Seeking a Balanced Discipline: Writing Teacher Education in First-Year Composition and English Education.

Abstract

nearly twenty years I have been teaching courses aimed at preparing secondary English education students to teach in the schools. Before that I worked as a TA in first-year composition and as a TA leader in a professional development program for beginning TAs. When I add all those years up it seems like a long time to me. However, it has been only a short time since I have begun thinking about this practice of teaching writing methods as an emerging discipline in its own right, with a long history extending across the boundaries of both English education and first-year composition and linking both together in numerous, sometimes surprising, sometimes uncomfortable ways. In this essay I will examine both the early and recent periods of that history as it has been written for both English education and first-year composition. Those accounts, I will argue, show consistently converging trajectories of disciplinary practice in both areas. On that basis, then, I will conclude by proposing that all of us, as teacher educators, should actively consider reconfiguring our shared discipline and more actively joining together to occupy the common ground to which we are heir.