“Opportunity/Exploitation”

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

Conclusion: Increasing Graduate Student Agency

What we are ultimately arguing for here is for Rhet-Comp programs to consider how they are shaping future disciplinary practices as they shape the lives of their graduate students. Perhaps a better vision of enculturation for graduate education, then, might be one of co-development. As Lawrence and Zawacki (2018) recognize, “Enculturation must be a two-way street, as . . . not only are graduate students enculturated into disciplinary communities; they too should transform the local academic communities in which they participate . . .” (p. 11). While this framing might require some labor from graduate students, it also posits a reflexive praxis that give graduate students more agency over their “opportunities.”

Now that we’ve come to the end of our contribution to this symposium, we are hyper-aware of how it perfectly reflects the tension between opportunity and exploitation this piece explores. We’ve received this opportunity to speak out on behalf of graduate students, but we have also had to manage complex labor and enculturation issues tied to the task. Thankfully, the editors of this symposium have demonstrated the exact kind of structural mentorship we are advocating for: They provided clear timelines at every step of this process; they asked writers what would be most beneficial for them to write before drafting the call; and perhaps most impressively, they sent detailed advice on how to divide labor as co-writers and how author-order affects CVs and citation practices. WAC-GO seeks to mirror these important moves in its ongoing projects and as a visible peer network. However, maybe supporting graduate students interested in WAC/WID first means re-evaluating what kinds of productivity are reasonable to expect from graduate students so that the line between opportunity and exploitation becomes more manageable.