The Conceptions of Literacy of New Graduate Instructors Teaching Composition

Abstract

This study explores the variety of understandings of literacy, or conceptions of literacy, that exist among graduate instructors in the fields of English literature, rhetoric and composition, and creative writing in their first semester of teaching and what the implications are for having these conceptions, particularly with regard to their teaching. I collected two kinds of data from seven participants who were enrolled in a fall 2010 composition practicum at a large, public university in the Northeast. The data I elicited included interviews of participants in which they examine their own writing, an assignment ranking activity, observations of participants as they teach composition, and field notes I collected from the Practicum course meetings. I also collected artifacts from their work in the Practicum course and their teaching, including two drafts of a literacy autobiography that they wrote for the practicum and marked-up student paper drafts from the composition course they were teaching. Following the work of Michael W. Smith and Dorothy Strickland, I parsed the data by content units. Using Peter Goggin's categories for defining literacy from Professing Literacy in Composition Studies, I coded data using the qualitative data management system Atlas.ti according to seven conceptions: literacy for personal growth, literacy for personal growth, social/critical literacy, critical activist literacy, cultural literacy, functionalist literacy, and instrumental literacy. My analysis of the data reveals that graduate instructors came to their first semester of teaching with powerful preconceptions about why people read, write, and engage in other literacy activities and that these positions deeply affected their teaching. I also contend that although all of the graduate instructors had complex, multifaceted conceptions of literacy, each graduate instructor had one primary conception, which acted as a kind of lens through which every other conception was viewed and filtered. This primary conception functioned as the graduate instructors' terministic screen for viewing literacy, even when other conceptions were at play. Finally, given the fact that all of the graduate instructors received the same syllabus for the composition course they were teaching, the extent to which each one of them was able to inscribe their own ideas about teaching and literacy onto the course was surprising and points to the power of these literacy orientations, even in the face of competing conceptions communicated to them in their practicum.