is necessary . . . [and] is the result of conscious questioning of the existing order. . . . [This] new vocabulary allows for different modes of expression than current language allows.
—Valerie Renegar and Stacey K. Sowards
As our experiences in the composition classroom have taught us, the problem of audience is a common one for those entering into an academic discourse community with well-established norms, patterns, and rules. The discourse patterns employed when writing about writing program administrator identity are fairly well illustrated by the titles of volumes that explore these issues, like Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers and Troubadours; The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration; or Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators. When we review these narratives and think of our own, the five of us imagine that if we could only find a metaphor to illustrate our experiences, we would have a way of talking about the work that reflects our lived experiences. If we could place ourselves on a continuum between two descriptive poles, either promising or perilous, we would have a foundation for our WPA identities. If we could define ourselves by rank alone, we would know how to place ourselves within the conversation. But because we think of our work—and ourselves as we do the work—more fluidly, there doesn’t seem to be much space for our stories in the narrative patterns established by the field; our stories do not fit the existing narrative patterns. And we expect we’re not alone in this thinking.
The work of this chapter, then, is to position GenAdmin within a context of history and inheritance, to attempt to carve a new narrative space for WPAs whose lives and work cannot be expressed easily in old metaphors, along binary continuums, or by the identification of rank. We seek a new vocabulary with which to discuss WPA work, its historical roots, and its potential to accommodate a wider range of views and experiences. We find agency in our historical positioning, which necessarily includes understanding how certain ideas have been taken up from past histories, reclaiming other ideas that have been neglected or left behind, and acknowledging the narratives we have inherited. We expose and come to terms with our own frustration at being viewed as naive or unprepared in understanding the kairotic moments that inspired past histories and stories. Most importantly, we offer a new way of imagining a history both collective and diverse in order to shed the notion that WPAs are victims and to create a new space for thinking about administration as capable of creating new conditions.
WPA Narratives as Situated Histories
Telling stories is a way of “doing history” (Lerner 199), and this narrative historicization becomes a useful site for the co-construction of WPA identities (Campbell, “Agency”; Howard, “Reflexivity”). Because they help establish norms and values that shape individuals’ behavior and thinking within a community, narratives develop a shared history that functions as a touchstone for later generations as they negotiate their present and imagine their future. This imagining, in turn, gives individuals the opportunity to claim ownership over their own lives and experiences and empowers the community to exercise control over its own self-perception. In the ways that narratives “give messages and instructions; they offer blueprints and ideals; they issue warnings and prohibitions” (Stone 5), they offer powerful representations that legitimize certain ways of being in the world that shape who we were, who we are, and who we are becoming.
Storytelling has become an integral component of WPA professional life and identity, as conventional a part of scholarship as citing sources or participating on the WPA-L listserv. At the 2008 WPA Conference, Amy listened to the ways that presenters used storytelling to frame their public discourse about WPA work. Out of the eighteen speakers she attended (including four panels of three presenters each, and three plenary speakers), seventeen told stories in one form or another as a way to frame their scholarship. The prevalence of these stories may be explained by the fact that narratives provide WPAs an opportunity to move between theory and experience and to anchor the hermeneutic inside/outside moves Donald E. Hall describes in The Academic Community: A Manual for Change. As Thomas P. Miller notes, “Stories help us make the imaginative leap back and forth between our lived experiences and abstract speculations” (Anson et al. 80).
Stories may also help us move from isolated self-definition to a sense of shared community. As graduate students, Amy, Jonikka, and Tarez wrote professionalization narratives in their WPA seminars that were modeled on published narratives in the field. They each adopted a genre or metaphor that shaped their story—Amy wrote a fable and Tarez wrote a creation myth, while others wrote a fairy tale, a victim narrative, or a children’s story. Given the opportunity to tell stories in their own way, seminar participants were able to articulate and share their experiences while also entering into a community—as both actor and listener—from which some members had previously felt excluded. Seminar participants drew on these narratives not as experts in each genre but as rhetoricians interested in how their composition provided insights into the communal values they tried to represent, whether certain genres best represented the epistemic potential of writing histories, and how the process of constructing narrative histories asked them to reconcile their “mixed heritages” and “complex pasts.” These narratives were a discovery of how to proceed, and their writing revealed much about how WPAs can see and approach the labor of reconstructing their own intellectual migration. Their writing also revealed that professionalization narratives have great potential as an ethnomethodological practice that—in their construction and analysis—can align writing program administration with knowledge-making, especially by helping new WPAs or WPAs-in-training to understand and reflect on the work of writing programs as emergent, their role in them as productive, and their representations as situated and complex.1 In a way, narratives position writers and readers as co-creators of productive knowledge, revealing how we use story in an ongoing maintenance of social order.
While narratives function in very particular ways for members of a given community, they can function just as powerfully for those outside of the community. Chris Anson’s claim that “experiential narratives set up a Bahktinian multivocality that rarely leads to a sense of resolution” is apt here (Anson et al. 79). In the same way that we posit GenAdmin as a broader reaching philosophical practice, we do not just think about what we gain personally by telling our stories, but rather we consider how these stories could work in the world: What do our colleagues in other disciplines make of our stories? How do these narratives shape the understanding of the field for pre-service WPAs or graduate students? Are we perpetuating an administrative philosophy, a way of being and working, that limits new opportunities for thinking about administrative work? How do these stories include and exclude, liberate and oppress? The weight of these questions, and the implications of their answers for the future of the field, calls us to interrogate the narratives that have shaped our WPA community by critically examining how they are told, why they are told, and how and why they might be told differently. To that end, we offer a discussion of the different ways in which WPAs tell their stories with an eye toward understanding what these stories say about this community, our notions of our community’s history, and the possibilities for its future.
A Spectrum of WPA Stories (or Beyond “The Promise and the Peril”)
The available WPA narratives seem to fall within a spectrum that places the victor’s story of success on one side (White, “Use It”) and the victim’s tale of suffering on the other (Bishop and Crossley, “How to Tell”; Bloom, “I Want”). These two poles offer very few avenues by which GenAdmin can enter into WPA discourse and claim authenticity: if we are successful WPAs, it is because we know how to read people and institutions and use the power we have. If we fail, it is because the system has in some way failed us. The extremes these two story types represent—the superabundance of power on the one hand and the lack of agency on the other—do not serve our visions of ourselves, and we’re not sure they serve WPAs as agents in the twenty-first century, in part because they are so extreme.2 Like other historians and theorists of rhetoric, we understand that what gives agency can also threaten it; that is, whatever is resource is also restraint (Campbell), and what some see as opportunity can be seen by others as impediment. Thus, examining the narratives we have inherited may help us to realize what aspects of WPA work and identity
