This page lists links to information about CWPA Executive Board elections and other matters on which CWPA members vote.
This information that follows is for the 2006 election Council of Writing Program Administrators 2006 Election of Executive Board Members
Please vote to fill three positions on the WPA Executive Board. Board members’ terms will begin July 1, 2006 and end June 30, 2009. Please read the following information about the Executive Board candidates: Eli Goldblatt, Rita Malenczyk, Carol Rutz, Tom Reynolds, Joe Marshall Hardin, and Jeff Rice.
Continuing Executive Board members are: Chris Anson (Past President), Shirley Rose (President), Joe Janangelo (Vice President), John Tassoni (Secretary pro tem), John Heyda (Treasurer), Marty Patton, Rebecca Moore Howard, Dominic Delli Carpini, Carrie Leverenz, Steve Wilhoit, Susan Miller-Cochran, Deborah Holdstein (ex officio, Consultant Evaluator Service), Greg Glau, Barry Maid, and Duane Roen (ex officio, co-editors of WPA Journal), and David Blakesley (ex officio, Digital WPA).
Please vote for one candidate in each pairing for each of the three vacant positions on the Executive Board. You will receive a separate email with information on how to cast your vote electronically. Please cast your vote by Friday, February 24, 2006.
Board Member #1 Vote for one: Eli Goldblatt or Rita Malenczyk
ELI GOLDBLATT is Associate Professor of English and University Writing Director at Temple University. He is both a compositionist and a poet. His book ‘Round My Way: Authority and Double-Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (U of Pittsburgh P, 1995) draws on his six years of high school teaching in urban Philadelphia. His article on Saul Alinsky and community/university literacy partnerships won the 2005 Ohmann award, and other essays have appeared in College English, CCC, Linguistics and Education, Writing on the Edge, and the Journal of Peace & Justice Studies. His poems have appeared in journals such as Ixnay, Another Chicago Magazine, Hambone, Louisiana Literature, Hubbub and 6ix, and his book-length collections include Sessions 1-62 (Chax P, 1991), Speech Acts (Chax P, 1999), and Without a Trace (Singing Horse P, 2001). He has also published two children’s books and a verse play.
Statement: “Universities are changing rapidly as employers, knowledge producers and preservers, licensing agents. As WPA’s, we are deeply involved with (or implicated in) these changes. I want to strengthen our resolve to fight for justice in employment for adjunct and graduate composition instructors. I also believe we must articulate a new vision of WAC that will guide writing programs as they go beyond the curriculum: K-16 connections, community-based learning, writing for the workplace, and action research off the campus. I hope to help in an effort to expand the active membership of WPA and encourage the growth of regional affiliates.â€
RITA MALENCZYK has been Director of the University Writing Program at Eastern Connecticut State University since 1994. As WPA at ECSU, she oversees the first-year writing and WAC programs, works on helping her colleagues in all disciplines develop sound strategies for teaching and assessing writing, and is currently chairing a committee working on developing communication-across-the-curriculum outcomes for ECSU’s new general education requirements. For the last year she has chaired the CCCC Committee on Academic Quality, which works to research and publicize successful efforts to improve the conditions under which writing is taught and learned. She presents regularly at CCCC and WPA, has served as a discussion leader and program committee member for the WPA conference, and was a member of the Steering Committee for the group that developed the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the journal WPA: Writing Program Administration. Her scholarly work, which is focused primarily on the rhetoric and politics of writing program administration, has appeared in that journal and in edited collections; with Susanmarie Harrington, Keith Rhodes and Ruth Overman Fischer, she co-edited The Outcomes Book (Utah State University Press, 2005).
Statement: “WPA is the professional organization I feel most committed to; having already served it in a number of capacities, I would very much like the opportunity to serve it as an Executive Board member. In addition to doing all the things Board members normally do—serving on standing committees, attending meetings, advising the officers—I would like to work with other relevant organizations such as the CCCC Committee on Academic Quality to help WPAs improve the conditions under which writing is taught. The Chattanooga conference will publicize successful efforts to convert temporary part-time lines to permanent full-time ones with better salary and benefits; how can we help all WPAs build on these local successes to better the learning conditions of our students?â€
Board Member #2 Vote for one: Carol Rutz or Tom Reynolds
CAROL RUTZ has served since 1997 as Director of the College Writing Program and adjunct lecturer in English at Carleton College. She teaches undergraduate writing seminars, often linked with a history course, and she also collaborates with an astrophysicist to teach “Writing Science.†Much of her work concerns faculty development and writing assessment in the context of WAC. Rutz presents regularly at CCCC, WAC, and WPA (including co-leading the Assessment Institute on Portfolio Assessment in 2003), and has also presented at AAHE, AAC&U, MLA, MMLA, NCTE, and RSA. Recent publications include an article co-written with Jacqulyn Lauer-Glebov in Assessing Writing (2005), “Assessment and innovation: One darn thing leads to another,†and a collection co-edited with Ed Nagelhout that theorizes the composition classroom in space and time: Classroom Spaces and Writing Instruction (Hampton, 2004). Other publications are pending, including a chapter on delivery of composition in the liberal arts college, forthcoming in a collection edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey. Carol Rutz is the current secretary of CCCC, and she serves as a reviewer for CCC, Writing Program Administration, and WAC Journal.
Statement: “As a professional organization, WPA has the strength of numbers combined with the agility of a lean, efficient administration. Given the work its members do, it should come as no surprise that WPA’s signature qualities are reflected in the effectiveness of the Executive Board in recent years. I see the continued promise of WPA in the domain of genuine leadership in higher education. As secretary of CCCC, I have participated in deliberations about responses to national conversations on writing instruction and assessment that impinge directly on our work. Consequently, I am convinced that it is up to us to anticipate critique and to advocate for best practices. If elected to the Executive Board, I will argue for increased attention to assessment, curriculum, and faculty working conditions—all with the primary focus on student learning. Our public identity must match and endorse our private, classroom-based goals as teachers of writing and administrators of writing programs.â€
TOM REYNOLDS is associate professor of writing at the University of Minnesota. He has co-directed and taught basic writing in the University of Minnesota's General College writing program since 1995. He has also served on the Center for Basic Writing's Executive Board, and was co-chair of that organization from 2001-2004. In addition, he co-edited BWe, an online journal devoted to the study and teaching of basic writing. Statement: “I'd like to serve WPA because of the organization's ability to influence those for whom writing instruction is more than a matter of just scheduling and teaching writing classes. I'm interested in how WPA carries awareness of writing programs as progressive, well-informed proponents of effective literacy instruction into academic and public forums. I'm also interested in serving WPA because of its support for writing instruction at the heart of college learning, on a par with any other subject in the curriculum. I have often drawn on WPA statements and policies, as well as the support of valued national colleagues, when working for the best possible writing instruction on my campus and in the local community.â€
Board Member #3 Vote for one: Joe Marshall Hardin or Jeff Rice
JOE MARSHALL HARDIN is currently Composition Director at Western Kentucky University and was formerly Director of Writing at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. His major activities as Composition Director for Western Kentucky University (2004-present) and as Director of Writing for Northwestern State University (1999-2004) have included designing the handbook for teachers of all writing courses at both universities and designing the composition websites. At both schools, he participated in hiring, supervising, and evaluating adjuncts, teaching assistants, and office staff. He scheduled classes; reviewed, selected and ordered texts; and conducted orientation sessions for teachers. As the head of writing committees at both universities, he designed, wrote grants, planned, administered, and evaluated the departmental assessment of writing courses. He has also led colloquia for faculty on evaluation, assessment, and best practices. Day-to-day activities included the general support of teachers in writing and handling of student and teacher and student problems and complaints. He also evaluates CLEP exams for the general education courses. At Western and at Northwestern State, he aided in the design of new computer environments for the departments.
Statement: “Increasingly, the Council of Writing Program Administrators finds itself in a leadership role in the discipline, through the popularity of its listserv, the research and publication of its members, its representation at CCCC and MLA, the prominence of its program evaluation service, and the hard work of its members to represent the discipline on national and local committees and through public outreach. As composition comes under increased scrutiny through academic and public interest in such subjects as literacy, standardization of language and language conventions, plagiarism and copyright issues, and testing, it is imperative that qualified and experienced writing program administrators continue to address these issues and to speak out at disciplinary and public forums. This is a project I feel called to participate in, and I hope that through the WPA executive board, I may contribute to the leadership role the writing program administrators can take on these issues.â€
JEFF RICE was Assistant Professor of English and the WPA at the University of Detroit Mercy from 2002-2004. Since 2004, he has been Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University where he teaches the graduate practicum in writing for new GTAs, graduate courses in composition theory and digital theory, and undergraduate courses in writing. His research has appeared in several journals and book collections. His textbook Writing About Cool was published by Longman Publishers. He recently completed a book manuscript on writing and new media entitled The Rhetoric of Cool: A Theory of Writing and New Media.
Statement: “My interests are in working with WPAs to think about the role technology plays in writing instruction (explicitly and implicitly) and how WPA work can better work with technology in ways that don't overburden already heavy workloads, but instead complement and improve the work already being done. Some of this work involves rethinking practices; some of it involves learning new skills for new types of instructional settings.â€
WPA is holding elections for three Executive Board members and for a Vice-President. We will be saying thank you and goodbye to Executive Board members Rebecca Moore Howard, Martha Patton, and Susan Miller-Cochran, whose terms end in June 2007. The Executive Board oversees WPA's events and activities, creates policies and procedures for its management, and engages in special projects and initiatives. The new Board members will serve for three years, with terms beginning in July of 2007. Nominees for Vice-President make a six-year commitment to WPA, first serving as vice-president for two years, as president for the next two years, and as immediate past president for a final two years.
On February 13, 2007, current members of the Council of Writing Program Administrators will receive a separate email with information on how to cast their votes electronically. Please cast your vote by Monday, February 26, 2007.
For instructions on checking your membership status: http://wpacouncil.org/membership
Candidates' statements follow...
LINDA ADLER-KASSNER is Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at Eastern Michigan University, a position she has held for seven years; she has also been a writing center director and director of graduate instructors. At EMU, she directs a large and robust writing program that was honored with a CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence in 2005. Her previous positions as a writing center director, a full-time lecturer and a graduate instructor have allowed her to experience the profession from a number of different vantage points.
Linda's research, like her teaching and work with the EMU First Year Writing Program, begins with questions about teaching and advocacy: How is literacy defined in particular contexts? Whose interests are represented, whose not, from these definitions? In the last five years, her work has focused on considering these questions in the public sphere, especially in media coverage of and policy reports about writers and writing, and developing strategies for WPAs and writing instructors to advocate for their views with audiences outside the writing program. She is currently completing a book on the subject, Activist Writing Program Administration: Changing Stories. She has authored and co-authored articles and book chapters about various aspects of writing program administration published in WPA Journal, The Outcomes Book, and elsewhere. She also has published extensively in the area of basic writing, often with co-author Susanmarie Harrington. Together, they authored Basic Writing as a Political Act: Public Conversations about Writing and Literacy (Hampton, 2002) and numerous articles, including the forthcoming The Public Work of Basic Writing in Journal of Basic Writing's 25th anniversary issue. Additionally, she has published articles in CCC, College English, English Education, and other journals, and she is on the editorial board of WPA Journal and Journal of Basic Writing.
As an executive board member on the Council of Writing Program Administrators, Linda was a co-author of the WPA Statement Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices and chair of the WPA Media Committee. With that group, she collaborated with others to conceive and develop the WPA Network for Media Action, which she continues to help coordinate. WPA-NMA (wpacouncil.org/nma) provides talking/writing points and writing tips for writing instructors and WPAs who want to communicate with mainstream media on issues relevant to writing instructors, such as plagiarism, 'grammar,' and machine scoring of writing.
Statement: What does it mean to teach writing? Who gets to respond to the question? What stories do WPAs want to tell about what teaching writing means? What stories does the Council of Writing Program Administrators want to tell? What stories--about teaching writing, about learning writing, about students and teachers--do others tell?
Stories about writing programs -- what they are, what is taught in their names, and who does that teaching -- are powerful. They shape the ways our work is understood and represented by WPAs and by people outside of our programs, departments, and institutions. A Test of Leadership, the report from the Spellings Commission on Higher Education, is but one of a spate of recent narratives that have the potential to fundamentally change the work of college faculty, especially WPAs and writing instructors.
As a CWPA executive board member, I learned first-hand the power of the expert knowledge that CWPA brings to discussions about writing instruction. As a coordinator of the WPA Network for Media Action, I've also seen the passion and desire that WPAs and writing instructors bring to these discussions. When we get involved in these discussions we can make a difference -- inside and outside of our programs.
At the same time, I understand that that when WPAs become involved in work that lies outside of the traditional boundaries of faculty reward structures, there can be (sometimes unanticipated) consequences. One possible contribution that CWPA can make to this dilemma is to help frame the public work of program administration, including work that involves communicating about the profession to those outside of it, as part of our intellectual endeavor.
As CWPA Vice-President, I would continue to work with the entire organization to make sure that our stories -- those of WPA as an organization, those of WPAs and writing instructors at institutions of all types -- are represented. This work involves building on CWPA's already-strong foundation to:
*encourage research that investigates best practices in writing program administration and instruction, and publicize the results of that research widely;
*help people outside of our profession understand how and why our work is (or can be) effective by speaking about our research and our commitments;
*continue efforts to expand WPA's membership base and ensure that CWPA speaks with and includes a broad constituency of 2- and 4-year instructors and administrators.
At the same time, I would work to ensure that the CWPA plays four important roles in gathering and promoting WPA's and writing instructors' stories about writing and writers:
*organizing writing instructors at all levels by learning about their stories, their interests, and their concerns;
*developing leaders to help promote those stories and address concerns;
*identifying local/national issues where CWPA members' expertise can shape and frame the conversation; and
*planning action to influence the discussion of writing and writers at the college level.
CWPA is an organization that brings together some of the most passionate and committed instructors in our field. As an organization it is nimble, flexible, and proactive. As Vice President and, later, as President, I would work to continue putting our passions and our abilities to important uses.
MARTY TOWNSEND was hired as Director of the University of Missouri's Campus Writing Program (fresh out of Arizona State University with a new PhD) in 1991, a position she held until just last summer. She is a Fellow of the Bryn Mawr Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration and a former literacy consultant for The Ford Foundation. Having earned tenure and promotion while serving as WPA--and, in part, for her work as WPA--she is now just an associate professor directing graduate studies in MU's English Department. Her professional interests focus on WAC/WID program development and assessment in the U.S. and abroad. As Campus Writing Program (CWP) director, Marty taught first-year composition, the department's capstone course, graduate seminars in composition and WAC/WID, and faculty seminars for writing-intensive instructors. Townsend presents regularly at CCCC, WPA, and WAC conferences and has consulted on writing for over seventy colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad, including China, Romania, Thailand, South Korea, and Costa Rica.
Along with CWP colleagues Marty Patton and Jo Ann Vogt, Townsend hosted the 2004 National WAC Conference in St. Louis, the first with an international focus. Because of the positive reception, the conference was subsequently renamed the International WAC Conference. Also in 2004, CWP was recognized with one of CCCC's first Writing Program Certificates of Excellence. Marty previously served on the WPA Executive Board and currently serves on the WPA Editorial Board and the WAC Board of Consultants. She has twice been co-leader of WPA's summer workshops. Marty is the subject of a recent WAC Journal interview, A Different Kind of Pioneer, in which author Carol Rutz notes that CWP is among the largest and sturdiest examples of WAC. CWP's example is reflected in MU's citation for Writing in the Disciplines in U.S. News & World Report's America's Best Colleges every year that WID has been featured. Townsend's most recent publication, co-authored with MU sociologist Edward Brent, is "Automated Essay Grading in the Sociology Classroom" in Ericsson and Haswell's Machine Scoring of Student Essays (Utah State UP, 2006). Her chapter "Negotiating the Risks and Reaping the Rewards" is forthcoming in Dew and Frank's Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators (Parlor Press, 2007).
Statement : For over two decades, I've been learning from WPA's collective membership, first as a graduate student, then as a writing program administrator myself, via the organization's pre-conference workshops at CCCC, summer conferences and workshops, Consultant/Evaluator Service, journal, newsletters, website, and other events. Serving as an executive officer would be a privilege--and an opportunity to repay a portion of the organization's fundamental contributions to my career.
National trends in higher education suggest that the stakes for our field are higher than ever. Virtually all aspects of college writing--programs, curricula, funding, assessment, technologies, hiring practices--are impacted by an array of forces both within and outside our control. It is incumbent on WPA to keep our membership apprised of new developments and to offer support to the best of our organizational ability. I'd like to work with WPA's leadership on a range of issues including:
I don't claim to have answers for the myriad issues that writing program administrators face, but I do know that I'm energized daily by the camaraderie and good will of the people in our field and by the desire we have to do our jobs well. I'd welcome applying that energy to this leadership role in our organization.
*Board Member #1: Vote for One of These Two Candidates
ELI GOLDBLATT is Associate Professor of English and Director of First Year Writing at Temple University. He is both a compositionist and a poet. His forthcoming book is Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy beyond the College Curriculum (Hampton P). His book 'Round My Way: Authority and Double-Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (U of Pittsburgh P, 1995) draws on his six years of high school teaching in urban Philadelphia. His article on Saul Alinsky and community/university literacy partnerships won the 2005 Ohmann award, and other essays have appeared in College English, CCC, Linguistics and Education, Writing on the Edge, and the Journal of Peace & Justice Studies. His poems have appeared in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Ixnay, Another Chicago Magazine, Hambone, Louisiana Literature, Hubbub and 6ix, and his book-length collections include Sessions 1-62 (Chax P, 1991), Speech Acts (Chax P, 1999), and Without a Trace (Singing Horse P, 2001). He has also
published two children's books and a verse play.
Statement: Universities are changing rapidly as employers, knowledge producers and preservers, and licensing agents. As WPA's, we are deeply involved with (or implicated in) these changes. I want to strengthen our resolve to fight for justice in employment for adjunct and graduate composition instructors. I also believe we must articulate a new vision of WAC that will guide writing programs as they go beyond the curriculum: K-16 connections, community-based learning, writing for the workplace, and action research off the campus. I hope to help in an effort to expand the active membership of WPA and encourage the growth of regional affiliates.
ALICE HORNING is Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics and Director of the Rhetoric Program at Oakland University. She provides leadership to a program that offers courses in first-year writing, upper-level courses that satisfy writing intensive requirements in General Education. The Rhetoric Program faculty have submitted a proposal for a major and minor in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, currently undergoing review. Her educational background and scholarly work focus on the cross-disciplinary nature of human literacy; her publications seek to explore the psychological and linguistic bases on which literacy rests. In addition, she has made use of research in applied linguistics to understand basic writers, revision processes and the teaching and learning of literacy. Her books have been published by Hampton Press, Parlor Press, Ablex and Southern Illinois University Press, and her articles have appeared in College English, JAC, The Reading Matrix and other journals, with work forthcoming in WPA. Her concern for untenured faculty serving as WPAs appears in a volume co-edited with Debra Dew called Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics (Parlor Press 2007).
Statement: I owe a tremendous debt to the WPA organization that I hope I can repay in small part by serving on the Executive Board. Nearly all of the positive changes I have been able to make in the Rhetoric Program at OU have come about, in one way or another, as a result of my membership in WPA, my participation in its workshops and conferences, and my reading of the listserv. I have been the founder and co-leader of the Michigan affiliate of WPA (with Roger Gilles), developed a Festival of Writing modeled on a great idea stolen from Linda Adler-Kassner, lowered class size in my program, and created a small pool of money for program enhancement and project support from a custom version of our program-wide handbook; all of these ideas have come through my interaction with WPA. I hope to bring my cross-disciplinary background and understanding of the psycholinguistics of reading and writing to bear on the work of the organization and to support all WPA enterprises that help students develop critical literacy urgently needed for their higher education and participation in democratic society.
Board Member #2: *Vote for One of These Two Candidates
JEFF ANDELORA has taught writing and literature for twenty-one years, the past eleven at Mesa Community College, located just outside of Phoenix. Prior to that he taught high school English for ten years. Jeff completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Arizona State University in 2005. His dissertation examined the impact of the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) on the professionalization of two-year college English faculty. He has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and has presented at CCCC, WPA, and TYCA West. Additionally, Jeff is a consulting reader for TETYC, has served on the 2006 James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation Award Committee, and serves on the CCCC Basic Data Task Force.
Statement: The Council of Writing Program Administrators has done remarkable work with four-year college and university writing programs; however, for a variety of reasons, the CWPA has had little success working with two-year colleges. The primary reason for this, I believe, is that two-year college English departments rarely have a WPA, so they don't readily see the relevance of the CWPA. Instead of a WPA, the duties of overseeing first-year composition in two-year colleges typically fall to an already overburdened department chair, leaving little time to coordinate the challenges of student placement, course outcomes, textbook selection, and program evaluation. In many two-year colleges, these tasks go on as they have for decades, without a coherent vision driving them. Given that half of America's college students take their composition courses at the more than 1200 two-year colleges, a stronger relationship between two-year colleges and the CWPA would benefit students, the colleges, and the organization.
If elected, I would help the CWPA work more deliberately with two-year colleges. The first step would be to forge an alliance with TYCA to examine the current state of writing programs in two-year colleges. Once we have a better understanding of how composition is administered at two-year colleges, we can develop strategies to help with some of the challenges they're facing. Some possibilities: I'd like to see members of the CWPA speak at TYCA's regional conferences about the work the CWPA is doing. I'd like us to devote a special issue of WPA to two-year college writing programs, and, as interest and membership grow, I'd like us to regularly solicit articles from two-year college faculty. I'd also encourage members of the CWPA and graduate students to view two-year college writing programs as important sites for research. In short, I'd like two-year college English departments to see the CWPA as an organization that is interested in and relevant to the work they're doing in two-year colleges, and I'd like to help in that effort.
MILES McCRIMMON is Professor of English at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, Virginia, where he has been teaching composition and literature for more than fifteen years. He served as English Department Chair from 1998-2001 and he is beginning a new three-year term in 2007. He currently holds the Chancellor's Commonwealth Professorship, a state-wide award for excellence in teaching and scholarship. He has published articles in Teaching English in the Two Year College (March 2005) and College English (November 2006) and has contributed pieces to a forthcoming NCTE collection, Creating the Teachable Moment (2007). He wrote the Instructor's Manuals for the first two editions of The World is a Text (2003 and 2006) and he is at work on a writing guide designed for first-year experience programs. He was Program Chair for the 38th TYCA-Southeast Annual Conference, served on the Regional Executive Committee of TYCA-SE from 2000-2002, and served as a Site Leader for a FIPSE Dissemination Grant from 2001-2004. His college service work has included co-directing the most recent self-study, coordinating dual enrollment offerings, writing and editing major federal grant proposals, serving as co-chair of his college's first-ever Major Gifts Campaign.
Statement : More than half of America's college students and more than half of all WPAs are at two-year institutions. As a former and returning WPA, I can represent this vast constituency and bring a valuable perspective to the board about the unique and dynamic relationships two-year colleges hold with senior institutions, the workforce, and K-12 education. Community colleges are contact zones (between disciplines, literacies, ethnicities, and levels of acculturation) where rich moments of generous and fruitful collaboration take place daily. Virtually every significant insight in my career has arisen when I stepped outside my comfort zone. My mission with WPA is to help to make these sorts of 'border crossings' a productive part of everyone's professional experience.
Board Member #3: Vote for One of These Two Candidates
BARBARA L'EPLATTENIER is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in historical studies, technical writing, theories of technical communication, grant writing, gender studies, and queer theory. She has been published in The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher: Inquiry in Action and Reflection, (editors Shirley K Rose and Bud Weiser); Calling Cards (editors Jackie Jones Royster and Ann Marie Simpkins); and the forthcoming Labor of Love, (editors Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohen). Her co-edited collection, Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline, published by Parlor Press, won the 2004-2005 Award for Best Book on Writing Program Administration.
Statement: I look to WPA as a model of administrative structure and professional organization development; WPA's strength is its ability to create standards and outcomes for a field as diverse and complex as college writing. I'm deeply interested in seeing WPA continue to develop its presence on a national level. WPA needs to continue pushing forward to gain the respect of university officials, elected officials, and others who criticize or have an impact on writing programs and writing projects. I would like to see WPA develop stronger public relations strategies, make more explicit connections with non-profit and advocacy groups vested in writing, promote and disseminate WPA research, and have a more prominent voice in national discussions about writing.
BARBARA GAAL LUTZ is assistant director of the University Writing Center at the University of Delaware and, with her colleagues, hosted the well-attended 2004 WPA Conference. Her administrative work at Delaware includes coordinating a writing program for developmental students which was run through the Writing Center; in addition, she teaches freshman composition courses, ESL composition classes, and honors composition courses through both the English department and Honors College. Currently she is in her second year of teaching a grant-funded advanced composition course she designed that links education majors with middle school students in an online tutoring environment. Lutz presents regularly at regional and national conferences, including IWCA, CCCC, and WPA. Her most recent published essay English as a Second Language: How Can We Help? was reprinted in Teaching Language and Literacy: Preschool through the Elementary Grades. Eds. James F. Christie, Billie Jean Enz, and Carol Vukelich. Boston: Pearson Education, 2007, 299-300.
Lutz brings twenty years of experience working with professional organizations: she served as co-president of Interstate Developmental Educators Association (IDEA) for five years, president of Mid Atlantic Writing Centers Association (MAWCA) for five years, and Executive Board member of Pennsylvania Writing Program Administrators (PWPA) for three years. In all, she organized or helped organize ten regional conferences, co-chaired two national conferences and served on several national committees for IWCA and WPA.
Statement: WPA continues to be a dynamic and critical voice in the field, one that assesses, addresses, and advocates best practices and policies within the educational community as well as the public sphere. Sustaining this high level of leadership requires commitment and strategic direction from its members and executive board to ensure that the organization remains unified in its goals. I believe that I can contribute to this mission in several areas: having learned English as a second language, and having designed and taught EFL composition courses for many years, I would advocate for the special needs of EFL students in both writing centers and composition classes; as a veteran writing center tutor and now an administrator, I would represent the needs and concerns of writing centers; and working in a continuing non-tenure track position, I would speak to the ongoing policy discussions concerning the use of adjunct and non-tenure track faculty in teaching and administration.
Overall, from twenty-five years of teaching experience and almost as many in board involvement, I have learned how people collaborate effectively in order to bring an organization's goals to fruition. I hope that the WPA membership will give me the opportunity to serve on the executive board as the organization confronts upcoming challenges in reaching its goals.
WPA is holding elections for three Executive Board members. We will say thank you and goodbye to Executive Board members Steve Wilhoit, Dominic Delli Carpini, and Carrie Leverenz, whose terms end in June 2008.
The Executive Board oversees WPA's events and activities, creates policies and procedures for its management, and engages in special projects and initiatives. The new Board members will serve for three years, with terms beginning in July of 2008 and ending in June 2011.
Continuing Executive Board members are Shirley Rose (Past President); Joe Janangelo (President); Linda Adler-Kassner (Vice President); Linda Bergmann (Secretary); Rick Johnson-Sheehan (Treasurer); Joe Marshall Hardin; Rita Malenczyk; Carol Rutz; Jeff Andelora; Eli Goldblatt; Barbara L'Eplattenier; Deborah Holdstein and Charles Schuster (ex-officio, Consultant Evaluator Service); Deirdre Pettipiece, Timothy Ray, and William McCauley (ex-officio, WPA Journal Editors); and Dave Blakesley (ex officio, Digital WPA).
Please vote for one candidate in each of the three pairings below .
Board member #1: Vote for Brian Huot or David Schwalm
BRIAN HUOT is in his fourth year as Writing Program Coordinator at Kent State University. Before his present WPA position, he had been Director of Composition and Writing Across the Curriculum Corrordinator at the University of Louisville as well as Writing Center Director at Lane College and the University of Northern Iowa. He is a long time member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and a three-time contributor to WPA: Writing Program Administration. He has published essays in College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition and other journals and collections devoted to the teaching and learning of writing at the postsecondary level. He is co-editor of four collections and author of the monograph (Re) Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning. He co-founded Assessing Writing and The Journal of Writing Assessment, which he continues to edit. He has been active in The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as a member and chair of the College Section and as a member of the executive committee from 2005-2007. He is currently a member of the WPA/NCTE Joint Ad Hoc Task Force on Assessment.
Statement: Current Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) live in interesting times. While college administrators and public policy makers heartily acknowledge the importance and centrality of a strong literacy education for all college students, many WPAs still administer under-funded programs that continue to exploit contingent faculty who often teach the majority of first-year courses (FYC), while these same WPAs face increasing demands for standardized accountability that ignores important educational goals and student outcomes. The Council of Writing Program Administrators has and continues to provide support for individual WPAs and the profession of WPAs to harness the potential and meet the challenges of these "interesting times." Projects like the WPA Network for Media Action and the Joint Ad Hoc Task Force on Assessment highlight the importance of basing WPA practice upon recognized and established principles in literacy learning that are the corner stones of recognized professional practice. While individual WPAs can have a difficult time making a case for better working conditions and contextualized forms of assessment (among other issues), I believe that the Council of WPAs allows these individuals and their concerns to be heard and listened to. I am honored to be considered for the executive board of this vital organization.
DAVID E. SCHWALM
Background and Statement: I would enjoy having the opportunity to serve as a member of the WPA executive committee, and I would bring to the position a wide range of relevant and useful experience as a faculty member, as a WPA, and as a college and university administrator. I was directly engaged in teaching writing and/or administering writing programs in various roles for the first 24 years of my professional life. I taught writing as an adjunct in colleges and community colleges in the Chicago area and subsequently as a full-time faculty member in the Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley and in English departments at Ohio State, UTEP, and Arizona State (Tempe). I started a National Writing Project site at UTEP, and this gave me a close-up view of the challenges faced by K-12 teachers. I was a WPA at both UTEP and at ASU for a total of about 8 years. Since 1992, I have been an academic vice provost first at ASU West and then at ASU Polytechnic, also serving a college dean at ASU Polytechnic—where I am now Dean of the School of Applied Arts and Sciences. During my entire time at ASU, I have been deeply engaged in community college-university transfer articulation issues, both at the local, state, national level, dealing not only with transfer of composition courses but generally with policy and structural issues. And, while I have not been exclusively involved in rhetoric and composition since I assumed my general administrative roles, I have kept watch over the WPA-L listserv since establishing it in 1991 (my colleague Barry Maid and I now serve as co-listowners) and have thus been able to stay in touch with the major issues of our profession and discipline. As a result of these experiences, I am knowledgeable about issues of writing instruction from kindergarten through college at many different kinds of institution. I have seen writing programs from different points of view as a faculty member, as a program director, and as a central administrator. With this knowledge and these different perspectives, I believe I can help us to work our way through some of the challenges ahead, such as the call for K-16 curriculum alignment, more accountability, seamless transfer, and greater effectiveness and efficiency in instruction.
Board Member #2: Vote for Darsie Bowden or Melissa Ianetta
DARSIE BOWDEN began her WPA work in the late 1980s as a graduate student at the University of Southern California’s First-Year Writing Program where she served as a program coordinator. In 1992, one year after taking her first job at DePaul University, she became director of DePaul’s Writing Center, then subsequently worked as co-director of DePaul’s first WAC program (with David Jolliffe) and Director of the MA in Writing at DePaul. She is currently director of First-Year Writing, a post she has held intermittently since 1994. She also served as Director of Composition at Western Washington University (2000-1). She is a member of the steering committee for the WPA’s Network for Media Action, served on the local arrangements committee for CCCC in Chicago in 2006 and also on the WPA breakfast committee that same year. She collaborated on two video projects, Writing as Writing Program Administrators (with Peter Vandenberg, 2006) about the WPA conference in Anchorage and Who is a Writer? What Writers Tell Us (2007), produced with Peter Vandenberg, Linda Adler-Kassner and Dominic Delli Carpini, as part of the WPA’s National Conversation on Writing initiative (NCoW). She received an MFA in cinema, worked for eight years as a screenwriter, then obtained a PhD from the University of Southern California in Rhetoric, Linguistics and Literature. She currently specializes in the teaching of composition, composition theory and literacy with articles published in WPA, CCC, Rhetoric Review, and WCJ. She has completed two books, The Mythology of Voice (1999, Heinemann), a critique of the voice metaphor, and Writing for Film (2006, Erlbaum), a screenwriting textbook.
Statement: Like most writing teachers and WPAs, I have struggled to do my job in the face of institutionalized lack of funding, status, and power. As most of us are all too aware, many of the challenges we face stem from a general and often profound lack of knowledge about writing, writers, and the teaching of writing among people outside our field. Public ignorance, compounded by myth and misinformation, contribute, I believe, to the enactment of such dubious projects as NCLB and the popularity of commercial models of assessment that assess very little. The WPA, working in conjunction with CCCC and NCTE, has done much to call into question the development of these programs and practices. My work with the Network for Media Action has provided ways for me to contribute to this project. I believe that WPA needs to continue our nascent media campaign—compellingly making the case for the connection between writing, power, and democracy through the diverse media at our disposal. Over the past few years, I have found a professional home in the WPA and have benefited enormously from support, advice, and professional development that mark this organization. I would be honored to be given the chance to give back.
MELISSA IANETTA is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing at the University of Delaware where she teaches writing and administers the writing center, composition program and writing-across-the-curriculum program. With Doug Downs, she co-founded APA-SIG, a cross-organization special interest group for assistant professor administrators in CWPA and the International Writing Center Association. She has twice chaired a CCCC pre-convention workshop focused on working as a tenure-track WPA. Melissa also served as an IWCA executive board member, and she and Lauren Fitzgerald are the incoming editors of The Writing Center Journal. Melissa’s scholarship focuses on the political and intellectual impact of disciplinary-based thinking in both our practices of writing program administration and our conceptualizations of the history of rhetoric. Her research has appeared in College English, Composition Studies, PMLA, Rhetoric Review, Writing Center Journal, Writing Lab Newsletter and WPA. Her current administrative research concerns the impact of continuing non-tenure track faculty positions on the evolution of English department culture.
Statement: Being the first in my family to attend college has meant my path into the professorate has been a winding one. After being a student at a range of institutions, including an urban community college, a suburban state college and an urban research university, I’ve had the opportunity to occupy a variety of teaching and administrative roles: graduate student TA, graduate student WPA, adjunct faculty member and non-tenure track WAC consultant. Further, as a tenure-track assistant professor, I’ve administered the full gamut of writing programs -- writing center, WAC and a composition program that ranges from basic writing to technical communication. This combination of experiences, I think, have prepared me well to speak with the diversity of writing program professionals who comprise WPA.
As I’ve moved into ever-expanding roles of administrative responsibility, CWPA has been foundational to my continued success, and I would consider it an honor to serve the organization that has served me so well. If elected, I would work on the executive board by drawing upon my scholarly interest in and practical experiences with crossing departmental/institutional/disciplinary borders. More specifically, I envision continuing my active participation in the International Writing Center Association, thus contributing to cross-organizational conversation with WPA. Likewise, I would continue my support of the Assistant Professor Administrator’s SIG and workshops that support the individuals in these often-challenging roles. Finally, I would continue my research on writing program employment conditions and hope to contribute to WPA through this work.
Board Member #3: Vote for Asao B. Inoue or Susan Thomas
ASAO B. INOUE is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition, the Assessment Expert for the College of Arts and Humanities, and the English 5A Coordinator at California State University, Fresno. He was a member of the NCTE and WPA Ad Hoc Task Force on Writing Assessment (2007-08), and is a current member of the CCCC’s Committee on Diversity. He teaches graduate courses in composition pedagogy and theory, writing assessment, and racism studies. He has published scholarship in both Assessing Writing and The Journal of Writing Assessment.
Statement: I bring to the WPA Executive Board a sensitivity to issues of race and racism in writing assessment, as well as a sensitivity to historically marginalized bodies in the academy generally. As a first-generation college graduate, a former remedial English student in public schools, and an academic of color who at times still finds his voice strange and uncomfortable in the academy, I know how many FYC students feel when they bring their own seemingly strange discourses to that foreign space. I’ll strive to represent the voices and bodies that often are not represented enough, are usually at the margins, but always help define the mainstream.
My priorities are first concerned with teachers and students who are not always well-represented, including TAs and part-time instructional faculty. I often advocate institutional change, not simply for its critiques to be heard (although critique is important), but because the structures that make some lives and working conditions more comfortable and profitable often make many others’ lives and work considerably less so. And these arrangements often seem to hurt students, and hurt students of color and poor students more than others. I believe that coalitions across multiple borders (racial, social, disciplinary, etc.) are crucial to improving the quality of education and lives of our students and the WPAs and teachers who serve and work alongside those students. And finally, I believe writing assessment is one important node in the network for making institutional changes in writing programs, in constructing more meaningful education and pedagogies, and more equitable material lives for all. There should be few gates or guarded towers in WPA work; instead, I prefer to think of literacy and writing instruction as pastures that we invite all to cultivate with us, nurturing and encouraging the work done, endeavors that expand, complicate, and problematize the academy, its discourses, and even the bodies that constitute it.
SUSAN THOMAS is Senior Lecturer (equivalent of US Associate Professor) at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she directs writing and WAC programs based on American models—the first such programs in the University’s 158-year history. Susan’s work focuses on strengthening the relationship between the University and the communities it serves, in order to promote ‘real world’ writing pedagogies and develop meaningful service learning, research, and internship opportunities for students—and a writing center informed by ‘real world’ practices and needs. Her duties include assessing courses and online delivery models across four faculties, and mentoring teachers. For the past two years, Susan has served as Associate Dean for the Faculty of Arts, where she chairs the Teaching and Learning Committee and advises working groups on assessment and student diversity. Due to Susan’s work, ‘proficiency in academic writing’ and ‘social citizenship’ are now named as expected outcomes for all University of Sydney graduates. Susan has recently been appointed Director of Teaching Development for the Faculties of Arts, Music, Education, and the Sydney College of the Arts.
Susan’s research brings her home to the US, where she presents at WPA, MLA, and 4Cs. She is the editor of What is the New Rhetoric? (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), which focuses on contemporary applications of rhetoric to technology, pedagogy, and WAC. Susan has published articles and chapters on teaching and learning, assessment, and academic writing, and is completing a monograph entitled Teaching Writing Beyond US Borders, which traces the development of the writing and WAC programs, comparing them with North American programs. Susan serves on the editorial board of Young Scholars in Writing and is treasurer of the Australian Association of Writing Programs. She has received national teaching grants and is the winner of the 2007 Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, Sydney University’s most prestigious award.
Susan’s work with the WPA includes collaborating with officers, the Executive Board, and committee members to develop internationalization initiatives, including generating a cross-national dialogue among WPAs, identifying cross-cultural teaching and research opportunities, and investigating the possibility of hosting international WPA conferences in ways that offer access to all members.
Statement: “As a WPA a long way from home, I have relied on our organization’s expertise and mentoring. It would be a pleasure to serve WPA in a more formalized way and repay its generosity. My primary goal would be to share what I have learned in Australia in order to help WPA broaden its international scope. Specifically, I would like to:
Council of Writing Program Administrators 2007 Election of Vice-President and Executive Board Members Slate and Candidates’ Statements
WPA is holding elections for three Executive Board members and for a Vice-President. We will be saying thank you and goodbye to Executive Board members Rebecca Moore Howard, Martha Patton, and Susan Miller-Cochran, whose terms end in June 2007. The Executive Board oversees WPA’s events and activities, creates policies and procedures for its management, and engages in special projects and initiatives. The new Board members will serve for three years, with terms beginning in July of 2007. Nominees for Vice-President make a six-year commitment to WPA, first serving as vice-president for two years, as president for the next two years, and as immediate past president for a final two years.
On February 13, 2007, current members of the Council of Writing Program Administrators will receive a separate email with information on how to cast their votes electronically. Please cast your vote by Monday, February 26, 2007.
For instructions on checking your membership status: http://wpacouncil.org/membership
Candidates' statements follow...
Nominees for Vice-President
LINDA ADLER-KASSNER is Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at Eastern Michigan University, a position she has held for seven years; she has also been a writing center director and director of graduate instructors. At EMU, she directs a large and robust writing program that was honored with a CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence in 2005. Her previous positions as a writing center director, a full-time lecturer and a graduate instructor have allowed her to experience the profession from a number of different vantage points.
Linda’s research, like her teaching and work with the EMU First Year Writing Program, begins with questions about teaching and advocacy: How is literacy defined in particular contexts? Whose interests are represented, whose not, from these definitions? In the last five years, her work has focused on considering these questions in the public sphere, especially in media coverage of and policy reports about writers and writing, and developing strategies for WPAs and writing instructors to advocate for their views with audiences outside the writing program. She is currently completing a book on the subject, Activist Writing Program Administration: Changing Stories. She has authored and co-authored articles and book chapters about various aspects of writing program administration published in WPA Journal, The Outcomes Book, and elsewhere. She also has published extensively in the area of basic writing, often with co-author Susanmarie Harrington. Together, they authored Basic Writing as a Political Act: Public Conversations about Writing and Literacy (Hampton, 2002) and numerous articles, including the forthcoming “The Public Work of Basic Writing†in Journal of Basic Writing’s 25th anniversary issue. Additionally, she has published articles in CCC, College English, English Education, and other journals, and she is on the editorial board of WPA Journal and Journal of Basic Writing.
As an executive board member on the Council of Writing Program Administrators, Linda was a co-author of the WPA Statement “Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices†and chair of the WPA Media Committee. With that group, she collaborated with others to conceive and develop the WPA Network for Media Action, which she continues to help coordinate. WPA-NMA (wpacouncil.org/nma) provides talking/writing points and writing tips for writing instructors and WPAs who want to communicate with mainstream media on issues relevant to writing instructors, such as plagiarism, ‘grammar,’ and machine scoring of writing.
Statement: What does it mean to teach writing? Who gets to respond to the question? What stories do WPAs want to tell about what teaching writing means? What stories does the Council of Writing Program Administrators want to tell? What stories—about teaching writing, about learning writing, about students and teachers--do others tell?
Stories about writing programs – what they are, what is taught in their names, and who does that teaching – are powerful. They shape the ways our work is understood and represented by WPAs and by people outside of our programs, departments, and institutions. A Test of Leadership, the report from the Spellings Commission on Higher Education, is but one of a spate of recent narratives that have the potential to fundamentally change the work of college faculty, especially WPAs and writing instructors.
As a CWPA executive board member, I learned first-hand the power of the expert knowledge that CWPA brings to discussions about writing instruction. As a coordinator of the WPA Network for Media Action, I’ve also seen the passion and desire that WPAs and writing instructors bring to these discussions. When we get involved in these discussions we can make a difference – inside and outside of our programs.
At the same time, I understand that that when WPAs become involved in work that lies outside of the traditional boundaries of faculty reward structures, there can be (sometimes unanticipated) consequences. One possible contribution that CWPA can make to this dilemma is to help frame the public work of program administration, including work that involves communicating about the profession to those outside of it, as part of our intellectual endeavor.
As CWPA Vice-President, I would continue to work with the entire organization to make sure that our stories – those of WPA as an organization, those of WPAs and writing instructors at institutions of all types – are represented. This work involves building on CWPA’s already-strong foundation to: *encourage research that investigates best practices in writing program administration and instruction, and publicize the results of that research widely; *help people outside of our profession understand how and why our work is (or can be) effective by speaking about our research and our commitments; *continue efforts to expand WPA’s membership base and ensure that CWPA speaks with and includes a broad constituency of 2- and 4-year instructors and administrators.
At the same time, I would work to ensure that the CWPA plays four important roles in gathering and promoting WPA’s and writing instructors’ stories about writing and writers: *organizing writing instructors at all levels by learning about their stories, their interests, and their concerns; *developing leaders to help promote those stories and address concerns; *identifying local/national issues where CWPA members’ expertise can shape and frame the conversation; and *planning action to influence the discussion of writing and writers at the college level.
CWPA is an organization that brings together some of the most passionate and committed instructors in our field. As an organization it is nimble, flexible, and proactive. As Vice President and, later, as President, I would work to continue putting our passions and our abilities to important uses.
MARTY TOWNSEND was hired as Director of the University of Missouri’s Campus Writing Program (fresh out of Arizona State University with a new PhD) in 1991, a position she held until just last summer. She is a Fellow of the Bryn Mawr Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration and a former literacy consultant for The Ford Foundation. Having earned tenure and promotion while serving as WPA—and, in part, for her work as WPA—she is now “just†an associate professor directing graduate studies in MU’s English Department. Her professional interests focus on WAC/WID program development and assessment in the U.S. and abroad. As Campus Writing Program (CWP) director, Marty taught first-year composition, the department’s capstone course, graduate seminars in composition and WAC/WID, and faculty seminars for writing-intensive instructors. Townsend presents regularly at CCCC, WPA, and WAC conferences and has consulted on writing for over seventy colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad, including China, Romania, Thailand, South Korea, and Costa Rica.
Along with CWP colleagues Marty Patton and Jo Ann Vogt, Townsend hosted the 2004 National WAC Conference in St. Louis, the first with an international focus. Because of the positive reception, the conference was subsequently renamed the International WAC Conference. Also in 2004, CWP was recognized with one of CCCC’s first Writing Program Certificates of Excellence. Marty previously served on the WPA Executive Board and currently serves on the WPA Editorial Board and the WAC Board of Consultants. She has twice been co-leader of WPA’s summer workshops. Marty is the subject of a recent WAC Journal interview, “A Different Kind of Pioneer,†in which author Carol Rutz notes that CWP “is among the largest and sturdiest examples of WAC.†CWP’s example is reflected in MU’s citation for Writing in the Disciplines in U.S. News & World Report’s America’s Best Colleges every year that WID has been featured. Townsend’s most recent publication, co-authored with MU sociologist Edward Brent, is "Automated Essay Grading in the Sociology Classroom" in Ericsson and Haswell’s Machine Scoring of Student Essays (Utah State UP, 2006). Her chapter “Negotiating the Risks and Reaping the Rewards" is forthcoming in Dew and Frank’s Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators (Parlor Press, 2007).
Statement: For over two decades, I've been learning from WPA’s collective membership, first as a graduate student, then as a writing program administrator myself, via the organization's pre-conference workshops at CCCC, summer conferences and workshops, Consultant/Evaluator Service, journal, newsletters, website, and other events. Serving as an executive officer would be a privilege—and an opportunity to repay a portion of the organization’s fundamental contributions to my career.
National trends in higher education suggest that the stakes for our field are higher than ever. Virtually all aspects of college writing—programs, curricula, funding, assessment, technologies, hiring practices—are impacted by an array of forces both within and outside our control. It is incumbent on WPA to keep our membership apprised of new developments and to offer support to the best of our organizational ability. I’d like to work with WPA’s leadership on a range of issues including: • continuing WPA’s long history of providing professional education for our field, • promoting more research in the field and showcasing exemplary models, • exploring how WPA might increase knowledge of key issues for our members but also for the deans, provosts, and presidents to whom we report: could we be more proactive on behalf of pre-tenured faculty in WPA jobs? is it time to go beyond our well-crafted Intellectual Work document to make a broader case about the benefits academe derives from our members’ work? can we foster a better understanding of assessment’s complexities? • supporting WPA’s ongoing exploration of international connections, to find new venues for conversation, research, and collaboration; the international work I’ve been doing in WAC/WID since 1995 has taught me a great deal, and I’d like to encourage other WPAs along these lines.
I don’t claim to have answers for the myriad issues that writing program administrators face, but I do know that I’m energized daily by the camaraderie and good will of the people in our field and by the desire we have to do our jobs well. I’d welcome applying that energy to this leadership role in our organization.
*Nominees for Executive Board Members
*Board Member #1: Vote for One of These Two Candidates ELI GOLDBLATT is Associate Professor of English and Director of First Year Writing at Temple University. He is both a compositionist and a poet. His forthcoming book is Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy beyond the College Curriculum (Hampton P). His book ‘Round My Way: Authority and Double-Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (U of Pittsburgh P, 1995) draws on his six years of high school teaching in urban Philadelphia. His article on Saul Alinsky and community/university literacy partnerships won the 2005 Ohmann award, and other essays have appeared in College English, CCC, Linguistics and Education, Writing on the Edge, and the Journal of Peace & Justice Studies. His poems have appeared in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Ixnay, Another Chicago Magazine, Hambone, Louisiana Literature, Hubbub and 6ix, and his book-length collections include Sessions 1-62 (Chax P, 1991), Speech Acts (Chax P, 1999), and Without a Trace (Singing Horse P, 2001). He has also published two children’s books and a verse play.
Statement: “Universities are changing rapidly as employers, knowledge producers and preservers, and licensing agents. As WPA’s, we are deeply involved with (or implicated in) these changes. I want to strengthen our resolve to fight for justice in employment for adjunct and graduate composition instructors. I also believe we must articulate a new vision of WAC that will guide writing programs as they go beyond the curriculum: K-16 connections, community-based learning, writing for the workplace, and action research off the campus. I hope to help in an effort to expand the active membership of WPA and encourage the growth of regional affiliates.â€
ALICE HORNING is Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics and Director of the Rhetoric Program at Oakland University. She provides leadership to a program that offers courses in first-year writing, upper-level courses that satisfy writing intensive requirements in General Education. The Rhetoric Program faculty have submitted a proposal for a major and minor in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, currently undergoing review. Her educational background and scholarly work focus on the cross-disciplinary nature of human literacy; her publications seek to explore the psychological and linguistic bases on which literacy rests. In addition, she has made use of research in applied linguistics to understand basic writers, revision processes and the teaching and learning of literacy. Her books have been published by Hampton Press, Parlor Press, Ablex and Southern Illinois University Press, and her articles have appeared in College English, JAC, The Reading Matrix and other journals, with work forthcoming in WPA. Her concern for untenured faculty serving as WPAs appears in a volume co-edited with Debra Dew called Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics (Parlor Press 2007).
Statement: I owe a tremendous debt to the WPA organization that I hope I can repay in small part by serving on the Executive Board. Nearly all of the positive changes I have been able to make in the Rhetoric Program at OU have come about, in one way or another, as a result of my membership in WPA, my participation in its workshops and conferences, and my reading of the listserv. I have been the founder and co-leader of the Michigan affiliate of WPA (with Roger Gilles), developed a Festival of Writing modeled on a great idea stolen from Linda Adler-Kassner, lowered class size in my program, and created a small pool of money for program enhancement and project support from a custom version of our program-wide handbook; all of these ideas have come through my interaction with WPA. I hope to bring my cross-disciplinary background and understanding of the psycholinguistics of reading and writing to bear on the work of the organization and to support all WPA enterprises that help students develop critical literacy urgently needed for their higher education and participation in democratic society.
Board Member #2: *Vote for One of These Two Candidates
JEFF ANDELORA has taught writing and literature for twenty-one years, the past eleven at Mesa Community College, located just outside of Phoenix. Prior to that he taught high school English for ten years. Jeff completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Arizona State University in 2005. His dissertation examined the impact of the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) on the professionalization of two-year college English faculty. He has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and has presented at CCCC, WPA, and TYCA West. Additionally, Jeff is a consulting reader for TETYC, has served on the 2006 James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation Award Committee, and serves on the CCCC Basic Data Task Force.
Statement: The Council of Writing Program Administrators has done remarkable work with four-year college and university writing programs; however, for a variety of reasons, the CWPA has had little success working with two-year colleges. The primary reason for this, I believe, is that two-year college English departments rarely have a WPA, so they don’t readily see the relevance of the CWPA. Instead of a WPA, the duties of overseeing first-year composition in two-year colleges typically fall to an already overburdened department chair, leaving little time to coordinate the challenges of student placement, course outcomes, textbook selection, and program evaluation. In many two-year colleges, these tasks go on as they have for decades, without a coherent vision driving them. Given that half of America’s college students take their composition courses at the more than 1200 two-year colleges, a stronger relationship between two-year colleges and the CWPA would benefit students, the colleges, and the organization.
If elected, I would help the CWPA work more deliberately with two-year colleges. The first step would be to forge an alliance with TYCA to examine the current state of writing programs in two-year colleges. Once we have a better understanding of how composition is administered at two-year colleges, we can develop strategies to help with some of the challenges they’re facing. Some possibilities: I’d like to see members of the CWPA speak at TYCA’s regional conferences about the work the CWPA is doing. I’d like us to devote a special issue of WPA to two-year college writing programs, and, as interest and membership grow, I’d like us to regularly solicit articles from two-year college faculty. I’d also encourage members of the CWPA and graduate students to view two-year college writing programs as important sites for research. In short, I’d like two-year college English departments to see the CWPA as an organization that is interested in and relevant to the work they’re doing in two-year colleges, and I’d like to help in that effort.
MILES McCRIMMON is Professor of English at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, Virginia, where he has been teaching composition and literature for more than fifteen years. He served as English Department Chair from 1998-2001 and he is beginning a new three-year term in 2007. He currently holds the Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship, a state-wide award for excellence in teaching and scholarship. He has published articles in Teaching English in the Two Year College (March 2005) and College English (November 2006) and has contributed pieces to a forthcoming NCTE collection, Creating the Teachable Moment (2007). He wrote the Instructor’s Manuals for the first two editions of The World is a Text (2003 and 2006) and he is at work on a writing guide designed for first-year experience programs. He was Program Chair for the 38th TYCA-Southeast Annual Conference, served on the Regional Executive Committee of TYCA-SE from 2000-2002, and served as a Site Leader for a FIPSE Dissemination Grant from 2001-2004. His college service work has included co-directing the most recent self-study, coordinating dual enrollment offerings, writing and editing major federal grant proposals, serving as co-chair of his college’s first-ever Major Gifts Campaign.
Statement: “More than half of America’s college students and more than half of all WPAs are at two-year institutions. As a former and returning WPA, I can represent this vast constituency and bring a valuable perspective to the board about the unique and dynamic relationships two-year colleges hold with senior institutions, the workforce, and K-12 education. Community colleges are contact zones (between disciplines, literacies, ethnicities, and levels of acculturation) where rich moments of generous and fruitful collaboration take place daily. Virtually every significant insight in my career has arisen when I stepped outside my comfort zone. My mission with WPA is to help to make these sorts of ‘border crossings’ a productive part of everyone’s professional experience.â€
Board Member #3: Vote for One of These Two Candidates
BARBARA L'EPLATTENIER is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in historical studies, technical writing, theories of technical communication, grant writing, gender studies, and queer theory. She has been published in The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher: Inquiry in Action and Reflection, (editors Shirley K Rose and Bud Weiser); Calling Cards (editors Jackie Jones Royster and Ann Marie Simpkins); and the forthcoming Labor of Love, (editors Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohen). Her co-edited collection, Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline, published by Parlor Press, won the 2004-2005 Award for Best Book on Writing Program Administration.
Statement: I look to WPA as a model of administrative structure and professional organization development; WPA's strength is its ability to create standards and outcomes for a field as diverse and complex as college writing. I'm deeply interested in seeing WPA continue to develop its presence on a national level. WPA needs to continue pushing forward to gain the respect of university officials, elected officials, and others who criticize or have an impact on writing programs and writing projects. I would like to see WPA develop stronger public relations strategies, make more explicit connections with non-profit and advocacy groups vested in writing, promote and disseminate WPA research, and have a more prominent voice in national discussions about writing.
BARBARA GAAL LUTZ is assistant director of the University Writing Center at the University of Delaware and, with her colleagues, hosted the well-attended 2004 WPA Conference. Her administrative work at Delaware includes coordinating a writing program for developmental students which was run through the Writing Center; in addition, she teaches freshman composition courses, ESL composition classes, and honors composition courses through both the English department and Honors College. Currently she is in her second year of teaching a grant-funded advanced composition course she designed that links education majors with middle school students in an online tutoring environment. Lutz presents regularly at regional and national conferences, including IWCA, CCCC, and WPA. Her most recent published essay “English as a Second Language: How Can We Help?†was reprinted in Teaching Language and Literacy: Preschool through the Elementary Grades. Eds. James F. Christie, Billie Jean Enz, and Carol Vukelich. Boston: Pearson Education, 2007, 299-300.
Lutz brings twenty years of experience working with professional organizations: she served as co-president of Interstate Developmental Educators Association (IDEA) for five years, president of Mid Atlantic Writing Centers Association (MAWCA) for five years, and Executive Board member of Pennsylvania Writing Program Administrators (PWPA) for three years. In all, she organized or helped organize ten regional conferences, co-chaired two national conferences and served on several national committees for IWCA and WPA.
Statement:WPA continues to be a dynamic and critical voice in the field, one that assesses, addresses, and advocates best practices and policies within the educational community as well as the public sphere. Sustaining this high level of leadership requires commitment and strategic direction from its members and executive board to ensure that the organization remains unified in its goals. I believe that I can contribute to this mission in several areas: having learned English as a second language, and having designed and taught EFL composition courses for many years, I would advocate for the special needs of EFL students in both writing centers and composition classes; as a veteran writing center tutor and now an administrator, I would represent the needs and concerns of writing centers; and working in a continuing non-tenure track position, I would speak to the ongoing policy discussions concerning the use of adjunct and non-tenure track faculty in teaching and administration.
Overall, from twenty-five years of teaching experience and almost as many in board involvement, I have learned how people collaborate effectively in order to bring an organization’s goals to fruition. I hope that the WPA membership will give me the opportunity to serve on the executive board as the organization confronts upcoming challenges in reaching its goals.