while postmodernism “aptly characterizes the world in which WPAs must function every day” (2). Their collection considers how postmodern actions, like challenging hierarchies or resisting master narratives (Handa and McGee 2), play out in the context of writing program administration to determine how WPAs and their programs can move from discord to direction. McGee and Handa’s position is a thread that informs our entire collection, for in arguing that WPA work, and GenAdmin in particular, is a becoming, we negotiate the theoretical tensions between what we want for our programs and the environment in which our programs exist.
Current WPA research adds to this rich body of work that has established writing program administration as a theory-based discipline in its own right by exploring the ways that WPAs enact their identities, problematize their work and role as administrators, and chart new paths toward pragmatic, ethical program leadership. In The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers, Linda Adler-Kassner identifies the need for WPAs to link ideas with strategies to reframe the predominantly negative stories about writing and writing instruction that circulate publicly, drawing largely on principles and practices related to grassroots organizing. Moreover, Adler-Kassner cites tikkun olam, a Jewish practice of “healing and restoring the world,” and prophetic pragmatism as motives and means that guide her activism as a WPA (169). Like Adler-Kassner, studying identities and ethics motivates and grounds our own work, although we focus more closely on academic WPA communities because we also see a need for activism and reform within these contexts. We value Adler-Kassner’s call to shift frames, a move we also make, though our focus is more often on changing the stories WPAs tell about themselves.
A reading of the essays in Theresa Enos and Shane Borrowman’s The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration causes us to reconsider the belief that writing program administration is a discipline built on solid ground. This collection offers survey data about WPAs and their living/working conditions and situates WPAs as caught between tensions related to a disrespect of our disciplinarity and jobs that entail large responsibilities but little authority, largely because of the number of untenured WPAs. An important argument Skeffington, Borrowman, and Enos make is that writing program administrators need to extend their understanding of the legitimacy of writing program administration beyond their sphere or work: “we have convinced ourselves that writing program administration is legitimate, important, and theoretical work. We now need to convince faculty members in our departments, colleges, and across campus” (“Living” 19). The tensions that WPAs negotiate, they argue, are often the source of much peril, but also create the possibility for much promise. Debra Frank Dew and Alice Horning’s recent collection, Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics, more fully explores the ethics and politics of jWPA positions, a discussion close to our hearts and minds as we all hold or have held WPA positions as graduate students and as pre-tenure faculty. This collection begins to re-landscape writing program administration in significant ways, and our work responds to their concerns, for we go further to disrupt accepted WPA narratives and frameworks that claim that jWPAs should not ever take on WPA jobs, a stance that the five of us find to be practically untenable and philosophically limiting given the many complications related to job choice.
Virginia Anderson and Susan Romano’s collection, Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric and Composition, turns a critical lens on the position of WPA by examining how the decisions WPAs make and the philosophies they enact as WPAs, combined with the changing issues of disciplinarity and professionalization happening in the field, challenge rhetoric and composition graduates’ identity development, practices, and beliefs about graduate student preparation. As a whole, the book critiques “luck-of-the-draw, true-grit” professional narratives in favor of rhetorical understanding (2). In their introduction, Anderson and Romano characterize the essays in this collection as “ask[ing] implicitly and explicitly for preparation in rhetorica utens, in the arts of deploying disciplinary knowledge and the skills of establishing relationships and ethos, from programs that have listened to and acted on news from the field” (3). We likewise use critique to construct new thinking about our profession. In this book, we build not only on “news from the field” to develop our arguments, but also on our collective (though disparate) experiences as WPAs in order to establish GenAdmin as an identity that includes, among other things, rhetorica utens and the notion that taking on shifting identities rather than seeking a fixed positioning is not only strategic (Anderson and Romano 3) but also a part of how we understand and experience identity.
In Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White’s two edited collections on twenty-first century WPA identities—Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change and Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future—the various chapters complicate a new WPA role and WPA work in the market-driven university by revitalizing their convergences with and their divergences from composition studies on issues like disciplinary origins, epistemology, and methodology. Framed around questions explored at an October 1993 conference by the same name, the first volume focuses on crisis and change by anticipating the kinds of practical and theoretical re-definitions that WPAs will need to make, not only to understand and teach the discipline but also to identify stakeholders in the discipline and what that identification means, to rethink assessment, to ask questions about politics, to understand and enact activism, and to consider how research will affect teaching. The second volume, shaped very much by the shadow of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, offers multiple readings of composition’s past in order to compose arguments for the future. In these collections, the editors and their contributors were as focused on an historical moment as we are now.
We build on the promises of texts like these because doing so yields a more complex understanding of WPA identity and disciplinarity. Most recently, Donna Strickland and Jeanne Gunner’s The Writing Program Interrupted: Making Space for Critical Discourse examines where WPAs have been, where they are, and where they are going in their abilities to critique the cultures, discourses, and subjectivities that ensue, reminding us again of the critical urgency to locate the WPA among vital and current theoretical dilemmas. Where previous work helped WPAs to see and rely on “admin” as a position, GenAdmin views administration as an orientation towards creating new conditions and, hence, for choosing the work. Rather than replace “admin” in our work, we hope to define it more robustly.
These texts, and any number of articles from the pages of our journals, especially WPA: Writing Program Administration, have been instrumental in the development of writing program administration as theory, as practice, as scholarly pursuit. Although these are not the only texts that have influenced the disciplinary emergence of writing program administration or our own beliefs as WPAs, we cannot underscore enough their importance in establishing writing program administration as a scholarly discipline in creating a body of texts, establishing research methods (narration, theorizing, reflecting, studying local practices and programs to offer useful generalizations), and in imparting means of constructing and revising programs rhetorically and thoughtfully.
Changing Perceptions About Administration
Our intent is not to talk back or aggressively reject criticisms that are directed towards our perceptions of WPA work, mainly because these are no longer the only speech acts that have shaped our thinking, but also because we are well aware of the diversity of our mentoring and training—that where we are is a direct result of the committed and longstanding work of many people in writing program administration specifically and in rhetoric and composition more broadly. As GenAdmin, we position ourselves within the dimensions of a broader evolving WPA identity that has been shaping the field since Donald Bushman’s recasting of the WPA as humanist intellectual in “The WPA as Pragmatist: Recasting ‘Service’ as ‘Human Science,’” including the WPA as activist, scholar, and change agent. Although in Chapter 4 we discuss the inefficacy of laying claim to metaphors, we realize that the evolving WPA role has been critical to our identity study. Furthermore, we invite extra-academic connections, again because of how related roles have challenged stable definitions of WPA work.
To clarify, this book is not a statement
