GenAdmin - Colin Charlton Writing Program Adminstration

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or imperialize), we disrupt and make more fluid these boundaries as spaces and places to move towards as we chart out new epistemologies for our work.4

      Even in our theorization of GenAdmin as a disciplinary identity, we aim to reasonably disrupt the various histories that GenAdmin inherits as well as to consider how such an identifier challenges (or stretches or expands) “disciplinary” history. Like Royster, the larger point we make is that when you shift rhetorical subjects and challenge perceptions, you can reform disciplinary histories beyond geographic and historical scope (“Disciplinary” 152) towards a more nuanced recovery of both self and history. But unlike Royster, we do not strive for self-and-historical recovery as much as we provoke what have traditionally been seen as stringent theoretical (and historical) divisions that limit perceptions of our work. In other words, rather than unsettling past narratives of WPA work so as to more accurately say what GenAdmin is, we strive to enact what GenAdmin does, and to redefine the terms of this en/action in the process.

      This move in turn puts a compelling question to our book: What are our explicit interventions in WPA’s theory and history if we do not wish to re-landscape, correct, or totalize in return? What does it mean for us and for GenAdmin to “theoretically disrupt”? In her article “Sp(l)itting Images,” Karen Kopelson poses a similar question, asking readers that if theory need not be applicable, if it need not be justified as a mode of inquiry, and if in fact there is no real need to overcome the theory/practice split (or what she calls the “use/do” divide) (764), then what are requisite roles for praxis in rhetoric and composition? While practice need not be consciously informed by theory, praxis, or “action driven by and resulting from theory” (Kopelson 764), it necessitates a more urgent recognition of a theory/praxis split, since practice is an “explicitly theorized, politicized intervention” (Kopelson 764). To make this new errand explicit, Kopelson argues for a redefinition of “terms such as action, intervention, service, and use” (765), a movement that aligns with how we see GenAdmin praxis being taken up.

      Although we may be less concerned than Kopelson’s subjects that our discipline will be seen as a user-doer-producer for others, rather than as a producer of our own knowledge field, we do benefit from Kopelson’s characterization in five dimensions of what she calls a “living rhetoric and composition” (775). We extend these five dimensions towards GenAdmin to consider the tenets that make GenAdmin a living philosophy and that differentiate it from other theoretical subject positions. First, a living philosophy aligns action, intervention, service, and use with politicized intervention rather than with group identification. Second, it links identity to becoming rather than to stability, where participants may be defined less by the spaces they occupy than by how they move between and among them. Third, it is productive—it makes itself, feeds on itself, could itself be seen as a field rather than as in servitude to some other field. Fourth, it relies on both the study of and deployment of language uses, in turn acknowledging the significant role of discourse in its enactments. Finally, it offers a spaciousness around which “an array of disciplinary inquiries and pursuits might best coalesce” (Kopelson 772), including those concerned with ethics and change.

      At the heart of a living philosophy we see an illumination and enactment of principles that can themselves carry meaning as useful abstractions, and a flexibility to imagine and respect other people’s truths even as we pursue alternatives. Thus, we do not posit that none of the difficulties raised by our critics is unprecedented or real. However, we do argue that these difficulties create vital gaps in WPA theorizing that push us to reject helpless notions of power for more helpful notions of disciplinarity and agency. They also push us to embrace the non-universality of our experiences without arriving at an unproductive, unpragmatic, relativistic set of principles from which to practice.

      Even still, this philosophy has its limitations. It need not stand in for perfect understanding, perfect rhetorical persuasion, or universally accepted principles of program management—hallmarks of the analytic philosophical tradition rather than a more feminist epistemology that privileges context and subjectivity. It may be a universal enough assumption to acknowledge (by now) that our lives would be easier in some ways if we were not WPAs. However, an overarching value of GenAdmin for us isn’t finding ways to make things easier day to day, but rather making ways to build the discipline by negotiating daily realities in the enactment of rhetoric and writing, whether or not those realities directly pertain to the construction and maintenance of a college writing program. In an attempt at re-orientation and enactment, we have arranged this book around six chapters that both describe and argue for an administrative philosophy embodied in a new generation of writing program administrators by addressing interrelated questions about WPA identities and actions. Both the conflation of rhetoric and composition with writing program administration, and the positioning of them as subsets of English studies are, we think, serious problems; as much as possible, the reader will find that our philosophy elides either conflation or subjugation in favor of other positionings, as we use narrative, reflection, and theorizing to study WPA identities and provide examples of how this theorizing impacts the work that we do.

      In so doing, the five of us assign new meaning to the narratives we inherit to articulate our understanding of WPA work within the context of new identities and experiential realities in order to build new knowledge about WPA identities and work. This book follows discussions of how we, as writing program administrators, and as teachers, scholars, spouses, parents, gamers, painters, foodies, hikers, yogis, crafters, birdwatchers, and more explore such questions as, Who do we think we are?, How do we conduct our work?, and What difference can that make? Because those discussions involved tracking our movement between past, present, and future locations and our positioning in those locations, each chapter in this book represents one of these locations or positionings, even as it articulates how a GenAdmin philosophy repositions us.

      In organizing the book, we found no perfect ordering to the chapters, as each chapter is a bit of a microcosm of what was, is, and can/should be. Even so, the order of our chapters is best described as a movement from past to future in terms of how GenAdmin relates to the domain of writing program administration. In Chapter 2, we illustrate the ways in which GenAdmin both inherit and challenge the conventional history of WPAs and their work by problematizing the perception of WPAs who take the job before tenure through a historical re-interpretation of WPA beliefs. We respond to and reframe the negative victim narratives that have shaped the field of WPA studies so consistently. We discuss how history and disciplinary memory influence writing program identities and work, for all program participants and stakeholders, and we begin to address the question of why this philosophical practice is sustainable day to day.

      In Chapter 3, we consider how GenAdmin is prepared for its work, focusing specifically on what WPA education looks like now and what it might look like in the future. We discuss the fear of professionalization grounded in a limiting suspicion of managerial specialization, the processes by which we studied or trained to become WPAs, and a possible future for disciplinary professionalization. We also consider what it means to be marked by multiplicinarity and the possibilities that WPA education affords our various roles.

      In Chapter 4, we discuss various iterations and implications of seeing ourselves as people in the process of becoming WPAs, and how withholding fixed identification affects theorizing, collaboration, training, and the value of expertise. This chapter performs a detotalizing of certain binaries, especially labels like s/j/gWPA, which we eschew for their association with tasks and preset identifiers. In disrupting staid and hierarchical notions of expertise, we better realize that the contexts in which those hierarchical relationships first emerged have changed and are changing. The same structures aren’t in place to support this kind of master/learner relationship; thus the relationships are being reconfigured.

      In Chapter 5, we consider another turn in WPA theorizing by presenting GenAdmin discourse as inherently rhetorical and pragmatic (which we in turn understand as temporal, contextual, and shifting). This chapter explicates what we have come to understand as the arts of discursive participation, focusing on redefinitions of pragmatic activism, civic discourse, and communicative ideology as essential components of how we further our work. GenAdmin discourse occurs at the intersection of three areas: feminist rereadings of classical American pragmatism, rhetorical theory, and discourse studies. At this intersection, we find new models for enacting a discursive power—rather

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