If the Academy Would Listen: Justice, Transformation, and Possibility

Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers
Shannon Madden, Michele Eodice, Kristen T. Edwards, and Alexandria Lockett, editors
Utah State University Press, 2020

Narrative inquiry has been utilized as a method across a vast range of fields, most frequently in fields focused heavily on education, for decades; something that is evident in works like Max van Manen’s Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy (1990), F. Michael Connelly and D. Jean Clandinin’s article “Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry” (1990), and, more recently, Petra Munro Hendry’s article “Narrative as Inquiry” (2010). However, scholars most frequently engage with this method with an “in it, not of mentality”, keeping their own lived experiences away from the research. Although scholars have made claims for the power of personal narrative and those experiences in their research and writing (Mahala and Swilky (1996), Evans (2013)), it has still been viewed as not rigorous or academic. 

The lived experiences that have frequently received the most dismissal is the personal experiences and voices of graduate students. In fact, little has truly been done in regards to research focusing on what these students, especially those marginalized by the academy, think, need, and struggle with during their graduate study. While there are notable exceptions to this, such as the special issues of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, “Access and Equity in Graduate Writing Support” (2016), and Across the Disciplines, “Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines” (2015), work on the support provided to graduate students has largely focused on what the academy chooses as important. 

For far too long academia has given very little thought to the real, personal lives of scholars and educators. Without giving proper recognition of how people are shaped by their lived experiences, and how that comes into play in the work they do and value, it’s impossible to fully understand and create a wide variety of scholarly work and to establish an academic community where people feel safe, valued, and productive. Recently, there has been a move toward the recognition and valuation of lived experiences and counternarratives that differ from the dominant narrative as scholarly work(Denny, et al. (2018) and Edwards, et al. (2021)). The collection Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers, does just that as it amplifies the voices of graduate students through research, personal narratives and reflections, and the work of battling epistemic injustice. 

Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers

The edited collection Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers takes up the multifaceted issue of graduate student support. Editors Shannon Madden, Michele Eodice, Kristen T. Edwards, and Alexandria Lockett emphasize the importance of graduate student (both past and present) voices by focusing on the telling and retelling of their lived experiences. This collection discusses issues of race, gender, trauma, and various forms of injustice while working to both address and pave the way for a necessary paradigm shift, as mentioned by Zanzuchi and Ferstermaker in chapter 12, in graduate education and mentorship.

As the opening chapter, Shannon Madden’s introduction, “Valuing Lived Experiences and Community Mentorship,” sets the tone for the collection while grounding it in historical and theoretical context. She explores where the field has been regarding the use of narrative inquiry as methods for research and meaning making, the attention that has been paid to the live experiences and voices of graduate students, and the mentorship of graduate students. Additionally, Madden gives an overview of the book, which is split in three parts: 1) voices, 2) Bridges and Borders, and 3) Approaches, and it’s chapters and foregrounds the text in epistemic justice and a pedagogy of love. Discussing how “this collection seeks to challenge the narrow ways success is defined and modeled in graduate education and to consider how institutional racism functions within and throughout graduate programs in the U.S.,” she concludes with the editors’ hopes for the collection as ones focused on the amplification of graduate student voices and creation of more opportunities for them (19). 

Beginning Part 1, Beth Godbee discusses her ongoing research and the trauma that can result from graduate education; she focuses on the epistemic injustice experienced by graduate students, specifically those already marginalized by the academy. Her chapter, “The Trauma of Graduate Education,” works to define epistemic injustice, both testimonial and hermeneutical; describes the traumatic lived experiences of herself and students in her study; and offers ways of countering that injustice by working to affirm students’ epistemic rights and utilizing feminist co-mentorship.

Following Godbee, Kristen T. Edwards works “to aid in [the] deconstruction. . . [of] the inequitable in-between space within the institution” (58). The chapter, “The Incidents in the Life of Kirsten T. Edwards,” does this through her exploration of the racist/sexist  history of higher education; the colonial systems still prevalent in the academy today; and the navigational practices of other in-betweeners. She looks specifically at how they “negotiate the treacherous waters of the academy” (53) “when their position within the academy communicates one class but their physical markers” communicate another (57). In addition to this overtly antiracist work, Edwards presents an interesting look at the value of narrative inquiry and the effects it can have on “Academic Truths”, something that is echoed in her afterword. 

Chapter 3, “Voices from the Hill: HBCUs and the Graduate Experience,” focuses on the authors’, Richard Sévère and Maurice Williams, experiences as undergraduate students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and their transitions, and accompanying struggles, to graduate study at primary white institutions (PWIs). Wilson’s section discusses his struggles to transition from his military service to his graduate program at a PWI, emphasizing the differences between it and his undergraduate education. Sévère’s section focuses on his work in campus writing centers, both at HBCUs and PWIs, and how it encouraged him to search for community in graduate school, which helped him navigate many of the same struggles articulated by Wilson. In this chapter, they work to highlight the need for support and mentorship for graduate students and to start “larger conversations regarding graduate student preparedness and success” (74). 

Utilizing a similar structure as Sévère and Wilson, Wonderful Faison and Anna K. (Willow) Treviño share their experiences of working in and with writing centers throughout various times in their academic careers. Bringing together their different lenses, their chapter works to illustrate how “cultures and identities can be suppressed by spaces” (97) by critiquing “the discord between WC literature that positions the WC as anti-institutional and comfortable” (93) and the reality of writing center spaces and the work done there. They state that “not only does WC design reflect the middle-class comforts of the dominant culture, it also dismisses the possible different cultural, racial, and ethnic middle-class comforts of POC, essentially rendering them invisible” (104). The chapter concludes with Faison and Treviño discussing why they choose to stay in the space and do the work of the writing center and potential ways to reconstruct the writing center and its ‘hidden curriculum’. 

In the last chapter of Part 1, Karen Keaton Jackson, Hope Jackson, Kendra L. Mitchell, Pamela Strong Simmons, Cecilia D. Shelton and LaKela Atkinson reflect on their time at HBCUs and on their experiences as Black women in academia. They discuss their experiences with mentoring while highlighting the key differences in what mentorship means and looks like to a white faculty member versus a nonwhite, specifically a woman of color, faculty member. Additionally, this chapter offers various strategies for mentorship and calls for academia to do better, stating that “we should not leave it to chance for Black women to find mentors willing to fight for them; institutions should invest money, resources, and people towards helping Black women graduate student achieve both professional and person success” (121).

Part 2, Bridges and Borders, addresses the ideas of building (all kinds) of bridges and crossing borders in the academy; the chapters in this section, 6 and 7, work to connect the voices of part 1 to the approaches in part 3.

This section opens with Alexandria Lockett’s chapter “Graduate Writing in Communities: Critical Notes on Access and Success”. Lockett’s discussion of the collection as a whole works to connect the chapters and puts them in conversation with each other, focusing on the ideals of access and success. She states that the focus of the collection was the exploration of supporting graduate student writers, which is intrinsically tied to “students hav[ing] increased access to the social resources designed to acclimate them more fully to the kinds of knowledge making that must be advanced in the academy” (129). In other words, she links the underlying theme of the book, graduate student support (specifically that of writing in communities), to students having access to what they need to succeed in the academy. In Chapter 7, Amanda E. Cuellar gives her ‘testimonio’ and reflects on her experience as a graduate student of color. She discusses crossing, or attempting to cross, academic borders and her search for community and “academic kin” during graduate study. In addition to illustrating (although not overtly) the connection of voices (part 1) and approached (part 3), Cuellar raises interesting ideas about linguistic justice and, especially after over a year of quarantine and social distancing, how to find/create community and kinship when it feels impossible.

As an embodiment of praxis, Part 3: Approaches, focuses on empirical studies about graduate student writing and strategies for supporting graduate students as they undertake this task. 

In Chapter 8, Jasmine Kar Tang and Noro Andriamanalina discuss “how the process of writing the dissertation can become another heightened site in which racialization and racism surface in the lives of people of color. . . argu[ing] that a lack of support for Indigenous doctoral writers and doctoral writers of color at PWIs. . . is a systematic problem” (140). Their research, which utilizes a critique against/critique for (emphasis is original), focuses on how instructor/mentor/dissertation advisor feedback can work as a racialized form of gatekeeping and disembodiment through the devaluing of the lived experiences of Indeginous students and students of color. They conclude with several critiques against and with a call for more work in this area to find more critiques for. 

Also discussing feedback practices is Daniel V. Bommarito in his chapter “Research Writing as an Adaptive Challenge”. He states that “a shortcoming of doctoral-level writing support is that adaptive challenges–the kinds of problems that call for substantive transformations–are treated as if they were technical problems requiring a conventional fix” (157). An issue seen through his study that analyzed feedback sessions between a faculty member and graduate student writers as they co-authored an article. He concludes by discussing the adaptive challenges he found during the feedback sessions and the study’s implications for faculty mentors and writing advisors to graduate student writers.

Lisa Russell-Pinson and Haadi Jafarian discuss procrastination, specifically helping doctoral students combat it while dissertation writing, in their chapter “From Avoidance to Action”. Utilizing their study on two doctoral students’ experiences with procrastination when writing their dissertations, Russel-Pinson and Jafarian discuss different types of procrastination and possible causes of it. Through analysis of the students’ struggles, they offer various strategies (many tied to the act of mentorship) that dissertation advisors, writing specialists, and doctoral students can employ to help prevent and move past procrastination.

In Chapter 11, “Dissertation Boot Camps,” Rachael Cayley discusses the history, current research, and usefulness of dissertation boot camps by grounding her work in existing literature and focusing “on the reflections a group of graduate writers offered about their experience of a process-oriented boot camp” (199). Through her analysis of these reflections, she discovered “two overarching themes: self-efficacy and community” (212). Cayley concludes the chapter with a discussion of these themes and how they relate to the success of graduate student writers, specifically in the improvement of their writing and writing process through the activities in and self awareness and writing community gained from the boot camp. 

Looking past the “nuts and bolts” of a graduate program–what they define as the “sequences of milestones. . . from seminar to dissertation”–Anne Zanzucchi and Amy Fenster discuss the creation and implementation of their peer review project. The chapter focuses on their approach to creating supplemental writing support, outside of faculty mentors and campus writing center, by designing and facilitating various peer review opportunities for graduate students such as a workshop series and a full course; they also discuss the benefits of both peer review and supplement writing support and close the chapter by looking forward and emphasizing (as previously mentioned) that “as graduate populations continue to diversify nationals, graduate education urgently needs a paradigm shift” (230).

Also focusing on supplemental writing support, Rochelle Rodrgio and Julia Romberger’s chapter, “Playing with Theory in Graduate Writing Groups,” argues “that prompting graduate students to playfully work through theoretical concepts in low-stakes writing group environments provides scaffolding to both learning specific theories and learning how and why to use theory for their scholarship” (243). The authors discuss the struggle that many graduate students face when trying to incorporate theory into their methods and practice and how they created a “sandbox” course that worked more as a writing group to provide them with feedback and writing-to-learn activities to help students overcome that. 

The final chapter focuses on “the needs assessment process and results that informed the development [and implementation] of [a] campus-wide Graduate Writing Initiative (GWI)” (258). Jennifer Friend, Jennifer Salvo, Michelle M. Paquette, and Elizabeth Brown discuss the work and research completed by the GWI and the graduate writing advisory committee (GWAC) at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, including several research studies to discover what support students needed and wanted and the best ways to implement that on campus. They conclude with reflections of their experiences with the GWI and the GWAC and offer suggestions for the initiative’s future.

Kirsten T. Edwards provides a thought provoking conclusion for this collection with her afterword, “On the Future of Higher Education”. Continuing with the theme of deconstruction from her chapter, she discusses her continued work of revolutionary practices, focusing on a reading circle for Black women graduate students; the epistemic and embodied injustice faced by graduate students, specifically those of color; and how the collection modeled “age-old resistant practices” by focusing on counternarratives (281). She concludes by offering her hopes for the future of the academy; one that does not rest “in the progression of higher education but in the tenacity, brilliance, and power of the stories [she] know[s] minoritized graduate writers will continue to tell and the supportive strategies their fellow justice workers will continue to create” (282). 

Looking Forward
The work done in this book highlights the possibilities that reside in listening to and valuing the lived experiences of others, especially those that do not hold dominant conventions of power (masculinity, whiteness, tenure, etc.). By amplifying the counternarratives found in this collection, the editors don’t just give voice to those that are typically excluded, they open a door for others to do this work and “invite those who take seriously the propositions made in this text to mobilize with [them]” (Edwards, 281). They have created a space for the silenced to not only share their experiences, but to actually be heard and have their struggles paid attention to. 

Using Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers as a foundation, the academy, or, more accurately, those in the academy working against the colonial DNA still ever present in the institution and its systems, can begin to fully utilize lived experience in research, administration, and pedagogy. This collection doesn’t just call for a shift in the treatment and support of graduate students; it helps to initiate a shift in how scholars can engage in radical practices and with social justice work that they are intrinsically invested in and tied to–work that holds evolutionary potential in terms of writing program administration, curriculum design, pedagogical practices, and being a scholar-activist. The value of lived experience doesn’t just reside in it being used as a method, it rests in the transformative power of the sharing and hearing of those experiences and how they can enact revolutionary change in all areas of academia. 

(2021)

Works Cited
Connelly, F. Michael, and D. Jean Clandinin. “Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry.” Educational Researcher, vol. 19, no. 5, [American Educational Research Association, Sage Publications, Inc.], 1990, pp. 2–14, https://doi.org/10.2307/1176100.

Denny, Harry C., et al. Out in the Center Public Controversies and Private Struggles. Utah State University Press, 2018. 

Edwards, Jessica, et al. Speaking up, Speaking out: Lived Experiences of Non-Tenure Track Faculty in Writing Studies. Utah State University Press, 2021.

Evans, Mary. “Auto/Biography as a Research Method.” Research Methods for English Studies, edited by Gabriele Griffin, NED-New edition, 2, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, pp. 32–47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g0b4xz.6. 

Hendry, Petra Munro. “Narrative as Inquiry.” The Journal of Educational Research, vol. 103, no. 2, Taylor & Francis, Ltd., 2010, pp. 72–80, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40539758.

Madden, Shannon, et al. Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers. Utah State University Press, 2020.

Mahala, Daniel, and Jody Swilky. “Telling Stories, Speaking Personally: Reconsidering the Place of Lived Experience in Composition.” JAC, vol. 16, no. 3, JAC, 1996, pp. 363–88, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20866088.

van, Manen, Max. Researching Lived Experience : Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy, State University of New York Press, 1990. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tcu/detail.action?docID=3408268.