The purpose of the ethnographic narrative project was to understand ourselves and our students in a more in-depth manner. The ethnographic narrative project has allowed me to explore myself, my students, my classroom, the community I teach in, and the link each of these has to social justice. In order to best serve our students as educators, we must comprehend all of the funds of knowledge our students possess and utilize these facets to aid their learning. I have found that understanding my students cultural, social, academic assets is critical to fulfilling their needs both as students and individuals. I have also explored my own strengths and areas of growth as an educator and solidified my teaching identity. As educators we must not only teach our students academic skills teach social and emotional assets as well.

This paper details the journey of a first-year teacher. It is a highly reflective exploration of their inner landscape – one that documents the development of the teaching self in relation to students and society at large. Separated into four distinct sections, this work serves as an account of personal motivation to teach, getting to know students beyond the classroom walls, immersion in the community to situate educational work, and a comprehensive reflection upon teaching effectiveness and the evolution of the educating self. Development as a professional educator as stated in Teacher Performance Expectation (TPE) 6 demands continual introspection and proactive adjustments to our practice. The first year of teaching – a stage of initial and potentially immense growth – is especially critical as it sets the tone for the next and many years after. This ethnography interweaves objective analysis and studies internal and external factors and how they influence one another, and honest perceptions, struggles, and realizations as an individual embarks on the journey to becoming a teacher. By documenting my personal experience and performing higher-level analysis, we unveil the varied intricacies, competing demands, and trying moments that constitute the teaching experience. As the year (and, consequently, the ethnography) unfolds, one thing remains clear – teaching is a work of the heart.

<p>  </p> <p>Widely recognized as bridging graduate coursework and independent research, doctoral examinations also (re)-produce disciplinary norms and map trajectories for graduate student professionalization. This institutional ethnography investigates doctoral exam processes as a component of curricular infrastructure, a term that I describe in functional, relational, temporal, and heuristic terms. This study begins with a discipline-wide survey (Chapter 3) reaching 81 PhD programs in Rhetoric and Composition, building on previous programmatic research in the field to identify constellations of exam formats and their stated purposes. From this broad view, institutional ethnography re-orients analysis by focusing on the standpoints of individual stakeholders (graduate students and faculty) and the ways that work processes point toward broader structural tendencies and assumptions.  From the survey, individual perspectives through interviews with faculty at nine different universities (Chapter 4) and a large focus group with graduate students (Chapter 5) to identify work practices and the institutional and disciplinary factors that direct them. This project yields an empirically grounded description of current graduate pedagogical practices, and through those practices, describes several contours of curricular infrastructure. Temporal boundary objects describe how the meaning and significance of an experience like a doctoral exam can change across time, yielding insight into how curricular practices transfer from one intuition to another. Institutional inertia appears as common iteration of curricular infrastructure, representing the tendency of intuitions to self-replicate and resist change, and nonverbal visually embodied actions serve as a key to understanding communication about institutions that avoids talking about institutions. The project culminates in Chapter 6 with a three-part heuristic, described as an aspect of curricular infrastructure, designed as a resource to faculty and administrators who are in decision-making positions with respect to doctoral exams.  </p>