Stories of Becoming

Demystifying the Professoriate for Graduate Students in Composition and Rhetoric

Claire Lutkewitte, Juliette C. Kitchens, Molly J. Scanlon

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781646421633
• eBook ISBN: 9781646421640
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Professional Development
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Based on findings from a multiyear, nationwide study of new faculty in the field of rhetoric and composition, Stories of Becoming provides graduate students—and those who train them—with specific strategies for preparing for a career in the professoriate. Through the use of stories, the authors invite readers to experience their collaborative research processes for conducting a nationwide survey, qualitative interviews, and textual analysis of professional documents.
 
Using data from the study, the authors offer six specific strategies—including how to manage time, how to create a work/life balance, and how to collaborate with others—that readers can use to prepare for the composition and rhetoric job market and to begin their careers as full-time faculty members. Readers will learn about the possible responsibilities they may take on as new faculty, particularly those that go beyond teaching, research, service, and administration to include navigating the politics of higher education and negotiating professional identity construction. And they will also engage in activities and answer questions designed to deepen their understanding of the field and help them identify their own values and desired career trajectory.
 
Stories of Becoming demystifies the professoriate, compares what current new faculty have to say of their job expectations with the realities that students might face when on the job, and brings to light the invisible, behind-the-scenes work done by new faculty. It will be invaluable to graduate students, those who teach graduate students, new faculty, and hiring administrators in composition and rhetoric.
 

Strategy 1

Know (Y)Our Stories

https://doi.org/10.7330/9781646421640.c001

Here’s a Story about . . . How Our Research Revealed Many Stories

At the end of our three-year data-collection process, our team met more often in our department’s conference room than in our offices; the conference room was a wonderful space for three faculty to collaborate—several chairs circle a long table in the center of the room, a large white board consumes one wall, a screen takes up another. On one particular day, we closed the door, found seats at the table, and got started by pulling up charts from the data we had collected. We shuffled laptops, books, and handwritten notes that traced our path over the course of those three years. After we settled into our working positions, we found ourselves staring at one another as if to say, “What now?” This was our first official drafting meeting, and we weren’t sure what our readers would want to know; we simply knew we needed more information in our composition and rhetoric field about what it means to transition from graduate student to professor—institutional challenges, shared concerns, small but glorious victories, contradictions, and validations included. We needed to find a path through the data; we needed to illuminate stories from our composition and rhetoric field.

We took turns talking through some of the themes and subthemes we each had found as we analyzed the survey data and the possible connections that existed within the interview transcripts and collected professional documents of our participants. Our conversation soon took a turn away from the data, and we talked about our day—the meeting Molly had just come from, the course Juliette was trying to develop, the upcoming sabbatical Claire was about to take. We’d had some version of this conversation weekly for five years, and during that time we had built a support network among ourselves as we helped each other navigate new positions and expectations at our institution. Frequently, we had talked about how our lived experience, our stories, paralleled the data we had collected and the stories they told.

In fact, one of the most important findings in our research study that grounds the stories creating this book wasn’t just in the data itself but was in our experience as a collaborative team. To succeed in the professoriate, we have learned, you need the people around you. This may sound rather trite, this idea that we need others, but creating a community of peers is different as a professor than it is as a graduate student. And that difference can be paralyzing. It can be enthralling. But, more often than not, it seems to be fairly confusing and a bit isolating. This realization had cemented itself for us first as new faculty ourselves and then again later on as more experienced faculty collecting the stories of others during this research study. These stories ultimately showed us why new faculty (and even experienced faculty) need others and how this need is often difficult to address. Therefore, we decided during this first official drafting meeting that our study would not be a typical textbook research write-up. We decided we needed to tell not just one but many stories so as to shed light on the many different ways new faculty succeed or don’t. As Diana George writes in Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers, and Troubadours, to paint the picture of a professor, one must tell “one story through and around many” (xii).

George’s collection promises and demonstrates the very intention we have in this book: “A good story ought to send us back to the scholarship and the institutional realities with yet another important piece to the puzzle of this work . . . that is what these stories are meant to do” (xiv). Throughout this project, we researchers shared memories with one another about our time in graduate school at the same time we were witnessing each other’s experiences as developing professionals teaching both undergraduate and graduate students, researching and writing scholarship, serving our college and university, and participating in administrative work. We realized that while our stories are in some ways vastly different from each other, as well as from those of our participants, they carry a multitude of similarities. The similarities kept us grounded as we developed the initial questions that ultimately guided us in crafting the survey and interview questions early on; the differences made us ask more questions than we could ever address in a single text such as this one. As our data grew, it became clear that we were not alone in our experiences and that the members of our community—professionals throughout the field of composition and rhetoric—were just as eager to share their stories with us as we were to share with each other.

Here’s Our Advice about . . . Understanding How Stories Operate in Our Field

Stories connect us, inform us, teach us. Stories have a strong tradition in composition and rhetoric. Graduate students in this field should be especially aware that we use stories in our everyday practices and scholarship; we find them in our conference presentations, writing centers, classrooms, and hallways. And these stories go beyond our job titles to our senses of self and our place in larger, dominant discourses. Pat Bizzell suggests that “there is a compelling reason for combining the personal, the professional, and the political” because as we construct our professional identities, we pull from every facet of life experience in order to do our jobs and do them well (qtd. in George vii). Maureen Daly Goggin and Peter Goggin’s edited collection approaches research experiences from the perspective of stories as well, citing a much more pragmatic truth: “Storytelling through narrative structures is how humans relate to each other, pass along wisdom, and give meaning to our lives” (7). Our field’s use of storytelling can help (and sometimes hinder) graduate students as they prepare for the professoriate. For instance, storytelling helps us understand why we make the choices we make, uphold or eschew certain traditions, contest or embolden different myths—how we find our way through the first few years of transitioning from student to professor and who we are on the other side of that experience. In other words, as we reflect on our stories, we reflect on who we are and who we are becoming. But in other ways, storytelling, when left unquestioned, risks privileging discourses, processes, and ways of being. While some stories may be similar or share commonalities, they may not be true for all in our field. As readers will see in this book, the participants in our study are unique, each with their own specific stories to tell that shed light on why it is important that graduate programs recognize just how diverse faculty career paths can be in our field.

Here’s What Our Research Says about . . . Studying New Faculty

First and foremost, what we gathered from participants were pieces of their stories, pieces that reflect the many complexities and intricacies of what it means to be a new faculty member and how our participants were prepared (or not) to be one. In other words, we examined their identities and how they constructed them. While we are keenly aware of the complexities of identity and its construction in professional spaces, we also realize demographic markers work in tandem with individual and environmental variables and feel it’s necessary to share this information to help readers extrapolate additional information and narratives and to allow readers to see themselves in the data.

Of our survey’s participants, 122 identified as females, 56 identified as males, 3 preferred not to say, and 15 left the question about gender unanswered. Seventy-one percent of the males and 64% of the females in our study were between the ages of 30 and 39. Five percent of the males and 10% of the females were between the ages of 20 and 29, and 9% of the males and 17% of the females were between the ages of 40 and 49. The rest of the participants were over 50 years of age. Three participants were veterans and one was active duty.

One hundred and fifty-six participants identified their race as white/Caucasian, 10 as Asian, 4 as African American/Black, 4 as Native American/Alaska Native, 4 as Hispanic/Latinx/Chicano, 3 as Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 1 as French Canadian; 5 preferred not to identify their race. Like the graduate students in the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students 2014 report, our study’s population “over-represents the general United States population in terms of women and whiteness” (6). Very similar to participants in the committee’s study, our participants were majority women (62.2%) and white (83.4%).

There were 145 of these participants who indicated they were in tenure-track positions, and 31 indicated they were not on the tenure track but that their institutions had tenure. The remaining participants were in various other positions, such as on renewable contract. The majority of the participants on renewable contracts were at institutions that do not offer tenure, and the remaining participants indicated they did not have the job security offered by either of the institutional contracts (renewable contracts or tenure).

The survey participants taught at small and large public and private colleges and universities across the United States, including two- and four-year institutions. These new faculty mainly taught undergraduate courses and general education courses, as well as courses required for a major. They were less likely to teach honors or service-learning courses. More than half the participants indicated that since starting their position, they had published an article in an academic or professional journal. Nearly half of the participants indicated that since starting their position, they had published a chapter in an edited book. More than half the participants indicated that since starting their position, they had participated in academic research that spans multiple disciplines.

At the conclusion of our survey (phase 1), we had a total of 94 eligible interview participants—those who indicated on the survey that they were willing to be contacted for a follow-up interview. Since we planned to interview a total of 10 participants, we divided this eligible population into five random groups of approximately 19 respondents and used a random number generator to select 4 participants per group, hoping that among these 4, we would be able to coordinate interviews from at least 2 participants. In other words, we would interview 2 participants from each of the five groups. Just in case, we randomly selected 4 potential interviewees instead of 2 from each group in the event the first 2 we contacted within a group no longer wished to be interviewed.

We chose to conduct interviews in our mixed-methods study for a number of reasons. Interviews provided narrative accounts of faculty’s experiences as professionals, thus contextualizing analysis of the collected data on the survey and providing a source for collecting professional documents (phase 3). The interviews also provided a different perspective on faculty labor that could push against or fall in line with the narratives that dominate via disciplinary lore. In the context of this study, the primary purpose of the narratives was to help us gauge the extent to which lore, historical or contemporary, was still true for the members of our field. We also chose interviews for this research project based on the research questions we were seeking to answer but also because of the reflective nature of interviews. In his book The Research Interview, Steve Mann writes that interviewing is a reflective practice and that “any professional activity can be better understood through attempts to reflect on practice and this is no different in the case of qualitative interviewing” (2). We felt the reflective practice of interviewing would allow the participants an opportunity to reflect and expand on their thoughts, which it did.

The following chart describes the interview participants in terms of their workload expectations. Please note we have used pseudonyms to protect their identities.

After the interviews, we went on to phase 3 of our study, which involved collecting professional documents from our interview participants. In total, we collected thirty-one documents, which included CVs, cover ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Strategy 1: Know (Y)Our Stories
• Strategy 2: Understand the Job Market
• Strategy 3: Define Your Tetrad: TRSA
• Strategy 4: Prepare for More Than TRSA
• Strategy 5: Recognize Your Time Is Valuable and Manage It Well
• Strategy 6: Collaborate
• Moving Forward: Faculty and Graduate Program Support
• Appendix: Framework
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Authors