Episode 5: Supporting Graduate Student Writing with Professor Amanda Lock Swarr

In this episode I talk with Dr. Amanda Lock Swarr, a professor in the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Washington about a wonderful dissertation writing course they facilitated. I actually took this course and it was THE SINGLE most useful writing support I have gotten as a graduate student writing a dissertation. Come listen to what it was that made the course so successful and why it is pivotal to support graduate students as we embark on the dissertation writing journey. 

Transcript

Episode 5: Supporting Graduate Student Writing with Amanda Lock Swarr

Intro: (Leah Rubinsky, LR) 

Hi there, welcome to Grad Share, the podcast where we talk about the challenges of graduate school. I'm your host layup. So I say this every episode, but I wouldn't say it if it weren't true. I am really excited for today's guest. We are speaking with Professor Amanda Locke Swarr, about the super important topic of how to support graduate student writing. Amanda is an associate professor in the gender women and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Washington.

Amanda Lock Swarr (ALS):...It reminds us that writing is not individual, right? Writing is always collaborative. And that's a very bizarre myth, because we all know that it's not true, but it's still perpetuated like, just do this on your own. You're a single author, you know, writing, academic writing, anything that's published has been read by at least 10 people, you know, and they've gotten feedback on it. So why not incorporate that in my mind into graduate education as well.

LR: Amanda really is just one of those wonderful people who, when you find someone like that on campus as a graduate student, especially someone who just really knows how to mentor, who cares as deeply about their students and their teaching, as they do about their own research, when you find that person, you really remember that person, and you try to learn from them and take their classes, all of that. And so that's, that's the kind of scholar and teacher and mentor Amanda is. I recently took a terrific dissertation writing class that Amanda facilitated. And I had such a great experience that I really wanted to find out more about the class. And to have a conversation with Amanda about what it might look like for departments to really support graduate student writing in concrete and material ways. Here's some of that conversation. To begin, I first asked Amanda to talk a little bit about their background, the work that they do, and also their relationship to the course that they created, the one that I took on graduate student writing.

ALS: Sure. Thank you, Leah, thank you so much for inviting me, I'm really honored to have this opportunity to talk to you about this class, which was a really special experience. And just to get into some of the details of what we created together during this class. My own background is in feminist studies. My PhD is in feminist studies. And I've been here at the University of Washington for amazingly 17 years and didn't realize it was so long. But I'm really excited to be talking about teaching because it's a passion of mine. I teach classes on queer desires, undergrad and grad classes on trans studies, and on feminist research methods, and then specialized classes like classes on queer Africa and other kinds of specialized topics. My own research is in queer, trans and intersex studies based in South Africa and through collaborations with activists there, most of my work, thinks through how the body is gendered and racialized, historically, and in the present, and the kind of responses activists have had to that way of ways of especially policing and racializing the body and then I like to think a lot about Transnational Feminisms and collaborative praxis. And I think some of that thinking about collaboration will come up today that extends into my teaching as well. But those are some of my passions.I always think about my teaching philosophy in terms of like two core approaches one is about both they're based in feminist pedagogy is one is about cooperative learning. And that's both in my teaching and my mentoring that I feel like I come to a class or a relationship with them, a mentee, expecting to learn that we'll learn from each other. So I feel like my classes are about like, how can we learn from each other? And how can we kind of collaborate on your learning? And how can students learn from each other in classes I think is really important too. So I really approach my teaching, expecting that everyone brings important and relevant not relevant knowledge to the classroom. So in this experiential, some is activist based, you know, some is what they read. And I feel like I try to create a classroom where students feel a responsibility to contributing to that. The other is, I feel like students have a really diverse range of learning styles. So I really tried to even in graduate classes to have very engaged classrooms. I mean, there are classes where I lecture, but in every class that I teach, I bring in active learning exercises, and I spend a lot of time trying to like research, like, what can we do that would be interesting, like, Can we do some free writing? Can we meet in groups? Can we, you know, use different kinds of prompts to, to stimulate your thinking, do we want to watch a little video clip or something? So I feel like, rather than having a classroom that's just like, you know, very dry or, you know, expecting students to perform certain kinds of knowledge or theory, you know, knowledge of particular theories, I want to make the class less intimidating, make it more interactive. So we're all kind of engaging in students are active participants in their own learning in that sense. So those are some of my that's things I think about all the time where I'm constantly like thinking, how can we make this class more interesting? Like, this is a long class, what can we do to like change things up and make it exciting?

LR:You know, it struck me while I was having this conversation, what an incredible teacher Amanda is the thoughtfulness, wanting to research and find the most engaging and relevant ways and activities to be in the classroom. This is wonderful. And to be honest, as a graduate student, I can't say that all of my professors have been this way. So how did Amanda get to be such a good mentor? Such a good instructor, such a good teacher pedagogically? How does that happen? Especially because not all professors get that way or become that way?

ALS: I mean, we don't get a lot of training on pedagogy or mentoring. I mean, I think that's a real deficiency of graduate training of like, those of us who are going to become professors don't ever get taught to do it, you just kind of trial and error. I was always lucky to have really supportive mentors. So in some ways, I'm sure I gleaned from, from their leadership and just modeled off of what they did. But I feel like, for me, grad school is about conducting research. But it's also about getting through a series of hoops that are institutionally designed to be like difficult means of gatekeeping. So part of my kind of starting point with mentoring is making institutional cultures less intimidating.

LR: I want to pause here for just a minute because it's really affirming to hear what Amanda is saying here about this thing that happens in higher education, where academia is so set up to really derail non traditional and marginalized students, right? It's this thing that happens in the way that there are unclear expectations, for example, in graduate school, or the ways in which academic genres of writing the application for funding or fellowship applications, or even prospectuses and things like that these genres of academic writing are not explicitly and transparently sort of taught and all of this works to really gatekeeper just as Amanda was saying, and to keep certain people out of the academy and to usher certain people in.

ALS: First generation students or students from varied educational backgrounds are best supported when expectations around grad education are demystify demystified. And they're supported in success. So I feel like that other model of like good luck, see when you're done with your dissertation, also really disadvantages students who may not have experience or you know, other kinds of mentoring maybe before they started grad school about what grad school is. So I think we need more classes that will support students in making progress on their own work. And that supports a wider range of students who are often gate kept out of academia because of these, you know, confusing processes or the lack of structure and support that can really help.

LR: For me, part of that supportive structure as a graduate student working on my own dissertation was taking Amanda's fabulous dissertation writing course. That's what I want to get into now. Let's talk about how the course was set up, what we did in that course, how we created this wonderful discourse community and how it was a course that really helped to demystify for me, the dissertation writing process in a way that was really, really supportive.

ALS: The course has very minimal reading, and the first half of the course we, you know, had some minimal reading around revision and around the kind of processes of writing and talked about what were some of your projects that you were working on? What were some of the needs that you had, as grad students, were you worried about the job market? Were you worried about how to create CVS, and so we could like think through and demystify some of those processes. And then in the second half, half of class, that's when we got into the peer review. And the thing that I really like about that peer review process that I feel like really works is we use a template of questions that we model every week. And, you know, everyone in the class read someone's work in progress and gives feedback using this template. But the person who's presenting in a way doesn't have the opportunity to speak and defend their work. It's a discussion about your work, and you're listening as a participant. And I think that's challenging to students like, wait, what do you mean, I can't explain what I was saying.

LR:It is, it is very challenging. I have so when it was my turn to receive feedback. So I circulated about a week before my turn a 20 to 25 page draft of a chapter that I was working on for my dissertation, I was so nervous I was I have never been so nervous to submit writing, not even to my committee or to my other professors, there's there was something about my peers, like having my peers read this, my fellow graduate students that I really wanted to step up and go above and beyond, because I know how busy graduate students are, and just for them to stop and take time out of everything that they're doing, teaching, writing and everything like that. It's not that my professors aren't busy. I mean, I know that they're busy. But there's something about the peer review that the fact that I'm getting comments and feedback from my peers that really made me want to step it up a notch. So I was so so scared to give my writing, to my peers, and to get this feedback. But at the end of the day, when it was finally time, and when I followed that format, of just sitting there in the class and letting the group have a feedback discussion about my draft, and not saying anything, and that is that was really hard, it was really hard to, to just keep quiet and not try to explain things but But ultimately, it was so helpful, that model of feedback, because I was able to listen to this group of peers that I still respect, have this very constructive conversation about what they were seeing in my writing the effects of my writing, the structural ways that my writing was organized, just being a fly on the wall, listening to these really rich comments back and forth in this group about my writing, it was, it was fantastic. It was phenomenal. It was it was so so enriching. So enriching for my work, all the feedback I got, and I shouldn't, there was no reason to be scared my peers were. So it's not that they didn't give me constructive because they did give me constructive feedback and really useful, constructive, but they did so from a place of care. I mean, that was evident. And it was just, it was so useful.

ALS:Overall, the feedback on the class has been positive. And that's the part of that peer review. Part of it that set up in a very structured way, I think is probably what I liked the most about the class that just takes a different approach than most kinds of models of writing.

LR:So a large part of what we were doing, and this dissertation writing course, was based around feedback. And part of what I think made this course in particular so successful was that the class really felt safe enough, it felt like we had built a good, supportive and respectful community to be able to be vulnerable enough, you know, to share our writing and to give really good feedback and to be able to hear that feedback as well. And that's hard because at that time, this course, that we were taking, that Amanda was facilitating was online. So we were all meeting over resume for this dissertation writing course. And still, Amanda was able to create this really supportive space. So I wanted to ask Amanda a little bit more about the community that we created, and how that really led to a class where we were able to be so successful in giving feedback and in making progress on our dissertation writing projects. 

ALS: This class was so supportive, I was worried, as you said about the pandemic I had not teaching this class. And it's such an interactive class to teach it on Zoom. I wondered, how will this work, but the construction of the class seemed to work well, and I think we just had a particularly amazing group of students, right, who were deeply engaged, really smart, and really kind, which was like an incredible combination. I mean, it was a special group. And I think part of the challenge of the class that I worried about throughout the quarter, but it worked out well, is that people are in really different places. And this always happens in this class. But in our class, it was particularly noticeable, right? Different places, and where they are in their writing, you know, are you finishing up your dissertation? Are you just about to start it? Or you're working on a proposal? Where are you at, we also have students from across the university, people from all sorts of areas, but the course really seem I mean, the students in the course really seem to work together and come together, I found it incredibly touching, I will say the part of the class that that moved me the most, we had great conversations, the fact first half of the quarter, we had these working sessions that felt really productive. But when we started discussing people's works, and really getting into it, people were so engaged, and so involved with each other's work. To me, that was like the most inspiring moving part of the class to, for the whole, you know, for the whole quarter. I mean, I felt like, regardless of differences among the work submitted, it could be something that was more notes, it could be something that was a polished chapter, and the conversation was so constructive and so positive, there were times when it brought a tear to my eye, just hearing like, the comments that and supportive comments that people shared with each other. And I was so grateful for that. That tone right of constructive support. And that just felt amazing. I just felt like that just facilitated the, the I don't know how the progress that folks made throughout the quarter. It was just it was incredibly special group and I always honored to be part of it.

Actually was working on my own book, like at the same in the same quarter, and I put our our whole class in my acknowledgments, I was like, I have to put everybody in this, because it just felt like the, the creation of the space together and like the tone just just like felt like it was inspiring me and everything I was doing. So

LR: The community and class were so inspiring for me too. I am happy to report that even though the quarter ended, and so the class formally ended already. We still get together to write, we're in communication, and we still have that wonderful supportive community that Amanda helped us create and fostered for us during her course. I want to thank Professor Amanda lock suar So much for talking to us about the importance of supporting graduate students and graduate student writing. Offering this kind of dissertation writing class is huge for just fighting against gatekeeping and really helping students and graduate students. Get that guidance that we need when we are going through what can be a really harrowing process which is writing the dissertation. Thank you so much to Amanda. Thank you so much to everyone for listening, and I will see you next time.

Music:

“Anthem of Rain” by End of the Road CCBY

HoliznaCC0 “Laundry on the Wire,” CC0 Public Domain

HoliznaCC0 “Unwind,” CC0 Public Domain