Heather Fester Speweik Through my professional experiences and scholarly orientation, I have come to see all aspects of writing program administration as irrevocably intertwined, especially with practices of teaching. I have witnessed first-hand some of the ways this type of work can be multidimensional, organic to the institution, and communally-driven. Also, as I have come to realize through teaching, both classroom and program management in writing are dependent on metadiscourse that describes what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we expect others to benefit as a result. This process of thinking and communicating with diverse audiences makes the writing program administrator someone focused on facilitating success in a variety of contexts.
Multidimensional Focus. As I mention above, the cognitive aspects of work for the Writing Program Administrator are complex and must successfully negotiate the juncture where theory sometimes breaks down in practice. While this individual must him/herself be focused on exciting new research about teaching and learning, she/he is also necessarily focused on short-term fixes and long-term consequences. What I’ve come to realize in comparing two dramatically different writing programs in which I have taught and assisted administratively is that theory often looks much different as it is applied across multiple sections and with a diverse body of teachers and students than it does as it is issued from the leading academic presses and journals. I have seen how very structured assessment processes and standardized curricula at BGSU have bred resistance amongst beginning teachers in the program, and at SVSU I have seen how the absence of such structure and sequencing can thwart productive conversation and forward movement in some ways. I believe I began to experience this multidimensionality in the classroom as a teacher. I was one of the instructors who initially fought the structure of the system at BGSU because I had been so excited about trying a little of anything and everything to engage students through my teaching. What I later realized was that from an administrative standpoint, a highly-structured program allowed 60+ instructors to all teach from sample materials designed around institutional expectations, demonstrated student needs, and process pedagogy. This program also worked because it enabled common conversations about teaching practices, allowed for deviation from the standardized curricula with experience and success, and facilitated a nationally-recognized series of assessment instruments built into a portfolio-system that work quite well across the many sections of writing taught each semester at BGSU. Seeing this process from both sides helped me appreciate the role that metadiscourse and effective communication about theory through teacher preparation and training can play in structuring an effective program. Organic to the Institution. While I could speak to my own philosophies of composition instruction and specific theories I hold about the sequencing of classes and literacy skills, I also realize that to some extent these principles must always be approached through the existing framework at a university. I ran headlong into a few brick walls early on at SVSU as I attended required “norming” sessions for instructors of writing. The conversations, focused around student writing detached from the original assignment and all context in the class where it was produced, were often incoherent and forced. The sessions also were seen as perfunctory instead of as opportunities for exchange amongst members of a community. I am proud to say that I can see a few key changes as a direct result of my involvement and leadership as a faculty member teaching in the program that I believe will contribute to more consistency and better training sessions in the future. Also related to institutional context, in my teaching over the past year, I have seen the ways that a specific student population and the discourse communities they belong to before and after they enter higher education can structure the learning environment. Some of these “contact zones” were invisible to me initially. However, by asking the students to pull their own experiences into the classroom, I was able to understand how regional identifications and histories surface repeatedly and must be factored into lesson plans. For instance, SVSU is transitioning from a commuter college to a residential university, and the students, though they often fall in the traditional college student age range, identify much more with the values of the nontraditional student. They are impatient with theoretical principles that do not have ready application, and life intervenes in compelling ways for these students more often than in my past experiences. Through conversations with the other first- and second-year faculty in the New Faculty Learning Community I co-founded at SVSU, I was able to understand that these concerns about invisible “contact zones” are foremost on faculty minds and surface in discussion topics as diverse as curriculum proposals to classroom management and teacher evaluation. For that reason, I am hesitant to endorse one model as exhibiting “best practices,” because a program is inherently situated in its region, institutional context, and history. Instead, I see it as my job to do a little “program archaeology” before rushing to make changes. This process—which involves interviewing founding and influential administrators and faculty about programmatic quirks—allows me to situate appeals for theoretically sound practices in the plain clothes of institutional rhetoric. Communally-Driven. One of the key concerns of my own research has been exploring the ways that rhetoric and composition as a discipline has struggled to professionalize itself because of its orientation as a fundamentally “engaged” discipline. By calling rhet/comp “engaged,” I mean to suggest that it has been responsive to existing needs of the broader community and the university community as well and has responded theoretically to those needs. The scholarship in the field has been shaped in interesting ways as a result of this orientation, often placing our work on the margins of basic research recognized and prized by academia. However, I believe much of the culture of academic professionalism is changing along the lines modeled by the discipline. These changes are the topic of my dissertation, entitled Rhetoric and the Scholarship of Engagement: Pragmatic, Professional, and Ethical Convergences. Similarly, Ernest Boyer addressed the trend of increasing student dissatisfaction during his tenure as Carnegie Foundation president, and he concluded that reconsidering the way faculty scholarship is evaluated will better promote the scholarship of teaching, application, and integration, instead of solely privileging the more traditional scholarship of discovery. Using Boyer’s “Scholarship of Engagement” as a starting point, I have since explored intersections between the view of scholarship held by professionals in rhetoric and composition and the broader discussion of “the scholarship of engagement.” In my dissertation, I continue this exploration; and I place engagement and the revival of rhetoric within the educational reform tradition, examining both movements’ shared concern with the questions of ethics in the curriculum, shifting notions of scholarship concomitant with the rise of professionalism in the academy, and the shared pragmatic focus of both rhetoric and engagement. The changing practices of professionals in the field have been shaped by community in more fundamental ways as well. Thomas Miller has argued persuasively in his 1997 book The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces that rhetoric and composition is a field situated “in the domain where the learned culture made contact with the popular experience” (26). Furthermore: [T]he teaching of English, particularly in broad-based institutions and in lower division courses, has been an area where the conventions of academic discourse and the learned culture still come into contact with those who have not been taught to respect them…. The dominant culture is itself transformed by such contacts through the dialectic process of “transculturation.” (26-29) I think it is vital as a potential writing program administrator that I learn to cultivate a deep respect for the “transculturation” that takes place in the university setting, looking to ways that teaching practices meet or fail to meet the needs of a student population. For this reason, much of the work of the WPA should reach into the high schools to facilitate better student transfer and also beyond the university to assess breakdowns in the transfer of skills. Teaching and administering transculturatively covers everything from reading traditional academic discourse (in the Barholomae and Petrosky sense) to reading visual and digital technologies as they reshape our composing processes (in the Selfe and Hawisher sense). Ultimately, all of these processes must work together in a sequence to facilitate the success of the newest instructor in the program and the most experienced instructor simultaneously. I would be very excited to discuss this philosophy further or to answer any questions you may have. |