From Liberation to Remediation
The Rhetoric of General Education
“An important argument for being attuned not just to shared values but also to how we enact those shared values in meaningful ways. This work makes a significant contribution to graduate education and the literature on institutional ethnography in writing studies."
—Tyler Branson, University of Cincinnati
The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development explores the role of writing programs—specifically practicum courses—in developing teachers and articulating programmatic values. Drawing on interviews, curricular analysis, program archives, and teacher research, Adrienne Jankens explores how implicit values shape decisions about curriculum, pedagogy, and programmatic structures.
Through her multi-site analysis, Jankens examines the ways values are reflected in syllabi, committee meetings, and classroom practices. She demonstrates how values that are often unstated or assumed can be made explicit and linked to programmatic action, thus supporting development and aligning instructional goals with broader institutional objectives. Offering a nuanced framework on practicum courses, Jankens also highlights the importance of local contexts and distinguishes among tacit, implicit, explicit, emergent, and articulated values. This layered understanding helps reveal the often hidden mechanisms by which writing program values are enacted in day-to-day teaching practices.
Teacher development is a crucial site for enacting and understanding programmatic values, and making these values explicit can guide meaningful programmatic change. Providing an institutional ethnography of Jankens’s own writing program and situating those findings within broader conversations in writing studies, The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development adds to scholarship exploring the focus of the practicum course, the positionality and experience of graduate teaching assistants in writing programs, and the perennial work of the field to identify its core values and disciplinary identity.
