What do I know now that I didn’t know before? I know I can do this.
My undergraduate career ended on a sour note, held for a long duration, and I took an extended break from intellectual work—not only that, but I found myself in an environment that, while not necessarily anti-intellectual, was profoundly anti-nerd. I came to graduate study after two years of national service. In AmeriCorps, you are largely paid in moral superiority (somehow I actually make more as a TA than I did as a full-time VISTA). It was a life changing experience, possibly because it taught me that I do not, in fact, want to go into the nonprofit sector for the rest of my life. I grappled with this transition in some of the early writing I did in AL 833, Composition Pedagogies. I was really dealing with becoming a writer again—the weekly reading responses assigned for that class gave me an opportunity to acclimate to the rhythms of the university again and rediscover my critical, reflective voice.
I never anticipated that I would feel so good about teaching. Many of my old coworkers were very skeptical that I would be a good teacher (perhaps because of my grouchy office demeanor?). The evolution of my confidence is very clear in the documents I’ve produced as a teacher—for example, the first assignment I gave my students fall semester, and spring semester. I created this assignment as my own version of the “literacy autobiography” assignment, to incorporate a community organizing-based pedagogy (because coming into TA training this summer, that was the only philosophy or approach I could think of that I felt confident enough to translate into a teaching strategy). However, my strategy of using “asset-based community development” as a pedagogy has worked satisfyingly well, and that assignment evolved successfully into something I was able to carry throughout more of this semester than how it all worked in the fall. Then again, I have had some failed assignments—my attempt at having my students critique different genres by writing in different genres confused them so hard that I collapsed the assignment into something much simpler. I would like to try this again in the future but I myself have to have a better mastery of genre theory to be able to do this well. I think the philosophy I have developed as a teacher can be seen very clearly in my reflective essay from AL 833 (which took the place of a more formalized teaching philosophy statement).
I learned a great deal this year about participating in a scholarly community. This is different from working at a nonprofit, which is often more like being a cog in a bureaucracy than a community member, as well as different from being in a primarily activist community. I love the difference between a group project and actual collaboration. I hate being forced into collaboration via circumstance, but I have had really good experiences this year where my fellow grad students and I were able to take cool ideas and run with them, and show off the diversity and yet coherence of our intellectual/writerly products. The best example of this is “Edge of the Panel, Edge of the Page,” the collaborative zine that four of us (Donnie Sackey, Katie Livingston, Casey Miles, and me) put together for the Edges conference. Included in my digital portfolio is a scan of my contributions, but I invite you to read the print version of the zine as well. I really want to do more collaborative work in the future—through this project, Katie and I have discussed further work on zines, and I see a co-authored paper as one possible outcome.
I have also learned to navigate this scholarly community. I am learning the genres and discourses expected of someone in this line of work, which can be seen in the two conference proposals that are included in my portfolio, as well as my work from AL 841, Professional Writing Theory and Research. That course in particular has challenged me to critically explore the discipline of technical communication and professional writing, through research in the discipline and on it.
As you may be able to tell from the form and shape of this portfolio, I now have greater confidence in my technical skills. I used to describe myself as “the worst webmaster in the world” at my old job, but I’ve realized I was being too hard on myself. The WRA 410 course, Advanced Web Authoring, has provided a structured environment for me to grow as a professional, and to develop the coding skills to support my future endeavors.
Finally, I’m excited that through my work this year, I know the general shape of what I want my thesis project to be. I have learned that I am, in fact, capable of a sustained intellectual project—I think this is the joy of doing work that goes beyond textual analysis and into theory building. I don’t think I can get bored of this project because it has many facets—I think the problem is going to be narrowing the scope. It is still preliminary, and I have a long way to go, but the first leg of it has been delivered.
The work I did in AL 805, History and Theory of Rhetoric, prepared me for the kind of serious rhetorical thought that drives this project, in particular, the thinking I was able to do about memory in different rhetorical traditions. This can first be seen in my weekly reflective writings from the course, of which I have provided a selection. It took me some time to find my intellectual footing, which can probably be seen from the difference between my early writings and later ones, but I eventually became confident interacting with the texts we covered and making them speak to one another.
Such a synthetic ability is even further developed in my final project: my collage comic zine, “Nonsense Comix #7” (or, as most people refer to it “Oh Shit I’m in Grad School”). I think that my comic does several critically important things. It synthesizes the theoretical and historical knowledge I absorbed on our whirlwind tour through rhetorical history. Secondly, it embodies one of my theories about indigenous visual rhetorical traditions—that by taking these texts seriously, we can learn new/forgotten purposes for our own visual work. (In this case, that comics can serve as memoria.) Lastly, the piece uses my favorite writerly voice—I like how I sound when I write argumentative scholarly prose, but I really cherish the opportunity to take the puckish girl intellectual smartass tone that zines afford me.
I was able to turn all this thinking into a format for a broader audience than the people who got a copy of my zine—I proposed and delivered a paper at Convergences: Comics and Globalization, the 7th annual University of Florida conference on comics and graphic novels. Included in this portfolio is my abstract and the slides from my talk. I may have committed some PowerPoint sins in the way I did my presentation, but what I can’t represent in this portfolio is my character as a speaker—I try to be confident and engaging, and after I delivered my talk I received really positive feedback from some audience members (including the editor of ImageText, who may be putting out some form of proceedings of the conference…let’s hope!).
I think the next direction I want to go with this is to look at comics as a literacy technology instead of a genre or form, that is separate from the visual rhetorical traditions that make up any comic’s content. This really speaks to the conversations going on in comics studies about what a comic or graphic novel is in a way that no one is really saying. This is the gist of the paper I intend to propose for CCCC 2010.
This has been an incredibly exciting year for me. I am happy. I feel that I have been consistently creatively and intellectually productive. I have a direction—this year has made it clear to me that I have a vision for myself as a scholar by profession. I see myself going on to a PhD program in Rhetoric and having a career as a teacher and writer and comic book maker. I am looking forward to pursuing innovative ideas and doing radical work to revise how comics and graphic are studied, and to reshape the way that we see Rhetoric and Writing as a discipline.