Writing program administration and institutional narratives

Arguing that narrative serves as a powerful tool for university administration, my dissertation provides new rhetoric and composition professionals with an analytical framework for understanding how to navigate university life. Because our current academic climate of accountability requires universities and their individual academic units to offer narrative accounts that demonstrate institutional effectiveness, narrative is a useful lens for navigating the intricacies of institutional relations among individual academic units and among units within the university at large. On a practical note, most of the work we do in the institution, from grading to annual reports to faculty governance, relies on narrative. Narrative shapes our understanding of the institution and also comprises a majority of the artifacts we associate with it. However, unlike these artifacts, narratives are not static; they are living, changing entities, just like people. From this perspective, writing program administrators can understand the institution and their role within it in a synergetic way and begin to imagine how to direct and redirect the consequences of narratives. I term this process narrative logic, and I offer classical pragmatism as a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between narrative and consequences. Through a case study of a mid-sized liberal arts school in the South, I isolates narrative's role in institutional assessment, programmatic change, and disciplinary identity in order to show how narrative effects material change

Transnational writing program administration: mobility, entanglement, work.

This dissertation advances the global turn in writing studies by examining academic mobilities through an ethnographic study of transnational writing program administrative (TWPA) work outside of the United States. The literature review reads global writing studies scholarship through a critical-transnational lens to locate the gap for new knowledge in TWPA work. Influenced by Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography, this dissertation grounds the findings of its interview-based study in the terms of everyday lived experiences by internationally mobile scholars currently doing WPA work in order to construct more nuanced narratives of navigation and sensemaking. Participants discussed the consequences and limitations of us/them or local/global binaries, traced commitments and policies across time and space, then accounted for and described the labor required to resist stable notions of difference. The study contributes terms and anecdotes for depicting TWPA sensemaking work as shifting, ever-changing, partial, layered, and complex. The core findings are theorizations of mobility and transnationality through discursive work, relative mobility, scaling practices, and co-constituted space

Writing program administration at public liberal arts colleges.

This study provides a focused look at the possibilities of WPA work at public liberal arts colleges. Through surveys of and interviews with WPAs and critical discourse analysis of public documents, I identify common structures of writing programs at public liberal arts colleges (PLACs), explore WPAs’ perceptions of what distinguishes writing program administration and writing instruction at these institutions, and distill the common values of public liberal arts colleges. I analyze the ways these values are articulated in mission statements and writing program websites and examine how WPAs draw on and, in some cases, resist institutional values as they develop or redesign writing programs. Survey data identifies some key differences between PLACs and private SLACS, which I speculate arises from their public status. Despite these differences, WPAs at PLACs felt a similar commitment to writing on their campuses and interview data provides insights into how WPAs worked to further formalize that commitment to writing. Furthermore, WPAs were relatively successful in advocating for programmatic efforts by appealing to the institution’s commitment to a public liberal arts identity. However, these commitments were rarely articulated in public-facing documents. Thus, I argue that WPAs should better articulate the importance of their writing programs and their contributions to fulfilling the university’s larger goals. This argument has implications for WPAs pursuing institutional change, as it demonstrates how the revision of public-facing documents can shape dominant discourses on campus

Thinking Beyond Tools: Writing Program Administration and Digital Literacy

Drawing on survey data from 70 Writing Program Administrators (WPAs), I describe how digital literacy is being theorized and practiced in a broad range of writing programs across the U.S. Because this study offers a glimpse of values and practices across programs with a variety of resources and challenges, the study results— which demonstrate in what ways WPAs value and are integrating digital literacies — can help other WPAs argue for resources, get ideas, defend practices in their own programs, or ensure that students in their programs will receive similar experiences as others across the country. At the same time, while my study showed that many WPAs value digital literacies, it also revealed some areas for further consideration—elements WPAs who are committed to digital literacy may need to focus on more as they more forward with their approaches. As I discuss some areas in which WPA practices do not necessarily align with current values in the field of computers and composition, I offer strategies for adopting best practices in the field while facing some of the challenges with which WPAs contend on a daily basis, such as a lack of resources or stakeholder resistance... This webtext begins with a brief discussion of the theoretical framework I used for the study. Then, I share details about the survey population. The rest of the webtext presents my findings, characterizing WPAs’ motivations for integrating digital literacy into their programs, the challenges they face in their attempts, and the ways in which they are interpreting digital literacy. I end by discussing the implications of the survey data for writing program administration

Researching Writing Program Administration Expertise in Action: A Case Study of Collaborative Problem Solving as Transdisciplinary Practice

Theorizing WPA expertise as problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, we apply the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to a campus WID Initiative to read and argue that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow us to better understand, represent, and leverage rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education

CARDS: A Collaborative Community Model for Faculty Development or an Institutional Case Study of Writing Program Administration

The structure of writing programs evolves to account for the transformation of composition studies. Online and dual credit programs necessitate a need to adjust prior practices initially geared towards face-to-face pedagogy; however, several challenges surface in online and dual credit writing programs. The most prevalent is that these online courses are primarily staffed by non-tenured faculty, including adjuncts who do not have a physical presence on campus. The faculty dynamic presents many challenges when attempting to garner participation in collaborations. In recent years, the Writing Program Administrator (WPA) at a regional public university noticed a need to improve faculty morale, satisfaction, and participation, especially with the emergence of online programs. Through a national survey and selective interviews of current faculty at the university, we determined that the answer lies in the structure of the program. The Writing Program Administrator has several models to choose from, but we will argue that the collaborative community model is most conducive to addressing and enhancing faculty morale, satisfaction, and participation in first-year writing programs

Articulating Digital Archival Practice Within Writing Program Administration: A Theoretical Framework

Throughout Writing Program Administration scholarship there has been a clear call for archivization and archival work. This dissertation project takes an interdisciplinary approach to digital archival practices for Writing Program Administrators to consider and employ in their home institutions. While I recognize that WPAs are not typically identified as “archivists,” I situate the digital archive within the digital humanities as an interdisciplinary, collaborative project and offer suggestions that lead to recommendations for making an institutional archive. I review archival practice in order to justify the digital archive as an appropriate vehicle for WPAs’ work. Further, I argue that the digital archive must be useable and, therefore, consider other commonly used composition studies archives for their usability. Overall, my dissertation seeks to define digital archival practice for WPAs in order to inspire other educators to take up this meaningful, historical work

Programmatic knowledge management: technology, literacy, and access in 21st-century writing programs

Growing out of research in Technical Communication, Composition Studies, and Writing Program Administration, the articles in this dissertation explicitly seek to address changes in the practices and products of writing and writing studies wrought by the so-called “digital revolution” in communication technology, which has been ongoing in these fields since at least 1982 and the publication of the first Computers and Composition newsletter. After more than three decades of concentrated study, the problems posed by the communication revolution have been brought into clear relief by a succession of scholars, and the complex and semi-coordinated project of remediating ourselves, our discourses, and our disciplines is in many respects well underway. Nevertheless, significant challenges face multimodal pedagogy in the context of Writing Program Administration, challenges that take the form of entrenched conflict regarding the ownership and distribution of personal information and intellectual property. These articles examine problems at the level of the student, the teacher, and the program and argue for a new kind of Writing Program Administrator who uses multiliteracies to rethink how writing programs should produce and practice writing and the teaching of writing in the 21st-century

Strengthening Graduate Student Preparation for WPA Work

Article on strengthening graduate student preparation for the Writing Program Administration (WPA) work

Fugitive administrative rhetorics

This article is a work in defining fugitivity in writing program administration. We return to the intersecting phenomena of the pandemic, of climate change, of state-sanctioned violence, of gerrymandering, and of stolen rights. We recognize the complicity writing programs have with this status quo, and we hope that Fugitive Administrative Rhetorics is a helpful framework for developing WPA practices that diverge from this complicity. Our writing is intended to acknowledge a deep scholarly debt within rhetoric and composition to the first fugitives of the academic space, the multiply marginalized students and faculty that built the undercommons: Black, Indigenous, Latinx, queer, women, immigrant, neurodivergent