Making Meaning of Experience

Phases 1 and 2: Moving From a Disorienting Dilemma to a Self-Examination of Feelings of Fear, Anger, Guilt, or Shame

Just as our teacher candidates and recent graduates report that they would welcome more preparation for the logistical and political realities of the classroom and the district, we have discovered that we would welcome, or would have welcomed, more support in navigating the post-PhD phase. A disorienting dilemma occurs when reality does not align with expectations or with an existing schema. Disorientation, as we discovered, can come with the territory of making the transition from PhD student to assistant professor, but graduate school doesn’t always teach that. The unsettling changes we faced both differed according to institutional context and had elements in common. Because of these factors, we want to acknowledge the presence of disorientation in the process of moving from pre- to post-PhD and to invite readers to recognize that their own transitional struggles, while they might be particular, are not exclusive.

Even more importantly than acknowledging that disorientation exists, however, we have learned that disorientation is an important step in the process of becoming new professors. Disorientation is uncomfortable, and this discomfort invites reflection and eventual change. Rather than something to be avoided, disorientation is a gateway to growth.

Monie accepted a position in the teacher education program at a small, private liberal arts college, where, after teaching mostly first-year courses for a number of years, she had looked forward to working with students over the course of a few years; she additionally accepted the position because the location of the college meant that she would be able to spend a few nights a week with her husband and then-adolescent daughters. Yet Monie found the all-encompassing and too often dreary nature of her work less satisfying than she had anticipated. Monie’s dissertation was gathering dust while she taught three or four courses per semester. At the same time, she was dismayed at never having the time to delve into any scholarly project and at handling a teaching and service load that left her—to borrow a metaphor from Graves (2001)—drawing from the well without having the kind of social-intellectual experiences that might replenish it. Rather than having conversations about theory or pedagogy or writing new publications, she found much of her time given not only to course preparation and grading but also to administrative tasks.

Moreover, the service obligations that came with a faculty-governance model combined with an overextended full-time faculty in many departments meant that Monie spent a number of hours in meetings outside her department. “I’m a writing teacher who doesn’t write,” she lamented, “and a reading teacher who doesn’t read.” In addition to feeling isolated intellectually, she felt fearful that she would not be able to meet the many expectations of assistant professors at the institution where she had assumed a faculty role, and where there was a movement to demand more scholarship and service even while student-to-faculty ratios remained high. Monie was moving into a period of self-examination as she experienced an unexpected sense of loss, such as being “a writing teacher who doesn’t write and a reading teacher who doesn’t read,” fear that this intellectual isolation would lead to professional stagnation, and guilt at finding herself in a context substantially different from what she had anticipated as she completed her graduate work and teaching assignments.

Pam struggled with this as well. Early in her post-PhD career, she was navigating the guilt that surfaced from juggling a series of seemingly competing roles: teacher, scholar, servant, mother, and caregiver. During her third year in a tenure-track position, preparing for her midterm review in the tenure process, Pam was the mother of a 1-year-old son when her father suffered a fatal heart attack. Her mother, unable to live alone 1,000 miles away, came to live with Pam and her family. Her mother was in poor health, and she needed fairly constant medical attention. Pam felt guilty that she could not be both at home with her mother and child and at work with her students and articles.

The first three years, Pam did not experience a great deal of guidance about how to maneuver the scholarly expectations of a research institution. While she knew and understood the demands of teaching and service, as any invested former secondary English teacher would, she was less familiar with the publishing expectations of a tenure-track position. She knew the end-point requirements to achieve tenure, but she was not certain how to mine her dissertation for independent journal articles. She did not have her graduate school mentors to meet with on a weekly basis to outline her goals and to hold her accountable. Feelings of guilt mixed with feelings of fear as she received “superior” ratings on her teaching and service, but “below expectations” ratings on her scholarship for her annual review. This disorienting dilemma—not fully understanding how to navigate the shift from doctoral student to tenure track professor—was leading her to examine how she could spread herself more evenly between the demands of home and work. She had assumed that a path would become clear for her, but as the tenure clock ticked, all she saw was the woods; no paths diverged in any direction.

As we each navigated the waters of our nascent careers, we were examining unexpected feelings of fear, anger, guilt, and shame. We had graduated from a prominent institution, thinking we had been prepared for anything that might come our way. What we encountered instead were disorienting dilemmas. What, if anything, could have prepared us to make meaning of our unfolding experiences? As teachers, we knew it was time to assess where we were, what we were doing, and how we could best proceed.

Phase 3: Critical Assessment of Assumptions

As new professors, we assume things about the profession that may or may not be true. These assumptions can be epistemic (what we know about what we know), sociocultural (what we know about our institutional context), and/or psychic (what we know about our mental processes; Mezirow, 1990). Meanwhile, other parties, including the administrators and colleagues who bring English education teacher-scholars to their campuses, make assumptions as well, and the assumptions don’t always match—there are conflicting discourses at work. The only way to navigate the space between definitions of English education is to interrogate the assumptions that inform them.

New English education professors are learning to join an innovative community, and regardless of the coursework they have taken, there is much about teaching that cannot be explained but must instead be lived. This is all well and good if there is an effective mentoring system in place; however, we found ourselves alone, running an entire program while also trying to negotiate a new, not-yet-learned professional space. As Mezirow (1990) points out, “Nonetheless, what we do and do not perceive, comprehend, and remember is profoundly influenced by our meaning schemes and perspectives” (p. 4). As new professors, we had “meaning schemes” related to disciplinary discourse, but they did not always serve us well in our individual contexts. We had to learn the new discourse of our new contexts through experience. We had to create new meaning schemes.

However, our new contexts did not have universally understood meaning schemes. Our experiences show that the discourse of English education is variably practiced across institutional contexts and variously interpreted within them. For instance, while Sheila was isolated professionally within her department, she did have some help from the English department, located on the downtown campus a mile and a half away. Adolescent fiction and writing methods courses were taught by English department colleagues, and the director of writing programs in the English department had been on Sheila’s hiring committee. She and Sheila coordinated closely to rebuild interdepartmental connections, and Sheila was part of the hiring process for a new English education-focused position funded within the English department. However, this new position ended up being filled by a folklorist who was interested in English education but had no public school teaching experience, reflective of some English colleagues’ understanding of English education as a service area within the larger discipline of English rather than an area of academic study in its own right. This incident, along with the separation of English education into two different areas (literally) caused Sheila to think more critically about the assumptions behind how her position was defined, leading to a sense of discontent that needed to be resolved.

Monie discovered a similar separation at her institution. While she left graduate school with some answers to the questions, “What is English?” And “What is English education?” she found few others among her colleagues who were interested in considering these questions. She quickly learned that educational studies had a lesser status at her institution, where English and education were assumed to be discrete domains. Meanwhile, Monie found herself asked to take part in updating a program in the wake of faculty retirements and to prepare teacher candidates to meet new state standards for promoting literacy in the content areas.

These anecdotes reflect differing understandings of what English education is—essentially, conflicting discourses. New English education professors enter their positions after having spent several years focused intensely on the research aspect of English education, along with some teaching internships. The part of the English education discourse that says “English education is about supervising student teachers and teaching preservice methods courses” gets communicated quite well. There are other parts, though—essential, time-consuming parts—that are not verbalized: understanding of state and national standards, awareness of larger debates around these state and national standards, the need to quickly forge connections with public school teachers (potentially in a state in which the new professor has not lived or taught), and changing educational policy decisions. To the extent possible, all areas of this discourse need to be made visible as new professors enter the field so that new colleagues can sidestep the isolation and attendant sense of inadequacy we initially assumed before sharing with mentors and colleagues our questions about life on the other side of the PhD.

As women in transition often realize when they give voice to the challenges they face and characterize the hurdles they struggle to clear, the personal is often political; that is, our struggles often owe in part to their cultural context. Tyler (2009) advocates for the use of storytelling as a way to socialize members of a group, to situate them within the cultural context, pointing to Mezirow’s conditions for participation in critical discourse (1991). In this way, storytelling can function as a form of critical discourse if the stories help the members of a group analyze and critique a cultural context, allowing them to more fully participate in that context. The authors are presenting their experiences here as a way to highlight how sharing their stories has helped them to more fully situate themselves in their respective academic contexts and as a way to highlight how analyzing and critiquing their assumptions through storytelling have helped them during this transformation process. Sharing their stories has allowed the authors to maintain a valued connection with and a sense of belonging with their graduate school community colleagues, helping them to bridge the old and new contexts. Per Mezirow, the first condition for participation in critical discourse is that participants have “accurate and complete information” (p. 77). We all needed more accurate and complete information to overcome our disorienting dilemmas. We needed someone to help us understand what it meant to be an authentic member of the academic community. Where discourse elements cannot be made visible, as Gee (1999) argues they cannot, a system of socialization needs to be in place so that new professors can learn firsthand what it means to be an authentic member. Continued silence and isolation lead to frustration, burnout, and leaving the profession (Riggs, 2013). This is why we need to extend self-examination to an interrogation of more widely held assumptions surrounding English education.

Phase 4: Recognition that One’s Discontent and the Process of Transformation Are Shared

As we moved through the initial three phases of transformation, we were at a point where it would have been easy to simply remain silent, become increasingly frustrated, and leave the profession. We felt isolated, and because of that isolation, we were ashamed to say anything about our struggles. Even as we felt isolated, however, we also sensed that the isolation was false. Someone, somewhere, must have experienced what we were experiencing. We were ready to move into phase 4 and come out of our isolation. We were ready to learn how others had navigated this set of changes.

Alcántara, Hayes, and York (2009) advocate establishing collaborative inquiry (CI) groups where participants form groups in order to examine a question and then act on their findings, noting, “the purpose of CI is for participants in the inquiry group to change themselves and how they are in relationship to the disorienting dilemma that is motivating their interest in the inquiry question” (p. 252). Our collaboration on this article is a form of CI, as we crave conversations with colleagues about pertinent questions. The very nature of what we do as English education professors’ positions us to open up these kinds of conversations with colleagues. While it is easy to feel isolated and overburdened, we are also academically multilingual. We have to be in order to do our work every day. This is where reaching out to our natural allies—public school teachers, new teacher graduates from our programs, interested colleagues across departments and disciplines who care about language arts education in all its aspects, fellow English education professors across institutions—becomes so important. Reaching out to our natural allies can shift roles for all involved. By doing so, we become more aware of the shared nature of our work, moving us toward solutions and away from guilt and frustration at not reaching some nonexistent professorial ideal.

Phase 5: Exploration of Options for New Roles, Relationships, and Actions

Recognizing the shared nature of our discontent and reaching out to our natural allies led naturally into exploring potential new roles, creating an opportunity to break out of the real and perceived constraints we were each experiencing. An essential part of exploring those new roles—one that some of us had while others lacked and had to create—is mentoring. Johnson and Ridley (2008) point to the inherent importance of mentoring, noting, “Mentoring is an act of generativity—a process of bringing into existence and passing on a professional legacy” (p. xv). Granted, in the early days of an academic career, few professors are focused on “passing on a professional legacy,” but Nakamura and Shernoff (2009) argue that meaningful, purposeful mentoring encourages protégés to strive for excellence and to invest in a profession, in essence, to do good work. Such work can and should be situated within a professional legacy.

Throughout the tenure and promotion process, English education professors, like colleagues across campus, are required to provide evidence of not only their ability to “do good work,” but they must define what that work is. In graduate school, these authors took semester-length courses that sought to answer such questions as, “What is English?” Even after close, focused study, they entered the profession as assistant professors of English education with little concrete understanding of how their area of expertise is defined across institutional contexts. New English education professors aptly look to colleagues to help mentor them into this understanding. But just as we had various experiences being mentored in graduate school, we have had differing experiences with mentoring as new professors. Some new English education scholars are more fortunate than others in locating a community of practice where they begin their careers.

Pam was hired as an assistant professor of English Education, housed in a department of English in a College of Liberal Arts. Like Monie and Sheila, she had come from a department of Curriculum and Instruction in a College of Education. When first hired, Pam did not fully understand what the difference would be. As she progressed through her first years, however, she learned that many of her English department colleagues did not fully understand the nature of her work—nor the venues where she published her work. Being situated in an English department where many colleagues research print-based as opposed to human resources, many of Pam’s colleagues did not understand the process behind gaining approval for research from an Institutional Review Board (IRB). Pam soon learned that she needed to include such paper work along with her annual activities report to help colleagues—particularly those serving in evaluative roles such as the Tenure and Promotion Committee—to understand the nature of her work. In addition, English education venues tend to publish relatively shorter works than some English counterparts in literature and composition. This does not make the work less rigorous, just different. Pam needed to learn how to articulate that difference in ways that her colleagues would understand and value.

Pam’s two closest English education colleagues shared knowledge, gave advice, and provided support in meaningful ways. They shared their own experiences with the tenure and promotion process. They offered advice about how to define and to clarify the work that we, as English educators, do. They allowed Pam access to their own tenure and promotion documents. Most importantly, they helped Pam to find and to articulate her own place in the institution’s legacy. Through scheduled meaningful conversations, they helped Pam to be invested in her profession. She already knew how to be invested in her students and in their success. She needed mentoring with regard to how to integrate teaching and research in ways that are understood and valued by the larger institution.

As we all know, such mentoring is far from widespread and far from systematic. This creates a particular challenge for English education professors, since we, as a profession, encourage early career elementary and secondary educators to find valuable mentors. We send preservice teachers into classrooms for field experiences, with the intent of observing and interacting with a master teacher who can help provide knowledge, advice, and support. We ask classroom teachers to provide our students with an opportunity to practice what they are learning. There is a stark dissonance when we do not practice what we preach in our own profession, when we do not allow early career professors an opportunity to ask questions and to enlist support in the same ways we advocate for our early career K–12 teachers.

Phase 6: Planning a Course of Action

As we moved out of our initial isolation and explored our developing new roles, we realized that something needed to change in us if we were to stay in the profession. We needed an action plan, a way to enact the agency we had read so much about as graduate students. Before describing our action plan efforts, we need to introduce a metaphor: A few years ago, Sheila started to terrace a very steep hill down from her back deck. She thought she could build all three terrace walls the same day. As work began, however, she realized that she could not build level two until the bottom wall was complete and filled in with dirt so that she had a level surface to stand on. She literally had to build what she would stand on to complete the next terrace. We believe that image works to describe the type of action we need to take in defining our professional space within English education. We build a level foundation, sharing with colleagues the research we do and explaining how it fits within current paradigms while also extending those paradigms in new directions. We can’t say exactly what the final product will look like because we have to “build the wall” as we go. Our initial research will take us in unanticipated directions and perhaps introduce unanticipated quandaries. We can at once offer and benefit from the support of a discursive community that includes interrogation as well as explication of its sometimes varied expectations.

Here are a few examples of what directions our action plans have taken:

Collaborative professional development school (PDS) Faculty in Residence—Sheila taught at an institution with a well-developed PDS system. Since she moved in from another state, she worked to get to know language arts teachers in the five counties that are part of the PDS network. As part of that process, during the spring 2010 semester Sheila co-taught with an eighth-grade English language arts teacher.

New teacher institutes—new teacher institutes provide a way for English education professors to maintain contact with graduates, so they can not only support them as they move into their careers but also use their classrooms as valuable data sources for future research.

We don’t know exactly what the wall—or the action plan—will look like as we build it. We do know that without help, the task is overwhelming. We’re forging into new territory, just as we ask our preservice teachers to do with their own students in their classrooms. Most importantly, we’re taking action to improve working and teaching conditions at multiple levels. Our careers, as a result, are being transformed by the plans we are making.

Phase 7: Acquisition of Knowledge and Skills for Implementing One’s Plan

A large part of the challenge in “building the wall as we go” within our newly developing roles as English education professors has been getting a handle on what materials are required to build into that wall. We needed to examine the knowledge and skills we possessed and explore ways to apply that knowledge in meaningful ways. Pam entered a position where she had English education colleagues who could show her the ropes; Monie and Sheila were not so fortunate and had to figure things out immediately upon arrival. Additionally, all three of us crossed state lines, which meant that we had to become acquainted almost immediately with different accreditation requirements.

To illustrate, here is a brief list of items Sheila had to become knowledgeable about in order to assume her new duties, national program certification guidelines, state certification guidelines, the context of local secondary schools’ relations with the university, and national and state educational mandates. This was on top of orienting herself to the expectations of her institution in terms of publications; departmental, college, and university-wide service; student advising; and rebuilding of the program so that course sequencing made sense with teacher preparation needs.

Monie entered a situation where she was required to advise a few dozen students across multiple grade levels and disciplinary specialties. This required her to know major requirements across essentially every discipline in the institution. She had to get this right, because mistakes on her part in advising had the potential for serious financial consequences if students’ graduation plans were delayed. Monie was also the IRB representative for her college, and her institution faced an accreditation review.

Pam found herself “retooling” existing knowledge and skills for her new context. As a doctoral student, she had served as the academic adviser for all the undergraduate and postbaccalaureate English teacher education students. In her new position, she was immediately responsible for 25 undergraduate English education advisees. She had a steep learning curve, needing to learn a new advising system while teaching two new course preps. Like Sheila and Monie, Pam understood that the stakes were high.

The point in listing all these activities is to demonstrate the need all three of us had to learn—and learn quickly—what we needed to know to not only keep our heads above water but also to then implement the plans we had for improving the programs in which we taught. In Sheila’s case, because there was so much to learn that was new, she needed to begin with what she already knew, which led her back to her course training in her doctoral program. For example, when she was assigned to teach a course on the teaching of language that lacked a syllabus or any written history of how it had been taught previously, Sheila contacted a professor from her doctoral program who had taught a similar course in order to obtain a syllabus to refer to for her own planning. She then referred back to activities she had designed for a course she had created as part of her comprehensive exam requirements to see if she could build from some of them. The course gradually took shape over the first semester’s teaching of it. It felt a little like staring at a lump of clay and diving in to start molding without entirely knowing what would result, all the while knowing that starting was the only way to find out. Such discovery through the process of creation is a key element we all taught our students in terms of process writing (e.g., Smith, 1981)—you learn what you know as you write it—but extending this idea to course creation was a new experience. We were developing new knowledge, so that we could implement new plans in our developing new roles; in doing so, we were ready to transform the original roles to which we were hired into something that better fit the scholars we were becoming. Rather than simply learning how to teach a course—what we had initially understood as the role of English education professors—we learned to create new working conditions rather than accept impositions from others, even when that creation was uncomfortable. Such transformation involved reassessing our roles and our presuppositions, which, as Mezirow asserts, is central to transformative learning. Mezirow (1990) observed, “Transformative learning involves a particular function of reflection: reassessing the presuppositions on which our beliefs are based and acting on insights derived from the transformed meaning perspective that results from such reassessment” (p. 18). It was this reassessment that allowed us to make sense of the new knowledge and skills we were acquiring in order to transform our roles. We learned to apply a process approach to our roles as instructors and scholars and that embracing the pedagogic practice we’d extolled could support our professional development.

Phase 8: Provisional Trying of New Roles

In graduate school, one of our mentors told us, “Look at the academics around you. Look at what they do on a day-to-day basis. Pattern your professional life around those you want to emulate.” She encouraged us to try on different roles, to see what “fit”—and what did not. That helped us each to build a set of schema about the roles we might expect to encounter in academe. Yet that schema set was clearly incomplete. We lacked some epistemic, sociocultural, and psychological knowledge about our individual contexts. We learned that we could not know what we did not know.

When Sheila originally took her first professorial position, she had not anticipated the administrative side of the role. She had imagined herself in a new professor buffer zone where she would be able to gradually ease into institutional requirements. Graduate school mentors had stressed the importance of staying out of administrative duties until after receiving tenure, which Sheila agreed with. However, reality played out very differently. As an example, near the end of her first year, Sheila met with her department head to look at her workload and administrative assignments. The department head shook her head at the list and said, “You can’t do all this; something has to go.” Sheila looked at the list and asked, “What? Every single item requires an English content expert. Tell me what I can safely take off my plate and I’ll do it.” The department head reread the list and said, “Hmm. I guess I can’t take you off any of these committees after all. Figure out how to balance your time.” This pattern continued every time Sheila had a question: “You’re the content expert that’s why we hired you. Figure it out.” Her colleagues saw the role in terms of surface duties, not realizing there was a body of research connected with being an English education professor. She was expected to maintain an active research agenda while also reviving all things English education, all at once. Gradually, Sheila realized that she could shape the position as she wished because none of her colleagues had a strong sense of what her role should be. Instead of lamenting the disconnect, she used it as an opportunity to further stretch her newly developing leadership opportunities to shape a role where English education was more than delivery of content and program elements. Sheila’s sense of what it means to be an English education professor was shifting.

At the beginning of Pam’s fifth year, the Dean called and asked Pam if she would serve in a new position: College of Liberal Arts Master Teacher Initiative (MTI) Coordinator. The Associate Vice Provost for Learning and Teaching (AVP) asked Pam to send out weekly teaching tips to College faculty. In addition, the AVP allotted funding to host three luncheons per semester, where she booked a speaker to address topics of interest to CLA instructors, tenure-track, adjunct, and graduate alike. Best of all, Pam had the opportunity to meet one on one with individual faculty members to discuss any concerns they were having related to teaching and learning. It was a role Pam could not have anticipated but one she was thrilled to try out—and one she is proud to continue occupying. Through her experience as an MTI Coordinator, Pam had the opportunity to engage in meaningful professional development related to course design, educational technology, and active learning, thus deepening her sense of what it means to be both a teacher and a teacher educator. It also allowed her a voice in campus discussions related to these topics and issues, which has been central to her own transformation.

Another role Pam got to try on was that of faculty sponsor for a student organization: the student affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English. In this role, Pam has had the opportunity to mentor preservice teachers into the profession. Pam has had the opportunity to mentor early career teachers through their first state and national professional conference presentations, and she is proud to say that her student affiliate is gaining a state and a national reputation for excellence.

Phase 9: Building of Competence and Self-Confidence in New Roles and Relationships

As Sheila’s experience with trying out new roles demonstrates, however, moving into new roles involves a lot of risks. All sorts of things might go wrong along the way because we’re still figuring out how things work. We needed to gradually develop confidence that we had the knowledge and skills to fulfill our new roles as they developed.

In Sheila’s case, since she was not finding answers through mentors, she needed to create a new knowledge base. This started back with Phase 7, but it gradually turned into a decision of “Well, if nobody else knows what my role is supposed to be, then I can create it how I would like.” Rather than remaining as the sole representative for English education in her department, Sheila reached out to colleagues in the English department (particularly those within the composition program) to learn what they were doing in courses that preservice teachers took as part of their licensure requirements. This opened up an opportunity to revise course sequencing, so that all four methods courses were taken as close as possible to student teaching. Sheila’s experience with the course sequencing revision showed her that as long as she provided a clear justification, she would not be questioned by her colleagues in the College of Education. They saw her as the person best positioned to make decisions and stepped back to provide the space she needed.

With that opened space, Sheila felt empowered to develop stronger relations with area English language arts teachers. She began visiting classrooms, led writing in-service sessions, and team taught with a National Writing Project (NWP) colleague. She participated in her university’s NWP Summer Institute program, joined the site’s leadership team as coordinator of research and in-service development, and codirected the program 3 years after she first attended herself. All of these activities cast Sheila in the role of university English education expert, further building her confidence that she had genuine expertise to offer in the community.

Pam, too, has had the opportunity to build competence and self-confidence in her new roles and relationships. At first, she stayed “close to home,” taking on new roles within her department, serving on the Undergraduate Committee and the Graduate Committee. She wove in roles outside of her department but within her discipline, serving on the Teacher Licensure Committee, bridging her content area and the School of Education. In her role as MTI Coordinator, she has extended her work out to the College of Liberal Arts. Moving beyond the confines of her College to the campus as a whole, she has helped to create new roles for herself in The Institute for Learning and Teaching (TILT), serving as a presenter for the Summer Conference on Teaching, Learning, and Critical Thinking. Last year, she helped to host a summer retreat for teachers through TILT. She hopes to continue to expand her roles as she builds new relationships with colleagues across campus and beyond.

Monie endeavored not only to contribute to the teacher education program at her institution but to carve out a niche that suited her affinities as well as institutional needs. In her first 2 years as an assistant professor, Monie taught courses she had not taught previously. In fact, the course closest to her graduate school and adjunct teaching experience was a freshman seminar in the general education sequence, not within her department. While Monie was able to rise to the challenge of all new preparations within the program during her first couple of years there, it was more than 2 years before her strengths were tapped in course design, and by then she already had been homesick for the teaching of English for some time; a sense of displacement had taken root. The point here is that we can expect to be plugged into assignments that might not align with our graduate studies emphases. We need to prepare for this by asking to what extent we are prepared to adapt, and for how long. As Mezirow (1990) discusses, we need to “distinguish between past and present pressures and between rational and irrational feelings and to challenge distorting assumptions” in order to take action (p. 17). Building competence and self-confidence in new roles and relationships provides the mental and emotional support to change unfavorable academic conditions or find opportunities that better fit the scholar we have become during the transformative learning process.

Phase 10: A Reintegration Into One’s Life on the Basis of Conditions Dictated by One’s New Perspective

As we developed a greater sense of confidence and gradually discovered who we were becoming as teachers and scholars, we realized that there were some changes to be made; we were not the same professors as we were when we were originally hired. We needed to reexamine our conditions. Transforming her understanding of her English education professorial role enabled Sheila to channel her initial isolation and frustration in a productive direction. Rather than continually hurling herself against the barrier of receiving no mentoring support, which could have very easily led to leaving the profession, Sheila looked more closely at the barrier to see how she might get around or over it in new ways. To quote from a text that Sheila used regularly in one of her methods courses:

You may not land in a school that fulfills your vision of an ideal, so while you work to change the structures that stifle innovation, you have a responsibility to figure out how to create dynamic learning environments within those contexts or to look for a new job. You are not powerless .…We don’t recommend storming the gates, but we do know that, through quiet example that becomes respectfully louder and louder, new teachers can effect change. (Long et al., 2006, p. 186, italics in original)

As Sheila and her students discussed this idea of effecting change without storming the gates, the metaphor of looking for the chinks in the barrier developed. Just as she was teaching her preservice teachers to look for the chinks in their schools’ curricular guidelines that would allow them to create the space they needed to be effective in the profession and stay in it, Sheila was developing new roles and professional connections that allowed her to do likewise.

The more clearly Sheila understood her newly developing role in English education, however, and the more confident she became in speaking up for the conditions she needed at her institution, the more she realized that she was approaching a point at which she might have to leave the institution she was in so that she could maintain her professional longevity. She had discussed with preservice teachers for years where they might need to draw their lines in the sand and what issues were so crucial to them that they would leave a position rather than have those issues left ignored. She constantly emphasized the need to know what working conditions had to be present for that work to be worth doing. She originally saw these discussions as a means of preventing new teacher burnout. As external conditions pushed against her newly developing understanding of her English education role, however, she saw the need to draw her own lines in the sand.

Sheila has just finished her third year at a new institution, situated within an English department with several English education colleagues. While there are new systems to learn and a new departmental understanding of English education to navigate (and renegotiate), her current position better fits her new perspective about what English education should involve. Changing institutions has uncovered an insight that would have remained hidden: As we develop new perspectives and change, our professional roles need to allow for that alteration/growth. Part of staying in the profession is realizing that English education is a profession rather than a service within a department.

Monie, meanwhile, recognized that institutional pressures attendant on staffing a large program at a small school and the label of education as distinct from English were not likely to lift despite her efforts to take part in the general education sequence and other cross-disciplinary initiatives. She contributed to departmental and cross-campus initiatives, but in the process, she became increasingly aware of how the climate of process and inquiry and the focus on teaching and learning within her classes contrasted with the discourse many of her colleagues shared. For her, reintegration meant a return to her home state, where her husband remained, and to the English classroom at community colleges. At one of these institutions, there is a large and vibrant English department across main and satellite campuses, and even though many of the participants’ communications are electronic, Monie once again feels part of something she knows. She has again assumed the role of a reading and writing teacher and is recognized as such. Additionally, she once again has time for literary engagement. The trade-off is that she is, for now, on the adjunct track.

Pam is now a tenured professor attempting to make meaning of the road to becoming a full professor. She is drawing upon her experiences to help inform her perspective of what she wants the next phase of her career to include. She is serving on the departmental tenure and promotion committee, which is providing mentorship about what it takes to secure promotion to full professor in her College. She is reaching out to colleagues like Sheila and Monie, writing about issues that are of interest and importance to her. She is conducting the kind of research on transitions that she wants to be part of her national reputation. Mezirow’s work on the 10 phases of transformation has been instrumental in helping Pam to make meaning of what she has experienced thus far. Perhaps even more importantly, Mezirow’s work has helped Pam establish a framework for meeting her next disorienting dilemma, whatever that may be.

Conclusion

As we experienced each of the 10 phases of Mezirow’s transformative process, we were conscious of the fact that it was, indeed, a process. What we did not always recognize, however, was our own agency, our own ability to act on our own behalf. In graduate school, we were taught how to reflect, but we were less familiar with how to act and react to our new contexts as assistant professors. Freire (1970) introduced the concept of conscientization, which he described as a process, an “act of knowing” that involves a combination of reflection and action. We had to learn that you cannot have transformation without this combination. Currently, we feel more prepared to act on what we have learned, but to a certain extent, this preparation needs to be accompanied by security, also known as tenure. At this point, Pam is the only one with this security, and so we continue to evaluate our epistemic, sociocultural, and psychic perceptions in light of our respective realities.

As we develop a clearer understanding of what we believe English education should be and the conditions we need in order for that vision to surface (or remain), we need to be able to articulate that understanding to others. It is intriguing that while all three authors trained in a College of Education, none of us currently works in a College of Education. Our positioning might require introducing a new discourse to replace an English education discourse that stifles intellectual growth and/or stretches an individual professor too far. We may reach a point where an institution’s understanding of English education prevents the growth we need; in such cases, our clearer sense of our role in English education should enable us to find a space somewhere else where we can enact that role and have the professional support we need. The transformative process we have experienced early in our careers should continue, leading to new insights and continual growth, and to the kind of transformative learning and emancipatory education that Mezirow (1990) advocates. English education professors, particularly those who are new, can use this model from transformative learning theory to create conditions in which they and their preservice teachers experience a professional lifetime of satisfaction.