GenAdmin. Colin Charlton
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we hope to elide a rhetoric-administration binary among all program participants that causes them to position the classroom, the WPA, the students, the teachers, and the curriculum in static positions that shape not only their work, but also their identities. Where this binary operates, it usually implies that, by virtue of our filling a role, we must stand in for a subset of ideologies that others assume the role carries with it. We also see this binary at work whenever professional rhetoric and composition identities are formulated at the exclusion of other personas, rather than understood as preparation for “adopting myriad and shifting professional personas” that our roles may need us to take up (Anderson and Romano 3).
Situating GenAdmin Historically
Reading through the past fifteen years of literature in WPA scholarship, we see assertions of writing program administration as a legitimate discipline in the twentieth century and the recognition in the twenty-first century of writing program administration as a protean and diverse discipline.3 We also see a good deal of attention paid to the WPA and an emphasis on sharing experiential narratives. Such writings often consider how issues of power, authority and responsibility intersect and diverge, often related to the existence of untenured WPAs and a lack of disciplinary recognition and respect from administrators and colleagues within and beyond our “home” departments. The identities of WPAs have evolved to include an understanding of the multiple roles and personas a WPA might adopt—and adapt differently in different situations—to succeed on the job. As a discipline and an endeavor, writing program administration is marked regularly as a space of tension—between crisis and change, discord and direction, promise and peril—because of the political, ethical, and programmatic challenges of both being an endeavor attached to a simultaneously poorly respected discipline and one that involves stakeholders with varying degrees of commitment to this discipline and its theories, practices, and interests. With the WPA often at the center of these tensions, the notion of the WPA as a change agent, established by Susan McLeod in 1995, has coalesced into a professional totem, though what that entails is varied and complex. These evolutions position writing program administration as a particularly rich site for institutional change and the WPA as a catalyst of change. For the five of us, one circumstance of our inherited WPA identity, and one impetus for ongoing change, has been the underlying conviction that our work is creative, intellectual, and has activist potential within and beyond our programs. In committee meetings we find ourselves regularly trying to creatively reform beliefs and practices about writing and writing instruction that have currency on our campuses and in our departments. We rhetorically frame data so that different stakeholders will support our program developments because of their extra-programmatic concerns and values. We invent and experiment with new feedback strategies that bridge our understanding of best practices with local student needs, values, and anxieties. When we create public events around the work our students and teachers do, we try to shift the culture of degree requirement into a culture of intellectual accomplishment. Even upholding program policies and negotiating student-instructor disagreements demands creative and intellectual efforts that may in fact lead stakeholders to new understandings. And these programmatic acts keep aggregating to create new, hopeful representations for employers, parents, public organizations, and more about what exactly it is that we do in writing programs. It is the conviction behind these examples that caused us to seek out jobs with different iterations of programmatic responsibility right away, and we see this coalescence of conviction and artistic action as an interesting historical moment to explore.
In Resituating Writing: Constructing and Administering Writing Programs, editors Joseph Janangelo and Kristine Hansen collect arguments that claim, from multiple angles, that the administrative work of WPAs is an expression of disciplinarity. GenAdmin follows this argument in new directions, largely because we represent a generation of administrators who became administrators in this climate of professionalization, who chose writing program administration as a career pre-tenure, or who became interested in writing program administration as an intellectual pursuit. In other words, our WPA disciplinary identification is strong, though our discipline still contends with those who see administration as purely managerial and entrepreneurial. Texts such as Stuart C. Brown and Theresa Enos’s The Writing Program Administrator’s Resource and Irene Ward and William J. Carpenter’s The Allyn and Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators mark the disciplinary terrain Janangelo and Hansen’s collection explores, establishing guideposts that offer handy resources for practicing WPAs, particularly new WPAs seeking knowledge from authorities in the field to help them solve problems and gain background knowledge in the diverse disciplinary terrain. Additionally, Brown and Enos’s collection extends the conversation of WPA disciplinarity by emphasizing the importance of WPAs adopting a reflective stance towards writing program administration, something the five of us have thoroughly embraced as an important methodology for making sense of our WPA experiences (as teachers, scholars, activists, and researchers). Each of these texts argues, in different ways, that writing program administration is its own discipline, one marked by thoughtful planning, problem solving, communication, and reflection.
Shirley K Rose and Irwin Weiser’s The Writing Program Administrator as Theorist extends the recognition of writing program administration as scholarly to “develop our professional understanding of the role of theory in writing program administration” (1). “Raised” as we were studying rhetorical and literary theory, this discussion of how WPAs develop and use theory and theorizing is an inherent part of our educational history and positioning, for it confirms our understanding that writing program administration is not just something that we do; rather, it is something we think about, write about, and live. Discord and Direction: The Postmodern Writing Program Administrator, edited by Carolyn Handa and Sharon James McGee, focuses on postmodern theory and how it impacts writing program administration, particularly given the claim that composition studies “sides itself more with modernism” while postmodernism “aptly characterizes the world in which WPAs must function every day” (2). Their collection considers how postmodern actions, like challenging hierarchies or resisting master narratives (Handa and McGee 2), play out in the context of writing program administration to determine how WPAs and their programs can move from discord to direction. McGee and Handa’s position is a thread that informs our entire collection, for in arguing that WPA work, and GenAdmin in particular, is a becoming, we negotiate the theoretical tensions between what we want for our programs and the environment in which our programs exist.
Current WPA research adds to this rich body of work that has established writing program administration as a theory-based discipline in its own right by exploring the ways that WPAs enact their identities, problematize their work and role as administrators, and chart new paths toward pragmatic, ethical program leadership. In The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers, Linda Adler-Kassner identifies the need for WPAs to link ideas with strategies to reframe the predominantly negative stories about writing and writing instruction that circulate publicly, drawing largely on principles and practices related to grassroots organizing. Moreover, Adler-Kassner cites tikkun olam, a Jewish practice of “healing and restoring the world,” and prophetic pragmatism as motives and means that guide her activism as a WPA (169). Like Adler-Kassner, studying identities and ethics motivates and grounds our own work, although we focus more closely on academic WPA communities because we also see a need for activism and reform within these contexts. We value Adler-Kassner’s call to shift frames, a move we also make, though our focus is more often on changing the stories WPAs tell about themselves.
A reading of the essays in Theresa Enos and Shane Borrowman’s The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration causes us to reconsider the belief that writing program administration is a discipline built on solid ground. This collection offers survey data about WPAs and their living/working conditions and situates WPAs as caught between tensions related to a disrespect of our disciplinarity and jobs that entail large responsibilities but little authority, largely because of the number of untenured WPAs. An important argument Skeffington, Borrowman, and Enos make is that writing program administrators need to extend their understanding of the legitimacy of writing program administration beyond their sphere or work: “we have convinced ourselves that writing program administration is legitimate, important, and theoretical work. We now need to convince faculty members in our departments, colleges, and across campus” (“Living” 19). The tensions that WPAs negotiate, they argue, are often the source of much peril,