ABSTRACT

Once, during a student presentation in one of our graduate classes, the presenter asked everyone in the class to write down as many nouns and adjectives as we could think of that best described our roles and lives. The words people wrote ranged from “writer” to “student” to “mother” to “teacher” to “runner” to “Native American.” Interestingly, not one person listed “researcher,” despite the fact that all of these students were working on their master’s degrees and many were also starting work on their culminating master’s projects. For the graduate students in our program, many of whom are already working professionals (both teachers and professional writers), this failure to call themselves a researcher probably is not that uncommon.