_In graduate education, professional practices circulate as embedded,
implied, and mystifying “lore.” Upon entering graduate programs,
students attempt to glean professional expectations from peers and
professors in patchworked ways—piecing together through time a sense
of how to “do” reading, writing, collaborating, and professionalizing.
The often improvisational nature of acquiring graduate literacies has
been variously identified in composition scholarship (see Bloom 1981,
Clark 2007, Micciche 2011), as have possible reasons for this absence of
direct literacy instruction. Patricia A. Sullivan, for example,
suggests that, "Most graduate faculty assume that graduate students, by
definition, 'already know how to write,' and thus writing assumes a
secondary and often marginal role in graduate education."
Because of a current-traditional assumption that writing and reading practices are always-already in tact, graduate students seem to stumble towards individual, ad-hoc means for accomplishing increasingly difficult literacy tasks. Amidst many insights about how writing, reading, and literacy practices operate in a variety of contexts, composition studies has come to understand literacy as first and foremost social. Now paradigmatic, social constructionism (Bartholomae, Bizzell, Berlin, and many more) has come to see composing and literacy as first "a socialization process, a process of initiation into the discourse community's world view" (Bizzell 194). As students of rhetoric and composition and teachers of composition courses, we notice here an odd discrepancy in the ways we teach writing in the university and the way it's taught to us in the context of graduate study, or more accurately not taught to us. In this way we suggest that composition studies can provide an invigorating framework from which current-traditional literacy assumptions within graduate instruction (across disciplines) can be shifted. This web-text takes up the idea that graduate literacy is foremost a process of socialization--an affective, responsive process of sharing narratives of our experiences.
Working from the assumption that graduate literacy is a complex social process, our inquiry attempts to capture and circulate some of the ways graduate students in English Studies have grappled with literacy learning.
As a way of beginning, we offer some questions that reflect what we want to know about our collective “ways with texts”. These questions raise a handful of issues around graduate literacy, some of which impede our inquiry and some of which provoke it by calling attention to gaps and problematic commonplaces of academia:
Contributing to existing scholarship on literacy-learning in graduate school, we argue here for the value of documenting, interacting with, and circulating the myriad ways students internalize and act upon the shadows and suggestions of proficient literacy practices. As we detail in the next section, we argue that digital space and online interaction in the form of an interactive archival space represents one way to facilitate the circulation and responsivity we find so integral to the ways literacy happens in the context of graduate school. Whether or not direct instruction exists in any given form, in any given program, literacy practices still form and reform as graduate students attempt to understand, often completely individually, what it takes to successfully do the reading and writing work required of them. In the next section, we forward archival "literacy in the raw" as one approach to creating more interaction and responsibility within graduate literacy.
Because of a current-traditional assumption that writing and reading practices are always-already in tact, graduate students seem to stumble towards individual, ad-hoc means for accomplishing increasingly difficult literacy tasks. Amidst many insights about how writing, reading, and literacy practices operate in a variety of contexts, composition studies has come to understand literacy as first and foremost social. Now paradigmatic, social constructionism (Bartholomae, Bizzell, Berlin, and many more) has come to see composing and literacy as first "a socialization process, a process of initiation into the discourse community's world view" (Bizzell 194). As students of rhetoric and composition and teachers of composition courses, we notice here an odd discrepancy in the ways we teach writing in the university and the way it's taught to us in the context of graduate study, or more accurately not taught to us. In this way we suggest that composition studies can provide an invigorating framework from which current-traditional literacy assumptions within graduate instruction (across disciplines) can be shifted. This web-text takes up the idea that graduate literacy is foremost a process of socialization--an affective, responsive process of sharing narratives of our experiences.
Working from the assumption that graduate literacy is a complex social process, our inquiry attempts to capture and circulate some of the ways graduate students in English Studies have grappled with literacy learning.
As a way of beginning, we offer some questions that reflect what we want to know about our collective “ways with texts”. These questions raise a handful of issues around graduate literacy, some of which impede our inquiry and some of which provoke it by calling attention to gaps and problematic commonplaces of academia:
- How can we make the literacy practices of our community visible?
- What happens when we ask about the reading, writing, and collaborating practices within our graduate communities?
- How do we come to know how to read, write, and collaborate?
- What do we do when we read, write, and collaborate? What does that doing mean?
- How can virtual archives help facilitate critical reflection on these practices?
Contributing to existing scholarship on literacy-learning in graduate school, we argue here for the value of documenting, interacting with, and circulating the myriad ways students internalize and act upon the shadows and suggestions of proficient literacy practices. As we detail in the next section, we argue that digital space and online interaction in the form of an interactive archival space represents one way to facilitate the circulation and responsivity we find so integral to the ways literacy happens in the context of graduate school. Whether or not direct instruction exists in any given form, in any given program, literacy practices still form and reform as graduate students attempt to understand, often completely individually, what it takes to successfully do the reading and writing work required of them. In the next section, we forward archival "literacy in the raw" as one approach to creating more interaction and responsibility within graduate literacy.
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