The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development

Values, the Practicum, and Programmatic Change in Writing Studies

Adrienne Jankens

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781646427888
  9781646427864
• eBook ISBN:
  9781646427895
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education Administration
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development explores the role of writing programs—specifically practicum courses—in developing teachers and articulating programmatic values. Drawing on interviews, curricular analysis, program archives, and teacher research, Adrienne Jankens explores how implicit values shape decisions about curriculum, pedagogy, and programmatic structures.
 
Through her multi-site analysis, Jankens examines the ways values are reflected in syllabi, committee meetings, and classroom practices. She demonstrates how values that are often unstated or assumed can be made explicit and linked to programmatic action, thus supporting development and aligning instructional goals with broader institutional objectives. Offering a nuanced framework on practicum courses, Jankens also highlights the importance of local contexts and distinguishes among tacit, implicit, explicit, emergent, and articulated values. This layered understanding helps reveal the often hidden mechanisms by which writing program values are enacted in day-to-day teaching practices.
 
Teacher development is a crucial site for enacting and understanding programmatic values, and making these values explicit can guide meaningful programmatic change. Providing an institutional ethnography of Jankens's own writing program and situating those findings within broader conversations in writing studies, The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development adds to scholarship exploring the focus of the practicum course, the positionality and experience of graduate teaching assistants in writing programs, and the perennial work of the field to identify its core values and disciplinary identity.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Looking Back (and) to the Future: Reading Inside My Home Program
• 2. Finding Values in the Practicum Syllabus in Interviews with WPAs and Practicum Instructors
• 3. Getting to Slow Agency via Slowing Conversation in Curricular Committee Work
• 4. “But Here We Are!” Still Learning How to Teach About Language: The Practicum, a Revised Curriculum, and the Pandemic
• 5. Between Mission and Action: Restructuring Programmatic Change Through Teacher Development
• Appendix: Semi-Structured Interview Protocol (excerpt): Interviews with WPAs and Practicum Instructors
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author