| Description |
Being a graduate student while becoming a teaching assistant (TA) is fraught with struggles of knowledge and identity. While the field of rhetoric and composition has long theorized the needs of undergraduate students in first year writing (FYW) classes, it has only recently begun to theorize the needs of the TAs who teach a majority of the FYW classes. This research study, using poststructural methodology and qualitative methods of ethnography and discourse analysis, adds to this growing body of research by exploring how TAs approach, execute, and communicate about their teaching work. Focusing on interaction ritual and face in connection to classroom observations and follow-up interviews, as well as growth and fluency in the practice of teacher talk, this study complicates fixed and simplistic identity options ascribed to TAs through the literature in the field. This study also highlights that TA identity, exhibited through facework and fluency in teacher talk, is fragmentary, contingent, and constantly revised in interaction. I argue that a combination of classroom observation and attention to elements of teacher talk can increase Writing Program Administrator's (WPA's) awareness of TAs' strengths and struggles, and ultimately lead to improved training and support practices for our work with TAs. In Chapter Three, I argue that the act of observation and institutionally situated questioning as part of the research process create space for different kinds of interaction rituals, face moves, and identity performances; facework and interaction ritual allow for the performance/emergence of an interactional identity that is fluid, fragmentary, iv emergent, and contingent. In Chapter Four, I show that fluency in teacher discourse (identified through teacher talk) is performed through managing multiple, sometimes conflicting, evaluations of self and students and through the use of context- and content-specific explanations, descriptions, and directives. |
