Moving to the Front of the Classroom: English Graduate Students as Composition Instructors

This phenomenological study explores how graduate students in an English department perceive their new roles as writing teachers. The findings show that even though the participants went through the same professional development program, they constructed different teacher identities based on their other identities and their experiences as students and writers. In university English departments, teaching assistantships are very common among students in MA, MFA, and Ph.D. programs who teach the required freshmen composition courses as part of their graduate program or fellowship requirements. Since most teaching assistants (TAs) have little or no classroom teaching experience, English departments provide some kind of professional development in the form of workshops, a course, or a practicum. These new teachers develop their teacher identities relying heavily on their experiences as students and members of the discourse community of their majors. The goal of this study was to understand how TAs construct their new identities as composition instructors. My interest in this subject comes from my experiences as an English TA and eventual faculty member, during which time I struggled with the construction of my multiple identities within academia. Therefore, my primary research question was: “What are new TAs’ perceptions about their roles as composition instructors?” Theoretical Framework As humans, we continuously construct and re-construct our identities to fit our different social contexts. Gee (1989, 1996) names these identities Discourses (with a capital D) and defines them as identity kits that are equipped with ways of speaking, acting, dressing, and writing, as well as with a set of values and beliefs associated with the social context. Our first or primary Discourse is the one constructed in the home during our first years of life. As we move in and out of different social contexts, we construct other identities or secondary Discourses from our primary Discourses and our other secondary Discourses. Therefore, these multiple identities are tied to each other and scaffold the identity construction experience with each new social context. Composition TAs develop a secondary Discourse grounded in their disciplines within the field of English, and later construct another secondary Discourse or identity kit tied to composition instruction with certain ways of acting, speaking, and dressing as well as with certain values and beliefs. Method This phenomenological study “focuses on the essence or structure of an experience” (Merriam, 2002, p. 7). I used an interpretative constructionist approach with a focus on “how people view an object or event and the meaning that they attribute to it” (Rubin & Rubin, 2005, p. 27). I interviewed each participant for 60-95 minutes using a semi-structured interview approach with main questions to allow for comparable data across all four participants (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003). This format allowed my participants to become conversational partners with more active roles in our discussions (Rubin & Rubin, 2005).