An important new resource for WPA preparation courses in rhetoric and composition PhD programs. In Going Public, Rose and Weiser moderate a discussion of the role of the writing program vis-a-vis the engagement movement, the service learning movement, and current interest in public discourse/civic rhetoric among scholars of rhetoric and composition. This is a thoughtful collection on the ways that engagement-focused programs may be changing conceptions of WPA identity. As institutions begin to include more explicit engagement with citizen and stakeholder communities as an element of their mission, writing program administrators find themselves with an opportunity to articulate the ways in which writing program goals and purposes significantly contribute to achieving these new institutional goals. Writing programs are typically situated at points where students make the transition from community to college (e.g., first-year composition) or from college to community (e.g. professional writing), and are already dedicated to developing literacies that are critically needed in communities.
In Going Public, Rose and Weiser locate their discussion in the context of three current conversations in higher education: 1) the engagement movement, particularly as this movement serves to address and respond to calls for greater accountability to broader publics; 2) recent interest in public discourse/civic rhetoric among scholars of rhetorical history and contemporary rhetorical theory; 3) the service learning movement in higher education, especially the ways in which college and university writing programs have contributed to this movement.
While there have been a number of publications describing service-learning and community leadership programs, most of these focus on curricular elements and address administrative issues, if at all, primarily from a curricular perspective. The emphasis of the current book is on the ways that engagement-focused programs change conceptions of WPA identity. Going Public, then, is not only a significant contribution to the scholarly literature, but also supplies an important new resource for WPA preparation courses in rhetoric and composition PhD programs.
GOING PUBLIC
What Writing Programs Learn from EngagementUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-769-8Contents
Introduction: The WPA as Citizen-Educator Shirley K Rose and Irwin Weiser...........................................................................................................................................................11 Infrastructure Outreach and the Engaged Writing Program Jeff Grabill..............................................................................................................................................................152 Centering Community Literacy: The Art of Location within Institutions and Neighborhoods Michael H. Norton and Eli Goldblatt.......................................................................................................293 The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project: A Hands-On, Experiential Course on School-College Articulation David A. Jolliffe.........................................................................................................504 The Illusion of Transparency at an HSI: Rethinking Service and Public Identity in a South Texas Writing Program Jonikka Charlton and Colin Charlton...............................................................................685 A Hybrid Genre Supports Hybrid Roles in Community-University Collaboration Timothy Henningsen, Diane Chin, Ann Feldman, Caroline Gottschalk-Druschke, Tom Moss, Nadya Pittendrigh, and Stephanie Turner Reich.....................856 Apprenticing Civic and Political Engagement in the First Year Writing Program Susan Wolff Murphy..................................................................................................................................1107 Wearing Multiple Hats: How Campus WPA Roles Can Inform Program-Specific Writing Designs Jessie L. Moore and Michael Strickland....................................................................................................1228 Students, Faculty and "Sustainable" WPA Work Thia Wolf, Jill Swiencicki, and Chris Fosen..........................................................................................................................................1409 The Writing Center as Site for Engagement Linda S. Bergmann.......................................................................................................................................................................16010 Not Politics as Usual: Public Writing as Writing for Engagement Linda Shamoon and Eileen Medeiros................................................................................................................................17711 Coming Down from the Ivory Tower: Writing Programs' Role in Advocating Public Scholarship Dominic DelliCarpini...................................................................................................................19312 The WPA as Activist: Systematic Strategies for Framing, Action, and Representation Linda Adler-Kassner...........................................................................................................................21613 Writing Program Administration and Community Engagement: A Bibliographic Essay Jaclyn M. Wells...................................................................................................................................237About the Authors....................................................................................................................................................................................................................256
Chapter One
INFRASTRUCTURE OUTREACH AND THE ENGAGED WRITING PROGRAM Jeff Grabill
This chapter is about writing programs, infrastructure, and the forms of work that can be supported by them. In particular, this chapter is about "engagement" as a form of intellectual work that writing programs are well-suited to support but that will, in turn, change the writing program that becomes engaged.
I argue here that a writing program constitutes a type of infrastructure that supports work. By "work," I am trying to name a category of activity that is broader than the commonplace activity of a writing program-teaching, learning, and administration. I mean that activity plus a range of activities associated with research and outreach in particular. Bounding or defining this activity is not important. What is more important is to understand a writing program as an infrastructure that "does work." That is, a writing program can be said to be the author of things such as a curriculum or a mission or an ethos. At the same time, a writing program enables the work of others-students, teachers, advisors, researchers-however that activity is understood. A writing program is both author and aggregator. As infrastructure, a program is a variable assemblage of people, technologies, missions, purposes, and other material and discursive things that is configurable. Because the meaning of infrastructure is emergent, I see the meaning of a writing program as something that is a function of the work of the writing program itself. In other words, infrastructure, as I will discuss below, is not stable, fixed-visible even-but rather emerges-becomes visible and meaningful-through use. What a writing program does, therefore, helps determine what it is. In many ways, this is an obvious statement, but the implications are potentially significant, as I hope to illustrate.
Given this understanding of institutional systems, I take up in this one recent challenge for writing programs: how various forms of outreach work (such as service learning) have required (or not) the support and resources of the writing program, and, therefore, have changed the very nature of programs themselves. Writing programs have become very complicated arrays of teaching, research, outreach, and service activity. I see tremendous potential in this situation for writing programs to become-much more explicitly-infrastructure that supports a range of intellectual activities of great value to the university. In particular, I take up the notion of "outreach" as a form of intellectual work that puts a particular kind of pressure on writing programs. I will then explore why I think writing programs constitute a powerful and potentially transformative infrastructure for outreach and engagement. Transformative for students and teachers, certainly, but-just as importantly-transformative for universities as a location for high impact experiences and not "merely" service.
OUTREACH AND THE WORK OF WRITING PROGRAMS
There is a distinction in this section that is important to keep in mind, and that is the difference among the work of faculty, the work of students, and the work of programs. This distinction is best understood as a tension, and it is a tension that I want to leave in place and just below the surface of the discussion here. In the interests of focus and space, I also set aside how we understand the work of students as part of the larger activity of a writing program. Student labor is often overlooked (see Horner 2000; DeJoy 2004 for examples to the contrary), and I believe this to be a significant mistake. I am mindful of making this mistake, but I need to do so largely because my concern here is for understanding "outreach" as a type of intellectual work and as a way of valuing intellectual work, and this is primarily a faculty and institutional issue. "Outreach" is not a common way to describe either faculty or programmatic work. The categories of research, teaching, and service...
