Book Project Overview

Book Project Overview

It seems like the story I'm now wanting to tell in this book is a bit of a drama, containing at least three kinds of actors:

Students: This is where the project began, with the students. And I have a good deal to say about them, but am still sorting through how to organize what I want to say. The information I have which interests me breaks down into several types: Past and Present. The organizing question seems to be: who were and are the adult students in my study--as people (parents, partners, community members), as students, as literacy users, and as workers or professionals. 

How do I envision organizing the chapters of this book with the data I have? In my dissertation, I simply chose the three students who interested me the most and wrote a chapter on each of them. The organization, then, was by participant.But since then, I have spent a good deal of time revisiting the transcripts of all participants in the study and writing about them for the "Carry" article and I have realized that there is a richness to the full set of data that I sacrificed in the decision to write about only three participants. 

So, how do I organize my chapters? Perhaps one chapter on Past--who these people have been and one chapter on present--who these people are now? These would fall under the headings of something like "personal and professional literacy history" and "current personal and professional literacy activities." If I were to organize the data from my dissertation in this way, I could, perhaps, focus each chapter on a series of implications or findings. 

Institution: All along, the institution about which I was writing, Granite State College itself, has seemed like another "participant" in this study. In my dissertation, I dropped this--but I did, at one point, have an entire chapter going on the school itself. I've always been intrigued by the school--the idea of teaching writing classes to adults on the tarmac of an airport has never left me as an intriguing symbol or metaphor. For some time, I've wanted to write about GSC and that satellite campus at which I taught (as well as the other contexts) as a way of writing about the larger cultural shift in higher education that took place from the late 1980s-present. This story has obviously already been told in other venues, but I'm not sure I've read this story in our own literature and seen/understood how it is relevant to the work we do teaching writing. 

And the story is simple. The metaphor of the classroom on the tarmac is compelling to me because it captures the way in which traditional notions of higher education have been challenged and/or given way to other ways of thinking. The location is an alternative site--no clock tower, no dining halls or dorms, no bucolic quad. This is the rent-classroom-space-at-the-cheapest-location-you-can-find-it way of thinking about where to teach. And perhaps here I should tap into this notion of "locations"--what the locations in which composition is being taught. So the location, in this case, a formal terminal building of a quickly expanding airport, is symbolic of the larger backdrop and shifts in higher ed...privatization, changing student demographics, etc. 

Faculty: I really don't know if I have enough to say about this to warrant a separate category, the issue of faculty perhaps more neatly falls under the "Institution" category above. But I've been thinking about how the students, the institution, and the faculty are all different and symbolize those larger cultural shifts in higher education. The point has to do with contingent faculty--all those who teach at GSC are contingent. There is no "faculty," no tenure system. Instructors are hired and paid by the course. The minimum requirement, I think, is that they have a MA, but come to think of it, I'm not sure that that even holds up because many of the folks who teach at GSC are professional people who have regular day-jobs doing something else and teach a class at GSC from time to time out of interest or need. So, the faculty interest me. A faculty that is as transient as the students, in some ways--their ties to the institution are certainly different than those of a more traditional college faculty, like the one we have here at RIC. 

All of this boils down to me wanting to define this project or at least walk myself through it in terms of story-telling. The story begins with the question: 

How did I (faculty) find myself at this place (GSC) teaching these people (nontraditional students) at this time (close of the 20th and opening of the 21st centuries)? 

The stories I want to tell come back to this question.