A quick before this report begins: due to COVID-19 worries and difficulties communicating back and forth, I wasn’t able to communicate some of my curiosities well. I’m hoping to come back later and ask about how Lacey can expand, but since so many programs are stressed out in the move toward online coursework, I’m nervous myself to make any suggestions or ask further questions.
Hall notes that “composition is a contact zone to foster articulation programs” (317). Yet some of the key aspects of WPA work that Lacey notes is missing from American University’s everyday functions are their relationships to other offices. She notes that the “only formal collaboration is with IAP, the international-student program” mentioned in earlier posts. She elaborates, saying “We’re part of the AU Core, the university’s gen ed program, and our courses fulfill the ‘W1’ requirement for the Core. And we’re part of the Dept. of Literature,” but overall “there are a few less-formal connections, though. For example, I connect frequently with the First-year Experience office, since we teach primarily first-year students.”
For the connections with the IAP, Lacey notes that “IAP isn’t that essential to us as a program; in many ways, it’s peripheral. It is beneficial to learn more about working with international students, but we are able to do that without IAP. It allowed us to hire more term faculty, so that’s a benefit.” I wonder, if the IAP isn’t essential, why did they partner in the beginning? After all, Lacey goes on to say that “IAP has often been a burden, both administratively and pedagogically. But that’s just kind of the nature of that program.” I’m not sure the value of keeping a burdensome program such as the IAP on board if it’s going to be such a pain to deal with and doesn’t help more than it hurts, if that makes sense.
For looking to connect with other programs in the future, Lacey says, “I can see benefits to connecting more with the W2 courses—the writing-intensive courses that students take after College Writing. That’s a tough one, though, because these are courses scattered across the university. But I think that if we could communicate more, we could better support students’ transitions into other writing situations and transfer.” This led me to question what kinds of outreach they may have made already with these programs.
One of the most beneficial parts of the program, though, Lacey says, is that there are essentially no “turf” wars anymore. She says, “I’ve been lucky. Many years ago, before I was director, there was a move on the part of the business school to end first-year writing and move it into the disciplines. The former director got them to review our program and even bring in an outside reviewer, and we did really well—which helped make the argument that we’re necessary.”
This made me wonder what it would have been like to assess the program so drastically like this in order to save the program and make sure that it was dubbed “necessary” in the eyes of the gen-ed AU Core programmers.
One program above others that I’m still waiting to hear back on about was the Writing Center. After all, in Moore and Strickland’s “Wearing Multiple Hats”, they note that they “have made a conscious effort to create a unified identity on campus, often doing faculty development workshops together and representing each other at various events,” and that they “have found the resulting strength and support to be beneficial to all aspects of [their] professional lives” (123).
Russell in his activity theory on writing instruction research illustrates both a need to teach writing in a new way for different genres as well as incorporate multiple ways of teaching writing, possibly through these campus connections, saying ” Learning to write means learning to write in the ways (genres) those in an activity system write (though one must remember that this is complicated by the fact that activity systems and their tools—including genres— are always in dialectical change)” (51). This illustrates a necessity for writing programs, no matter who or where, to interact with others in order to give students a fuller writing education as well as illustrate the necessity to students of communicating across disciplines and writing collaboratively.
Works Cited
Hall, Ann-Marie, “Expanding the Community: A Comprehensive Look at Outreach and Articulation.” The Writing Program Administrator’s Resource: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Practice. Ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart Brown. New York: Erlbaum, 2002. 315-330.
Moore, Jessie L., and Michael Strickland, “Wearing Multiple Hats: How Campus WPA Roles Can Inform Program-Specific Public Writing Designs.” Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement, edited by Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser. Utah State University Press, pp. 122-139.
Russell, D. (1995). Activity theory and its implications for writing instruction. In J. Petraglia (Ed.), Reconceiving writing, rethinking writing instruction (pp. 51-78). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Wootton, Lacey. “Report 7: Relationships to Other Offices, Programs, and Curricula.” Received by Bethany Van Scooter, March 5 , 2020.