Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration, The

Description

Combining formal quantitative research with narrative-based scholarship, THE PROMISE AND PERILS OF WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION represents multiple voices from faculty balancing between the demands of teaching, writing, and administering writing programs in professional, ethical ways-often under circumstances that can be defined, at best, as difficult. In these pages, junior faculty tell their stories of triumph and trauma, while more firmly established composition scholars reflect upon the changing and challenging profession we all share.

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Rhetoric

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 26 janvier 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602354999
• Langue: English

Extrait

Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition
Series Editors, Patricia Sullivan, Catherine Hobbs, Thomas Rickert, and Jennifer Bay
The Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition honors the contributions Janice Lauer Hutton has made to the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a disciplinary study. It publishes scholarship that carries on Professor Lauer’s varied work in the history of written rhetoric, disciplinarity in composition studies, contemporary pedagogical theory, and written literacy theory and research.
Other Books in the Series
Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics , edited by Debra Frank Dew and Alice Horning (2007)
1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition by Brent Henze, Jack Selzer, and Wendy Sharer (2007)
Networked Process: Dissolving Boundaries of Process and Post-Process , by Helen Foster (2007)
Composing a Community: A History of Writing Across the Curriculum , edited by Susan H. McLeod and Margot Soven (2006)
Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline, edited by Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo (2004).
Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies (Expanded Edition) by James A. Berlin (2003)


The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration
Edited by Theresa Enos and Shane Borrowman
Jillian Skeffington, Assistant Editor
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2008 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
“The Portland Resolution” (© 1992) “Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Administration” (© 1998), and “The WPA Outcomes Statement” (© 2000) are reproduced here by permission of the Council of Writing Program Administrators.
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The promise and perils of writing program administration / edited by Theresa Enos and Shane Borrowman ; Jillian Skeffington , assistant editor. p. cm. -- (Lauer series in rhetoric and composition)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60235-050-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-051-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-052-6 (adobe ebook) 1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching--United States. 2. Report writing--Study and teaching (Higher)--United States. 3. Writing centers--Administration. I. Enos, Theresa. II. Borrowman, Shane. III. Skeffington, Jillian.
PE1405.U6P76 2008
808’.0420711--dc22
2008000171
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 8 1 6 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].


Contents
Foreword
John Trimbur
1 Living in the Spaces Between: Profiling the Writing Program Administrator
Jillian Skeffington, Shane Borrowman, and Theresa Enos
2 “Creating a Context”: The Institutional Logic of the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Development of the Consultant-Evaluator Service
Shirley K Rose
3 Credibility, Disciplinary Bias, and the WPA
Sharing WPA Perils as Pearls of Wisdom
Ernest J. Enchelmayer
Two Things
Patti J. Kurtz
Rocking the Boat: Asserting Authority and Change in a Writing Program
Richard McNabb
Irreconcilable Differences: One Former WPD’s Cautionary Tale
Erin O’Neill
Portraits of a Field
Chris Anson, Jeanne Gunner, and Thomas P. Miller
4 Tenure-Track Faculty as WPAs
Notes from a New WPA
Megan Fulwiler
An Army of One: The Possibilities and Pitfalls of WPA Work for the Lone Compositionist
Randall McClure
Why I Won’t Keep My Head Down or Follow Other Bad Advice for the Junior Faculty WPA
Stephanie Roach
Writing Program Administration at the Small University
Matt Smith
Location and the WPA
Stuart C. Brown, Andrea A. Lunsford, and Edward M. White
5 Nontenure-Track Faculty as WPAs
Without Title: One NTT’s Struggle in the TT Society
Nita Danko
Skeletons in the Closet, Ghosts, and Other Invisible Creatures
Suellynn Duffey
Neither Fish Nor Fowl: The Promise and Peril of Directing a Program on an Administrative Line
Claire C. Lamonica
One White Girl’s Failed Attempt to Unsilence the Dialogue
Cynthia Nearman
Three Reflections and an Observation
Susan H. McLeod, Victor Villanueva, and Douglas Hesse
6 Tenure, Promotion, and the WPA
What Is Research and Writing?
Emily Isaacs
A New WPA at a Small Private School with Large Public(ation) Expectations
Camille Langston
Fit for an Unfit Fittedness: National Writing Project Site Directors as WPAs
Chere L. Peguesse
Will Administrate for Tenure, or, Be Careful What You Ask For
E. Shelley Reid
A Prologue and Three Responses
Duane Roen, Kathleen Blake Yancey, and David Schwalm
7 Understanding Ourselves, Our Work, and Our Working Conditions
At the Pleasure of the Chair: A Cautionary Tale from the Private Side of the Public Story
Elizabeth Hodges
Diversity Work and the WPA: Feminist Writing Center Work Prior to Tenure
Ann E. Green
“Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t”: The Ethical and Professional Dilemmas of WPA Work for Those Who Know Better
Melissa Nicolas
Exploitation, Opportunity, and Writing Program Administration
Christine Norris
Three Responses and a Prologue
Martha A. Townsend, Art Young, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps
8 Identity Theft of a Writing Center Director: The New Art of Academic Punishment
Margaret E. Weaver
9 From Adjunct Wrangler to Autonomous WPA: The Surprising Benefits of Pretenure Writing Program Administration
Lauren Sewell Ingraham
Appendix A
WPA Survey
Appendix B
The Portland Resolution
Christine Hult and the Portland Resolution Committee: David Joliffe, Kathleen Kelly, Dana Mead, Charles Schuster
Appendix C
Council of Writing Program Administrators Statement on Intellectual Work
Appendix D
The WPA Outcomes Statement
Contributors
Index to the Print Edition


Foreword
John Trimbur
No matter their academic rank, terms of employment, or conditions of work, WPAs are bureaucrats who manage larger or smaller chunks of curricular real estate in the political economy of higher education. To make sense, in the first instance, of the experiences recounted in this book and to hope, in turn, to improve the work of writing programs, as Promises and Perils certainly wishes to do, you’ve got to start by putting WPAs in the material circumstances of their work lives. The metaphors used to capture the dexterity of WPAs—“kitchen cooks, plate twirlers, troubadours” (George)—give a sense of the heterogeneity of work in the mid levels of management: the meetings, e-mail, mentoring, phone calls, public relations, networking, annual reports, and daily multitasking that determine the lived experience of WPAs, caught in the middle, as mid-level managers always are, between the staff they manage and the superiors they report to.
Joseph Harris is correct to distinguish between “questions of disciplinary status and working conditions” (57) and to recognize that increasing the academic legitimacy of composition and rhetoric as a field of study (which has been more or less accomplished) is not necessarily equivalent to improving the material conditions of the people who teach writing. The two terms— disciplinary status and working conditions —are related, but not causally. Rather, the crux of the matter, as many of the following WPA narratives give witness, is on the ground, in struggles over the managerial prerogative to control the conditions of work in contemporary postsecondary education.
I do not mean to be accusatory in calling WPAs managers—or to suggest that their class interests are necessarily tied to the structural adjustments that have been taking place over the past several decades in colleges and universities. If WPAs are “bosses,” their position and powers nonetheless are circumscribed by the academic capitalism of the present moment. To my mind, the value of recognizing WPAs as mid-level managers is to see how they fit into the corporate structures that have come to dominate academic work more generally in the era of neoliberalism and the widespread marketization of higher education.
There can be little doubt that decisive changes have occurred as colleges and universities increasingly adopt a corporate mentality. For one thing, the market logic of neoliberalism amounts to a dramatic restructuring of the “private” and the “public” in higher education. While institutions of higher education are still officially nonprofit, they are operating nonetheless as though they had been privatized, acting more like profit-making enterprises than publi