Introductions

Inevitably when meeting someone for the first time, there is only so long until the question of employment comes up. English teacher? Literature professor? Writing instructor?

As I progressed through graduate school over the better part of the past decade, my responses have led to one of two follow-up questions: “What are you going to do with an English degree?” or, more commonly, “What grade do you teach?”

Disciplinary and personal angst creeps into the contours of our ensuing discussion as I scramble to mask the hesitation: where to begin?

A simple enough question, but one to leave me pondering long after the conversation ends.

Although I committed to learning to teach writing with a pragmatic approach, I did not realize my initial hesitations against being labelled a “teacher” emanated from longstanding disciplinary debate of the value of research over teaching for professoriate labor.

The anxiety to maintain these disciplinary divides reifies a hierarchy privileging theory over teaching and equating teaching and pedagogy with pre-college or contingency labor. In fact, some call into question its place in education and among serious lifelong academic pursuits.

And yet, teaching and theorizing about writing was conceptually thrilling and personally rewarding. This left me unsure of my place in the academy. Was it possible to situate myself somewhere in the intersection? If so, at what cost?

When I first started teaching writing as a doctoral student in literature, I had the opportunity to take a teaching practicum the last time a seminal figure in the composition and rhetoric field offered it before transitioning to partial retirement. The varied levels of enthusiasm of the students in their own disciplinary coteries to be teaching writing at all dramatized these intra-disciplinary fractures.

For me, it opened up new research possibilities and I started piecing together a dissertation that tried to put some pressure on these divides. My overarching research questions was what the respective areas could teach each other about everyday reading and writing practices, as I looked for examples of writing (and its significance) in literature.This pursuit even brought me out of the classroom and into seeming mundane experiences with texts.

While I have learned to pause long enough to think through my immediate response to these comments, my particular experience also illuminates the biases of this profession. The relationship between English (Literature) and Writing (with its ELL/ESL counterparts) is not always as cozy as our students and others assume, and this gets even more complicated when folding Creative Writing into the mix.

While all these branches deal with reading and writing, each imagine different contexts for their work. What is most interesting to me is that many of us identify with more than one at any given time, yet the way that we see these working together has a real impact on the work that gets envisioned as possible or legitimate in college classrooms.

We feel pressure to proclaim what we "really" are: a literature professor with an interest in writing, and writing instructor with a background in literature, a writer who teaches writing, a literacy teacher-researcher.

And yet, the tension is not resolved or satisfying resolvable.

Yes, those labels both fit and don't fit as I work through my day assuming various roles. I try them on and eventually wear them out.

At least the question is fodder for good discussion, once we get past the hesitation.