Ecocompositionists challenge us to consider the ways our identity as writing teachers is influenced by place, whether natural, constructed or imagined. While we were sensitive to the role that place plays in interactions, we had not given serious consideration to the assertion that “place precedes all others,” including race, class, gender, and culture (White, 2002, p. x)—that is, until we were confronted with offering a composition practicum during a global pandemic.
After removing the credit-bearing ENG 703 from the course schedule, our Department Head referred to this weekly GTA training as “staff meetings.” We resisted this label and continued to refer to these weekly exchanges as the composition practicum. Admittedly, aside from continuing to use the title “composition practicum,” the place bore no resemblance to the prior ENG 703. Of course, the most obvious difference was that the practicum was no longer a credit-bearing course. In addition, the practicum was not conducted in a seated classroom, but rather via Zoom. In response to the lack of faculty buy-in, we also embraced an alternative format for the weekly practicum; we opened the practicum to all faculty within the department and had unscripted discussions about particular topics related to teaching composition.
When we had conducted our listening sessions in May 2020, we asked faculty, “What would you like to see?” We embraced this semantic word choice and invited faculty beginning in August 2020 to actually “see” that the various topics they identified were being addressed in the practicum. We sent weekly invitations to all faculty and encouraged them to join the ZOOM discussion with GTAs. No longer would the practicum occur in an isolated space hidden from view. We took what Deborah Murray (2005) refers to as a “team approach to running the practicum,” hoping to capitalize on the different strengths of faculty. As Murray so astutely points out, “some people are better at inspiring new teachers, giving them confidence in their ability…. Other people are best at…helping new teachers find the vocabulary….Other people are best at modeling” (p. 312). A team approach would also allow us to not hold GTAs hostage to a “cult of personality.”
At the beginning of the semester and each week, we circulated via email the topic for the practicum. Some of the topics were those suggested by second-year GTAs on the questionnaire, other topics were those suggested by the faculty during the listening sessions, and still other topics were those that we felt were necessary to include. Attendance varied from week to week, some topics drawing more faculty attendance than other weeks. Ironically, the topics that drew the largest faculty attendance were not necessarily the ones that faculty had suggested during the listening sessions (i.e., responding to student writing, grading student writing, teaching the importance of citation). In fact, “Collaborating with Emerging Bilinguals” was the only faculty-suggested topic that attracted a healthy number of faculty. No doubt, colleagues were intrigued, as we were, by the shift in terminology to “emerging bilinguals” and wanted to hear more from the TESOL faculty. Overall, faculty did not seem to have a vested interest in the topics they suggested. Contrary to what might be anticipated, the topics suggested by the GTAs drew the largest attendance from faculty (i.e., facilitating classroom discussion, helping students find a thesis, and strengthening time management). Three of the topics that we had added were also well attended (i.e., orchestrating peer response groups, building an inclusive and accessible classroom, and managing stress and mental health), particularly the last one on stress and mental health.
In Spring 2021, we expanded the reach of the practicum to include discussion forums outside of the department. We wanted the GTAs to recognize that the composition practicum was indeed a complex ecosystem intertwined with other systems. The practicum schedule included the Interim Department Head’s presentation on the future vision of our department, a discussion with a librarian, a session from the Linguistics colloquium on teacher perspectives of educating English learners, a UConn Writing Center workshop on racism, a discussion with Dr. Liz Monske on pandemic pedagogy, and sessions at the Undergraduate Literature Conference. It was difficult to gauge faculty attendance at some of these sessions because we were not the Zoom host, but we had excellent faculty attendance at the session “Educational Experiences Around the World,” a panel of our international GTAs.
Over 50% of faculty attended one or more practicums during the 2020-21 academic year. Faculty participants came from all departmental areas, as well as all ranks. While it would be tempting to attribute this healthy faculty attendance to some hidden desire to proselytize to GTAs, this would be a significant misinterpretation of what we found. Faculty were motivated to participate in the composition practicum because they craved interaction with their colleagues and the GTAs. They were hungry to discuss teaching with other teachers. While it would also be tempting to conclude it was the pandemic that engendered open discussion of teaching methods between teachers and students, we remain convinced that the pandemic was only a catalyst. Faculty were already hungry to discuss teaching because it is something that they are rarely given the opportunity to do. Faculty regularly attend such events as scholarly presentations, creative readings, and departmental meetings, but rarely do their interactions involve frank discussions about teaching. Even when they attend a colleague’s class, it is usually to evaluate the teaching.
As part of this webtext, we informally interviewed three faculty in our department, each from a different program area, and asked them to share their impressions of the redesigned composition practicum. One of the first things mentioned was how the composition practicum has afforded inter-departmental conversations. Jen Murvin, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, shares that “the practicum has been a place for me to hear ideas from my colleagues and also from the teaching assistants…I have just loved it … just having that time to listen.” Similarly, Dr. Alan Tinkler, Associate Professor of English Education, notes how the composition practicum has built collaborative capacity: “what we’ve got is graduate students and faculty with emerging expertise in both their professional areas as well as their teaching and so by bringing people together we’re able to have conversations about what does it mean to effectively engage students in a meaningful learning experience….part of it is thinking about the humility of our professional identities. Part of that humility rests on listening and learning from others.”
Notably, both faculty members emphasize that what the newly designed composition practicum has provided for is space for listening. George Lipsitz (1990) shares an illuminating story about providing such a space in the introduction to his article on listening to learn:
According to a story often told among jazz musicians, when trumpet player Clark Terry first joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1951, he rehearsed in his mind every complicated technical maneuver that might be expected of him. The young musician waited anxiously for instructions from the legendary band leader, but all his new boss asked him to do was "to listen." When Terry complained that anyone could just sit and listen, the ever enigmatic Ellington informed him that "there's listening, and then there's listening, but what I want from you is to listen." Eventually, Terry came to understand what Ellington wanted. Terry had been so preoccupied with what he might contribute to the orchestra as an individual, that he had not taken time to hear what the other musicians needed. He had not yet learned to hear the voices around him. (p. 615)
Ellington's admonition to listen was facilitated in the composition practicum in ways we had not anticipated by the technology.
Obviously, Zoom collapsed time and space, thereby increasing accessibility for faculty. Zoom was accessible on any device by simply clicking on the link we provided to Margaret’s institutional account. Faculty who in previous semesters pre-COVID would have been unable to attend in person due to the physical logistics of when and where they were teaching, were able to join us. This was also true for scholars outside our department. As mentioned earlier, in Spring 2021 we expanded the practicum schedule to include multiple participants from outside the university who graciously shared their time and expertise through open discussions with the practicum attendees. Our experience was not unique. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Samuel J. Adams (2021), a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, also found that “The pandemic revealed the best in many people. That came through repeatedly in the past three semesters. For example, guest speakers and experts who — before Covid — would have been too busy or too costly to invite to the campus often eagerly responded to invitations. By Zooming in to talk about their own writings and impressions, they added priceless color.”
Accessibility, however, was not the only thing that facilitated increased listening. Because the practicum was no longer a class, there was also not a designated “teacher” or “instructor of record” for the practicum. This significantly altered the interactions that occurred within the space. The weekly sessions were not scripted in any way, aside from specifying a general discussion topic (as indicated in the schedule that was circulated via email). There were no expectations and/or goals regarding what would be discussed during each session.
We conceived of our roles as fellow collaborators, and when necessary, moderators who would pose questions if the discussion began to flounder. Unlike in the physical space of a classroom, the virtual space of Zoom did not set clearly defined parameters for us. “When teaching, or in a physical meeting, our physical space is defined by role and choice,” as Jamilia L. McWhirter (2020) explains. “When teaching, we have an area from which to teach. Our students have assigned places or chose their seats. We use the physical space as a teaching tool itself” (p. 42). Though Zoom has been adopted as a space for teaching during the pandemic, the technology does not allow for the space to be used in the same way. All participants, including the teacher, appear in a non-hierarchical grid—not in assigned places, alphabetical order, or some predetermined arrangement. Even if a user chooses to use “speaker” view, this view is transitory, shifting when the speaker role shifts from one person to another person.
In an article that appeared recently in Inside Higher Education, Susan D. Blum (2020) concludes that Zoom is a platform made for a single speaker at a time. Thus, “Zoom works well for faculty members who lecture, or for groups that have formal meetings, with rules for who speaks.” When used for something other than the traditional classroom, Blum maintains people talk over each other, prompting a constant need to apologize. Yu Sheng’s research (2021) confirmed this. By analyzing transcripts of several interactions in an online college classroom using Zoom, Sheng found that overlaps between speakers were longer and more frequent than in a seated classroom setting. In both a seated classroom and on Zoom, multiple individuals can speak simultaneously. The difference, however, is that the mixed sound quality of voices on Zoom can make it difficult to determine who spoke first. This affects the unspoken rules for turn-taking in conversation.
Havey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson’s (1974) ground-breaking systematics in turn-taking serves as a useful framework for understanding how individuals navigate conversations. In a face-to-face conversation, three rules guide turn-taking: 1) The current speaker selects the next speaker, 2) If the current speaker does not select the next speaker, self-selection may be instituted, and 3) the current speaker may continue if no speaker is selected (p. 704). Another guiding rule is that only one speaker may speak at a given time (p. 706). These rules help to guarantee that occurrences of more than one speaker at a time are brief. So for instance, if the current speaker does not select the next speaker and self-selection is initiated, the turn is allocated to the self-selector who starts first. As Sheng (2021) discovered, the sound quality and the sheer number of participants in a Zoom discussion may make it difficult to determine which self-selector spoke first.
This turn-taking ambiguity can be somewhat mitigated, though, if the Zoom space is structured to more closely resemble the traditional classroom, with the teacher being the agreed upon arbitrator of overlap interference. In the traditional seated classroom, “only teachers can direct speakership” (McHoul, 1978, p. 188). This explains why Blum (2020) concludes that Zoom works well for faculty who lecture. The faculty member maintains the role of speaker and, in turn, becomes the determiner of who can (or cannot speak) even in the Zoom environment. If the teacher asks a question to all possible speakers, the teacher is given the power to select who is to speak (whether by random or from the selection of those with blue raised hands).
Because there was no designated teacher/speaker for the composition practicum, this would seem to suggest that Zoom was a hinderance more than a way forward. However, the ambiguity of turn-taking encouraged participants to be more intentional listeners, as indicated by Murvin and Tinkler in their video interviews. In the composition practicum, participants had to develop their own implicit rules for turn-taking and speaker self-selection rather than relying on a “teacher” to guide the discussion. Granted, faculty were present who could have easily assumed the “teacher” role when we did not, but the technology discouraged this. In Zoom, there is little differentiation among attendees, at least in terms of the labels that appear on the thumbnail images. When attendees log into the Zoom space, their names appear in the list of participants and underneath their thumbnail images. Unless a faculty member deliberately renames the identification label to include “Dr.” or “Professor” (which no one ever did), attendees would be unaware of the person’s identity within the department. Even though age of the participant might provide a clue (or prior knowledge of the participant), Zoom provided a way to move beyond “the cult of personality.” Technically, all faculty in attendance were guests. Diane Gayesk (2021) points out that this creates a leveling of sorts because the host of the Zoom meeting “does not feel an obligation to turn over the entire class period to the guest” (Class Technologies). In short, the visual set-up of Zoom eliminates the hierarchy that is often present when faculty members and graduate students interact face-to-face in a hallway or classroom. In the virtual space of the composition practicum, faculty were not perceived as sages giving guest lectures. Instead, they were writing teachers collaborating with other writing teachers.
All three faculty who were interviewed provided specific examples of things they learned from listening to other writing teachers in the practicum. Dr. Jonathan Newman, Associate Professor of Literature, shares,
One thing that I learned from the practicum that is again very different from my training … is to be less directive in my feedback—to be less like this is how you should write your thesis, this is how you should revise the sentence, this is how you should structure your paragraph, and edit heavy-handedly. I was inspired by some of these practicum sessions that I attended to work more to empower them [students] with the skills to do that themselves, to find their own course, do their own corrections, and give them those skills that they’re going to take beyond their time here at the university.
In particular, Newman mentions how enlightening the practicum session on “Finding a Thesis” was for him: “I learned a fair bit about how people who work in rhet comp think about theses and what they’re for in a more open way that’s not kind of jumping right to a specific target, but in a way that really kind of develops students as thinkers and writers more.”
Newman’s remarks are not isolated. The other two faculty members we interviewed also reference specific pedagogical techniques they are now implementing as a result of the practicum. Tinkler highlights how the practicum has reminded him of best practices in writing instruction:
There are new things that I’m thinking about and being reminded of. For instance, a couple of the graduate students talked about the importance of individual conferencing. That’s a practice that I haven’t incorporated as much recently into my own teaching practice maybe because of the pandemic, maybe because it is so time intensive, but hearing about the energy that is developed through those individual relationships…I decided [to include it] in my next lesson plan.
Tinkler was also moved when one of the graduate students talked about her community engaged work. Her sharing has prompted him to “reflect on what are those opportunities to manage community engaged learning opportunities within the context of my coursework.”
Murvin’s impressions of the composition practicum mirror those of Newman and Tinkler, even though all three are in different programs. She reports that the practicum sessions have served to “highlight things I need to work on for myself, so that’s been kind of an unexpected benefit.” This inertia even prompted Murvin to arrange for someone to come from the Counseling Center to offer a trauma writing workshop for all writing teachers in our department. As she explains in her interview video, “I found myself thinking I really would like some support, I really would like some more knowledge to empower myself to be a better teacher…maybe other people need it, too.” This is a superb example of the “multiplier effect” that Tinkler references in his video. We excitedly built Murvin’s workshop into the Fall 2021 practicum schedule.
We would be remiss, too, if we did not acknowledge how faculty responded to the well-attended practicum session on “Managing Stress and Maintaining Mental Health.” Part of the culture that had surrounded ENG 703 was that the practicum was akin to a “gripe session” or “group therapy session.” We worried how faculty would characterize a session devoted to stress management. Our worries were quickly abated when GTAs and faculty shared personal stories and coping strategies with each other during the session. Newman specifically mentions this particular session in his video and describes it as an eye-opener. He comments on how the session “sensitized us [faculty] to the fact that school is important but it’s only one part of a student’s full spectrum of their life. It really spoke to the culture of the practicums … that the students were able to speak and share so freely and watch them support each other.” Faculty in attendance were able to “see” first-hand the benefits of openly sharing concerns and struggles, in addition to engaging in the scholarly study of composition theory.
One of our goals for offering the practicum via Zoom and as an unscripted open discussion with faculty was to improve transparency about what happens in the composition practicum. Though we never articulated this goal in a public way to our colleagues, nevertheless faculty affirmed the accomplishment of this goal. This is the exact word that Tinkler chose to use when discussing what he perceives as the significance of the redesigned composition practicum: “transparency across programs is crucial to the way the department of English functions. I think what the practicum is doing is modeling really effective community practices around teaching and learning.” Both Tinkler and Newman make reference to the lack of awareness regarding the composition program prior to Fall 2020. Newman describes having a vague sense that there was a coordinated curriculum that involved portfolios and “an iterative sort of staged writing process.” Tinkler’s description is a bit more memorable: “a black box.”
The most noticeable indication that we had increased understanding about what happens in the practicum was the shift in the way our Department Head referred to the weekly discussions. When the Department Head removed the credit-bearing ENG 703 from the course schedule, it was replaced by what the Department Head referred to as weekly “staff meetings.” We actively resisted this characterization in multiple ways. In our weekly email reminders, we invited faculty to join us for the “composition practicum.” In departmental meetings, we referred to our Friday discussions as “composition practicum.” In Composition Committee minutes, we referenced the “practicum” schedule. On more than one occasion, the Department Head zoomed into the Friday composition practicum and listened as faculty and GTAs discussed pedagogical issues and best practices in composition. By the end of Fall 2020, the Department Head was opting to use “composition practicum” rather than “staff meeting” to refer to the Friday GTA discussions. In a complete turn-about, then, the Department Head announced that ENG 703 would be reinstated for the 2021-2022 academic year and would be placed on the course schedule.
What these experiences have affirmed to us is that the composition practicum is indeed a delicate ecosystem. Its livelihood depends on faculty buy-in. Although the pandemic served as a catalyst to gain institutional perspectives on the composition practicum, the digital format provided an unexpected way to rebuild community among our various departmental areas and buy-in to the importance of pedagogical work. Would faculty buy-in have happened without Zoom? Perhaps, but not likely. We contend that the technology created a space/place that affected the discourse that was possible, though we are also inclined to acknowledge that this is a bit of a theoretical chicken and egg argument: “discourse creates environment and environment creates discourse. It is a dialogic relationship; environment and discourse are co-constitutive” (Dobrin & Weisser, 2002b, p. 32). As a result, several questions haunted us at the end of the 2020-2021 academic year: What would happen when faculty and students reconvened in person in Fall 2021? What would happen when the practicum reappeared as the credit-bearing ENG 703? Could the ecosystem we created be maintained? Was this composition practicum sustainable?