The preparation of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) for the college composition classroom has been a conversation in writing program administration scholarship for the last century. In that time, national position statements have been written articulating best practices for the design of these preparation programs in addition to the countless number of articles, chapters, and books taking up this topic. However, a large-scale study of these preparation programs has not been conducted for twenty years. In seeking to update the field’s knowledge of large-scale GTA writing pedagogy education (WPE) preparation, this dissertation describes how doctoral programs across the nation prepare their GTA instructors to enter the undergraduate composition classroom. The study employs a mixed-methods approach to describe GTA education and professionalization across institutions granting doctoral degrees in Rhetoric and Composition and includes a national survey along with three local case studies. The findings for this dissertation include the following: 1) WPE must often balance multiple purposes including the development of local, pedagogical, and theoretical knowledges, 2) WPAs employ a variety of strategies to manage those purposes such as blending, loading, and embedding, 3) The greatest constraint in designing and delivering WPE, as identified by this study’s respondents, is time, 4) The design of WPE is highly local in that it is deeply impacted by programmatic and administrative histories, local constraints, and the population who deliver and receive WPE. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2019. / April 15, 2019. / composition, GTA education, GTA preparation, writing pedagogy education, writing program administration / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathleen Blake Yancey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Vanessa Paz Dennen, University Representative; Michael Neal, Committee Member; Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Committee Member; Deborah Coxwell-Teague, Committee Member.

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In the commercial theaters of early modern London there worked a group of dramatists who, though they wrote for the playmaking industry, were not members of it. Rather than outliers in a unified, closed field of playwriting, they were amateur dramatists, a distinct class of writers who took advantage of the radically open nature of the field of playwriting for professional theaters to supply their own plays to the actors. Their plays require a different set of critical and historical questions than that traditionally used in examining plays by professionals. The reason for this distinction is that amateur dramatists came to their work with primary experience of the theater as cultural consumers rather than producers: they were playgoers who, though from a diverse range of economic and social backgrounds, shared a passion for the public stage—a passion that they translated into efforts to pen plays for that same stage. As plays by playgoers, their texts provide evidence for better understanding how particular audience members saw and understood the professional stage. Their plays reveal directly what audience members wanted to see and how they thought actors might stage it. In their attempts to replicate specific practices, conventions, and techniques that they saw in professionals' plays, they reveal how certain playgoers understood, or thought they understood, the professional theater. In their deviations from what they saw in professionals' plays, they testify to a gap between what the profession produced and what the audience wanted—a gap unnoticed by studies of audience experience that rely on professionals' plays to recreate that experience. Playgoers writing their own plays demonstrate that the early modern audience was a participatory, engaged, and even autonomously active force of dramatic creation. In the early modern professional theater, playgoers could create the texts and, in some cases, the performances that they desired. Reading amateurs' plays with an awareness that they were written not just for audiences but also by audiences thus opens a new window onto the early modern playhouse, the diversity of dramatists who wrote for it, and the creative experiences of the spectators who attended it.

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