Jessica Beckett

Writing Program Administrators continually act within a situation where their discipline is being

mobilized by their institutional work. This condition of tension—the values, allegiances, and

material structures of the institution in relationship with the values, allegiances, and material

structures of the discipline—is mediated daily by the work that WPAs accomplish. In this

dissertation, I explore the institutional and disciplinary inputs into the

writing program. After outlining the way these inputs interact within the writing program and

create a condition of tension, I locate the specific strategies of Requesting, Enriching, Learning,

Showcasing, Collaborating, and Aligning as value-based forms of action that WPAs take to

navigate this tension in positive ways. This dissertation accomplishes two things: it makes the

duality of WPA work explicit, and it offers a set of existing strategies that WPAs apply in

practical situations.

Team-based approaches to GTA preparation build vital connections between graduate students and faculty and celebrate the expertise of composition instructors. However, the age of austerity means that higher education institutions frequently turn to corporate business practices and management theories to make efficient use of institutional resources. There are economical implications when instructor-ranked faculty take on the work of mentoring GTAs, as they require course releases or compensation for their work. In this multi-part session, the presenters will describe a series of changes to their university's GTA advising program and will facilitate a discussion to theorize and troubleshoot the implications of each model in terms of equitable labor practices, department budgets, educational quality, and professional identity.

What strategies do you use to mediate the tension of your institutional constraints with the theories of our discipline? How well does your program fit into the values of your institution? This session presents research-based engagement strategies and offers activities for theorizing your own strategies for responding to institutional contexts.

Rhetoric possesses transformational energy through a complex negotiation of situation, purpose, audience, and text. Since Mina Shaughnessy showed the damages of composition’s preoccupation with error, Jenny Rice, Patrick Hartwell, David Russell and others have pointed out that as a field we have been wary of placing the wrong amount of focus on what compositionists have deemed lower order concerns (McAndrew and Reigstad). Drawing on stylistics, however, we can see that sentence structure, organizational patterns, and grammatical decisions are powerful tools for creating effect. The field of rhetoric is rich with studies that focus on the higher order of rhetoric. We need to continue building this rigor with an attention to mechanics, as well. While I argue that crafting rhetoric is a complicated set of opposing ideas about modernism, economics, and citizenship, it also offers a salient reminder of our field’s work with techne and suggests an increased attention to the crafting of text.

First Year Writing courses are part of complex institutional constellations of accreditation standards, general education curricula, and university values. A writing program administrator’s work is an enactment of a relationship between this institutional system and an academic discipline—they are what Marc Bousquet terms “bureaucratic intellectuals.” This work has been characterized by WPA scholars as that of establishing disciplinary integrity within such constellations, yet each context offers a divergent set of material realities that affect this process. This presentation argues for a systems approach to exploring the agency of a WPA within higher education and disciplinary systems. I surveyed and interviewed multiple WPAs regarding their work with their disciplines and universities. By contextualising their day to day actions,  I demonstrate how WPAs enact their own disciplinary and managerial agency within institutional boundaries. Placing the work of a WPA as a system unit, I cast maintaining integrity as a highly contextualized act.

"The practical implementation of many of these more authentic approaches to situating writing presents a clash between the isolation of the composition classroom and the genres that are used in situations external to the classroom.  If students are expected to understand the role of the rhetorical situations of their writing, we can’t ignore the social and economic pressures of the writing classroom as the rhetorical situation they are writing within." 

"There is a freefall that occurs with the implementation of our careful decisions; it is an act of faith/desperation/determination that an approximation of our intention will occur. The movement of intention and choice becomes important as we experiment and play among possibilities and our own acts of generation, but so too is the pleasure that we take in playing with language and the ways we negotiate and enact reality and self and relationship."

"Though writing studies as its own field celebrates a deep and diverse scholarship, first-year writing programs are still part of university-wide first-year programs, where writing courses function as introductory or skill-based core requirements. As programs are designed, assessed, branded, or placed into contact with other departments and disciplines these processes of negotiation are crucial to successful institutional relationships and a healthy writing program."

"By grafting a new set of ideals onto an old system, the teachers are balancing the philosophies of the curriculum with their own assumptions about their role as educators—assumptions engendered by the existing structure of institutionalized education—in order to achieve their purpose in the curriculum and in the larger institution."