The argument of this collection is that the cultural and intellectual legacies of postmodernism impinge, significantly and daily, on the practice of the Writing Program Administrator. WPAs work in spaces where they must assume responsibility for a multifaceted program, a diverse curriculum, instructors with varying pedagogies and technological expertise—and where they must position their program in relation to a university with its own conflicted mission, and a state with its unpredictable views of accountability and assessment.
The collection further argues that postmodernism offers a useful lens through which to understand the work of WPAs and to examine the discordant cultural and institutional issues that shape their work. Each chapter tackles a problem local to its author’s writing program or experience as a WPA, and each responds to existing discord in creative ways that move toward rebuilding and redirection.
It is a given that accepting the role of WPA will land you squarely in the bind between modernism and postmodernism: while composition studies as a field arguably still reflects a modernist ethos, the WPA must grapple daily with postmodern habits of thought and ways of being. The effort to live in this role may or may not mean that a WPA will adopt a postmodern stance; it does mean, however, that being a WPA requires dealing with the postmodern.
DISCORD AND DIRECTION
The Postmodern Writing Program AdministratorUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2005 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-617-2Contents
Introduction: Postmodernity and Writing Programs Sharon James McGee and Carolyn Handa......................................................................................................................................................................................11 Where Discord Meets Direction: The Role of Consultant-Evaluation in Writing Program Administration Deborah H. Holdstein..................................................................................................................................................182 Cold Pastoral: The Moral Order of an Idealized Form Jeanne Gunner........................................................................................................................................................................................................283 Beyond Accommodation: Individual and Collective in a Large Writing Program Christy Desmet................................................................................................................................................................................404 Overcoming Disappointment: Constructing Writing Program Identity through Postmodern Mapping Sharon James McGee...........................................................................................................................................................595 The Road to Mainstreaming: One Program's Successful but Cautionary Tale Anthony Edgington, Marcy Tucker, Karen Ware, and Brian Huot......................................................................................................................................726 Developmental Administration: A Pragmatic Theory of Evolution in Basic Writing Keith Rhodes..............................................................................................................................................................................847 Information Technology as Other: Reflections on a Useful Problem Mike Palmquist..........................................................................................................................................................................................958 Computers, Innovation, and Resistance in First-Year Composition Programs Fred Kemp.......................................................................................................................................................................................1059 Minimum Qualifications: Who Should Teach First-Year Writing? Richard E. Miller and Michael J. Cripps.....................................................................................................................................................................12310 The Place of Assessment and Reflection in Writing Program Administration Susanmarie Harrington..........................................................................................................................................................................14011 New Designs for Communication Across the Curriculum Andrew Billings, Teddi Fishman, Morgan Gresham, Angie Justice, Michael Neal, Barbara Ramirez, Summer Smith Taylor, Melissa Tidwell Powell, Donna Winchell, Kathleen Blake Yancey, and Art Young.....................15812 Mirror, Mirror on the Web: Visual Depiction, Identity, and the Writing Program Carolyn Handa............................................................................................................................................................................181Notes.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................203References..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................207Contributors................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................218Index.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................220
Chapter One
WHERE DISCORD MEETS DIRECTION The Role of Consultant Evaluation in Writing Program Administration
Deborah H. Holdstein
Over the last fifteen years there have been numerous, often successful, attempts to define and theorize the role of the WPA and the place of writing programs, Writing Across the Curriculum, and the like on campus. For instance, in "Ideology, Theory, and the Genre of Writing Programs," Jeanne Gunner writes,
Examining writing programs as a genre, a social and institutional genre, yields some fairly familiar answers to questions about program purpose. In their social and institutional setting, writing programs as a genre serve both an ideological and hence also epistemological function; they help structure a relation of language and culture. (2002, 11)
Further, Gunner elaborates, writing programs "help establish the cultural rules for language use, what its cultural work is: how we are to form categories of language users; how we are to hierarchize discourses; how we are to correlate specific discourses with ability and social worth; how we are to validate the differences produced" (11).
The same can be said, however, for the larger institutional context in which the WPA and the writing program do their work: the administration of an institution is local, influenced by its own, larger context of often vexing state mandates, accreditation bodies, and boards of trustees. A given institution, too, has its cultural rules for language work, its sense of what the important cultural work of the institution is and how (in the best circumstances) it is to be carried out. It, too, correlates specific discourses with ability and social/hierarchical worth.
Within this complex and often conflicting set of contexts and interactions is the legion of work regarding the relative powerlessness of most WPAs. Gary Olson and Joseph Moxley's "Directing Freshman Composition and the Limits of Authority" (1989) articulates the negligible value of WPAs to the English department. But as Edward White puts it, department chairs "appreciate us principally for our accessibility and ability to communicate, that is, for our ability to keep things nicely under control without exerting any real authority" (2002, 108). As White notes, he had been a "statewide administrator in halls where nobody pretended (as they do on campus) that everyone is powerless" (106). Indeed, White
absorbed from the atmosphere certain lessons: recognize the fact that all administration deals in power; power games demand aggressive players; assert that you have power (even if you don't) and you can often wield it. (106)
All this is well and good. However, as Richard Miller posits, "[I]nstitutional life gives rise to a general feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness"...
