problems and questions, just as much as other theoretical or historical or methodological commitments become the shared property of us all. (Here, I don’t mean to forward the argument that one is a sub-field of or supra-field to another, simply that I do not view my work in histories and theories of rhetoric and composition as cut off from the same intellectual onus that drives the work I do with course administration, TA mentoring, and curriculum development. And vice versa.)
This may be why I have been drawn to Generation Administration as a historical and geospatial identifier more so than to WPA as a label or a subject position. I did not leave my doctoral program hoping for a WPA job, but simply hoped and expected that I would continue to mentor teachers and develop curriculum in a dynamic program, at the hub of core issues and trends that shaped or disrupted the broader university context.
Amy: The WPA courses that I took as a graduate student taught me how to think like a WPA. I began graduate school with an interest in language and grammar (having spent two years working as a copy-editor for an investment company before beginning my PhD), and while my dissertation was about grammar instruction, it had a particular WPA bent, examining the ways in which decisions made by WPAs in TA training and curricular development push grammar out of the first-year writing curriculum. I could have focused my study on classrooms alone, but because I was trained to think like a WPA, I knew that what happened in the classroom was directly influenced by how a program was constructed, so for me, writing about grammar pedagogy necessarily meant that I had to talk to WPAs, too.
Colin: I was actually able, in retrospect, to overlap all of my final classes and my dissertation with programmatic questions that emerged for me as our writing program underwent a massive change from a two-semester sequence to a single five-hour course that had a serious rhetorical-technological dimension. I worked with professors, new teachers, and students at the undergraduate and graduate level to try to understand the dynamics we were putting in place, from conferencing to computer classroom pedagogies to my obsession with challenging expert-novice narratives of education in writing classrooms. Without taking any WPA classes (though I did occasionally peek at Jonikka’s course packs) and with a position as a graduate mentor, WPA concerns emerged in all aspects of my doctoral experience. But this was in large part due to my desire and choice to work with particular people and not a connection to an area of study.
Jonnika: My relationship with the concept of choosing WPA has not always been an easy one. When I took my first tenure-track job, I still felt like a WPA, I wanted to be a WPA, but I wasn’t the WPA, and that hurt my feelings. One of my new colleagues had taken on the WPA position in a pinch the year we came in, and while he certainly proved himself to be a capable steward of the program, his true interests lay elsewhere, and, emotionally, that was hard for me. I didn’t take over the position for a couple of years, and in the interim, I had a bit of an identity crisis. If I wasn’t the WPA, who was I? A WPA scholarly agenda, a strong WPA mentor, and WPA friends helped me see that my WPA identity was more complex than I had realized. I will always be a WPA no matter the circumstances.
Kate: At my current job, I am the WPA. I try to both resist and deploy the notion that the connotes for me—the only one. Technically, I’m not, as there is a Basic Writing Coordinator, a Composition Coordinator, a Writing Center Director, and an Associate Writing Center Director, all of whom are committed to their jobs. But I am the only one with a doctorate, the only one with a doctorate in rhetoric and composition. My love of collaboration also urges me resist the the even as I have invoked my role as it pertains to my responsibilities for writing and writing students and my disciplinary affiliation that shapes my beliefs and arguments on campus. I also resist the phrase because for many people it’s seen in quite a reductive way, as little more than a manager of multiple composition sections and their teachers, mainly TAs and adjuncts. As the WPA, I’m also a WPA for life even though I imagine not being the only WPA because I think the WPA is too conflated with the program, and I want to see it diversify and entail more of a shared programmatic commitment. As the WPA, I’m in the position of needing to try to define and imagine what else that could mean.
Colin: I usually don’t think about a class, a teacher, or a curriculum apart from a program. Makes for complicated negotiations, but I adopted the mantra don’t teach what you love early on. That just leads to disappointment. I’d rather teach what I don’t know (yet) under an umbrella or vision for the smaller pieces—like a first-year writing class—as a smaller part of a greater sequence. As someone obsessed with invention in senses beyond rhetoric and composition, I still can’t function without a map. Some would say that explains why Jonikka and I are together. Anyone who goes off the reservation needs a map. But her involvement with WPA never seemed programmed. Our discussions always gave me a sense that, for my own personal style of teaching and philosophy of learning, I had to know about, think about, and live with the larger structures of power, persuasion, invention, and functionality that surrounded me in any job. My obsession with invention morphed into a desire to change what I perceived as detrimental dependence on expert-apprentice models for learning in rhetoric and composition. But you have to be in the administrative mix to change that particular dichotomy, or at least you have a better chance to promote significant change. So when I had an opportunity to coordinate developmental courses at my current university, I felt compelled to choose it, to become officially a teacher-scholar-administrator. But you really have to just keep adding hyphens, especially in terms of what I have come to see as GenAdmin. I have a willingness to engage, and a need to not rely on another class of people to take care of what I do or don’t do in the set of classes I’m responsible for, in my classrooms, or in my writing.
Tarez: I think that what sets GenAdmin apart is its intellectual orientation to the work, i.e., having been brought up under the onus that one can do the work willingly, prepared, and excitedly, that doing the work is likely intrinsic to all the other dimensions of our selves, and that doing the work carries multiple forms beyond the lone writing program director. There is something exciting in the realization that what brings us together for the writing of this book—and what may have brought some of us together to do WPA coursework in graduate school—is our need to theorize and to articulate our theories as fundamental, not only to the daily operations of the courses or the programs we direct, but also to the epistemic fissures and openings that drive the field forward. There is also something hopeful about knowing that there do exist collaborative models for program direction, and that one need not always be the WPA to carry influence on campus. Before and throughout graduate school, it had always been my experience that the writing program was one of the most dynamic, fluid, and contentious systems of activity on campus. When its players were committed to that contention and oriented towards that dynamism, the work felt rewarding indeed.
Amy: The year that I applied for my current job, the university had two rhetoric and composition lines open—one for a rhetoric and composition specialist and one for a rhetoric and composition specialist who would be the WPA. At the time, I was in a non-tenure track WAC job at the institution where my husband had been offered a tenure-track job. WAC wasn’t my forte, and at the time I believed I wanted a tenure-track job that didn’t have administrative responsibilities, so I applied for the non-WPA rhetoric and composition job. Because of budget shortfalls, they were only able to hire one position, and although I didn’t officially apply for it, they offered me the WPA job because of my experiences as the Assistant WPA in graduate school. I chose to take the job because I wanted to work toward tenure, and I knew that I could do the WPA work they required, but I was nervous about being the WPA before tenure. Now that I’ve been in the job for two years, I can’t imagine not being the WPA (even though, like Kate, I don’t like the article). I came in to the job while the university was in the midst of a major general education overhaul, one that necessitated a revised first-year writing course. I have been able to enact the curricular development, collaboration, and big-picture thinking that originally drew me to WPA studies in my job, and I feel fortunate that while I certainly have WPA tasks that seem, at times, managerial, I’m supported by my department in doing the intellectual work of writing program administration that I desire.
Jonnika: I feel like I have been the most adamant in pursuing the idea that what sets GenAdmin
