forever_jung

It's a lot easier to intellectually colonize (i.e., lecture) students than to provide thoughtful, scaffolded, and interactive learning experiences for them. The best practices you describe are based on research--and according to research, class discussion does not lead to student comprehension or learning (unless it is scaffolded and integrated with activities and learning experiences). As a rhet/comp (but really more tech comm) person, I strongly believe that students in writing classes ought to actually learn something. It's true--some of the best writing teachers I've had (and observed at my institution) are lit people, but they were the same folks who were deeply invested in making their classrooms interactive and engaging spaces, scaffolded, informed by these best practices, and truly designed for students to learn. 
 
The histories and politics of our disciplines are complex, and while we won't agree on everything, I think we can at least agree that writing pedagogy ought to be dedicated to students. 

OP, I wanted to answer your original question- if you haven't been scared away by this thread!
 
I started my master's program with a focus on British Literature, particularly in the long 18th century. However, when I started teaching composition courses as a teaching assistant, and took the required course, I found that I was hooked. There were lots of reasons why: I love teaching; I enjoy reading/writing about pedagogy and the classroom; I could continue applying critical and cultural theory to my work; studying rhetoric made sense to me. I also found that, in contrast to literature, there truly isn't a hierarchy as to what to study. I could look at any text and analyze it rhetorically- if I wanted to take Fanny Burney's journal and analyze it for theories of disability at the time, I could do so. If I wanted to take a bawdy play and analyze the audience reception to it, I could. Both of these relate to literature and even the time period I originally came in to study, but as a literature person I was encouraged not to do these projects (which, admittedly, could say more about the faculty I was working with than literature itself). My point, though, is that in rhetoric you can still connect to literature or media studies, if you want. 
 
Which leads to the other reasons I decided to make the move to rhet/comp. I felt that literature is very hierarchical still, and I felt limited in what I could study and what would be accepted for publication, or what will endear me to departments and faculty. I have a  disability that has influenced some of my work, and when I still had a literature advisor, she told me I shouldn't do a PhD program because of it. And maybe that is true for literature, I don't know. But as I transitioned to rhet/comp, I suddenly felt like people were seeing me as a whole person, not as some academic machine. My experiences with disabilities were welcomed into the conversation rather than something that would mark me as a "liability" or whatever. I could be an academic with a disability, and my differing perspective has helped, rather than hindered me. 
 
My last point, which I suppose connects to some of the points above. I have personally found way more rhet/comp faculty and students "on the ground," protesting, advocating for students and contigent faculty on a variety of issues, doing things like participating in National Adjunct Walkout Day, setting up professional development for adjuncts and fighting to make sure it is paid, etc. I want to be part of that fight, and to advocate for students. As it says in our office, "the working conditions of our faculty are the learning conditions of our students." 
 
So that was my experience, and the reasons why I switched. The one thing I'd say to someone considering switching is to really reflect why. Is it because you are truly passionate for the field and maybe just unsure how to enter it? Or is it a "plan B" because there seems to be more jobs? If it is the first, come on over! If it is the second, I'd advise against it. As ComeBackZinc reminds us, while this subfield might have more jobs, it is certainly no guarantee that you will get one, particularly in the TT. 
 
As for your interest in comic studies, I do think it is an up and coming focus! In fact, the next issue of Composition Studies is going to focus on Comics, Multimodality, and Composition. 

I'm sure your pedagogy is fully-formed and perfect, developed independently from a century of research into first-year composition. How many five paragraph themes do you assign in a semester? Academic freedom does not entitle you to do whatever you want to the students under your care--nor does it exempt you from professional development. It boggles the mind to see someone educated about literature think that writing is something that just anyone can teach for a general education, first-year student audience. Why not have history and philosophy professors teaching FYC, too? And chemistry professors obviously must know how to write. And the linguists. 
 
 
In what possible world does this make sense? Unless your WPA is standing behind you in your classroom, how is being exposed to other pedagogies in any way oppressive to you? Writing is such a complex activity that it needs a field devoted to its study that literature just doesn't cover. You continue to cite Bousquet which leads me to believe that your own education in rhetoric and composition is severely lacking to be making such claims against the discipline. The vast majority of scholarship in the field has nothing to do with WPA work, and most of it is targeted to individual instructors. Why would anyone want to hire you if they knew how much you'd whine about discussions of pedagogy?
 
 
"What works for one teacher does not work for another." Sure. No one teacher is the same and no class is the same, either. That doesn't mean you won't benefit from learning how someone else does something. Thinking explicitly and conscientiously about pedagogy is important. Surely, you must be acting like such an anachronism to make some sort of point. Perhaps your doctoral training was so woefully inadequate or misleading with regard to writing instruction that you actually believe that we don't need to produce scholarship about it. 
 
Why does writing not deserve its own field? History professors read a lot. Shouldn't that make them qualified to teach literature? Just because you write a lot does not mean that you know anything about writing pedagogy, nor does the fact that you "value" that kind of work. A lot of terrible instructors are perfectly nice people. You might not even be terrible, but sticking your head in the sand and claiming oppression is not productive or forward-thinking. 

And the tenured lit professor who teaches a 1-2, two of which are graduate courses-- that's not an exploitation of the adjunct and graduate student labor that teaches a majority of university English classes? That's not exploitation of the underclass that they wouldn't deign to speak to in the hallway? You can play the class analysis card, friend, but I'm afraid it redounds to the benefit of my field, not yours. It's literature that has perpetuated a two-tiered employment system, literature that employs profs who live in a elevated state above the actual apparatus of teaching undergraduate students, literature that is so riven with class resentment and prestige and envy. A vast majority of rhetoric and composition scholars are employed at community colleges and teaching colleges, a fact that literature people make fun of constantly. Rhet comp people are out there teaching 4/4s while holding down administrative positions and trying to scratch out time to do research. But at least we work, in the academy, in TT jobs or long-term instructorships. We are a more ethical field because a vastly higher portion of our PhDs go on to secure employment in the academy than literature does. In your field, a tiny number of profs live disconnected from the day-to-day work of adjuncts and instructors, enjoying the life of a researcher. Well, good for them. But don't turn around and try to play working class hero when your field is still obsessed with status and prestige while a vast number of its graduates go on to lives of overwork, terrible pay, and perpetual contingency. You don't have a leg to stand on.

This is so true.  The job market sucks everywhere.  B.A.s, too, are dime a dozen nowadays.  People who got their B.A.s in English made these "mistakes" a while ago.  One thing, too, that I look forward to with my Ph.D. is finally having the luxury to be able to do internships over the summers instead of busting my ass at underpaid jobs to scrape together a little money to get through the next year of school.  I tried to diversify my resume as much as I could during my B.A., but it was hard given my circumstances.  With my Ph.D. I'll have these funded years of Ph.D. work, but also big city opportunities for things like internships and summer language immersion programs etc. that I didn't have the luxury of being able to do as an undergrad.
 
The job market is demoralizing everywhere.  I can't name a single prospective professional field for myself right now, given my work experience and skill sets, that isn't bleak.  The economy sucks!  Right now this Ph.D. program is offering me the best option financially that I foresee myself having right now.  The town I live in has over 10% unemployment and over 30% of the people here are living at or below the poverty level and the job I work, as a long term substitute teacher, is having me live hand to mouth while I work my fucking ass off -- this program gives me a feasible way to get the hell out of here without, for the first time in a long time, needing to constantly worry about money, at least for a few years.  And no, teaching public school and working as a sub is not a stable market and the prospects in that are not great.  I plan on learning two more languages in graduate school.  I plan on doing summer internships so I can gain skills for work in the non-profit and education sectors.  While participating in a dynamic scholarly environment and working with some of the most amazing people in my field.  None of us are in this for the money, but we're not stupid.  I'd like to think I have as few illusions about this as one can have, given that I've already made a thoroughly irresponsible decision.  
 
Anyway, this will likely get buried amongst bitchy rants (again), but I'd still be interested in hearing about peoples' experiences preserving their resumes while in Ph.D. programs.  I'm 100% enthused and happy about starting my Ph.D., but I also have a resume that I don't want to allow to get completely out of date and untouched, so I'd be interested in hearing about whether people have faced particular struggles with that.  Or not.  You guys can also, I guess, just keep bickering about how much the job market sucks.  Everyone is fucking poor now, okay?  The middle class is fucked, the humanities are fucked, we're all fucked.  I'd like to hear some more from the people actually saying productive things on this thread about what we can do instead of it always devolving into the same shit over and over again.  You're not going to convince anyone on these forums to say "no" to their graduate programs that they've already committed to at this point and many of us aren't just wide-eyed little snowflakes waiting for our academic princes to come swoop us away to some intellectual la la land.  
 
News flash: none of us give a shit that you could make a little more money becoming a manager at Wendy's or something like that -- why do you think we got our B.A.s and M.A.s in literature to start with?  To put a more cynical twist on allplaid's observation: I see 30-somethings working at places like Wendy's all the time. Christ.  You know?  I walked away from a job as a building maintenance technician at a fancy Los Angeles Hilton after I graduated high school and I chose to move half way across the country on a scholarship instead where I was able to get an amazing, if technically less "valuable," education.  Not one person that I've ever met would criticize me for that decision, which still put me in a good amount of debt.  Now I'm going to grad school for free, getting paid, and it's this condescending conversation about how naive everyone is who goes to get a PhD?  Whatever.  Economically, I was never gonna be shit anyway.

I guess that was me, but I didn't quite say that. I do think that adjuncts are in a terrible position. However, I was simply making the observation that adjunct exploitation would collapse tomorrow if adjuncts refused to do it anymore. That is true.
 
And no, you should not do it if you don't absolutely have to. Your labor is worth more--your skills are worth more. You deserve a better job than adjuncting; you deserve a living wage with health benefits. You just do.

ComeBackZinc: I always appreciate your reminders about the job market (that sounds sarcastic, but it's really not!). I think it's important to always keep the economic realities of our field in mind. I always wonder, though, how the lit and the rhet/comp job markets compare. Just how dire is it out there for rhet/comp folks? I know it's not ideal--I read the WPA listserv--but I also know lots of rhet/comp folks who are securing TT jobs straight out of grad school. So what's it like on the market as a rhet/comp grad? What sort of experience (teaching, service, research) are you finding to be especially valued by hiring committees?

As a conference organizer, here is the kind of email I appreciate: "Dear organizers, I submitted an abstract with the title Title (or: submission number, other relevant info) to Conference. The conference website says that acceptance notifications should have gone out in mid-February, but I haven't heard anything yet. I was wondering if notifications have gone out already, and if so if it would be possible to know my result and to receive any feedback from the referees that my abstract may have gotten. Thank you, -me." Whatever you do, please don't write a passive-aggressive "well I didn't hear so I suppose I'm rejected, you could at least email" because it's possible that notifications are delayed and it's possible that there was a technical glitch with the email (you'd be surprised how many of those one gets as an organizer!). 

We are too lowly for the Ivy Leagues. There's a lot I could say about it, but it's not maybe worth the effort. Let them rot in antiquity and elitism while they are busy with their real mission of training the next ruling class =)

*rabblerouser*

rhet comp people are always happy. There are jobs at the end of our rainbow (we expect).

Thank you! I'm a little all over the place to be honest, but mainly interested in researching how civic discourse and epistemology operate within virtual communities. 

Nope! One of the things I love most about our field. You want to make sure that any program you're considering has multiple people you want to work with, and furthermore, that these people are publishing in top journals/academic presses and frequently presenting at CCCC and RSA (and FemRhets, CPWA, and/or Computers and Writing depending on their interest). Check placement rates too. I'd say those are the most helpful criteria in determining a rhet/comp program's reputation.

Maryland is experiencing some cuts too (as are most public universities), but nothing like Wisconsin. Your stipend won't be affected, as your offer becomes essentially a signed contract when you accept. But your mandatory grad student fees could increase, and travel funding could decrease. And like ComeBackZinc says, I wouldn't anticipate any new hires in the near future.

But you'll also likely get lots of experiencing advocating for educational funding and discussing the value of the humanities, skills that are unfortunately increasingly important to the modern day humanities scholar-teacher. And you'll get to vote against Scott Walker in future elections, because as Wikipedia tells me, there is no term limit in Wisconsin (which is terrifying since this man has already won, what, three elections including the recall?).

Hey, here I am, after all! And I'll tell you, going to grad school was the best decision I ever made. So I'm always trying to say these things from the point of view of someone who gets it. I just sometimes feel like people here say "I get how bad the market is" and then demonstrate, right after, that they don't really get how bad it is. So I just want to urge caution and express the other side a little. 

I would just like to say thank you Wyatt's Torch for starting this thread and thanks to everyone who has chimed in so far--it's given me some interesting new paths to look into 
 
I would also like to second the usefulness of going through an MA program prior to applying to doing a PhD. My MA experience seems to be much like thepriorwalter's:
 
 
I also (briefly, so very briefly) took a look at the list of funded MA programs and didn't see Western Washington on there. They have both a funded MA and a funded MFA--teaching experience, tuition waiver, etc. Not everyone gets funding but the majority do. During my second year there, they also found funding and RA positions for those without TA positions (I know that funding for the RA positions was much less, but I'm also sure it helped some). Also, WWU has a great track record for those interested in teaching at CC's or applying to PhD programs. It's a nice (if small) program, where the professors will really work with your interests as well as help you to expand those you already have. There's also a mix of literary studies, creative writing, rhet/comp, and film people both in the department and in the MA cohort.
 
Anyway, an MA program will at least let you know if you're truly interested in pursuing a PhD and it's a pretty good way to look for other options if you figure out you're not interested or if the adcomm overlords bring only rejection. 
 
(Edited: Oops, left some weird mistakes in here the first time! I didn't mean to say something about figuring out you, yourself, are uninteresting  Although I do often sit and worry about how uninteresting I really am  .)

Congrats on Minnesota (and Purdue, too)! I did my undergrad in St. Paul (Hamline University) and LOVE the area. If you get a chance while you are there, eat some Pizza Luce for me
 
And I'll be at C's too- it will be nice to get away from the midwest snow and cold!

As someone also at UNO, though the deadline for the TAship is next week, they've been known to extend slightly in order to get the best candidates -- send an email if interested and see if something can be worked out! The website is here. http://www.unomaha.edu/english/grad.php
 
Hands down, I know that program set me on a path for PhD. Great faculty and great mentors all around!

Along the same lines as the poster talking about K-state, I am just about to graduate from the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) MA program, which was an excellent experience. 
 
The list of funded MAs that is linked above doesn't specify between U of Nebraska Omaha and Lincoln. I can't speak for Lincoln, but UNO offers a funded MA, and the deadline for the Teaching Assistant application is next week. Just saying
 
I guess this is to say that getting a local MA is sometimes a really great thing- you can build up your CV, refine research interests, and perhaps even get college teaching experience. 

Along the same lines as the poster talking about K-state, I am just about to graduate from the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) MA program, which was an excellent experience. 
 
The list of funded MAs that is linked above doesn't specify between U of Nebraska Omaha and Lincoln. I can't speak for Lincoln, but UNO offers a funded MA, and the deadline for the Teaching Assistant application is next week. Just saying
 
I guess this is to say that getting a local MA is sometimes a really great thing- you can build up your CV, refine research interests, and perhaps even get college teaching experience. 

Trying to grade while waiting to hear news...

Trying to grade while waiting to hear news...

Trying to grade while waiting to hear news...

Trying to grade while waiting to hear news...