GenAdmin. Colin Charlton
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all at its center, but a collaboration that was powerful enough to invite (or provoke) ideological disruption in our different institutional contexts.
In Memories of Listening to Others: In Chattanooga, Tennessee, site of the 2006 CWPA conference—in a hotel topped with a marquee train suggesting history, motion, and the “you are here” appeal of a landmark—Colin was hauling around tripods and microphones. He didn’t know anything more about WPAs than what he had picked up from Jonikka’s classes in that specialization and was trying to understand writing programs through video documentaries of students, teachers, and the work that emerged when they collaborated on public writing projects. He was trying, as an outsider, to collect enough tape to create an audio documentary. He and Jonikka found Tarez at a table and literally took a load (of equipment) off.
For Colin, the idea for this book began to emerge at that table, where Amy and Kate eventually happened by, talking about the panels we had attended. Juxtaposed with the strangeness that accompanies recording others, Colin sensed a familiarity of energy around that accidental table as we asked each other questions about what was happening around us, why we did or didn’t belong. We were people watching, physically lurking amongst names we knew for which we still did not have faces.
In Memories of Interrogating Assumptions: In 2007, Amy was struggling with her decision to take a non-tenure-track WPA job her first year out of graduate school. She felt good about her decision because it allowed her to live in the same city as her husband rather than resorting to the long-distance marriage so many dual-career academics are forced to choose, but she also wondered if she had made a mistake in disregarding the oft-repeated advice that pre-tenure faculty who took WPA positions were doomed for failure. She came to the book project wanting to interrogate the assumption that all pre-tenure WPAs are doomed, and she wanted a space to talk about how her decision to take such a job made her feel like she was being disobedient or naive, disregarding the advice of those with more professional experience in favor of what felt right for her whole life, not just her professional life.
As she moved from that first non-tenure-track WPA job to a tenure-track WPA job early in the life of this project, Amy became more aware of the professional/personal dichotomy her earlier thinking had created, and she wanted to write towards a new understanding of WPA work that blended the personal and professional in a more nuanced way. Her job change caused her to shift her approach to the project, and she experienced a felt need to move beyond simply resisting those dire advice narratives to imagining new ways that we could tell our stories of WPA work and new ways of thinking about our shared histories.
In Memories of Resistance: Two thousand and six found Kate at the end of her fifth year as a WPA, and the end of her first year as the Director of Composition in her second tenure-track job. As a pre-tenure WPA she had felt, on the one hand, the excitement of developing composition curricula on two campuses and working with TAs and instructors on their development as composition teachers, and, on the other, the frustration of being a composition specialist making arguments she was surprised to find still needed to be made, like those about the need to hire qualified adjunct instructors to teach composition, to understand that writing is a complex and rhetorical process rather than a simple matter of skill mastery, and to recognize the limited value of rising junior exams. She wished that accepted disciplinary ideas were more welcome across campuses. At the same time, she struggled with resistance to a prevalent notion circulating among WPAs, namely that being a pre-tenure WPA is untenable and should be undesirable. She wished the CWPA could find ways to move past arguments about whether or not there should be pre-tenure WPAs and towards discussions of power, agency, and positioning for all WPAs, including those who chose to be WPAs pre-tenure. Conversations with Tarez, Amy, Colin, and Jonikka at the 2006 CWPA conference were well timed, as Kate was ready to offer her perspective on these tensions. She entered this project with a readiness to speak and theorize publicly about these issues instead of just feeling frustrated and unproductively resistant to them.
Our conversations throughout 2006 and 2007 became an ongoing discussion on the nature of administration before tenure, the philosophies of writing programs, the energies that communities create, and the unavoidable distances that demarcate where we are and what we were hoping to individually accomplish. We began listening to each other intensely. As we listened, we heard about the different ways in which our work was our life, about why we had been professionally tapped to innovate while also being discouraged from wandering into unfamiliar territory, about what we needed and what we could live without, and about which ideas we gravitated towards as people who desired change, as abstract as that desire for change can sometimes seem.
Through these conversations, we realized how our lives were each marked, albeit differently, by common points of tension. We were all programmatically invested in what our home campuses were fostering, perpetuating, inventing, and constraining, but we were not necessarily sketching bumper sticker designs on napkins that read “Honk if you’re GenAdmin.” We had not yet coined the term, although words like hybridity, becoming, optimism, pragmatism, responsibility, and even new words like multiplicinarity, came up in our discussions of our students, our ways of learning, our colleagues, our ways of being in the world, our programs, our plans for food and friendship at future conference meetings.
Energized by these interactions, we proposed a panel for the CCCCs in New York, where we planned to synthesize these conversations and share them with others, specifically to explore the tensions between our administrative identities and the emergent writing programs in which we currently worked or had played a part. Although the panel proposal wasn’t accepted, our enthusiasm for the project had already grown, and our commitment to the project—and to each other—demanded that we give voice to the ideas we were building together. As teachers with administrative identities, we wanted to theorize the various ways and contexts in which we present ourselves as mentors, program developers, teachers, and scholars. We wanted to work through how other people interpret and represent our identities largely in light of their own locations and commitments, and often with misunderstanding or resistance. Finally, we wanted to demonstrate that part of our role as administrative teachers is recognizing areas of resistance as productive sites for bridging communication gaps, to find ways to engage with those who resist or are silent/silenced, not just to console ourselves or convince them, but to arrive at a shared commitment to the intellectual work of composition. In other words, we wanted to articulate how such a re-presentation could open and close epistemic opportunities for the field at large.
Somewhere between a brief conversation in Park City and a planned panel in New York City, a space had emerged where we found a voice, both individual and collective, that spoke through hundreds of emails, Google chats, panel proposals, conference dinners, and a videoconference. We learned that collaboration is more difficult, more satisfying, and more epistemic than going it alone. We found that, in thinking together, we arrived at more nuanced understandings of our experiences because of the multiplicity of perspectives we had to accommodate. We realized, in fact, that we had sketched an early but viable portrait of a generation of writing program administrators. Back in 2008, as embedded as we were in the Presidential campaigns, we could not disguise our interest in and connection to a historical moment rich with volunteerism, activism, and dialogue. Such a groundswell, complete with generational analyses and attempts to frame small movements as movements of larger significance, still could not quite capture how we were thinking of our “generation” of writing program administrators. But we had been generated, we were generating, and we were sensing and thinking through shifts in the reflections, identities, and goals between us and some of our WPA predecessors.
We sought an umbrella for our shared terms and experiences, one that had the hope and promise of a new perspective on what it means to compose a writing program among students, teachers, administrators, publics, and families, without dividing our administrative selves off from other works that engaged us, letting our administrative responsibilities and relationships smother us, or dissociating ourselves from the WPAs who had trained us. To articulate who we were, to have a name and a place, was a necessary philosophical, practical, and social act, as we continued to discuss how our identities didn’t exist, or weren’t necessarily experienced, as stable and teleological. We chose GenAdmin, short for Generation Administration, since both generation and administration are value-heavy and convenient frames for imagining