First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground by Jessica Restaino (review)

First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground captures the anxieties, failures, accomplishments, and invaluable pedagogical experiences graduate students endure in their first semester teaching writing. Restaino contends that there is very little research on how graduate student teachers impact composition scholarship, and that graduate student teaching is a diverse field of study capable of widening the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical purview of the discipline of rhetoric and composition. She uses Hannah Arendt's theories on labor, work, and action to examine how four graduate students (Tess, Nancy, Anjel, and Shirley) wade through their first semester teaching, asking us to ponder how the perception of "endless laboring" for the teaching of writing impacts graduate student teachers (50). Restaino wants us to consider the ramifications for pushing graduate students into teaching roles before they are ready or adequately prepared to teach, and how these ramifications may alter the future of our discipline. A significant realization this book attempts to provide Writing Program Administrators (WPAs), Composition Directors, and faculty responsible for teaching practicum courses and mentoring new teachers is that graduate students may not be capable of deriving value from their teaching without an opportunity to practice being a writing teacher in a more formal space. Restaino uses Christopher Higgins's notion of middle spaces as a place to begin thinking about a formal space where new teachers can learn how to find value in their teaching and how to avoid the tug of Arendtian labor common to the teaching of writing.

In chapter one, "Arendt, Writing Teachers, and Beginnings," Restaino uses Arendt's The Human Condition to analyze how graduate student teachers negotiate labor, work, and action, and how that negotiation process shapes their pedagogy and, ultimately, their desire to teach writing. Arendt's "theoretical concepts serve as a kind of equation for discovering new revelations about relationships among teachers, institutions, programs, and students" that help expose how grading, teaching process-pedagogy, designing classroom activities and assignments, and dealing with obtuse students can overwhelm all writing instructors (21). Restaino argues that graduate students may benefit from a learning space where they can "experiment safely" with teaching, with work, labor, and action, without fear of "labor's consumptive grasp" (16), a point she revisits in her last two chapters. Chapter two, "Labor and Endlessness: Necessity and Consumption in the First Semester," interprets new teacher labor and work more specifically through Arendt's definitions for labor and work. For Arendt when a process fails to lead to a usable product, it is useless labor. Work leads to a usable, definable product. However, without a usable product or a sense of the work taking place in the classroom new teachers may struggle to identify what they do in and out of the classroom as work. New teachers struggle to see their teaching efforts as something "more enduring" because the heavy workload required to teach writing often obfuscates that value (44).

Formulating classroom activities, discussions, and assignments can bury new writing teachers in Arendtian labor that may ultimately hinder their growth as both a student and teacher. This further complicates a new writing teacher's ability to see the rewards from her teaching because she is struggling with the frustrations and anxieties that come from heavy grading demands and determining how to occupy class time each week. Realizing student gains in learning and improvements in writing or how teaching sharpens critical thinking and the ability to structure information are difficult rewards for new teachers to recognize because designing classroom activities and grading are consuming all of their energy. For example, Tess is a white female in her mid-twenties and is pursuing a PhD in literature. Her struggles with motivation and finding value in her teaching are connected to her struggles constructing her own authoritative teaching space and identifying as an expert in and out of the classroom. To diminish the anxieties and tension associated...