CompTheory Blog

I’m writing an article about the proliferation of discipline-specific
pedagogy courses that our English graduate program has begun to offer in
the past 5 years. For example, in addition to our pro-sem in FYC (English
537), we have Teaching ESL (E536), Teaching Literature and Literary Studies
(E592), Teaching Tech Writing (E539), and, next year, Teaching Creative
Writing (E535).

All tend to be approached as a "how to" courses. And nearly all graduate
students are required to enroll in 537; thereafter, they "track" into one
(and, typically, only one) of the various elective courses.

These courses signal my graduate program’s efforts to give our graduate
students training that will serve them in their future teaching careers.

But I’m concerned about the way "pedagogy" is being used to further
fragment (albeit unintentionally) English graduate student culture and
English studies in general.

That said, I am not sure what you are getting at in your final
paragraph about further fragmentation of "English graduate culture and
English studies in general." I can see that there is a certain parsing
out of focuses when we teach courses in ESL/Basic Writer and Theories
and Practices in Composition (636 here, applied) required of all GTAs
and writing and rhet folks, and 637 (further theory, less applied) and
qualitative research strategies vs teacher-research, etc. But I am not
sure I understand this as fragmentation so much as reasonable bites
for a given semester. Would you say more about what you are thinking?

Elizabeth

The context for my thinking about “fragmentation” comes from interest in
discovering how English graduate students internalize oppositional
attitudes about such things as teaching and research, (writing) courses one
teaches and (lit) courses one takes, and, at base, rhet/comp and literary
studies.

At UNM, there are plenty of overt ways this happens (our English Grad
Director tells a group of 80 FYC TAs on the first day of Orientation Week
that they are “not here to teach but to get an advanced degree”; most UNM
English graduate students are being credentialed in a form of literary
studies while most of their intellectual energies go into their teaching of
FYC courses; and so on). Nothing new here, I know.

Now, I *want* to believe that programmatic, curricular offerings in
pedagogical instruction (like the kind happening here at UNM) is a sign
that graduate students are finally given opportunities to develop more of
a “meta-knowledge” of English studies pedagogy (certainly, from what you
disclose, teachers like you make this possible). And, in this way, pedagogy
acts as a means for English graduate students to explore the connections
among the various disciplinary knowledges they pick up during what Jim
Seitz (Motives for Metaphor) has described as a “tour” of discrete English
courses.

But instead of serving as a common or “capstone” experience that engages
all graduate students in reflective talk about pedagogy vis-à-vis English
studies, discipline-specific pedagogy courses may *undermine* the goal of
providing graduate students with a cohesive educational experience (I have
in mind here something like the English doctoral “metacurriculum” that
Richard Fulkerson talks about). Instead, such courses may re-inscribe a
narrow sense of professional identity and departmental citizenship in
graduate students.