about the big picture, and I love the viral potential of doing administrative work. It must be linked to my desire to do something big with my life, always seemingly unfulfilled, that makes me want to be a WPA, a real one, a respected one. I had been the interim writing center director at the university where I got my MA, and while I knew my colleagues had confidence in me, I also knew they wanted the position to be tenure-track, which meant I would not be able to keep it. I had to go back to school. I chose my graduate program because of its secondary area in WPA, and I immediately embraced what that program had to offer—a commitment to the intellectual nature of WPA work. I knew that was my path towards respect.
Colin: While Jonikka defined and chose a path for a PhD, I went along for the ride. I knew I wanted to teach writing, and I knew that, unlike a range of couples we would meet in our doctoral program, Jonikka and I would be together, working together, even if I eventually went outside of academia for a job. So moving to Indiana, for me, wasn’t a choice I ever had to make. But I did choose to have a programmatic voice, even though I struggled with the definition of rhetoric and my role in a rhetoric and composition program for many years. And that started from day one when I met with our incoming graduate student mentor group. Shirley K Rose asked us pretty directly, “Why are you here?” I couldn’t answer that question, and she bugged me about it until I could. In fact, she kept asking until I had incorporated it into my internalized reflections, my ways of thinking about teaching and learning, about being anywhere.
At the time, I didn’t know that asking such a question would lead me to learn about an area connected to administration. But that word wasn’t a bad word to me. I think I was in middle school when my dad was promoted to being in charge of a lab at a government contractor, and I remember his prep-work including reading Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings, which I read in turn. Such a self-education taught me several things about what my dad called management: (1) administration doesn’t circumvent creativity and should in fact stimulate it; (2) assessment isn’t useful or relevant if you can’t give a five (on a one to five scale) to your people—it’s just a rationalization for financial choices that will be made at an administrative level higher than yours; and (3) interdisciplinary reading should increase exponentially with your pay-grade, while management-related trend texts were barely worth a library card and a quick read for main points. In short, a classic book on the way of the samurai can be quite a relevant read for anyone in a position of authority and responsibility if you’re not asking questions you already have the answers to.
Amy: Like Jonikka, I’m a big picture-thinker and I’m a planner. I like to think about what could be and what has to happen in order to make the could be what is. While I like thinking about and reading theory, I’m a practical person by nature, and WPA work gave me the chance to take the theories of rhetoric and composition and put them into practice in ways that supported student writers and their teachers. To me, it felt like work that mattered. I could see the outcome of my writing and thinking as a WPA that I couldn’t see if I tried to imagine myself as a theorist. I don’t support the theory-practice divide that seems to pervade much of the field because I think that writing program administration is a blending of both, but I was drawn to WPA work because of its practicality—it suited my interests and strengths and my desire to contribute to the programs in which I work. I’m also a collaborator; I work best when I can talk through ideas with others, and that seemed to be a particular offering of WPA studies. This could be because I was doing my work in a big program with lots of WPAs who worked closely together, so I saw the collaborative work environment I desired modeled by the faculty in my program. Taking what I knew of myself and what I wanted and how I worked best, I really didn’t see any other option than making WPA studies a central part of my graduate work.
Kate: For me, becoming a WPA never felt like a big, life altering choice but rather the unfolding of decisions and choices along the way that, while substantial, weren’t a direct path to writing program administration. I chose to leave my first doctoral program because I felt a huge disconnect between my teaching and prospective dissertation research and wanted to spend more time teaching before outlining a research trajectory that would likely map my career. A few years later I chose to leave my high school teaching job because I understood many of my beliefs about teaching and felt driven to return to graduate school to earn the PhD that might make my beliefs about teaching and learning matter more than to a few sections of composition or literature classes, that might have larger impact on students stuck learning five-paragraph essays and thinking they have to guess what the teacher wants. I also went back because I knew that as a woman I didn’t get listened to that much when it came to raising concerns about writing, agency, and gender in the high school I taught in. I wanted to have more influence on designing curriculum and helping students gain a sense of agency from learning about writing and rhetoric. As a doctoral candidate, I learned how WPAs use their disciplinary knowledge to design, develop, and teach curricula that engage students in thinking and learning in potentially powerful ways. My commitment to writing program administration became a commitment to rhetoric and often a commitment to reform.
Jonnika: During that first year of my PhD program, I took two WPA courses, and it was pretty clear to me early on that many of my peers were in those courses because they knew that one day they might have to be a WPA. Only a few of us were there because WPA work was our passion. That summer, I presented at my very first CWPA conference, and I began my paper, an argument for WPA professionalization, with a line that has been at the heart of my work ever since: “I choose to be a WPA.” In that statement was the idea that drives this book for me. The fact that I choose to be a WPA, that I am a WPA even when I don’t hold an official WPA position, defines a large part of who I am.
I took four WPA classes, I wrote a WPA dissertation, and when I went on the job market, I sought out WPA jobs. Advice to steer clear of those jobs until after tenure were deeply offensive to me since, emotionally, that advice registered as an affront to my worth as an academic, to my education and experience as a WPA, to my professional identity.
Kate: I never took any WPA classes, and I wrote my dissertation on the rhetorical canon of memory. Honestly, it didn’t occur to me to write a WPA dissertation. I simply hadn’t read enough WPA literature to realize I might want to make that choice. My doctoral institution was small, and we didn’t have courses about WPA work. Instead, I came to WPA through service and my interest always in the big picture: I was the assistant director of the program, co-taught the TA practicum, and found I really liked teaching and mentoring teachers, and I wanted to make that central to my daily work. When I went on the job market the first time, I chose to apply for both WPA jobs and non-WPA jobs, and my first job cemented my WPA career. I’m not sure I could have chosen other than a WPA job and gotten it in a geographical region my partner and I wanted to live—the so-called more desirable route to tenure—but since I wanted a WPA job, I was happy to get one. And I really enjoyed working with TAs, collaborating with colleagues, and contributing to developing an undergraduate composition program. I wasn’t advised to steer clear of WPA jobs, though I was advised to carefully consider the do-ability of any job. When I left my first WPA job, in part because it felt untenable—too big, too many worries that I couldn’t get tenure because of its scope (I had worries of my own and didn’t feel comfortable with other people’s worries on top of my own)—and because we wanted to live in the west, I chose to step into an actually bigger WPA job—a directorship—at a smaller school. While we can never know what we choose when we choose a job, on that search I felt like I was choosing—a certain kind of WPA in a certain kind of school, in a particular place. I already had a job, and felt like I could choose a new one or stay at the old one. The first time on the market I felt like I had to take the best job offer rather than the best lifestyle choice for me.
Tarez: I was drawn to WPA coursework and projects because I enjoyed the kind of intellectual engagement they provided, had been a WPA prior to my PhD program, served as a gWPA in graduate school, and in many ways think like a WPA. I identify with the role and its potential for institutional and social reform because it seems like a natural outgrowth of (or parallel space to) my identity as a rhetoric and composition scholar and practitioner, not because I felt inclined to identify with a subject position or a group called WPA. Writing
