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Articles Conference Reviews |
2008C6HochmanShaping WPA Work I: Diachronic and Sychronic Perceptions of Writing Program Administration Rita Malencyzk: Changing WPA Realities: What Do Rank and Tenure Do? For Whom? Professor Malencyzk began by introducing herself as doing both WPA and WAC work and explaining her paper is speculative. She recommended Eodice and Geller’s WPA: Writing Program Administrator because it helps distinguish between knowledge transfer and authority. Malencyzk then told a story of being on a Youth Hockey Organization board for her children, and then she went onto to situate herself in that community while drawing parallels between her Hockey work and her WPA work. She said that she understands the familiarity of being a tenured full professor at her school, and she emphasized her sense of community as giving her authority. She has been given charges recently to start a new Writing Center (“We don’t have it yet but we will”) but she also thinks about what it would mean to leave her school in terms of status and familiarity. Malencyzk noted the contexts of different schools and what the status of being a tenured, full professor means at different schools, and she also emphasized the learning curve in some of learning contexts particular to her situation. She mentioned her post on WPA-L a couple of months ago about this issue and describes the conversations and responses it engendered. She went deeper into “the experience of a place” and mentioned Sue McLeod and Eli Goldblatt’s recent books about building learning communities through program building by WPA’s with a “particular sense of place.” Kelly Ritter: The Changing Realities of Writing Program Administration: The More I Change, The More You Stay the Same On point of full disclosure, I’m a member of the faculty discussed in this presentation. Professor Ritter began by noting that perceptions of what you do as a WPA make WPA work very public. She discussed an incident about scheduling where she was unable to accommodate a scheduling request from a literature teacher, and then she was told by the teacher that she didn’t “understand” the request because Ritter has release time and does not teaching a “full load.” Ritter asserted that the faculty member’s reaction was due to a misunderstanding of her WPA role in a 4/4 teaching institution, and she indicated that this was also due to the faculty member being perceived as “difficult.” Ritter said that sometimes she was perceived as the chair’s assistant or a secretary. She claimed that WPAs have no counterparts in other departments at her school. Ritter noted a department member’s request that Ritter stick to the paperwork, and Ritter also thought her title as “coordinator” did not help her program leadership. She said she was taking hits for the writing program but not getting respect for her ideas. However, Ritter said she wanted to do more than tell stories to understand the divisions between the WPA and faculty. She found ways to gain recognition based on the fact that our work “is rarely static.” Ritter asserts that the WPA roles have changed over years and may create changes, but faculty perceptions of the WPA may remain static. Doug Downs: What We Need You to Do: How Writing Program Sponsors’ Perceptions of Writing Instruction Authorize WPA Workspaces Downs began by noting he is the chair of the Writing Committee Coordinating the Writing program in his department, and he is also the Writing Program Coordinator. He is about to be an ex-WPA and moving to a program that wants him to gain tenure before doing administrative work in the department. After offering this context, Downs wondered what happens when you only have the managerial aspects of the WPA tasks and not the intellectual aspects? Downs cited Schwalm who uses the question, “Is this a task or a position?” Downs used a graphic to delineate his job description listing both managerial and intellectual tasks. He noted that he works with four compositionists who are given release time that is “just enough to manage but not enough to think.” Downs argues that people who sponsor his writing program (which according to Downs isn’t a program but a couple of courses students are required to take) believe that writing is separable from content, and that this attitude reduces writing to simply being about grammar and syntax. He said that this makes writing a basic skill and that the assumption is that “there is really nothing to know” beyond the forms, grammars and syntaxes of language. Finally, Downs asked “If change demands reconceptions, where does that come from?” Shirley Rose and Jonika Harlton: The WPA’s Progress Twenty Years Later Just when I was thinking that this session was about personal situations somehow relating to larger issues, Rose and Harlton offered some pretty interesting research. Rose discussed results from a survey done a year ago and acknowledged that many in the audience probably participated in. She cited Peterson’s survey of WPA’s twenty years ago and explained that she used the WPA list and achieved very good response results. Her presentation went directly into a slide show accompanied with country music. First, she mentioned that the gender balance has shifted over the 20 years from the inverse of the present 35% men and 65% women. She found that more WPAs are assistant professors and more WPAs are getting Ph.D.s in Rhetoric and Composition. In the earlier study, 80 % identified their research in English, and the recent study noted that 53% of the WPAs now have done their Ph.D.s in Rhetoric and Composition. In l987, 76% of WPAs were tenured, and now, only 48% are tenured. In the early study, 44% of the WPAs were tenured before doing WPA work, but Rose also recognized that those who didn’t get tenure are not part of the study. There are now more untenured WPAs. In l987, 20% of those surveyed didn’t think they would gain tenure and twenty years later, 2% surveyed didn’t think they would get tenure. Charlton finished the presentation on what it means to be a WPA without title but with WPA responsibilities. She sees her work as intellectualizing WPA work even when she isn’t doing the WPA work and identified a significant population of WPAs who are now part of this “non-administrative” WPA group. Duane Roen was listed as a respondent, but the last presentation went long and his remarks were curtailed. He graciously gave way to audience questions. This was a personal loss since I believe that Professor Roen is often wise about the ways that administration and teaching intersect and might have connected even more of the session’s ideas had time permitted. |