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After six years of orchestrating and grooming the brainstorming, drafting, modeling, conferencing, drafting, reflecting, editing, and publishing processes of high school students, here I am, stuck between brainstorming and drafting this story. The agitation in my twitching, impatient legs reminds me of the nonstop bouncing of basketball players' legs during journal time. The gnawed thumbnail on my right hand sulks in sisterhood with back-row senior girls who had procrastinated Clearance MBT Shoes on their personal essays until their nails were whittled down. I am sitting at the table, one minute with my arm flopped over my head, the next minute leaning back with my legs up on a chair. Where I once was the enthusiastic cheerleader of writing time and cajoler of those wayward students, I am now the gawky graduate student writer. Newly positioned as a novice on the periphery of the doctoral student community, at times I feel more akin to a high school ninth-grade student. I entered, unfamiliar with the language, procedures, locations, and wardrobes expected by my professors and new peers. How does one become the first-year student? Is it simply admission to the school or program? Ninth-grade students are forged on Facebook, in the hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms just as doctoral students are formed in seminars, writing groups, coffee shops, and first conferences. In other words, by social immersion in these new cultural worlds, we first-year students learn to be competent members. As a part of this membership, our identities as writers within these contexts are also constructed. How students talk about writing assignments, appropriate academic language (or not), is negotiated amid slamming locker doors and coffee chatter. The social aspects of learning to be a writer within a cultural community, such as sophomore speech class or qualitative research methods class, are significant in constructing success, motivation, persistence, and value. As teachers we recognize the influence of peers on our students, but often from a negative perspective (i.e., hanging with the "wrong" crowd). We often seek ways to minimize socializing or carefully construct rules for social interaction in classrooms. In our writing classroom, this can be seen in efforts to include peer conferencing. From worksheets to check-lists, teachers are often concerned with regulating language and behavior. In my experience as a teacher, I found a tension between my efforts to make peer conferencing a meaningful experience with real benefits for young writers and the knowledge that the relationships and context were contrived. Student belief in the value of peer conferencing was often tenuous. In the classes that had the best social cohesion, I found that students entered into peer conferences with less resistance. While not difficult to surmise that comfort plays a major role, it became clear that students believed in the feedback they received. Conversations about students' writings that lived beyond feedback forms were evidence that they were taking writing seriously. Students' continued conversations helped to construct a community of writers. Through friendship networks in the ninth-grade class, the web of support for writing and peer feedback strengthened. In my experience in graduate school, I found my peer conferencing partner when a friend was pre-paring for candidacy exams. She wanted someone to listen to her talk through points. Not just listen; she wanted someone to listen critically for gaps in her arguments that would make the committee members jump. As I listened, I became attuned to not only the content of her words but also her phrasing, argument structure, and use of evidence. Soon, we were meeting to "talk out a paper" in which one person would take notes while the other rambled through ideas or stubborn spots. The scribe would reflect back, pointing out hidden brilliance, fleshing out the hesitant claim, and probing for more connections. A draft later, we would repeat the process at problematic areas. This became our pattern for term papers, manuscripts, proposals, and presentations. As I begin to prepare for my candidacy exams, and she, the writing of her MBT Shoes dissertation, our time scribing the other's thoughts will only increase. As educators, we both knew we were scaffolding each other's appropriation of academic language, the rhetorical structure of the genre, and the use of a theoretical construct. More interestingly, as social peers, we knew that it was up to us to engage in this meaning-making process and to write, as the opening of this column describes, hesitantly, innovatively, and even awkwardly. We were writing in much the same ways my high school students were writing.
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