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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780874219623 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
David S. Martins is associate professor and writing program administrator at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Read an Excerpt
Transnational Writing Program Administration
By David S. Martins
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2015 University Press of ColoradoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-962-3
CHAPTER 1
Deconstructing "Writing Program Administration" in an International Context
CHRIS M. ANSON AND CHRISTIANE DONAHUE
The scene is familiar: you're moving across a rural landscape in a train, car, bus, or even on a bicycle. If this landscape is arable, eventually you'll pass by something you immediately recognize as farmland. The crops will be specific to the region, of course: corn, cotton, soybeans, pineapple, tobacco, poppies. But if someone were to ask you what goes on in those fields, what activity the fields represent, without hesitation you'd say farming. Even when we travel to the most remote and culturally distinctive regions of the world, "farming" activates familiar schemas for us.
In some ways, the concept of the "writing program," with its roots in the history of US higher education and the development of the almost ubiquitous first-year composition (FYC) requirement, is generic enough in most educators' minds to make a rough but workable analogy to the concept of farmland. The activities that take place in most writing programs — curricular oversight, teacher development, the placement of students into courses, and the attempt to make several or many different classes cohesive across a range of teachers — exist at the same level of generality as tilling soil, putting down seed, and harvesting what grows.
When we think about writing programs and their administration, it's tempting to construct them by activating familiar schemas that we map onto other educational contexts. Acknowledging that students may be fulfilling a variety of educational requirements structured in different ways, in various kinds of degree programs with different missions, and in other languages, we nevertheless imagine some kind of organizational center whose goals and activities share an affinity with the ones we know. At the helm is a director, someone with specialized knowledge and, usually, an advanced degree in rhetoric and composition. The principle activity is teaching, which is provided by a group of academic staff, sometimes tenure-line faculty, sometimes graduate students, but usually — especially at larger institutions — part-time or full-time instructors on contingent appointments. However, these assumptions often ignore major differences in what constitutes a "program," and how that program functions within its broader activity system — with various complex political, ideological, and social (f)actors at work. Consider, for example, the difference between a family-run soybean farm and a corporate-style wheat farm. These farms' economies of scale will be strikingly different. The larger farm will be in a more productive, competitive bargaining position than the smaller and may be able to withstand the ebbs and flows of the economy more effectively. Although there will be a hierarchy that governs both farms, the larger one will adhere to a carefully designed structure with specified roles and reporting processes, while the family farm will operate on the basis of tradition and unwritten rules of activity and productivity. The "farmers" in the corporate operation may include managers who have MBAs or advanced degrees in agricultural economics, while the titular head of the family farm may only be a high school graduate. When we compare the large, business-run US farm with one, say, in China, significant differences emerge from these countries' governance systems and overarching political and economic ideologies. Every operation within the farm itself — its roles, interpersonal relations, activities, finances, and measures of accountability — must be understood in light of these systems.
Over the past twenty years, the common refrain in US composition literature that references writing instruction and writing programs beyond US borders has been one of lack or even absence: "There is no ..." Even as recently as 2007, Susan McLeod stated that "there was until very recently no comparable [FYC] course in universities based on the European model" (McLeod 2007, 23), with the exception of some in the Netherlands — a claim that simply does not bear out (see, for example, Donahue 2008). That misperception, we propose, has grown out of our tendency to look for what we know and, not seeing it, proclaim that it doesn't exist, such as arriving in a country where farming takes place out of sight in huge underground greenhouses when we expect it to be above ground. Sometimes the farm doesn't look like a farm. The "there is no ..." belief persists for three additional reasons. It has grown out of our tendency, first, to equate any "writing program" with "first-year US-style composition curriculum," and, second, to restrict our knowledge to what we can read in English. Third, and perhaps more insidiously, the narrative serves us better by falsely reassuring us of our unique status in the world of writing instruction. And our overseas colleagues tend to oblige — because the programs can appear so different, the narrative is easier to enter. Only when pressed about classroom activities or curricular goals do alternate narratives emerge, usually ones that more closely resemble writing across the curriculum (WAC) or writing in the disciplines (WID).
And yet, both currently and historically, even within our US scholarship, there is evidence of a broader and less limiting understanding. It is not difficult to find references in book chapters to the roots of writing program administration (WPA) work in nineteenth-century developments fostered by Jardine or Bain in Scotland (Gaillet 2004). Current and forthcoming books (e.g., Thaiss et al. 2012) offer strong descriptions of full and partial programs. In the space of twenty minutes of Internet searching of websites and homepages, we can create tables of comparative writing program features in multi-country university networks (see appendix 1.1).
In this chapter, we will first briefly trace the place, role, history, and importance of WPA work in the United States, focusing on the contested nature of WPA and what constitutes a "writing program," because this underscores the heterogeneity of meanings and usually unconscious assumptions about what is meant by "program" and "administration" across the years and across types of US institutions. We will then explore how writing programs beyond the United States are shaped by and into unique institutional, disciplinary, and pedagogical contexts, demonstrating the importance of understanding the teaching of writing as situated within complex histories and cultures. To illustrate these principles, we will briefly describe some contextually evolving features of writing programs in three countries: a preparatory writing program at Dar Al-Hekma College in Saudi Arabia; a Center for University Methodology (Le Centre de Méthodologie Universitaire) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles; and a writing research center at The Université de Poitiers, one of France's oldest universities. These cases highlight the degree to which twenty-first century WPAs need a stronger sense of other approaches to higher education plans and infrastructures around the world. These examples will lead into a final section suggesting that, as dialogue with international writing studies and pedagogies continues to expand and invite greater cross-national collaboration, it is increasingly important that we map our frames, our language, and our assumptions onto writing work outside the US with caution, and with an almost anthropological sensitivity to context and the cultural and national sources of praxis. We will argue that seeing what has been persistently missed encourages us to revisit our entrenched beliefs about the "automatic" value of our courses, our field, and our research. This can help to widen possibilities not only for US-style WPA roles, but also for writing courses and pedagogies, enriching our development of new approaches and sharpening our sense of the local nature of existing WPA work.
The "WPA" as a US Construction: History and Current Contours
Most generalized histories of composition instruction in US colleges and universities portray its development along a trajectory of increasing specialization. As the story goes, the ubiquitous US composition program has its roots in the slow democratization of higher education that took place in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Most historians of rhetoric and composition point directly to Harvard as having created the progenitor "program," particularly after the establishment of the Boylston Professorship in Rhetoric and Oratory and the widening of Harvard's admission door to students who appeared to lack the communicative refinements of their predecessors (Reynolds, Bizzell, and Herzberg 2004). The precedent Harvard set — programs that sought to purge linguistic infelicities from the writing of young men — spread rapidly, both to newly established institutions and to older ones that, like Harvard, were starting to admit less prepared students and creating new areas of study that did more than train the next generation of lawyers, politicians, and clergymen (McDonald 1999). The eventual entrenchment of writing instruction in departments of literature, and the advent of New Criticism, solidified a focus on students' written products that has come to be known across the United States as the "current- traditional paradigm" (Adams and Adams 1987). As most historical accounts suggest, however, it was not until the development of the process movement in the 1960s and 1970s that the concept of the "writing program" — led by a growing cohort of specialists in writing process research — was fully developed. As Crowley puts it, process pedagogy caused several "remarkable changes" to composition in the university, including the professionalization of the teaching of first year writing and a "reconceptualization of composition teachers as disciplined professionals" (Crowley 1998, 191).
Recently, US histories of both composition and WPA work have been complicating the story. L'Eplattenier and Mastrangelo's (2004)Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration highlights the earlier history — primarily, but not only, in the United States — through its analysis of stories of individual pioneers and whole communities. Notably, the influence of George Jardine (University of Glasgow) and Alexander Bain (University of Aberdeen) is carefully detailed by Lynée Gaillet (2004), who suggests that these scholars' early emphasis on writing, writing instruction, and writing in all disciplines is rarely noted in US scholarship. Similarly, David Gold's (2008)Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 offers a neglected history of writing programs at three southern institutions (a black liberal arts college, a teacher-training school, and a public university for women). Gold's historical analysis of these institutions reveals the internal sources of their programmatic innovations, breaking the stereotype that progressive educational practice always trickles down from elite institutions and that what appears to represent instructional conservatism always has its source in conservative ideology. And Charles Paine's (1999)The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present documents the history of composition through the influence of competing institutions and practices. Such histories, described as alternate by Gaillet (2004, 185), suggest that there may well be alternate accounts of the current international WPA story.
From a contemporary perspective, scholars continue to struggle with the definition of a writing program, especially as institutionally systematic efforts to focus on writing still exhibit structural, curricular, and pedagogical diversity. For Janangelo (2011), writing programs in the United States are designed to help students to "write effectively for audiences both within and beyond the academy, develop their abilities as rhetors, and do their best work by composing and revising texts" in all kinds of venues, including first-year courses, disciplinary courses, or tutoring experiences. These venues have already clearly moved writing programs beyond FYC and, thus, WPA beyond its FYC profile. L'Eplattenier's suggestion that "the work of WPAs has existed as long as there have been institutions offering writing courses" would seem to support this broader interpretation as well, both in history and in current configurations (quoted in McLeod 2007, 45).
Just as "there is no agreed-upon concept of 'writing program'" (Schwalm 2002, 11), writing program administration in the United States as recently configured has been defined in various overlapping ways. Everyone who tries to pin it down encounters substantial diversity, leading Susan McLeod to say "context is all" (McLeod 2007, 8). Gaillet (2004) cites Olson and Moxley's outline of WPA activities — based on surveys of 250 English departments — to include "establishing liaisons with the community, promoting curricular reform, determining program policy in written documents, maintaining scholarship," and serving as leader and instigator of reform (174). This version of WPA work is set in opposition to the "feminist" administrative structure proposed by Dickson, which emphasizes collaboration, diversified authority, faculty-driven conversations about pedagogy, research, and administration, an atmosphere more in line with workshops and forums, strong support and mentoring, and effective rewards (175). In these "characteristic"-based descriptions of WPAs we also find the skills delineated by Cambridge and McClelland (1995), based on Gardner, including agreement-building, networking, diffusion of power, institution building, and flexibility. Perhaps an equally comprehensive, though differently detailed, way to understand the scope of WPA work is to consider the table of contents in Susan McLeod's (2007)Writing Program Administration. This volume places WPAs in roles as different as the unappreciated wife, the politician, and the manager, with domains of responsibility that may include curricula, ranges of courses, placement, accountability, staffing, multiple languages, and so on. These diverse descriptions suggest a different starting point for framing WPA in the world — not by associating it with a course (like a crop), but with a set of activities.
The WPA story at community colleges is an illuminating alternate account: community college faculty who are performing de facto WPA work without identifiable "programs." Community college voices underscore the fact that the four-year college account of a divide between English and writing, composition, or rhetoric is not their story (Andelora, cited in Calhoon-Dillahunt 2011), since composition is the mainstay of English departments (Holmstein, cited in Calhoon-Dillahunt 2011, 124). "Writing program," Raines (1990, 124) suggests, "does not evoke a precise image of what we [community colleges] do." The unique institutional histories of two- and four-year colleges provide contexts that are quite different; community colleges do not generally budget for WPAs, do not have coherent bodies of faculty employed at one institution, and do not provide for release time or professional development (123–24). And yet, clearly the activities of the WPA as defined above are in play. McLeod (2007) suggests that at least two aspects influence how WPAs develop: the size of what they must manage, and the point at which their work shifts from a task to a position. However, for colleagues in the 1,200 US community colleges, the first may be easy to discern, but the second is more likely to be unrecognized.
An alternative to FYC at a growing number of colleges and universities also provides a new account of WPA work and purpose. This account moves us in the direction of European programmatic interests through its attention to WID, even in the first year, as well as its undergraduate research model that is often the base for writing instruction in other contexts. A recent study about writing programs in small colleges illustrates the move toward first-year seminars as the sole entry-level writing requirement, a move with interesting implications for writing and disciplinarity (Gladstein and Regaignon 2012). Interestingly, several of the individuals in L'Eplattenier and Mastrangelo's (2004) history of WPA work were at institutions — such as Vassar or Bryn Mawr — that fall into this category, suggesting stronger roots than are generally acknowledged in this kind of setting and pointing us back to university structures, governance, and missions as powerful contextual shapers of WPAs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Transnational Writing Program Administration by David S. Martins. Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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