"Reconciling Local and Global (or, Short Term and Long Term) Graduate Student Concerns."
Susan Lang
Texas Tech University
"Reconciling Local and Global (or, Short Term and Long Term) Graduate Student Concerns."
Susan Lang
Texas Tech University
In this, indeed, in any discussion of graduate student issues, I think it important to remember that much of the graduate school experience involves addressing and balancing the immediate, local concerns of a graduate program as well as more extended, professional issues. Students entering a program at either the Master's level (a group often overlooked in most discussions) or at the doctoral level are faced with programmatic, departmental, and institutional requirements that may or may not appear to directly influence a student's professional success. Given the nature of the academic job market for Ph.D.s in the Humanities (rightly or not, the academic division with which Rhet/Comp or C&W Ph.D.s are most commonly allied), discussions of graduate student concerns gravitate toward the issues concerning those students within a year or two of the job search. I would suggest that we should look locally (at the programmatic or departmental level) and consider what we can do for our graduate students during their first two years to assist them both in navigating obligatory hurdles and in preparing for traditional and alternative careers.Some possibilities for discussion include:
- How can we orient new students to the evolving area of study known as "computers and writing"? For many of us attending the Town Hall, such orientations were largely informal and unstructured, taking place in online discussions and face-to-face conferences as well as through a reading of the publications of the field. (Note that I am, for the moment, labeling C&W as a field -- whether or not this is a healthy thing to do can remain fodder for another discussion). Should these orientations now take a more structured form, i.e. one or more seminars? If so, what are we willing to trade off in our programs in order to not make these courses simply another requirement for the students? Or should we trust that students want to know about the field enough to form reading groups or engage in online discussions, much like I and a few of my colleagues did to study Foucault in more detail.
- How can we explore, programmatically, the integration of technology into rhetoric, composition, technical communication, and other areas with our students? We should continually consider how what it is we currently call computers and writing can be situated within the programs of study of our departments.
- What opportunities can we provide students to teach or to lean about teaching with varying amounts of technology. Few programs can provide students with the opportunity to always teach in a computer classroom, and fewer provide students with the chance to experiment with distributed or distance learning. If we are indeed slowly developing an ecology of the 24-hour classroom, what opportunities can we provide for our students?
- How do we prepare students for the realities of academic positions? When I first tested the job market in 1991, nearly all of the institutions interviewing me let me know that I would be the technology/writing specialist. Nearly a decade later, our students may well face similar situations, where they will be asked to write grants, lead initiatives, and develop programs -- all without tenure. We should consider how to prepare our students for the transition from "student at institution with technology" to "faculty at institution with outdated or minimal new technology," in terms of teaching, research, and administrative requirements of the academy.
- Finally, we should acknowledge the fact that many of our doctoral students will explore career opportunities other than academic appointments. We should consider what our current programs offer to those students.
