In transition

Abstract

This article investigates the learning trajectories of graduate students and early career faculty - a group we refer to as emerging scholars. Taking a developmental perspective, our mixed-methods study employs surveys and interviews to understand emerging scholars' writing needs and experiences. This research is significant because although literature suggests emerging scholars struggle with new writing practices, perceptions, and identities, researchers rarely take a developmental perspective on the learning needs of emerging scholars, which ultimately limits access to the educational enterprise and perpetuates a gatekeeping culture in higher education. Further, no studies that we know of consider graduate student and faculty writers' needs in relation to one another. In this article, we present an innovative method for cross-analyzing data from these two groups in ways that reveal recurring/diverging features of lifelong writing development. Our preliminary findings reveal connections and variations in the needs and experiences of these two groups that could inform pedagogy, programming, and institutional policy geared toward graduate student and faculty writers. Finally, we discuss methodological implications for studying groups of writers with proximate developmental relationships and explain how future applications of our method will contribute to research on writing development across the lifespan.

Chapter 5. Making Connections Between Theory and Practice: Pre-Service Educator Disciplinary Literacy Courses as Secondary WAC Initiation

“…Toward that end, we present new findings from our ongoing study of graduate student and faculty writers' development (Tarabochia & Madden, 2018). In this chapter, we explore one new insight: that writers perform significant emotional labor around mentoring.…”

“…We combined these two data sets (doctoral students' survey responses and faculty interviews) and analyzed them by adapting Cheryl Geisler's ( 2004) method of verbal data analysis, Peter Smagorinsky's ( 2008) process of collaborative coding, and Johnny Saldaña's (2016) guide for magnitude and evaluation coding. As we explain elsewhere (Tarabochia & Madden, 2018), our methodology represents an innovative approach to studying writer development. Our goal was to learn about the developmental experiences of emerging scholars without relying on traditional longitudinal methods that demand time and resources not always feasible given career and institutional constraints.…”

Untangling Methodological Commitments in Writing Research: Using Collaborative Secondary Data Analysis to Maximize Interpretive Potentials of Qualitative Data

“…Although we have recently begun to examine our work in relation to SDA literature, the partnership we discuss here emerged from our longer history of collaborating around research, writing curricula, and educational administration, as well as with a gut instinct that our distinct studies were related. When this project began, we were both researching issues related to writers’ development and were studying groups of writers that are (1) proximal to one another on a developmental trajectory; (2) navigating high-stakes, identity-driven situations in writing for tenure and writing to earn a doctoral degree; and (3) often interacting with one another around communication (e.g., faculty mentor doctoral students’ dissertations, faculty and doctoral students frequently collaborate and coauthor in labs; Tarabochia & Madden, 2018). We were also both mentored by Michele Eodice on our studies, and Michele’s influence shaped our approaches to studying these writers in similar ways.…”

“…We then reflect on how our collaborative process of combining two distinct studies addresses these issues. Findings from our collaboration are published in Tarabochia and Madden (2018) and Madden and Tarabochia (2020). Here, we enact Rickly and Cook’s (2017) call for methodological transparency by foregrounding “the mess” of research, and submit a meta-analysis of our process in the spirit of Driscoll et al’s (2017) study of “failed” research attempts.…”

“…In general, SDA refers to using existing data sets to investigate new research questions, often through quantitative and big data approaches. In this article, we ask how and whether SDA might also offer writing researchers a textured and enriched perspective on qualitative data (Tarabochia & Madden, 2018). Although scholars have contended that SDA is not compatible with qualitative research, we offer a critical analysis of our experience combining two qualitative data sets in the context of a collaborative secondary investigation that fruitfully responds to those critiques.…”