Making Places as Teacher-Scholars in Composition Studies: Comparing Transition Narratives.

Abstract

I am a lecturer at a state university. Like lecturers, adjuncts, and part-timers everywhere, I work without hope for tenure-or even promise of continuation. Two days each week for five years, I drove six hours round-trip to take graduate courses toward my PhD; three other days each week, I cleaned houses and worked part-time as a secretary at the university where I am now marginally employed. A former colleague said to me recently, "Why would you admit doing this kind of work?" No doubt, my narrative must sound like the stories many of our fathers told of walking five miles each way to school in shoes with holes in them (and sometimes through snow!). And that familiarity makes me laugh at myself, on the one hand, but see a similarity with those "dads" of ours on the other. Many of our dads were the first in their families to be educated, much as I was the first in mine; we are pioneers in education of sorts, much