By Lindsey Ives and Leah Sneider

For the inaugural issue of In Progress, we are excited to feature three articles and an advice column all centered on beginnings and graduate school.

The first two articles focus on personal identity and its impact on the graduate school experience. In her literacy narrative, “A Home at School: Reflections on the Lasting Influence of Early Language and Literacy Development,” Erin Penner Gallegos describes growing up with parents who were well-versed in academic discourses and literacies and engaged her from the earliest ages in interactions and activities that mirrored the kind she would experience in school. These interactions, she argues, led those around her to incorrectly assume that she was naturally brighter than others because she caught on quickly to the discourses of school, when really she entered school with an advantage over many of her peers because she had already experienced those discourses at home. Gallegos points to the injustices of a system that values certain discourses over others and, based on those values, mistakenly labels some smarter than others.

In “Navigating the Academy: Experiences of Female Students of Color in the Social Sciences,” Tamekia Wilkins, Aisha Griffith, Latesha Washington, and Joanna Wu make a similar point, opening their article by noting that “[e]ntry into graduate school does not always begin on the same starting line for all students. Graduate students come with a multitude of experiences and identities that stagger these positions of beginning.” The scenarios that Wilkins et. al. present indicate that for many graduate students of color, previous experiences, as well as others’ often mistaken assumptions about what their previous experiences must have been, can lead to conflicted and complicated transitions into graduate school.

At the end of her article, after noting how different most of her students’ beginnings likely were from her own, Gallegos states, “With critical reflection and guidance, I hope that my future students might be able to start unpacking their primary identities, and choose to build for themselves new identities as writers, readers, and students that do not replace, but help to supplement and refine their existing conceptions of themselves.” The stories that Wilkins et. al. tell indicate that for graduate students of color, primary and academic identities can be difficult to merge. In fact, these identities are often in conflict, be it because of prejudiced assumptions about people of color in predominantly white institutions or suspicion of the values of academia on the part of friends and family.

In response to the scenarios they describe, Wilkins et. al. offer useful strategies for other graduate students of color who might face similar dilemmas as they begin navigating the academy. Similarly, in “The Literacy Games of the First Quarter of Doctoral Studies,” Carolyn Shemwell Kaplan provides strategies for interacting with academic texts that are likely to be useful to anyone entering a new graduate program. Through a narrative describing the difficulties she experienced in her first quarter as a Ph.D. student mastering the literacy tasks characteristic of her new discourse community, Kaplan recounts how she learned rules of the reading, speaking, and writing “games” that doctoral students must play in order to succeed.

Finally, in her first advice column for graduate students across disciplines, In Progress Coeditor Dr. Leah Sneider focuses on an important tool to assist through coursework and into the dissertation writing process. In order to ameliorate the stresses for Ph.D. students and in an effort to promote the values of community learning, Sneider makes a convincing case for participating in an interdisciplinary writing group.

Thanks are due to all of the authors, reviewers, publicists, and supporters who made this issue possible. We look forward to your comments as we continually engage in a long and fruitful conversation about the experiences and implications of graduate study across the disciplines.

Co-Editors

Lindsey Ives, MA & Leah Sneider, PhD