Administering Writing Programs In The Twenty First Century

This book is a comprehensive guide to administering writing programs at a moment when communication, and thus the teaching of writing, is always changing. A companion to Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century, which considers how writing instructors can successfully adapt to new challenges, this volume addresses the concerns of both novice and experienced writing program administrators. It includes guidance on building and assessing writing programs; on hiring, training, evaluating, and mentoring instructors; on eliminating cultural bias; on encouraging the well-being of administrators and instructors; on assignments and instructional tools; and on access, diversity, and inclusion. Aiming to help administrators develop thoughtful, effective approaches to using technology in writing programs, the book also provides information designed to support instructors in their teaching of rhetorical literacy strategies regardless of the environment or medium in which students compose and communicate.

Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century is a comprehensive introduction to writing instruction in an increasingly digital world. It provides both a theoretical background and detailed practical guidance to writing instructors faced with novel and ever-changing digital learning technologies, new approaches to access needs and usability design, increasing student diversity, and the multiliteracies of reading, alphabetic writing, and multimodal composition. A companion volume, Administering Writing Programs in the Twenty-First Century, considers the role of administrators in addressing these issues. Covering all aspects of teaching online, various composition genres, and the technologies available to teachers, Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century addresses composing processes and approaches; designing and scaffolding assignments; providing response, feedback, and evaluation; communicating effectively; and supporting students. These strategic and practical ideas are prefaced by a history of the relation between composition and rhetoric and a guide to diversity, inclusion, and access. The volume ends with a chapter on envisioning the future of composition.

A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators (2nd Edition) presents the major issues and questions in the field of writing program administration. The collection provides aspiring, new, and seasoned WPAs with the theoretical lenses, terminologies, historical contexts, and research they need to understand the nature, history, and complexities of their intellectual and administrative work.

Multimodal composition is becoming increasingly popular in university classrooms as faculty, students, and institutions come to recognize that old and new technologies have enabled, and even demanded, the use of more than one composing mode for communicating, solving problems, and keeping up with the latest discourse. Professionalizing Multimodal Composition embraces and enacts multimodal composition in various writing courses and programs by exploring institutional, programmatic, and individual faculty initiatives for capacity building and human resource development across institutions. Academic leaders, scholars, and faculty who have successfully designed and launched academic programs or faculty development initiatives discuss the theoretical and logistical questions considered in their design, the outcomes they achieved, and how others can emulate them. This exchange of knowledge, insight, experiences, and lessons learned among community members is critical for enabling or inspiring other programs, departments, and institutions to conceive, design, and launch academic programs or faculty development initiatives for their own faculty. The larger goal of professionalizing is to work with teaching faculty to increase their interactional expertise with multimodal composition, and this collection offers a set of models for how faculty can do that at their own institutions and in their own programs.

The essays in this book, stemming from a national conference of the same name, focus on the single subject required of nearly all college students--composition. Despite its pervasiveness and its significance, composition has an unstable status within the curriculum. Writing programs and writing faculty are besieged by academic, political, and financial concerns that have not been well understood or addressed. At many institutions, composition functions paradoxically as both the gateway to academic success and as the gatekeeper, reducing access to academic work and opportunity for those with limited facility in English. Although writing programs are expected to provide services that range from instruction in correct grammar to assisting--or resisting--political correctness, expanding programs and shrinking faculty get caught in the crossfire. The bottom line becomes the firing line as forces outside the classroom determine funding and seek to define what composition should do. In search of that definition, the contributors ask and answer a series of specific and salient questions: What implications--intellectual, political, and institutional--will forces outside the classroom have on the quality and delivery of composition in the twenty-first century? How will faculty and administrators identify and address these issues? What policies and practices ought we propose for the century to come? This book features sixteen position papers by distinguished scholars and researchers in composition and rhetoric; most of the papers are followed by invited responses by other notable compositionists. In all, twenty-five contributors approach composition from a wide variety of contemporary perspectives: rhetorical, historical, social, cultural, political, intellectual, economic, structural, administrative, and developmental. They propose solutions applicable to pedagogy, research, graduate training of composition teachers, academic administration, and public and social policy. In a very real sense, then, this is the only book to offer a map to the future of composition.

GenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the Twenty-First Century examines identity formation in a generation of rhetoric and composition professionals who have undergone explicit preparation in scholarly dimensions of writing program administration. The authors argue for “GenAdmin” both as an intellectual identity and as a contingent philosophy of writing program work. GenAdmin alternates between traditional chapters and accompanying “Interludes,” each of which offers extended illuminations of the single conflict or theoretical question integral to the preceding chapter.

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.

Making Administrative Work Visible brings together voices from graduate students, associated faculty, administrative staff, and tenured and tenure-track faculty at community colleges, regional state universities, liberal arts colleges, private colleges, and research-intensive institutions across the country to speak to the challenges, both named and unnamed, faced by those who do writing program administration work. These authors call explicit attention to this work and examine WPAs’ lived labor experiences and research methodologies to truly understand the scope of lived WPA labor. The collection has three parts, each of which focuses on the most confounding challenges facing WPAs as well as the most compelling sites of their contributions to administration, labor in higher education, and the discipline’s collective obligation to forwarding the goals of social justice and advocacy: Advocating through Representations of WPA Labor, Advocating by Accounting for Time and Labor, and Advocating in and through Complex Institutional Contexts. The chapters use data to share and track the work functions, job titles, grand narratives, program assessments, tenure and promotion, email practices, and more undertaken by WPAs in their administrative capacities. Chapters also surface narratives for future data and studies to be done by other scholars. By taking up and answering questions about the range of WPA work—and the invisibility of much of that work—Making Administrative Work Visible creates avenues toward accounting for and acknowledging the complex activity systems in which WPAs lead the work of the university and advocate for data-driven strategies needed to sustain this foundational area of higher education. Contributors: Kamila Albert, Brooke Anderson, Sheila Carter-Tod, Amy Cicchino, Ana Cortés Lagos, Kristi Murray Costello, Jennifer Cunningham, Ryan Dippre, Kimberly Emmons, Genevieve García de Müeller, Jill Gladstein, Caleb González, Michael Healy, Lyra Hilliard, Kristine Johnson, Seth Kahn, Rita Malenczyk, Troy Mikanovich, Lilian Mina, Angela Mitchell, Greer Murphy, Kate Navickas, Michael Neal, Patti Poblete, Jan Rieman, Heather Robinson, Katelyn Stark, Mary Stewart, Natalie Stillman-Webb, Lizbett Tinoco, Lisa Tremain, Martha Wilson Schaffer