Search

“Youth cannot just be seen as cultural dupes but as the active creators of their own lives” (131). This quote, hidden halfway through Youthscapes and written by Susan Shepler in her discussion of c...

This study examines the experiences of ten first-year English teachers in various school contexts in two Northeastern states. Through a phenomenological approach to in-depth interviewing, teachers were interviewed at the end of their first year of teaching. Commonalities in teachers' experiences include former teachers' influences on their teacher personae, negotiating their authoritative role in the classroom, understanding how and why to set boundaries with students, and demonstrating resilience and resolve in the face of multiple challenges. Implications for teacher education and induction programs are to address the disequilibrium of the self in early teaching experiences and to model habits of mind that promote “productive disequilibrium.”

In this article, we describe an approach to teaching first-year composition that is built on a qualitative design for undergraduate research and writing. As writing instructors at a state teaching college, we see the need to move our students beyond the boundaries of expressivism, personal narrative, and argument and into the murkier, messier, and more critical territory of considering subjectivities, interpreting cultural texts and contexts, and, ultimately, coming to see the dynamic and dialogic nature of rhetorical situations and knowledge production. We have discovered that asking undergraduates to do field work as a way to enter the academic conversation allows them to shift from high school writing to college-level writing. Inviting them to delve into a primary research project of their own design grants them permission to construct their ownership, authority, and intellectual engagement of ideas. Case studies of the experiences of five student research writers illustrate the process through which, as ethnographers, students become actors in their own learning process.