Multivocality and Distributed Reflection on the Listserv

As an intertextual resource for collaborative critical thinking and distributed critical reflection, the listserv allowed students to connect their local experiences to larger contexts of experience and meaning. Here we focus on examples regarding an issue with which many new teachers must grapple, their authority in the classroom. For example, DT, a graduate teaching assistant teaching basic writing, struggled to maintain discipline in her class for the first three weeks of the semester. Her teaching log during this period was filled with entries such as the following:

Such fun, especially with two "men" bored and one smart mouth. Going to have to let my stern side show a little more. Hey, it’s their career, right? Always said that, now it’s time to live up to it. I can’t pass them if they don’t produce. I’m not responsible for their failure.... In our experience as teacher educators, it is certainly not uncommon for young female instructors to encounter resistance from 18- and 19-year old males (we are unaware of any but anecdotal evidence for this generalization). Thus, this problem represents a teacherly dilemma that many of our students must learn to deal with.

By the next week, the situation had worsened:

"The Wild Bunch" is the name of my class. Orientation [to the computer lab] today was wild. Needed to be 4 people...failure? Not this time. I did mess up in the orientation, but took it in stride. Tried not to be too perfect ‘cause I’m not. I didn’t feel the need today to act as if I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t "teaching" so much as trying to show them the lab and how to access the computer. Wes was more out of control than usual. I have got to talk to him! Too much disruption. Similar entries continued for another week. Meanwhile on the listserv, the issue of authority had become a major thread and had branched into discussions of role modeling and mentoring. In class discussion DT revealed that she had followed this discussion "avidly" although she did not contribute until another TA wrote on the listserv that she "was loving teaching." DT responded (on the listserv), mentioning the gender issue and connecting it to another professional development issue, the quality of mentoring for student-teachers: At first I wasn’t too sure how I would like [teaching]. After teaching for awhile, I do like it despite all the hassles one encounters with freshman...As for mentoring...I am still in contact with one of my undergraduate profs. She and I converse on a number of subjects we have in common. As for men mentors, I have found that SOME do not understand the problems that women encounter in the classroom (discipline being one). Five days later DT wrote in response to a question posed by another TA about student-teacher relationships: I have been trying to figure that one out since before I started teaching. Still haven’t come up with a good solution yet. I think that might come with time and experience...I don’t see myself in a peer relationship as I am older than most of my students. I sure ain’t gonna be a mother either. So I am somewhere in between. Just precisely where I’m not sure. Although DT does not have an answer to these questions about mentors and student-teacher relationships, the listserv gives her a chance to say publicly that she doesn’t have the answers and to realize that other TA’s share her concerns. We see this rhetorical move as an example of the distributed cognition embodied in the listserv: DT is able to "think" publicly and collaboratively about her "personal" experience, trying to locate herself between possible but unacceptable roles in the classroom. This kind of thinking requires a sense of security as well as a forum, which this student was apparently able to find on the listserv.

In DT’s last entry on the listserv she wrote about this problem of identity and role:

I know there are days when I’d like to run from the classroom rather than go in. Only because I have so much else to do, not because of the students or the class. I think that for some people, their personal life can influence their teaching performance because a bad day "colors" the whole day. That mood can come across if one isn’t a good actor. This excerpt indicates that DT had moved from the particular descriptions in her written logs of how her students behaved to thinking critically about her role in the classroom and how to exercise power in that role by being aware of what she brings to the classroom. Her contributions to the listserv, which also included reflections on gender that were not included in her teaching log entries, did not focus at all on her discipline problems in the classroom, but these contributions to the listserv helped her to recontextualize her problems within other ongoing discussions. Thus, she was able to connect her concerns about her relationship with her students and her role as authority figure with larger issues of gender and power. In an interview with her supervisor (Elias), DT commented that she was especially relieved, even after her class had calmed down, to have the implicit support of peers struggling with similar issues but "on a more abstract level of discussion," as she put it. Her language indicates an awareness, if not an explicit labeling, of a level of cognitive activity that she perhaps could have engaged in on her own, and would have eventually; and with the listserv she was able to garner support and help in thinking about her problems without having to confess that she was having any problems at all.

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