I arrived at TAMUCC with a short curriculum vitae and a strong desire to publish and participate more actively in my disciplinary community. I had attended and given papers at conferences, but not regularly, and wanted to work more on scholarship. Doing so has proven to be the most difficult challenge for me. I taught for over a decade at a small liberal arts school with a heavy teaching emphasis (4//4, 4/5, and often higher teaching load, all writing-intensive courses) that left me little time or energy for scholarly activity with few resources for conference travel or professional development. The habit of focusing on teaching not only first but to the exclusion of other duties has been a difficult one to break, especially given the high commitment I share with the College of Liberal Arts to teaching and the instructional process. It has especially been in the last year that I have been able to see and plan for more synchronicity between my teaching, service, and scholarship. Being at TAMUCC has done more than afford me travel money, funding opportunities, and a teaching load that supports scholarship; I have benefitted from being part of a community of integrated scholar-teachers in writing studies and the English department in ways that I could not have planned for. My work at TAMUCC reveals to me that I have arrived at a transitional point in my research: long-standing agendas have found new life, and newer agendas are emerging.
My scholarly work to this time has been focused in three areas:
I would still define myself as being motivated by these areas and issues, and my recently published and current work fits right into these broad tracks—often thinking about how ideologies are manifested and circulated in online discussion spaces. “Professionalization in vivo: Graduate Students on Facebook” (Tab 14) is a qualitative study describing the educational and professional roles that social networking sites play for graduate students in writing and related fields. In that article, I add to the discipline’s growing conversation about professional use of social media by giving a research-based account of graduate students deploying online social networks to professionalize and gain access to their academic and disciplinary cultures.
In another article currently submitted and under review, “Writing Instructors Really Are a Pretty Selfless Lot: Liberating Students and Technology on the WPA-LISTSERV” (Tab 15) I consider the set of interrelated rationales and commonplaces writing studies teacher/scholars use as they write about students, agency, and technology in semi-public online forums. This examination of ideology, technology, and rhetoric contributes new notes to an important conversation around how literacy teachers must understand their responsibility to the socio-technical orders they promote in their courses, assignments, and programs. Another piece I have just begun working on will explore the rhetoric of the #wpalistservfeministrevolution and show other dimensions of how graduate students experience disciplinary power dynamics in online communities—in this case a long-established community rather than self-sponsored professional spaces.
As the previous examples suggest, I feel I have also learned how to better connect my research activities with my teaching and program development activities. My 2018 presentation at CPTSC examines content management as a larger trend in technical communication and its relative absence in graduate programs in the field (Tab 13). This project is closely tied to the research I’ve completed for developing the Master of Arts in Digital Content Design and Management program (Tab 19), involving research not only into technical communication field trends, but regional and state employment opportunities, labor and workforce outlook for content writers and developers, and curricular research. These two projects encourage and support one another. My service developing web and other materials for the English Department, the writing studies track, and the MA in English (Tab 18) bear a close practical and theoretical relationship another ongoing research project, a rhetorical analysis that examines how English programs appeal to technocultural values and pragmatism on their websites, something that has roots in my dissertation but has extended through an ARWS conference talk (Tab 13) into an article I am currently drafting (Tab 16). By looking for and encouraging these connections, I find opportunities for research in discovery, application, teaching and learning alike. I feel that I have been successful in learning how to not just balance but also integrate scholarship with the other aspects of my appointment. Still, I know I still have work to do.
While some of my work draws deeply on where I have been, my current and upcoming work points more towards where I would like to go. I have been afforded opportunities to focus more on the technical communication elements of my academic training, which has been a positive experience. For example, my ongoing applied work with Mechanical Engineering for the Strada MSI Measuring College Value Grant is pointing in some interesting directions for scholarship (Tab 21) about how engineers learn—and can best learn—the technical writing practices that benefit them in their profession as well as the communities they serve. My earlier, more general interest in online education has turned much more specifically towards research into master’s programs in technical communication and online graduate program development. Though I came to the university as a nominal specialist in technical communication and online education, I am realizing that specialization in scholarly work now and going into the future.