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Why Won’t this Thing Open? Negotiating New WPA Identity
On the whole, writing programs are increasingly open: our curriculum, instructors, assessment,
and even our students are often open to university, community, and web praise and scrutiny. Further,
most of us have some sort of open-door policy, are employed at “open” campuses, opt for
open-access compositions, insist that the lines of communication be open across and
within the department. However, as a new WPA at a large, public, mid-western university,
I’ve encountered a number of closed spaces as well. Since we’re so used to “open,”
closed can be even more surprising, especially when the barriers appear within our own programs.
In my brief comments today, I would like to consider how examining the genre ecology (see
Spinnuzi) that constitutes our work as WPAs can help us better identify the contexts that
create these apparent open and closed spaces. Hopefully better understanding of these spaces
will allow us to make kairotic use of, as Amy Ferdinandt Stolley aptly notes, the “rhetorical
potential in being “new”.” Honestly accepting this newcomer role (as opposed to
denying or exploiting it) has certain mileage in allowing “strategic interventions into
program and institutional culture,” thus providing entrance into relationships and
questions that may initially appear closed.
In considering revisions to his own Writing Program, Dylan Dryer suggests that “WPAs
should think carefully about the genres through which their administration is enacted [...] if
genre conventions organize social relations among students, administrators, and faculty,
changes in such conventions can be signals of, and possibly provocations for, changes
in social relations” (34).
At my own institution, simply cataloguing the genres through which we are institutionally
connected and that shape the relationships between instructional staff and students underscores
why we are what we are: our relationships are driven by programmatic documents – outcome
statements, syllabi, templates, curriculum maps, and rubrics; course texts – open source
materials, rhetorics, readers, and grammar & mechanics handbooks; and digital interactive
spaces – the program blog, wiki, and twitter page. A number of items within this list are
publicly under revision and directly open to change, which has contributed to a climate
of simultaneous excitement about possibilities and anxiety about what lies beyond the semester.
This nervous energy is palpable. The nervous energy of genre change.
As do all genres, these social tools balance between the discourse of what has come before
– the “this is the way it has always been done” narrative – and the potential of
what can be in the future, given some tactical foresight, risk-taking and innovation. Here,
the opportunities provided through shiny newness are most apparent: junior WPAs (jWPAs) can
respond to “this is the way it has always been done with” with “why?” Because,
“when asked curiously (instead of as a confrontation)” such questions can “[open] up conversations
about how the institutional culture, student population, and/or knowledge about writing
and writing programs [has] shifted since an initiative was last attempted” (Stolley).
These shared genres, those established and those in earnest development, constitute our
curriculum, demonstrate a living history of our program’s trajectory, and promote transactions
between administrators, instructors, and students. However, inventorying these genres leads me
to the primary closure in our program: dialogue and reciprocal interaction across different
instructional types (tenured and tenure-track faculty, full-time lecturers, part-time lecturers,
and graduate assistants). How do you encourage uptake of our overtly interactional genre
spaces? Of genres that stretch the boundaries of the long-established ecology?
One simple answer – to promote more interaction beyond simple transactions – has been to
create a new space to invite a genre that hasn’t had an established home in our program:
that of the pedagogical email share. Such an email takes little effort on part of participants
and immediately builds community, the ideal, casual intervention into closed relationships.
Mid-semester, the program director and I decided to scrap our old listserv designations, rename
them, and create a dedicated listserv for pedagogical shares, entitled “discussion.”
After its creation, we emailed staff through the discussion listserv, encouraged them to
post, and repeatedly discussed it during meetings. Each time it was discussed, the change was
met with acclaim. After posting, I even received some private emails – private, mind you
– praising the change. But what’s a discussion listserv without discussion? Can a genre exist
without uptake? When a tree falls in the woods...
The change has been incremental, and discussion has begun to trickle in, productively leaking
into the social system of our program and creating useful fissures for further genre
development. I hope to harness the “rhetorical potential of being new,” to close the gaps
in assessment, open up new possibilities for collaboration, texts, and funding, and close
down old guard assumptions about how “it has always been done,” particularly in relation
to remedial associations with first-year writing. I hope that the listserv really does open
a new space for discussion. By being mindful of the genre change we initiate as jWPAs,
the relative uptake within our programs, and the conventions that take root – we can
make the most of our newness. You’re new but for a brief moment.