“Opportunity/Exploitation”

by Tom Polk, Alisa Russell, and Allie Sockwell Johnston, Writing Across the Curriculum Graduate Organization (WAC-GO) | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020

Introduction: Navigating Roles as Graduate Students

The Writing Across the Curriculum Graduate Organization (WAC-GO) began just a few short years ago when its founding members saw the need to formalize the professionalization and integration of graduate students interested in writing across the curriculum and in the disciplines (WAC/WID) studies. As a relatively new organization, we are still finding our feet, understanding how to operate, and developing a voice to support and advocate for graduate students in the field. Based on our own experiences, and in line with the work of other graduate organizations like nextGEN and the Writing Program Administrators Graduate Organization (WPA-GO), part of our work as WAC-GO officers is to provide the support and structures for graduate students that aren’t necessarily guaranteed in other spaces. We originally wanted to use this piece to advocate for those structures and explain why they’re so important, but we weren’t certain where to take the conversation until we saw this recent post from Dan Libertz (2019) (thanks, Dan!) on the nextGEN listserv:

I think service work can be a tricky problem for rhet/comp because so much of our research and professionalizing relies on service opportunities. I don’t think programs in literature or other English/Comm-adjacent disciplines have the same issue that we do. We NEED this experience, but it also opens us up for exploitation (and that exploitation need not be intentional by the higher-ups, though, of course, it could be very intentional, too).

It’s this post that organized our thinking, sparked our writing, and inspired the title of this piece. As graduate students, we are constantly navigating the relationship between opportunity and exploitation. It reminds us of Schell’s (1998) discussion of “psychic income”: Since graduate students want and need a variety of research, teaching, and service experiences, and because those experiences are often fulfilling in non-monetary ways, those in power can ignore the structural factors that put graduate students in these unpaid and undervalued positions (p. 41). As WAC-GO officers, then, we want graduate students interested in WAC/WID to know how and when to parse out the difference between opportunity and exploitation based on their own goals and identities. While there are essentially endless factors that contribute to this confusion between opportunities and exploitation, we’d like to center our discussion on two: (1) the high service and teaching demands across Rhetoric and Composition (Rhet-Comp); and (2) the challenges of enculturation—not just into disciplinary ways of knowing, but also ways of doing. In this short piece, we explore these two factors and offer recommendations for how the field can continue to work toward more equitable labor expectations and more accessible professionalization for graduate students. We, too, echo the important question posed by WPA-GO’s Presswood and Schwarz (2020): How do we as graduate students advocate for change?

As our field’s history reveals, service and teaching are often at the heart of what we do in Rhet-Comp. Graduate students across Rhet-Comp are exposed to numerous opportunities to serve their department and writing programs, and WAC/WID especially relies on cross-curricular work and thus further extra administrative and service requirements. Related to service, the teaching aspect of Rhet-Comp also differs from many other fields because teaching first-year writing is fundamentally tied to our discipline; for WAC/WID scholars, these teaching demands fan out even further across disciplines. And, of course, most of the labor these first-year writing courses or WAC/WID programs draw on comes from adjuncts and graduate students acting as instructors of record. In short, because of Rhet-Comp’s precarious positionality within academia, and because of how much energy it takes to not only run a WAC/WID program but to convince others around us (e.g., deans, other departments, colleagues in other departments) of why it’s needed, graduate students can slip through the cracks of mentorship, and even worse, begin carrying that emotional labor load on their own so that the line between opportunity and exploitation becomes rather muddied.

That line becomes further muddied by the complex enculturation processes into disciplinary ways of doing. Enculturation, understood as the adoption of the norms and values of a community, remains a cornerstone (if contested) interest for WAC/WID scholars. In particular, recent studies have revealed the importance of mentoring for graduate student enculturation, and some researchers have called for better training around faculty mentoring practices and for expanded mentoring structures that reach beyond the dyadic advisor-student model (Tarabochia & Madden, 2019). The absence of support structures from programs signals to students that their needs are non-normative, and thus advocating for ourselves and peers within this framework can often place us in direct conflict with faculty who wield much power over our lives. This conflict is why so many students form their own informal support groups (e.g. Alvarez, Brito, Salazar, & Aguilar, 2016; Bell & Hewerdine, 2016). Often, these peer networks serve as the primary means by which graduate students—particularly for populations traditionally marginalized by the academy—make sense of the daily work in which they engage, the feedback they may or may not receive, and their relationships with faculty, advisors, and mentors. Though many of us find meaning in these efforts, they reflect the need for more intentional structures that might best be delivered, supported, or coordinated by programs. These are the realities that led to the development of WAC-GO and other graduate student organizations that coordinate events and networks to support our mutual development across institutional boundaries. Our hope is that we create meaningful relationships between peers and professionals, but of course our reach can only extend so far.