we have arrived—the acknowledgement of administration as scholarship by our colleagues in other fields, a resolution to the English/composition tensions in our departments, an equitable policy for the use of adjuncts to teach writing courses—there will always be sites within the discipline, institutions, departments, and classrooms that compel WPAs to resist common assumptions about the work they do and drive them toward more ethical and effective administrative and teaching practices.
For the purposes of narrative reconstruction, our understanding of the resistant WPA is further solidified in histories of rhetoric and composition as retold by James Berlin, Robert Connors, John C. Brereton, and Stephen North, out of which emerge five particular moments in rhetoric and composition’s history that represent the work of the resistant WPA. These moments of resistance map directly onto the contemporary history and trends of writing instruction in general, as the history of composition and writing program administration are intimately intertwined.
Moment One: The Resistant WPA as Researcher and Theorist
The influx of knowledge being generated about the writing process through cognitive psychology during the 1980s is directly related to the notion of the resistant WPA as a researcher and theorist. The resistant WPA argued that writing was a recursive, intellectual process that needed to be practiced (with feedback) rather than something that could be mimicked by exposure to “good” literature and model texts.
The process movement required that WPAs resist the once dominant belief that teaching writing is teaching grammar and/or literature. WPAs had to resist pressure from colleagues in other disciplines who bemoaned the “lack of writing skills” students displayed in their classrooms. They had to resist the resistance from teachers who didn’t want to change their pedagogy based on “some new theory.” And they had to resist critiques that composition teachers weren’t doing their jobs because they were no longer providing their “service” to the university.
In many ways, the process movement has been a defining moment for the field of rhetoric and composition as a whole because, as Maxine Hairston argued, it created a “paradigmatic shift” (76) within the field that changed the way we thought about—and taught—writing. Therefore, it seems necessary to include the process movement as a moment of resistance for WPAs, as well, because a paradigmatic shift demands a curricular shift, and the resistant WPA has historically had to continually defend process as a meaningful approach to the teaching of writing.
Moment Two: The Resistant WPA as Collaborator
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