Abstract
Notwithstanding a veritable avalanche of scholarship in the past decades of the writing conference (WC), these studies tend to concentrate exclusively on the WC engagement done by secondary-school writing instructors or by senior faculty members and/or specialized instructors at the tertiary level. Little has been done on how first-year-composition graduate teaching assistants (FYC GTAs) establish their unique identity roles as GTAs. This current research study, through a qualitative case-study design, aims to further the understanding of two FYC GTAs’ identity formation at a large Midwestern university in the U.S. through the interconnectedness between WCs and institutional spaces. Methods included researcher observations, semi-structured interviews, and artifact collection. By qualitatively grounding the data analysis through the prism of an ontogenetic understanding (Prior, 2008; Prior & Shipka, 2003), this study reveals that the two FYC GTAs’ identities as GTAs are discursively morphed and negotiated through multilayered interpersonal interaction and institutional constraints and affordances. Through a discursive becoming and become, this research suggests that the rhetoric of treating FYC GTAs’ identity roles as a becoming trajectory might aid FYC GTAs, writing instructors, and writing-program administrators to orchestrate more pedagogically fruitful schemas and policies of WCs.
Recommended Citation
Liu, Meng-Hsien (Neal)
(2022)
"First-Year-Composition Writing Conferences as a Pathway for Becoming Graduate Teaching Assistants,"
Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education: Vol. 11:
Iss.
1, Article 6.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/wte/vol11/iss1/6
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