Excerpts from my teaching journal my first semester in the Writing Program reveal my early sense of the importance of talk in shaping my 205 course. Although I quickly acknowledged the influence of hall talk on my curriculum design, I was uncomfortable with the informal, though powerful, role it played in affecting change in my course plans. I come from a teaching background where, although common to have perhaps two or three trusted colleagues with whom to discuss ideas for course design, I composed my syllabus, chose my texts, questioned and sought ways to inform my instructional goals, largely in a vacuum, in the little confines of an office. Suddenly, I found myself in the basement of HBC, surrounded by colleagues who not only willingly answered my questions, but who questioned me, explained their courses to me, and who talked excessively among themselves about their teaching. Confronted by a multivocal community of "talkers" whose discourse was at first foreign and alienating, I found it difficult not to question and doubt my own teaching pedagogies.

In his "Utterance and Text in Freshman English," Edward Lotto asserts that "much talk performs the function of text." Hall talk clearly "functions as text" in the Writing Program, particularly for NEW instructors. Far from being idle chat, hall talk nearly always resulted in moments of tension or anxious questioning for me. As a new PWI, I found that not only did I have to enter into this "communal" talk, I also had to learn to read that talk in a separate way, as if it were itself a "complex text." In my first months of teaching, I took scattered, sometimes frantic notes during my talk with other instructors. Afterwards (a day or two later), I went back to my notes to reread them and place annotations, questions, and responses in the margins. Often my rereading of the notes resulted in a different interpretation of the hall talk than did my earlier "reading" of the actual conversation while it was underway. Unlike a written text, the "hall talk text" provided no one place to situate my critical questions. There was no coming back to the "real" text to read and reread it; I could only return to my first reading of the text, and that reading often conflicted with my memories of insights and ideas gained from the conversation. The "hall talk text," then, was never static; meaning was constantly fluctuating based on the context of my readings and on the fact that the "text" contained multiple voices, each eliciting different responses from me. Because the speakers always changed and the bridging premises of their talk were always unspoken, often their multiple voices either conflicted or were difficult to hear.

Crucial to my reading was a necessity for rhetorical distance from the text, a distance nearly impossible to gain during my first semester. Like any new instructor, I was most concerned with the power dynamic of having to walk into my class with a confident and stable course plan in mind. In trying to "read" the hall talk text, I found that I concentrated entirely on content. As with any textual engagement, preoccupation with content prevented my stepping back from and contextualizing my reading. Hall talk was powerful my first semester in the program because I struggled with my "reading" of it much the same way our students struggle with their readings of complex texts. Yet, unlike written texts that come from outside the community, hall talk represented an immediate authoritative text, one that had a much more powerful role in shaping my curriculum than any other theory text possibly could.

Hall talk is represented as "communal," and, I would argue, at times FELT that way even in my earliest weeks of teaching. Yet, the conversational exchanges in which I participated and overheard were filled with shared theoretical histories and assumptions in which I was not a part. The discourse of hall talk was often alien, and I found just as confusing the underlying connections between names of developmental skills or studio practices, and the ways in which these were to be enacted in the studio. The "hall talk text" assumed, for example, that I should know the difference between what constituted a "good Studio 1 activity" as opposed to a "good Studio 2 activity," and that I should use that knowledge to inform my course design. Speakers in the "text" never stopped to explain the difference between these distinctions, although often, at my suggestion of a possible assignment for my 205 course, they corrected me by suggesting it would make a "better 105 activity." Thus, in representing itself as a "communal" text, hall talk conveyed conflicting messages:
although it felt productive to be around colleagues who wanted to talk and whose implicit claim was to make me a part of a community of speakers; at the same time, hall talk demonstrated the extent to which theoretical and developmental assumptions operated in the program. As with any text that implies a hierarchical set of assumptions, but never fully articulates them, I found myself intimidated by the text. Hall talk maintained this promise of camaraderie and productivity, yet at the same time implied that in order to reap these rewards, I first had to decipher and accept the hierarchical assumptions about knowledge and teacher development operating in the "text."

One assumption in the talk was that my development as an instructor in the program was quite linear. Despite my previous teaching experience, during hall talk episodes I felt I was at some "lower" level of expertise, and that if I just sat back and listened long enough, I would eventually become empowered enough to speak. What identified me as "lower" developmentally, was the degree to which I failed to conform linguistically to the discourse of the "text." Language, then, becomes the site for perceived developmental differences among instructors. New instructors must accept that the community of speakers have, before their arrival, invested a certain language and practices with significance and meaning, yet to do so complicates their own ability to make sound curricular decisions. I found it difficult not to grant the preestablished meaning authority, and when I was unable to situate some of my own teaching practices and knowledge into the program's discourse context, I often ended up questioning my own pedagogical instincts.

For example, the hall talk speakers suggested that I include a specific profiling activity in the early weeks of my 205 class that required students to interview one another about their Studio 1 writing experiences. Yet, I had already conceptualized the early weeks of Studio 2, and in my planning had instinctively recognized that students needed to work collaboratively in order to establish a comfortable writing community. I also knew that interviewing often worked well as a tool for collaborative learning and knowledge-making. My sketchy course plans for those early weeks of class included a profiling activity: students were going to interview one another, exchange class copies of interviews, and work on generating a descriptive portrait of themselves as a "generation" of students, this in an attempt to complicate a reading they were to do that claimed to provide a "portrait of today's college students." Yet, because I had not named my activity "profiling," and because my plans for interviewing did not focus on students' 105 experiences, I rewrote my curricular text to conform to what I had heard in the talk. Instead of allowing the hall talk to be a generative source of ideas for me, so that I could supplement my early course plans, question them, and rewrite them based on new insights, I simply granted authority to the speakers in the text. The language of the communal text was too powerful to find an open space to try out my own ideas or even to articulate them. Just as our students see academic texts as closed spaces that do not allow for questions or confrontations, I did not see the hall talk definition of "profiling" as open to speculation or question. I privileged the one example of a 205 profiling activity listed in the "hall talk text" as the ONLY profiling activity allowable in the first weeks of Studio 2. It felt too risky to privilege, as Spellmeyer calls it, "the text of my own experience" over the hall talk text.

Abrupt, unquestioned curriculum changes like this happened frequently during my first semester, but ceased, quite suddenly, at the beginning of my second semester. I wish I were able to point to the exact moment when I stopped letting the language of hall talk drown out my own. I'd like to be able to identify some developmental milestone that caused my refusal, that second semester, to simply lift a practice or language from hall talk without questioning it and without listening to my own voice in response to it. Moreover, I'd like this essay to have a tidy, safe conclusion, to say, like any good student in a course evaluation, that I learned to rhetorically read the text and because of this I am now miraculously empowered to speak. But I can't
name specific moments or simple answers. It took a full semester, even this first year, to gain enough distance on the text in order to rhetorically read it (and I am still in the process of reading it).

In trying to read and enter the "hall talk text," I have come to the unsettling recognition that the linguistic hierarchy existing in the talk functions to disable new instructors. It strips us of our own language, and in a sense, erases the knowledge we came into the program with. New instructors are given a name, "profiling," and other names: "ethnography," "critical literacy," "reflective essay," among others; fed them quite matter-of-factly, so that this language is privileged in a way that is difficult to question. Yet, while the talk disavows the language we bring into the program, at the same time the institution itself sends implicit signals that it values our past teaching experience. Unlike new TAs (many of whom have no prior teaching experience), new PWIs are not required to take, audit, or even attend one session of the 613 class. We are given no special help beyond the Fall Teaching Conference and a five week mentor. Thus, I am "told" my experience is valid enough to enable me to enter the program and teach Studio 2, yet in the hall talk my experience is never validated in such a powerful way. Obviously it was difficult to rhetorically read my position in the program when I was told I was qualified to teach the second course in a spiral curriculum, yet the language I heard in the halls alienated my teaching practices in such a way that I began to question my competence.

Interestingly, while the unspoken linguistic hierarchy in hall talk worked to disable me in many ways, it was, also, ENABLING. I often took language and theory into my Studios that at times felt foreign, and worked with my students to develop knowledge about them. In this way, hall talk enabled me to take risks and eventually come to value those risky moments as necessary for growth. Hall talk implicitly asked me to form instructional collages of bits and pieces of practice and theory: someone mentions a theory text that helped articulate a studio goal, someone else mentions a text that informed his teaching, or another person mentions a playful freewriting assignment. By hearing practices and language in hall talk, by collecting them like pieces of dropped bread and adapting parts of them, by contextualizing them based on the needs of my own classes, or by negotiating their meanings and benefits for my own instructional use, hall talk enables informal and creative teacher research that in turn promotes productive, exciting teacher agency in classrooms and curriculum design.

Yet, because of the specialized discourse of hall talk, new instructors like myself tend to blame themselves, to label themselves too unassertive and slightly victimized by the talk that alienates them. Without a rhetorical distance from the "text," they are unable to view hall talk as part of the institution at large. When instructors recognize hall talk as one of many forums that play out the complexities of powerful institutional constraints, they are better able to ask difficult questions about how the structure of the "text" works. Yet, questioning the "textual structure" of talk, indeed, even this act of WRITING about talk, has felt risky and unsettling to me. I am aware of a responsibility in writing about talk to name WHAT HAPPENS in that talk, and to try to articulate the many positions from which we speak in a "communal" text. Yet, the power structures inherent in hall talk are NEVER TALKED ABOUT, and, if acknowledged, only privately. This seems ironic and a little frightening, because the relationship between power, knowledge, and language is central to many studio topics of inquiry. In order to be "communal," talk must be dialogical: both new and veteran speakers must be allowed to talk and be heard, and they must work against the unfairness of one language given greater currency than another. The community of speakers can provide a safe site for teacher development, but that "development" must include opportunities for instructors to position their own experience and language alongside the program "text," and to theorize and question in that process, both their own voices as well as the voice of the program. For our "hall talk text" to be a communal one, we must acknowledge subtextual hierarchies, and we must welcome revision of the text based on new knowledges, new languages, and new teaching "cultures."