LITMIR.BIZ

      Prelude

      On Location

      Somewhere in the swirl of life, each of us ponders three essential questions: “Who am I?” “Where am I?” and “What am I supposed to do?” We often consider the first question in isolation, as if it were the true key to our existence—as if the matter of who we are could be resolved independently of the two remaining questions. But all three of these questions must be answered in consort, as together they articulate the totality of the human condition. We do different things with varying degrees of understanding and purpose. We are born, live, feel, think, act, move, settle, and die. Questions of our existence and action are separable neither from each other nor from place—but it is place that we have most often ignored.

      —Robert L. Thayer, Jr.

      Robert Thayer’s insight is an appropriate opening to this book because his questions are also our questions and because his questions prompt another: Where to begin in defining this project? The idea of GenAdmin—a group or generation of writing program administrators whose graduate careers prepared them to do WPA work in some form, who came to see administration as a core component of their professional and intellectual identities, and who pursued or accepted administrative roles before tenure to satisfy personal or professional needs—emerged for each of us as we experienced substantially different lives, interests, and courses of study. But any portrait of an artist or collective, specifically with writing program administration as a subject, calls for a frame, no matter how untethered its edges may seem. And so, we offer one of place—or, perhaps more accurately, we offer a frame constructed of locations, meta-narratives, memories of places where the book began for each of us, where the questions and desires that led to the book began to solidify.

      In Memories of Emerging Identities: Jonikka’s first national conference presentation was in July 2002 at the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) conference in Park City, Utah. She was on a panel with Shirley K Rose, her WPA mentor, and they were making the case for the professionalization, specifically the intellectual preparation, of future WPAs. It was the first time Jonikka articulated the idea that she felt somehow different because she had chosen writing program administration, not only in terms of the various roles and responsibilities that come with a WPA position, but also in terms of embracing WPA as her emerging professional identity.

      As the years passed, she took several writing program administration seminars, and, in other courses, wrote papers with a WPA perspective, all of which culminated in her dissertation, in which she began to articulate what it might mean to think of the WPA as an updated version of Quintilian’s vir bonus. While she has moved in and out of WPA positions ever since, she has maintained her WPA identity through a preoccupation with theorizing that identity—for herself and for others, specifically thinking about what marks writing program administration expertise and how one can learn to think and act from a WPA perspective.

      One of her clearest memories of stepping into her new role as a WPA scholar is when Marty Townsend approached her at the end of that 2002 conference presentation and said something to the effect of, “You know, I chose WPA work, too. If you ever want to write about that, let me know.” That moment validated Jonikka’s experience and thinking and gave her the encouragement she needed to pursue her questions of WPA identity: What difference does it make when we choose WPA work? How might that one factor change the ways we do our work and the ways others see our work? And what happens when more and more of us begin to choose writing program administration as the focus of our scholarly identity? Over time, Jonikka saw in Amy, Tarez, Kate, and Colin a desire to ask similar questions, all borne of a hope to do meaningful work in often cynical places. Part of what brings us together is a conviction that WPAs can do ethical work, can entertain vital ideas, and can promote change without letting fear overwhelm them. The book emerged for Jonikka from that desire to theorize what makes us able to think, believe, and act as we do.

      In Memories of Thinking Together: Between 2002 and 2007, Tarez had collaborated with Jonikka and Colin on one project, and with Kate on one or two others. She had also worked with Amy on course projects during their PhD program. In that five-year span, each of them had already been thinking, together and apart, about mentoring, pedagogy, and the discipline, and this thinking had been sustained and challenged by institutional challenges such as job relocations, institutional resistance, and curriculum upheaval. What these solo and collaborative projects held in common for Tarez was evidence of a willingness and an aptitude to write from different sites or approaches to administrative work—i.e., to problematize the expert, to theorize the feminist/pragmatic, to rethink the gaze on graduate student WPAs (gWPAs). But these collaborations also signaled transformative and reciprocal experiences for Tarez, and they signaled the reasons why she first became interested in WPA work.

      Early on in her tenure-track job, Tarez realized how difficult such collaborations were to come by, how rare they were to achieve, and how much they needed to be nurtured and maintained over time. She also realized that transformative collaboration would probably always define her role as both a WPA and a rhetoric and composition practitioner. For her, this project emerged from a desire to engage each other in a larger

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