Writing Program Administration Research Articles

Academic Freedom and the Composition Program

Composition programs in American colleges and universities do not enjoy the rights and privileges of other fields and disciplines. The problems have to do with the status of an academic field beset by commonsense criticism of both its curriculum and pedagogy. Subject to frequent institutional reviews, writing programs are often expected to defend their academic practices from the advice of reviewers whose commonsense understanding of writing eschews process and practice in favor of product. Drawing on several reviews of the program in which they teach, the authors argue that the propensity to allow professors from a range of departments to decide what constitutes good writing and the best ways to teach it violates the intentions on which academic freedom at their university resides. They provide examples of reviews of their program that fail to take into account the pedagogical goals of the writing program. Such reviews rely on external criteria such as commonsense understandings of grammar and style instead of considering the program's stated pedagogical goals and learning outcomes. The essay concludes that institutional reviews of writing programs should acknowledge the review guidelines set by professional organizations in writing program administration and, further, that they be conducted by peers familiar with research and scholarship in the field of composition.

Creating a Culture of Assessment in Writing Programs and Beyond

As writing-program administrators and faculty are being called upon more frequently to help design and facilitate large-scale assessments, it becomes increasingly important for us to see assessment as integral to our work as academics. This article provides a framework, based on current historical, theoretical, and rhetorical knowledge, to help writing specialists understand how to embrace assessment as a powerful mechanism for improved teaching and learning at their institutions.

Writing Program Administration and Faculty Professional Development

The author considers faculty development and its potential relationship to the ethos of collaborative practice modeled both by critical (Freirean) pedagogy and by interdisciplinary research. As a primary concern for any academic administrator, faculty development is not only a teaching moment but also an opportunity for reciprocal exchange, learning, and knowledge production, allowing participants to challenge the received wisdom of their fields and to come to a more rhetorical understanding of their identities. The collaborative construction of new knowledge and an emerging understanding of identities are examined in the context of two professional development and administrative contexts: the assessment by faculty of the writing of entering, first-year students and a collegewide, first-year experience (learning-community) initiative.

Mapping the Terrain: The Two-Year College Writing Program Administrator

By reimagining traditional WPA work in the context of a two-year college, we can begin to identify unique challenges and opportunities for a two-year college WPA.

Datagogies, Writing Spaces, and the Age of Peer Production

This essay investigates how teachers and Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) can use commons-based peer-to-peer technologies to change their roles, to alter writing instruction and literacy genres, and to transform our processes of learning, writing, and collaborating. The essay introduces the term “datagogy” to theorize about the synergy that takes place when “crowds” of teachers employ technologies to construct and debate shared pedagogies. The essay juxtaposes the values and ideologies of two metaphorical communities, the Community of Power and the Community of Learning, explores how these communities use and design online learning communities, and concludes that datagogies are unique interfaces that emphasize the values of the Community of Learning as opposed to the values of the Community of Power. Finally, the essay argues that English studies will concede the central pedagogical stage of the 21st century unless we develop datagogies that engage the creative power of individuals working collaboratively in a climate that respects diversity and independent thinking.

Assessment of Generation 1.5 Learners for Placement into College Writing Courses

Higher education settings in the United States typically include several types of writing assessments. Since tests determining students’ placement into writing courses are often high-stakes, it is imperative for those who make placement decisions to be knowledgeable of the different types of learners entering higher education in order to make appropriate placement recommendations. This article investigates the existence of different types of second language learners in the U.S., with particular emphasis on the population currently identified as Generation 1.5. After describing several defining characteristics, I draw on results of studies identifying how these learners are different from other L2 learners. I use this exploration to highlight findings that can inform writing program administrators interested in adopting assessment procedures leading to fairer and more accurate placement of L2 students. Such findings could serve as a foundation for a writing placement framework that takes into consideration different types of learners based on their writing performance as well as cultural and educational backgrounds.

Information for Authors

TETYC publishes articles for two-year college teachers and those teaching the first two years of English in four-year institutions. We seek articles in all areas of composition (basic, first-year, and advanced); business, technical, and creative writing; and the teaching of literature in the first two college years. We also publish articles on topics such as staffing, assessment, technology, writing program administration, speech, journalism, reading, ESL, and other areas of interest.

The Lone Ranger as Technical Writing Program Administrator

The popularity of technical writing and communication has caused many colleges and universities to scramble to hire qualified tenure-track faculty members. So-called lone ranger candidates are often lured to workplaces in which they are the sole technical writing faculty members by promises of autonomy and the ability to develop programs in ways, and at a pace, that would not necessarily be possible at other institutions. This article explores challenges faced by several such lone ranger faculty members and outlines survival strategies that may help lone rangers sustain and build their technical writing programs.

Reviews: Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline

Reviews: Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline

Alinsky's Reveille: A Community-Organizing Model for Neighborhood-Based Literacy Projects

instruction and service-learning over the last few years. Studies in the midto late nineties described courses and institutional arrangements and began to explore the ramifications for composition and English studies (Schutz and Gere; Herzberg; Peck, Flower, and Higgins). Linda Adler-Kassner and her colleagues edited an influential volume in 1997 that signaled the arrival of this new approach as a major pedagogical movement, and in 2000 Tom Deans's Writing Partnerships gave us a basic framework for thinking about the cooperative relationship between students and the organizations they encounter in these courses. More recent work has focused on how community-based learning can be sustained over time through faculty research (Cushman), how to address the gap between community and academic discourses (Chaden, Graves, Jolliffe, and Vandenberg), and what contradictions we must struggle with in intercultural inquiry (Flower), each study highlighting strategies for respecting the needs and abilities of participating community partners. In a crucial step toward establishing the institutional structures necessary for sustained partnership, Jeffrey T. Grabill and Lynde Lewis Gaillet have urged us to focus on the interface between writing programs and community partners. The need for a balanced and nonexploitive relationship in community-based learning asserts itself insistently in our discussions of this approach, and clearly at this stage writing program administrators must become much more active in developing institutional models that promise true mutual benefits for postsecondary schools and their off

Changing the Center of Gravity: Collaborative Writing Program Administration in Large Universities

Technical communication practices have been changed dramatically by the increasingly ubiquitous nature of digital technologies. Yet, while those who work in the profession have been living through this dramatic change, our academic discipline has been moving at a slower pace, at times appearing quite unsure about how to proceed. This article focuses on the following three areas of opportunity for change in our discipline in relation to digital technologies: access and expectations, scholarship and community building, and accountability and partnering.

The future threat to computers and composition: Nontenured instructors, intellectual property, and distance education

In this article, I argue that recent initiatives concerning the use of computer-mediated instruction to improve writing skills in large lecture classes often work to undermine the professional status of composition teachers in North American universities. I trace the use of computer-assisted instruction, specifically distance-education initiatives. To further the cause of a just implementation of CAI, I discuss recent contractual language and explore the current practice of hiring computers and writing specialists into nontenurable staff positions. I posit that writing program administrators need to fight for stable, long-term positions for faculty who teach with computers and within computer-mediated spaces. I also argue that compositionists must seek to regulate and control the ownership of their intellectual property and course materials.

The Writing Program Administrator's Resource: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Practice

The Writing Program Administrator's Resource: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Practice

The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist: Making Knowledge Work

I. Theorizing Our Writing Programs 1. Ideology, Theory, and the Genre of Writing Programs, Jeanne Gunner 2. Breaking Hierarchies: Using Reflective Practice to Re-Construct the Role of the Writing Program Administrator, Susan Popham, Michael Neal, Ellen Schendel & Brian Huot 3. Writing Programs as Phenomenological Communities, Thomas Hemmeter 4. On the Road to (Documentary) Reality: Capturing the Intellectual and Political Process of Writing Program Administration, Karen Bishop 5. The Writing Program Administrator and the Challenge of Textbooks and Theory, William Lalicker 6. Re-Examining the Theory-Practice Binary in the Work of Writing Program Administrators, Linda K. Shamoon, Robert A. Schwegler, Rebecca Moore Howard & Sandra Jamieson II. Theorizing Writing Program Administration 7. Administration as Emergence: Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Writing Program Administration, Rita Malenczyk 8. Beyond Postmodernism: Leadership Theories and Writing Program Administration, Ruth M. Mirtz & Roxanne M. Cullen 9. Theorizing Ethical Issues in Writing Program Administration, Carrie Leverenz 10. Program Administrators as/and Postmodern Planners: Frameworks for Making Tomorrow's Writing Space, Tim Peeples 11. Opportunities for Consilience: Toward a Network-Based Model for Writing Program Administration, Diane Kelly-Riley, Lisa Johnson-Shull & Bill Condon 12. Writing-Across-the-Curriculum: Contemplating Auteurism and Creativity in Writing Program Direction, Joseph Janangelo 13. Reconsidering and Assessing the Work of Writing Program Administrators, Duane Roen, Barry M. Maid, Gregory R. Glau, John Ramage & David Schwalm 14. Developing Practice Theories through Collaborative Research: Implications for WPA Scholarship, Jeffrey Jablonski 15. Theorizing Writing Program Theorizing, Irwin Weiser & Shirley K Rose

Writing Across and Against the Curriculum

After reviewing my career as a teacher of composition and literature and as a writing program administrator of writing across the curriculum, I discuss the potential of poetry across the curriculum as an important tool for writing “against” the curriculum of academic discourse. When they write poetry, students often express meaningful thoughts and emotions not readily available to them in disciplinary languages and contexts.

Reflections on the Missouri CWA Surveys, 1989-2001: A New Composition Delivery Paradigm

Since 1989, the Missouri Colloquium on Writing Assessment (CWA) has conducted, compiled, and published the results of thirteen annual writing surveys completed by writing program administrators at Missouri's two-year and four-year institutions (primarily public) as well as at Johnson County Kansas Community College, a part of the Kansas City metropolitan area. In all, thirty-seven different colleges and universities (nineteen two-year and eighteen four-year institutions) are represented in the thirteen years of survey results, with eight institutions included in all thirteen surveys and twenty-seven (72 percent) of the colleges and universities participating eight or more survey years (see Tables 1 and 2).1 The collected data are unique in that the same cohort of schools responded to the same detailed inquiries related to the assessing, curricular design, delivery, and staffing of general studies writing courses. An examination of the re-

More Than a Feeling: Disappointment and WPA Work

Addresses the climate of disappointment that characterizes English studies generally and composition studies--particularly writing program administration (WPA). Considers that the context of disappointment is shaped by a number of overlapping factors including: the widely perceived job market collapse in the humanities; the national abuse of adjunct teachers of first-year writing courses; and the general devaluation of the humanities.

More Than a Feeling: Disappointment and WPA Work

n this essay, I address the climate of disappointment that characterizes English studies generally and composition studies-particularly writing program administration (WPA)-specifically. The context of disappointment, as I understand it, is shaped by number of overlapping factors, including but not limited to the following: the widely perceived job market collapse in the humanities (especially in the fields of literature, creative writing, and linguistics); the national abuse of adjunct teachers whose primary duty is the instruction of required first-year writing courses; and the general devaluation of the humanities as the academy develops into more and more of corporate entity, offering education for profit at schools such as the University of Phoenix. According to several recent critics, these conditions, especially the narrowing of the job market, have produced distinct lackluster familiarity in English studies scholarship. In his introduction to Day Late, Dollar Short: The Next Generation and the New Academy, editor and literary critic Peter Herman notes that the of scholars-by which he means critics at the beginning of their careers-are increasingly feeling pressure to write not what we feel, but what we think we ought to say (4). As result, a certain sameness starts to creep into scholarship, certain predictability about conclusions, certain reticence toward taking positions that might either lead to rejection at journals with considerable professional capital ... or alienating influential people and hiring committees (4). The context for his discussion is theoretical knowledge, particularly the lack of new theoretical paradigms that would differentiate next generation scholars from their predecessors in the 1960s and early 1970s, the makers of Big Theory. Noting the intimate connection between research agendas and

WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition1

Considers the wide variation of first-year composition programs and if they do indeed vary so widely. Considers what the programs have in common. Asks if it would be possible to articulate a general curricular framework for first-year composition, regardless of institutional home, student demographics, and instructor characteristics. Presents a list of outcomes approved by the Council of Writing Program Administrators.

Writing beyond the Curriculum: Fostering New Collaborations in Literacy

s Susan McLeod noted more than ten years ago, the movement for writing across the curriculum at its best has been about change in the entire educational process at the university level (Defining 23). From its inception in small liberal arts colleges to its broad application in land grant universities and Ivy League schools, WAC has challenged teachers in every discipline to think more about the context and nature of student than they might within the traditional content-driven model of college teaching. WAC's attention to students' precedes the recent drive in higher education circles to shift universities from teaching to learning (Barr and Tagg; M. Miller; Schneider and Shoenberg). Indeed, WAC practitioners have become institutional leaders in faculty development and activist program design. Writing program administrators (WPAs) are often asked to participate in service task forces, teaching excellence advisories, technology roundtables, and core revision committees. Writing programs are now involved in service projects that connect the classroom to the community (Adler-Kassner, Crooks, and Watters; Cushman Public; Herzberg; Schutz and Gere) and in new instructional initiatives that draw on information technology and the Internet (Anson; Faigley; Hawisher, et al.; Walvoord; or see on-line journals such as Kairos). Our colleagues in the National Writing Project have for many years