“I Can Be Wild in What I Say”: Adding Writing Instruction to a Graduate Education Classroom

This article reports on a collaboration between a scholar of writing studies and a scholar of education to denaturalize the idea of writing at the graduate level being learned passively through disciplinary courses. Being able to communicate expertise clearly is a key competency of graduate education. Yet graduate writers often receive insufficient support. The authors redesigned a master’s-level course in the field of education, adding explicit writing instruction, peer review and revision activities, and a course text on writing, and shifting the core assignment from an end-of-term paper to a multistage, peer-oriented project. The authors then studied the impact of the writing instruction on one student through the lens of literacy scholar and teacher educator Gholdy Muhammad’s instructional equity framework. This narrative case study relays how one student processed and implemented the writing activities both in the course and, later, as a teacher. Her narrative suggests benefit in cross-departmental partnerships for integrating writing instruction into graduate courses across disciplines for holistic graduate learning.