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.
This reference guide provides a comprehensive review of the literature on all the issues, responsibilities, and opportunities that writing program administrators need to understand, manage, and enact, including budgets, personnel, curriculum, assessment, teacher training and supervision, and more. Writing Program Administration also provides the first comprehensive history of writing program administration in U.S. higher education. Writing Program Administration includes a helpful glossary of terms and an annotated bibliography for further reading.
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.
While local conditions remain at the forefront of writing program administration, transnational activities are slowly and thoroughly shifting the questions we ask about writing curricula, the space and place in which writing happens, and the cultural and linguistic issues at the heart of the relationships forged in literacy work. Transnational Writing Program Administration challenges taken-for-granted assumptions regarding program identity, curriculum and pedagogical effectiveness, logistics and quality assurance, faculty and student demographics, innovative partnerships and research, and the infrastructure needed to support writing instruction in higher education. Well-known scholars and new voices in the field extend the theoretical underpinnings of writing program administration to consider programs, activities, and institutions involving students and faculty from two or more countries working together and highlight the situated practices of such efforts. The collection brings translingual graduate students at the forefront of writing studies together with established administrators, teachers, and researchers and intends to enrich the efforts of WPAs by examining the practices and theories that impact our ability to conceive of writing program administration as transnational. This collection will enable writing program administrators to take the emerging locations of writing instruction seriously, to address the role of language difference in writing, and to engage critically with the key notions and approaches to writing program administration that reveal its transnationality.
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
Leading with the provocative observation that writing programs administration lacks “an established set of texts that provides a baseline of shared knowledge... in which to root our ongoing conversations and with which to welcome newcomers,” Landmark Essays on Writing Program Administration focuses on WPA identity to propose one such grouping of texts. This Landmark volume is the cornerstone resource for new Writing Program Administrators and graduate students seeking an ever-important overview of the literature on Writing Program Administration. Drawing broadly across scholarship in writing programs and writing centers, Ritter and Ianetta work to historicize, theorize, and problematize the ever-shifting answers offered to the question: Who—or what—is a WPA?
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.
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
