WHERE AM I?

As a first-year TA, I have spent past year as a teacher of freshman writing in the regular classroom and as a student of electronic writing in the Networked Writing Environment computer labs. This fall I will be able to combine these two aspects of my experience as a graduate student in English at the University of Flordia by teaching freshman writing in the NWE.

Despite the rich experiences of the past year, teaching in the digital classroom remains a terrortory for me. I am now moving out of the relative safety of the traditional classroom-- so many years as a student as well as as a teacher in that space has provided a modicum of comfort, if sometimes constraint.

When I signed up for the NWE Teaching Practicum, I thought I would be taking a course that would focus on skills needed to to set up a course in the electronic environment--technicalities of running class MOO sessions, what hypertext projects might be appropriate for first-year students--guidelines drawn from the sucesses and failures of my more experienced peers. At first,I was a bit frustrated that Jane and Tony were leaving the discussion of pedagogy until the end of the semester. Although I wanted to concentrate on issues of teaching in the NWE, in the end I believe I benefited from the emphasis on the process of learning and thinking as a student in the NWE. I was exposed to a wide range of assignments and course plans used by other TAs, but as these plans tended to reflect idiosyncratic interests and strengths, I couldn't just scoop up projects from here and there to pile together my syllabus. At the end of the spring term, I faced an empowering, yet terrifying realization: I would have to invent my own pedagogical space.