“In this important study, Jessica Restaino uses Hannah Arendt’s theoretical model of labor, action, and work to investigate the experiences of four graduate students teaching their first writing classes at a large state university. Her portraits of these participants’ struggles as they negotiate the challenges they face as both teachers and graduate students raise insightful, thought-provoking questions not only about the way writing program administrators train and mentor new teachers but also about how writing is taught, researched, and theorized. First Semester is a model of ethnographic analysis at its best.”—Lisa Ede, professor of English, Oregon State University
“Teaching assistants juggle a punishing workload for their own classes, as well as the workload of the demanding, grade-obsessed, and sometimes threatening undergraduates that they are expected to teach. It is a balancing act of conflicting identities, as they play the role of both educator and student. As Restaino trails four new graduate student teachers in their first weeks of classroom teaching, she employs Arendt to think through new teachers’ workplace self-fashioning. First Semester is a great place to start asking ourselves tough questions about how we turn students into faculty.”—Marc Bousquet, author of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation
"This study will profoundly shape the way I think about my work with graduate teaching assistants and with the long-term contract faculty who staff the writing program I direct."-Shirley K. Rose, Professor and Writing Programs Director, Arizona State University