Seeing in Writing: A Case Study of a Multilingual Graduate Writing Instructor’s Socialization through Multimodality

With growing numbers of multilinguals becoming writing instructors and scholars in the U.S. composition context, it is urgent to understand how multilingual graduate instructors of writing socialization processes are mediated by multimodal elements rather than just textual forms of language. This article reports on an ethnographically-oriented case study to respond to the following questions: (1) Does multimodality contribute to a multilingual graduate instructor’s socialization into writing and the teaching of writing? If yes, in what ways does multimodality interact with the writer’s language repertoire? (2) How does the multilingual graduate instructor’s multimodal writing and teaching of writing impact other academic practices? Through systematic thematic coding and multimodal textual analysis of questionnaires, a classroom observation, writing materials, and a semi-structured interview, the study reveals that the participant, a graduate teacher of writing, transitioned from isolation to socialization through multimodality while developing a gendered consciousness. In addition, her identity shifted in power hierarchies as socialization enabled researching and teaching through multimodal and multisensorial identity.

Transgressive Learning Communities: Transformative Spaces for Underprivileged, Underserved, and Historically Underrepresented Graduate Students at Their Institutions

In this paper we propose a new vision of educational development that reimagines how graduate instructors are socialized and professionalized in academic settings. We describe a Transgressive Learning Community (TLC) that empowers graduate instructors with tools to reveal, mitigate, and disrupt oppressive structures in higher education. Our learning community is founded on critical race and feminist conceptualizations of pedagogical inquiry in its design, implementation, and assessment to serve underprivileged, underserved, and historically underrepresented graduate students. We argue that the intersections of marginalized and graduate student identities create distinct experiences of discrimination, marginalization, tokenism, isolation, and impostor syndrome due to a lack of sustained teaching mentorship within the academy. The Transgressive Learning Community model that we propose in this paper functions to create spaces of transgressive and transformational pedagogical engagement for graduate students who exist at the intersections of these identities.