experience.

This activity should prompt even the most seasoned instructor to reflect on how they understand graduate writing and graduate pedagogy. It should also prompt them to question their assumptions of what graduate writers should know (which will feel vulnerable) to explicitly build writing skills in a developmentally appropriate way for the writers. Instructors should be prompted to reflect on where and how they learned to read and write as graduate learners. This activity should also prompt instructors to question where their graduate learners go after graduation—aligning the writing skills focused on in this section with the actual future professions of graduate learners.

We invite readers adapting our framework to approach this teaching time as conversational—providing worksheets and/or handouts that name the skills so students can refer to them throughout their schooling. To accomplish this, we often bring five or six handouts we created anticipating what we would teach, then share just one or two of those handouts that best extend the session conversation. Shore’s work offers a great starting point to educators new to centering graduate reading, writing, and research skills. We also invite readers to make this conversational, asking graduate students to share their goals for their graduate education so skills discussed can be individualized more easily. This also opens space for students to ask questions and seek specific language surrounding skills. Now that students have individualized their writing process and worked with the group generated ideas in multiple ways, this transparent skill build time allows for further individualization. As a group, students can imagine what their writing process will look like in various situations, actively imagining managing their vulnerability, increasing their experiences with intellectual choices.

Create time and space to prompt graduate students on their applications of these ideas. We know writing, as a skill, benefits from practice. Students should be prompted to share what a regular writing practice will look like for them, during the semester (again, managing vulnerability and increasing experience). We can also prompt students to connect writing practices to reading and research practices. We should discuss approaches to reading for disciplinary content development and reading for rhetorical practices development. Finally, students should be invited to share their approaches to researching to align research skills with demonstrating a breadth and depth of knowing about disciplinary topics.

While much of this will be familiar to writing instructors, these are ideas and approaches used within most composition courses, the important difference is the focus on the graduate learner. These learners bring with them a variety of experiences and identities, including success with college level writing. Introducing new skills, language, and/or approaches to writing needs to be developmentally appropriate for the graduate learner so they actively consider risks available to them, and metacognitively reflect on managing vulnerability.

Step Seven: our framework closes with a post-survey. This provides useful program assessment data to us as instructors. However, we frame the post-survey as graduate student centered to continue their learning. We want students to see the post-survey more like an exit ticket than an assessment). We ask students:

• I am more confident in myself as a scholarly writer (Yes, a little, maybe, no)
• After working through ideas in this session, to me scholarly writing is…. (open ended)
• To make learning better for myself this year, I will… (open ended)
• To focus on my writing skills, I will… (open ended)

Framework Reflection

We began exploring the ideas informing this framework Summer 2023. Leonora built in more reflection assignments, with rich discussions on the value of reflection to graduate learners. Despite these curricular and pedagogical shifts, Leonora still saw room for more student supports. Nicole built in more prompts to help students track and name their writing skills as they used them in assignment completion. Similarly, Nicole also saw room for more student supports. In these early pedagogical shifts, both of us sought to facilitate writing support that helped students see themselves as public scholars, to help graduate students consider submitting their work for conferences and/or smaller publications, to help students see intellectual risks available to them. We were starting to ask students to connect their growth as scholars to their future professional goals—answers that informed how we continued to develop this framework. We explored pedagogically engaging intellectual risk-taking theories and pedagogy of vulnerability to transparently and vulnerably design the graduate classroom in support of all graduate writers.

Then, Nicole taught a graduate course early Summer 2024. As the faculty member overseeing department blogs, newsletters, and social media accounts, she invited her graduate students to publish blogs written as part of class on the blog (to be advertised through the social media accounts). In a class of 11, each student had the opportunity to write and publish two blogs. Nicole received permission to publish 14 of the possible 22. While this left a lot of space to question the intellectual risks students were willing to take, it also demonstrated that over half the students chose to share their written work.

As we reflected and shared these experiences, we developed the framework shared in this article for a social work residency weekend. We have found this framework offers scaffolding and structure to center the reading, writing, and research needs of graduate learners. We have made minor modifications to this approach when working with new social work and English graduate learners and have adapted these ideas to graduate writing groups.

We intentionally structured this framework knowing the ‘mini lesson’ we develop may be the only time graduate students receive direct instruction on and conversation about graduate writing, reading, and research skill development unless they reached out for support. We made decisions assuming students can seek additional research support from our faculty-librarians, but graduate students need to be proactive and seek out that support as instructive. Finally, we centered the needs of graduate learners. Most educators have access to faculty professional development centering pedagogical growth, and instructional design support, but those spaces overwhelmingly center undergraduate education. The constraints impacting the design, development, teaching, and support of graduate learners are numerous. We share our constraints anticipating these will look familiar to many of our readers, and, to inspire our readers to embrace feelings of vulnerability as they explore the risks and choices associated with modifying our pedagogical approaches to deliver graduate pedagogy that serves as graduate professional development.

From the Graduate Students

Here we share some results from a social work residency weekend where we worked with an early career group (beginning program) and a late career group (nearing graduation). In the pre-survey (Step One), students from the early career group and the late career group were asked to describe scholarly writing. Responses from the early career group included several remarks on “challenging”, and several responses included “research.” In general, most students provided expected definitions of writing as a skill acquired in higher education. Responses from the late career group only included on “challenging,” but more focus on editing, technicality, formatting, and professional language. In general, most responses demonstrate graduate student’s experiences with formatting and line editing comments on their papers. Unlike the early career group, the late career group included two responses indicating academic writing expresses disciplinary ideas.

These pre-survey responses are shared to show the difference with the post-survey. However, we also want to draw attention to the vulnerability and risk taking. In the pre-survey, graduate students provided expected answers. This pre-survey did not push our graduate learners to begin taking risks but helped them manage their vulnerability by providing space to brainstorm responses and feel comfortable in their experiences and identity as graduate learners. The different focuses of each group demonstrates more about their experiences and identity (or lack of for early career) as graduate learners knowing how they think they should describe writing.

In the post-survey (Step Seven), students from the early career group and the late career group were asked if they felt more confident in themselves as scholarly writers. Two students from the early career group modified their answers from “a little” and “maybe” to “yes.” Three students from the late career group modified their answers to “yes.” From student self-reported data, the framework increased their confidence. While these were small sample groups, rhetorical vulnerability centers the experiences and identity of rhetors, in this case graduate learners. The shift to feeling more confident means each of these five students now has experience affirming their confidence as scholarly writers—an experience they will use (subconsciously or consciously) as they manage future vulnerability.

When asked to describe scholarly writing, answers shifted to “knowledge-making” and “possible” (from the early career) and “an opportunity to communicate with others in my field” and “the ability to rewrite and revise writings based on content, audience, feedback, and processing of ideas.” Again, despite the small sample size, we saw a noticeable shift in the risks students chose to mention, and the language used to describe scholarly writing. Ultimately, these students showed up for growth because we created space to be vulnerable and learn together.

Conclusion

The more we teach graduate learners, the more we grow as graduate educators. However, we realize more and more that the lack of research on master’s and non-Ph.D. students combined with high retention and graduation rates in those programs, contributes to the lack of research in these programs. As we continue work in this area trying to build a graduate learner profile, we are realizing there IS a graduate learner profile—the Ph.D. student at an R1 institution. When we developed this framework, we did not realize the size of the gap in research, we did not realize how little attention is being paid to master’s and non-Ph.D. programs.

As we continue to work in this area growing programming and support for graduate writing skills, we are finding champions across campus (with Fall 2025 support from the Dean of Graduate Studies for an extended version of this program). However, we are very aware we will reach capacity in number of students we can serve very quickly. The framework shared here is designed for one- to three-hour sessions, hoping to further grow the program, increase faculty who provide more effective graduate pedagogy, and shift campus culture toward graduate pedagogy.