A Blast from my Past

The circle of academic life

I’m in the middle of another post right now, but for reasons that will become clear, I wanted to interrupt myself with a story:

Back in the early 2000s, I had taken a position here at Syracuse, and was just beginning to find my way in terms of teaching PhD-level courses. It can be a challenge: even though it was my second job out of graduate school, I was still in my early 30s, which meant that I wasn’t much older than most of my students (in some cases, I was younger). Consciously or not, we can sometimes feel pressured to “prove we belong,” something that folks often refer to as “imposter syndrome.” (And I felt it acutely, despite having a great deal of privilege across just about every axis of identity. You can’t rationalize yourself out of that sort of anxiety.)

In the spring of 2005, I’d taken over as our program’s Director of Graduate Studies, having just completed my first research sabbatical and submitted the initial manuscript for what would eventually become Lingua Fracta. I spent some time talking with the graduate students to see what kinds of courses they were interested in taking, and overwhelmingly, they wanted to see the program offer a course that would help them with their writing. The vast majority of their coursework involved end-of-semester seminar papers and minimal formative feedback (I’ve shared my opinions on this approach before).

In my head, I didn’t think I could just transpose a first-year composition course to the graduate level, so I had to figure out how to both “prove myself” and provide the students with the writing instruction they were interested in. I had a few ideas, some tried-and-true readings that had helped me think about what I was doing as a writer, and I had just written a book manuscript. The readings came from scholars in the field (or next door) and many of them identified their work as genre studies (or rhetorical genre studies, as I’d later learn). So I decided to offer a summer course on “Genre Theory and Academic Wtiting.” The one problem I had was that I knew hardly anything about genre studies (!!). So I did kind of a crash course on the topic, I traced out a reading list from the bibliographies of the things I had read, stayed alert to the overlaps (the canonical texts that were cited by several scholars, e.g.), and ended up putting together a pretty solid set of readings for the course.

But I couldn’t really claim to be an expert. So I did something that would shape my pedagogy for years to come: I owned my inexperience. I went into the course on the first day and told the students that I only knew a little about genre studies (true), that I wasn’t sure that it was really a coherent subfield (also true), but that we would spend our time together thinking through that question. The most pithy way I can think of to describe it: rather than leading the students to an answer I already possessed, I started with a question for us to answer together. I won’t say that I never felt like an imposter again, but it ended up being a real phase shift for me in terms of how I thought about teaching (and how comfortable I was in the classroom).

For the first third of the course, we read deeply into that set of readings I’d assembled, looked for blind spots, considered their implications and applications, and explored the value of genre studies. I’d asked the students to come into the class with a piece of writing that they wanted to revise for publication; during the second third of the course, I asked them to create the same sort of multi-level citation map that I’d made in designing the course (I had created a visualization of our course readings that exemplified the kind of thing I was looking for). That is, they took their own essays, and traced out their bibliographies, looking at the sources that their own sources had cited (visualizing them into network diagrams). For the final third of the course, they worked on taking and incorporating what they’d learned about the broader context of their essays to revise them into publication-ready articles or chapters, and we peer-reviewed their essays as well. (Of the 10 students in the class, I think that 7 of them eventually published the pieces they’d worked on, which felt pretty validating to me)

It’s hard to articulate exactly the difference between a seminar paper and a journal article, but much of it has to do with genre and context. Writing an essay at the end of a course is a much narrower activity: there’s the time crunch, the essay is responsible only to the course itself, and the professor is the (primary) audience. Journal articles (or book chapters) aren’t just “really good” seminar papers; they frame their issues for a much wider (and more varied) audience, they have to account for a more complete disciplinary context, and not having time to read an important source is not really something one can fall back on. Accounting for that broader context is maybe the trickiest bit, and we talked about ways to accomplish that, and how to know when and how we’d done enough in that regard.

Looking back, almost twenty years later, I think it was a pretty decent course, and I’ve incorporated many of the ideas and readings into other courses I’ve taught over the years. I still give out some of those readings to folks to this day. On top of that, I became versed enough in rhetorical genre studies that I presented a paper at a pretty prestigious international conference on genre (Panel D2 2.01, if you want to check the program). But this isn’t actually meant to be a story about me.

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One of the students in the course, Gina Liotta, was getting her MA in our English Department. (In fact, there were two students from English who ended up taking the course, and I had to write a memo to their department’s Director of Graduate Studies to get them to allow our course to count (Prove it!) for their coursework requirements.) Gina ended up revising an essay, “Reading Langston Hughes' Literature for Children As Imagetext,” that she turned into a 2007 MLA presentation, and which later became a chapter in Laurie Ousley's To See the Wizard: Politics and the Literature of Childhood. I know about this only because Gina contacted me, several years later, to ask for a letter of recommendation as she applied to PhD programs, which I happily provided. By then, she’d married and become Gina Sipley.

That was ten years ago or so. Since then, Gina graduated, and she’s an associate professor at SUNY Nassau Community College. And next week, a copy of her new book, Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice, will be arriving in my mailbox:

But I wanted to write about it today, because the latest issue of Laura Portwood-Stacer’s Manuscript Works newsletter¹ has an interview with Gina, where she talks about the process she went through in publishing the book, her experience as a first-generation college student and community college professor, as well as the ins and outs of working with her press.

Talking about her experience with Laura’s Book Proposal Accelerator, Gina says:

I also liked the way you approached the book proposal as a genre of academic writing. I took a wonderful course from Collin Gifford Brooke at Syracuse during my masters called Genre Theory and Academic Writing. That course offered a new perspective on writing and empowered me to be less intimidated by things like seminar papers and to see the larger trajectory of how the seminar paper could lead to an article, which could lead to the dissertation. I understood how different genres of writing reframe your ideas. So what you were doing with book proposals seemed perfectly in line with that. I felt your course would be worth the investment, and I took it very seriously.

How cool is that? Like I said above, this is less about me and more about Gina’s book, which I’m looking forward to reading. And I wanted to give a little wave to anyone who happens across my own space as a result of that shout out. Gina dropped me a note a couple of months ago to let me know about the book and the interview, and I couldn’t have been happier. One of the things that gets lost in the assault on higher education and the largely bogus accusations of indoctrination is the fact that much of academia works on a gift economy, a sprawling network of connections, citations, and conversations that, at its best, makes this place better than when we found it. Hearing about Gina’s success has really brightened my entire semester.

If you’re interested in learning more about her book, Gina gave a talk at the CUNY Graduate Center and there are more links to her work on her portfolio page.

I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine.

1. If you scroll down the MW page, you’ll find a subscription link—if you’re working on a book, might someday, or know someone who is/will, I highly recommend Manuscript Works. It is a treasure trove of smart advice.