The Profession and Blogging

 

 

Those readers who are familiar with scholarship in rhetoric and composition will recognize that the title of this blog is a riff on David Bartholomae's oft-cited, "Inventing the University," an essay in which Bartholomae asserts that undergraduate writers, specifically first-year students, must engage and struggle with academic discourse in order to become members of academic discourse communities. Students make mistakes and confuse conventions because they are, in essence, learning how to function in a new environment--the university--and they are learning the rules of that new environment while they are simultaneously expected to function within it.

When I was a PhD candidate, I maintained a private blog where I would write through issues that I was having with my dissertation. It was a private space for talking to myself about the problems of producing a dissertation as quickly and cheaply as possible. And, because it was private, that blog provided a space to express all my anxieties and angst. It was effectively a safety valve. A graduate school colleague asked me to write a guest post for his blog, Constructing the Academy, about my private blogging practices.

But when I decided to start a professional blog, I knew that it should be a public blog. That blog I maintained for two years while I was writing my dissertation and, for that least year, going on the academic job market, was important for me because I needed privacy to develop ideas. This new blog, however, needs to be public. In some ways, this blog will meet many of the needs that my previous blog met, but I want to write for a public audience that is interested in many of the same academic current events and ongoing concerns that fascinate and frustrate me. But I want this blog to be public because I think it is vital to explore these professional problems in ways that I would feel comfortable with my fellow faculty members, my students, a Dean, or--and who can imagine?--a stray university president or chancellor finding and reading.

So who am I, anyway? I have modified Bartholomae's title because, like first-year students who have to engage in new discursive practices that sometimes baffle them but can also excite them, I am in the infancy of my career. I'm new. And while I've had years of academic and professional training, through both my MA and PhD program as well as three years as a full-time lecturer, I have started a position that offers the promise of permanence.

I am now an assistant professor of English at Indiana University Southeast, in my first year on the tenure track. More specifically, since "English" is a very big disciplinary moniker, I am a specialist in rhetoric and composition. I teach writing courses and contribute to the programmatic development of the writing concentration within the English major and the undergraduate writing program that provides courses required of all undergraduates at IU Southeast. My research focuses on the historical development of the discipline of rhetoric and composition, and I see myself as what Maureen Daly Goggin called a disciplinographer.

IU Southeast is a small regional campus located in New Albany, Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. It is primarily a commuter campus, although initiatives over the past decade or so have resulted in the construction of a handful of lodges (as I was told once, "dorm" is a four-letter word here) that have provided space for roughly ten percent of the student population to reside on campus. As part of the Louisville Metroversity system, a loose gathering of public and private institutions in the greater Louisville metropolitan area, IU Southeast draws on students from both urban and rural areas. The student body seems to be especially aware of the cultural capital of a college degree, since many of them already work full-time and want degrees to improve their economic situations. I have no doubt that in this blog, my institutional setting will influence how I conceive of these issues.

Now, to wrap up this inaugural post, what are the kinds of issues I want to write about on this blog? The answer is deceptively simple: anything related to my profession. For example, blog posts in the very near future will focus on the development and adaptability of teaching personae and the production and maintenance of a research agenda. The next blog post, which should appear later this week, will address the latest outcry regarding adjunct instruction in American colleges and universities.

I will not promise that this blog will always be brilliant and illuminating. Instead, I envision a blog that provides a public space for considering many of the issues that I think about when I'm driving to work or when I'm walking back to my office from class.