Black Perspectives In Writing Program Administration

Editors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building. This collection centers writing program administration (WPA) discourse as intersectional race work. In this historical moment in public discourse when race and racist logics are no longer sanitized in coded language or veiled political rhetoric, contributors provide examples of how WPA scholars can push back against the ways in which larger, cultural rhetorical projects inform our institutional practices, are coded into administrative agendas, and are reflected in programmatic objectives and interpersonal relations. Editors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building. This framework also positions WPAs of color to build relationships with allies and create contexts for students and faculty to imagine rhetorics that speak truth to oppressive and divisive ideologies within and beyond the academy, but especially within writing programs. Contributors share not just experiences of racist microaggressions, but also the successes of black WPAs and WPAs whose work represents a strong commitment to students of color. Together they work to foster stronger alliance building among white allies in the discipline, and, most importantly, to develop concrete, specific models for taking action to confront and resist racist microaggressions. As a whole, this collection works to shift the focus from race more broadly toward perspectives on blackness in writing program administration.

The field of writing program administration has long been a space rich in metaphor. From plate-twirling to fire-extinguishing, parents to dungeon masters, and much more, the work of a WPA extends to horizons unknown. Responding to the constraints of austerity, Toward More Sustainable Metaphors of Writing Program Administration offers new lenses for established WPAs and provides aspiring and early career WPAs with a sense of the range of responsibilities and opportunities in their academic and professional spaces. This volume presents twelve chapters that reclaim and revise established metaphors; offer new metaphors based on sustainable, relational, or emotional labor practices and phenomena; and reveal the improvisational, artisanal nature of WPA work. Chapters resonate across three sections. The first section focuses on organic relationships captured in phrases like “putting out fires” and "seeing forests for the trees” alongside unexpected comparisons to ground and light. The second describes institutional landscapes featuring generative juxtapositions such as the WPA as a labor activist or a mapper of emotional geography. And the third discusses performance crafts like improv comedy and artisanal making. Toward More Sustainable Metaphors of Writing Program Administration offers new and revised ways of thinking and acting for WPAs, who are constantly negotiating the paradoxical demands of their work and continually striving to act ethically in conflicted, and even fraught, situations. It will inspire practicing, aspiring, and former WPAs working in a time of transformation by highlighting more sustainable ways of enacting WPA identity. Contributors: Jacob Babb, John Belk, Katherine Daily O'Meara, Ryan J. Dippre, Douglas Hesse, Andrew Hollinger, Rona Kaufman, Cynthia D. Mwenja, Manny Piña, Scott Rogers, Robyn Tasaka, Alexis Teagarden, Christy I. Wenger, Lydia Wilkes

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.

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

The only book-length study of the ways that postsecondary desegregation litigation and policy affected writing instruction and assessment in US colleges, Desegregation State provides a history of federal enforcement of higher education desegregation and its impact on writing programs from 1970 to 1988. Focusing on the University System of Georgia and two of its public colleges in Savannah, one a historically segregated white college and the other a historically Black college, Annie S. Mendenhall shows how desegregation enforcement promoted and shaped writing programs by presenting literacy remediation and testing as critical to desegregation efforts in southern and border states. Formerly segregated state university systems crafted desegregation plans that gave them more control over policies for admissions, remediation, and retention. These plans created literacy requirements—admissions and graduation tests, remedial classes, and even writing centers and writing across the curriculum programs—that reshaped the landscape of college writing instruction and denied the demands of Black students, civil rights activists, and historically Black colleges and universities for major changes to university systems. This history details the profound influence of desegregation—and resistance to desegregation—on the ways that writing is taught and assessed in colleges today. Desegregation State provides WPAs and writing teachers with a disciplinary history for understanding racism in writing assessment and writing programs. Mendenhall brings emerging scholarship on the racialization of institutions into the field, showing why writing studies must pay more attention to how writing programs have institutionalized racist literacy ideologies through arguments about student placement, individualized writing instruction, and writing assessment.

Disruptive Stories uses an activist editing method to select and publish authors that have been marginalized in scholarly conversations and enrich the understanding of lived writing center experiences that have been underrepresented in writing center scholarship. These chapters explore how marginality affects writing centers, the people who work in them, and the scholarship generated from them by examining the consequences—both positive and negative—of marginalization through a mix of narratives and research. Contributors provide unique perspectives ranging across status, role, nationality, race, and ability. While US tenure-track writing center administrators (WCAs) do not make up the majority of those who hold WCA positions in writing centers, they are more likely to be the storytellers of the writing center grand narrative. They publish more, present more conference papers, edit more journals, and participate more in organizational leadership. This collection complicates that narrative by adding marginalized voices and experiences in three thematic categories: structural marginalization, globalization and marginalization, and embodied marginalization. Disruptive Stories spurs further conversations about ways to improve the review process in writing center scholarship so that it more accurately reflects the growing diversity of its administrators and practitioners.

Queerly Centered explores writing center administration and queer identity, showcasing LGBTQA labor undertaken but not previously acknowledged or documented in the field’s research. Drawing from interviews with twenty queer writing center directors, Travis Webster examines the lived experiences of queer people leading writing centers, the promise and occasional peril of this work, and the disciplinary implications of such work for writing center administration, research, and praxis. Focused on directors’ queer histories, administrative activisms, and on-the-job tensions, this study connects and departs from oft-referenced lenses, such as emotional and invisible labor, for understanding work in higher education. The first book-length project that exclusively bridges writing centers and LGBTQA studies, Queerly Centered is for researchers, administrators, educators, and practitioners of all orientations and backgrounds in writing center and writing program administration, rhetoric and composition, and higher education administration.