A Review of Conceding Composition: A Crooked History of Composition\u27s Institutional Fortunes

Compositionists (a community in which I include myself) often work with a chip on our shoulders. Perhaps we find the chip during grad school or when we are asked to teach an overload or when a literature professor’s summer course does not make and they demand a section of first year writing instead or because so many of us remain contingent faculty. Whenever and however the chip appeared, many of us have felt or discussed its presence: we, and our courses, are the misunderstood and much maligned. In fact, this is “the field’s conventional historical narrative, [that] composition is marginalized in higher education because instructions are ambivalent at best and hostile at worst to composition as a scholarly and pedagogical object” (19). The conventional response to this conventional narrative has been (ultimately for the better, probably) efforts of legitimation: philosophies, scholarships, journals, societies, conferences, methods, research—activity that Sharon Crowley has called “the topos of improvement = appreciation” (qtd in Skinnell 20)

You’re Going to Need This for College

When I first heard a teacher say, “You’re going to need this for college,” I was a high school student. I heard the phrase again when I began teaching 10th grade English, and I wondered, as a first-year teacher, whether that was the teacher version of “Because I said so,” or if, more tragically, it was what teachers said in response to the often asked, “Why do I have to learn this?” when they didn’t really know the answer. The teachers I worked with, however, were very smart and some of the most student-centered educators I’ve ever known, so it’s hard for me to fully believe that

Another Sort of Life: A Novel

In the critical introduction of this thesis, I examine the academic and creative impulses that helped me to complete this novel. In particular, I detail my seemingly nonlinear course of study as I planned, wrote, and reflected on this novel draft. This work required significant research and study outside the field of creative writing: health care systems, cancer, shame, vulnerability, guilt. I discuss at length the processes by which I became knowledgeable of these subjects, and how even after the first draft of the creative work was completed, I continued to create a more nuanced and sophisticated concept of my own work. This introduction finds its focus in my academic journey through this novel—because this is an area of self-fulfillment

(Dis)similarity and Identity: On Becoming Quasi-WPA

This article examines WPA positions that are non-tenured, part-time or otherwise under-supported. Drawing on previous discussions of this precariously-situated WPA position, the authors introduce the term “quasi-WPA” and explore how WPAs in this position face three critical issues in their position as administrator: (1) authority and power dynamics, (2) identity, and (3) resources. Due to the dynamics these WPA positions come with, the authors argue that these critical issues are magnified for quasi-WPAs. The authors investigate how the quasi-WPA position is made problematic by their positionality. They are holding a position of responsibility while also occupying a position of uncertainty. The quasi-WPA does everything a regular WPA does and deals with all the same issues that any other WPA must navigate, but he or she must do so through the complications contingent employment present