The Writing Program Administrator's Resource

A Guide To Reflective Institutional Practice

Stuart C. Brown, Theresa Jarnagi Enos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135648848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The role of the writing program administrator is one of diverse activities and challenges, and preparation for the position has traditionally come through performing the job itself. As a result, uninitiated WPAs often find themselves struggling to manage the various requirements and demands of the position, and even experienced WPAs often encounter situations on which they need advice. The Writing Program Administrator's Resource has been developed to address the needs of all WPAs, regardless of background or experience. It provides practical, applicable tools to effectively address the differing and sometimes competing roles in which WPAs find themselves. Readers will find an invaluable collection of articles in this volume, addressing fundamental practices and issues encountered by WPAs in their workplace settings and focusing on the hows and whys of writing program administration. With formal preparation and training only now beginning to catch up to the very real needs of the WPA, this volume offers guidance and support from authoritative and experienced sources--educators who have established the definitions and standards of the position; who have run into obstacles and surmounted them; and who have not just survived but thrived in their roles as WPAs. Editors Stuart C. Brown and Theresa Enos contribute their own experience and bring together the voices of their colleagues to delineate the intellectual scope and practices of writing program administration as an emerging discipline. Established and esteemed leaders in the field offer insights, advice, and plans of action for the myriad scenarios encountered in the position, encouraging WPAs and helping them to realize that they often know more than they think they do. This resource is required reading for the new WPA, and an essential reference for all who serve in the WPA role. As a guidebook for WPAs, it is destined to become a fixture on the desk of every educator involved with or interested in administrating writing programs, writing centers, and writing-across-the-curriculum efforts.

I
Instituting Change

1
Turtles All the Way Down: Educating Academic Leaders

Louise Wetherbee Phelps
Syracuse University

Leadership education is a neglected goal of faculty development, even in the most enlightened of recent efforts to rethink the career and preparation of the future professoriate. For most academics, leadership is a tacit dimension of service, little noticed or valued as a situated responsibility of institutional life. Few graduate teachers think of leadership in that sense as a faculty competence to be cultivated in doctoral education. As for administration, it is stereotyped as the refuge of those less talented as scholars or past their prime. Narratives by faculty who have become administrators portray it as an accident that befalls an unsuspecting professor, drafted into reluctant duty and entirely naive about what it involves. Administration as intellectual leadership remains, for graduate students and young professors, almost unimaginable as a professional role they might aspire to as part of a faculty career. As a result, most faculty members are woefully unprepared for the complex challenges of program and departmental leadership that many will, sooner or later, take on.

This situation strikes me as very dangerous in the present circumstances of the academy. A tide of cultural and structural change accompanying the global transformation to an information society is rippling through American higher education just as it has other sectors of society. With it comes the breakdown of a century-old paradigm that gave stable meaning and social respect to academic work and faculty roles. No longer trusted to serve the publie good through the autonomous practice of its professional expertise, the professoriate is compelled to renegotiate its compact with society.

Even as higher education tries to reinvent itself for new purposes and realities, American universities are already educating the graduate students who will replace 40 percent of the faculty in the next decade or so. Either these graduates will become a reservoir of leaders whose ideas and energies significantly strengthen the ability of higher education to adapt creatively and thrive; or they will forfeit the opportunity to competitors, including a variety of external policy makers, top-down reformers, and alternate providers of professional credentials and learning options.¹ To become equal partners in reform rather than futile resisters or passive objects of it, faculty themselves must develop thoughtful programs to foster the development of leaders from their own ranks—programs designed to operate seamlessly throughout a faculty career from graduate school to senior leadership roles in higher education.

I would like to advance that work in this essay. Composition and rhetoric is in a unique position to contribute to this goal, since it has pioneered the concept of administration as scholarly and professional work, constituted and certified by its own specialized research, literature, and professional organization. Inevitably, success with this strategy generated the need to credential writing program administrators (WPAs) as professionals through doctoral education. Steps in that direction include the electronic circulation of course plans, recent conference sessions on educating WPAs, and the production of texts for graduate study. Writing program administration is too singular a professional role to provide a universal model for educating faculty leaders, especially at the graduate level. But in focusing here on developing administrative leaders in composition and rhetoric, I hope my analysis can at many points speak more broadly to the challenge that faces all disciplines to help faculty throughout their careers undertake leadership roles as academic citizens and administrators.

The story is told about William James, that after a lecture he was approached by a lady who insisted that the earth is not a round globe circling the sun, but a layer of earth resting on the back of a giant turtle. But, asked James, what does the turtle stand on? “The first turtle stands on the back of another turtle, of course,” she replied complacently. “Well, then, what does the second turtle stand on?” The old lady wasn’t fazed. “It’s no use, Mr. James—it’s turtles all the way down!”

When they hear the word leader, most people still tend to envision a single, powerful individual dominating activity and decision making from the top down. But, as research and postmodern organizational practice tell us, leadership is understood today as an interdependent function of a dynamic system.² Among other things, this means that you can cut through the layers of an academic organization and find leaders all the way down. Unlike the old lady’s simple universe, with its turtles stacked like pancakes, a cross section of a college or university reveals a fractal structure, with irregular patterns of leadership repeated at smaller and smaller scales of organization. Any time a group coalesces formally or informally around purposeful activity—a committee, task force, council, senate, research group, or union— leaders emerge because leadership is a necessary function of human enterprises. So leadership is an everyday, if largely invisible, part of belonging to a college faculty. In composition, it is more likely than in most disciplines that this responsibility will rise to a program or departmental level, that it may come early in a faculty career, and that it will require specialized disciplinary expertise in the intellectual work of administration. For that reason, graduate education in rhetoric and composition must incorporate specialized leadership education for prospective WPAs while also providing some level of preparation and opportunities for all students to play leadership roles as academic citizens.

Consider some other implications of the proposition that academic leadership is “turtles all the way down”:

• It applies at all stages of a faculty career. The opportunity or obligation to be a leader doesn’t wait for formal preparation or institutional investment of authority. Students in graduate school (if not before) are already citizens of the academy who may lead in many settings: within student groups and organizations, department and university committees, or a teaching community; in collaborative research projects, conference planning, community outreach, and national professional organizations; even in formal administrative positions (coordinating or supervising the work of others). These early responsibilities are not unique to rhetoric and composition, but they are unusually encouraged and enabled in many of its doctoral programs. Similarly, young compositionists, even when not appointed in positions of formal authority, often take leadership or have semiadministrative roles in writing programs. But the need for leadership education is not confined to graduate students or those entering major administrative positions as junior faculty (a distinctive feature of writing program administration): It recurs whenever faculty members make the transition to new leadership roles and need professional development to prepare and support them.

• It means WPAs themselves must teach leadership. Besides their role as graduate educators, WPAs are responsible for promoting the learning of all workers in the academic environment. If leadership does permeate the system, it is not only right but smart to identify and cultivate leaders among faculty peers, junior faculty, contingent faculty, and staff and to support them through professional development programs, mentoring, access to significant tasks and positions, and other means. Good leadership is, almost by definition, leadership development.

These considerations will lead me to propose an integrated practical model for developing leaders that addresses the full range of needs, settings, and interdependencies implied in a fractal theory of leadership.

Experiments in Leadership Development

I recently served again as administrator of my department (an independent writing program) during a transition from one leader to another. This interim position allowed me to experiment with an idea I had been advocating for our newly established PhD program in composition and cultural rhetoric (CCR): offering part-time fellowships in writing program administration, designed to combine opportunities to observe, participate in, study, and discuss administrative and institutional processes.³ I found some budgeted administrative duties I could assign to four graduate students to replace one or two sections of their teaching assistantships; paired them with staff mentors who normally supervised these tasks; and arranged access to administrative information, functions, and interactions for the “CCR Administrative Fellows.” Assignments were matched as closely as possible to students’ skills, learning goals, and career aspirations. These opportunistic arrangements, ad hoc as they were, provided immediate benefits to graduate students, while allowing coparticipants to develop the concept and demonstrate its viability and value in a pilot program.

Some unique circumstances enabled me to synergize this project with other modes and stages of leadership education. While helping to create a leadership development program for the university’s new and continuing department chairs, I had advocated expanding this initiative to include recruiting and educating prospective leaders of programs and departments. Here was a chance to model one approach: a fellowship or special appointment for a junior faculty member to practice and study administration in the local culture, mentored by senior leaders. An advanced assistant professor in our program, Eileen Schell, had been hired in part because of substantial experience as well as scholarship in writing program administration and was a candidate for major administrative roles in the near future. In anticipation of that prospect, I asked Eileen to take a one-year position as a part-time associate director where she could pioneer a practical effort to accomplish such advanced leadership development; her role would combine a major leadership assignment (heading a curriculum task force) with varied opportunities to observe, analyze, teach, supervise, and practice administrative work in our complex environment, working with me and other senior faculty mentors as well as experienced staff. We decided to co-teach a graduate course in writing program administration to coincide with the administrative fellowships. Finally, with leadership changing hands not only in the department but in the college and central administration, I proposed that the Writing Program make administration one of its yearly themes of inquiry. As director, I pledged to renew efforts to make administrative functions, decision making, and their institutional context as transparent as possible for our many constituent groups: graduate students from different degree programs and departments; professional writing instructors; the junior and senior professorial faculty; and staff administrators. These understandings were the fundamental condition for the various ways the program could encourage and enable all these groups to participate as contributors and leaders in governance and collaborative achievements.

This set of interlocking arrangements, combining reflective study, information sharing, participation, mentorship, observation, teaching, and reciprocal learning among students, faculty, staff, and administrators, was a contingent design I improvised instinctively, reflecting my systems orientation to administration and expressing principles of leadership development and learning that I had only partially formulated. As I researched this essay, I began to make those principles explicit and to find theoretical support for them. Although not a formal case study, my analysis relies on insights from several coparticipants in the experiment—Professor Eileen Schell and doctoral students Tracy Hamler Carrick and Tobi Jacobi, drawing on our conversations and interactions, their writings, and taped interviews.⁴ Despite a plan crafted from the materials of a unique situation and somewhat ragged in execution, our experiences together as learners and teachers converge here with theories of practical learning to suggest the richness of a multi-modal model of leadership education grounded in active participation and shared reflection among leaders and learners at all levels of the academy.

The Changing Landscape for Faculty Work

For over a decade higher education and its critics have engaged in a set of overlapping conversations that interrogate and reconstruct familiar understandings and attitudes toward faculty work. Each frames differently the descriptive, conceptual, and normative grounds for changing (or defending) the current paradigm, but together they are driving serious, consequential reform. In the unstable climate of pressures, conflicts, and conceptual innovation that now surrounds faculty work, professors feel their image, their autonomy, their very jobs to be at risk. These winds of change sculpt a dynamic, changing landscape in which students and faculty make choices about their work and take up professional roles, including writing program administration.

Here’s a quick sketch of some of these discourses and the activities they inform and interanimate.⁵

Faculty roles and rewards: an initiative to reform the conventions that define what faculty activities count as professional work—research, teaching, or service—and assign them relative worth. At issue is how faculty members organize and prioritize their time, how their work is motivated, perceived, and rewarded, and how well the system governing these choices reflects and responds to the changing missions and resources of higher education. Reformers have capitalized on the dissonance many professors feel between work demands, which are various and context-dependent, and what is ultimately valued in their performance. Ernest Boyer’s book Scholarship Reconsidered, by proposing new terms for differentiating and valuing faculty work (augmenting the scholarship of discovery with “scholarships” of teaching, application, and integration), broadened the discussion beyond revitalizing undergraduate teaching and stimulated enriched descriptions and analyses of the diversity of faculty work and the complexity of the new challenges it faces.⁶ Despite impressive progress in reconceptualizing faculty work at a policy level and in some arenas of practice, it has become clear, in light of the deeply conservative nature of the academy and competing discourses of reform, that the future professoriate is the key to long-term internal change, and graduate education a significant lever.

Graduate education: reforms in doctoral programs directed at preparing future professors more adequately and comprehensively for the full range of faculty roles and career paths in higher education. Closely paralleling the roles and rewards project, these efforts address the growing gap between graduate preparation for research careers and the actual experiences and demands on faculty in the heterogeneous workplaces of different types of institutions. They set the stage for a more fundamental, far-reaching reform that recently got underway to re-envision the PhD for the next century, enlisting all sectors of society to ensure it is responsive to their multiple, disparate needs for highly educated professionals.⁷

Professionalism: a discourse featuring competing versions of professionalism pertinent to forming faculty identities—call them the “cynical” or “realist” and the “utopian” interpretations. The first, assuming a perpetual hegemony of research over other faculty roles, focuses on “getting ahead” through a high degree of specialization, early and prolific publication, and an orientation to the discipline over the local campus and mission. This ethos of competitive individualism pervades most doctoral programs and advice to junior faculty. The utopian alternative (civic or collegial professionalism) harks back to an older tradition to advocate citizenship, shared governance, and service within a collegial community, emphasizing the institution, its mission, and its social situatedness in a particular location.⁸

Faculty labor: a many-stranded, contentious conversation about faculty jobs that expresses a newly materialist awareness of faculty work as paid labor and the college or university as a workplace, rather than a holding company for individual entrepreneurship. Critics have targeted faculty work and its autonomous individualism for their dissatisfactions with academe’s efficiency, productivity, performance, and faculty priorities. Their concerns generated calls for greater accountability, including outcomes assessment and posttenure review; mandates for increasing faculty (teaching) load; attempts to micromanage faculty time and work processes; and attacks on the tenure system. Meanwhile, however, faculty members, especially women, minority, and new faculty, complain about overwork and int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Instituting Change
• Part II: Instituting Practice
• Appendix A: Portland Resolution
• Appendix B: Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Administration
• Appendix C: WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition
• Author Index
• Subject Index