Hiring at American University

At American University’s Writing Studies Program, there are two distinct types of employees: full-time “term” instructors and part-time “adjunct” instructors. Term instructors report to and are assessed by the chair of the Literature department (as well as the WSP review committee; more on that in a bit) and adjunct faculty report to and are assessed by the WPA, Lacey Wootton. Lacey and I met over Zoom on Friday, 02/07 to discuss the process of getting hired, assessed, promoted, or terminated in AU’s Writing Studies Faculty.

The Search & Hire

For adjunct faculty, Lacey is responsible for the hiring and supervising. She has been hiring adjuncts every semester since there are constantly more and more students, and the turnover and fairly consistent. There is a general pool of adjunct applications and Lacey keeps a Dropbox of information so that when it’s time to hire for the next semester, she is able to comb through the most recent ones and figure out who to contact, interview, check references, and then (if all of the previous checks out) hire them.  Lacey does all of this on her own and it’s a relatively quick process, limited to local applicants.

For term faculty, there’s a more involved, formal search (but this search is not funded, meaning there’s no money for flying people out or hiring them). In the recent years, there have been less replacement hires (meaning people who left the position and it needs to be filled by someone new) and more term-line additions (meaning creating new term positions).

She notes that there has not been as high of turnover for term faculty. For this, the Writing Studies Program has a hiring committee where they go through steps to diversify the pool and get approval for the search. They put together a hiring committee, people submit through Interfolio, and then the committee interviews once (either in-person or over the phone). This process generally takes about two-to-three weeks, usually around May.

Requirements for Hiring Faculty

Lacey notes that she never hires anyone without teaching experience, except graduate students or recent graduates from AU who went through AU’s specific pedagogical training (which includes specific coursework and portfolio work).

For an adjunct faculty member, she looks for at least one year of teaching experience. For term faculty, because the pool is getting more and more competitive, she’s been requiring two-to-three years of experience and they’ve been hiring more PhDs. However, the base requirement for these positions (adjunct or term) is an MA or MFA in English or Rhet/Comp specifically.

For graduate students, they go through a specific program focused on pedagogy called “Teaching Practicum” and they can begin teaching while they are still students or will come in as adjunct faculty fresh after graduation. The difference in hiring grad students is that they put together portfolios from their practicum and then small writing studies committees interview grad students (more casually than the other committees) as a group. Some might not get hired if they are deemed to not be ready to teach on their own quite yet.

Because the landscape for hiring is getting more and more competitive as well, she noted that every new hire has recently had a unique writing perspective, such as international and technical communication,

You’re hired! Now what?

Once you are hired, you will go through a week-long summer conference put together by the Professional Development Committee. After the conference and pedagogical training, new faculty are matched with mentoring faculty, which are more senior term faculty who give formative assessments each month of the adjunct faculty.  Lacey is the direct supervisor for the adjunct faculty while full-time faculty report to the department chair.

Lacey is a big proponent of the NCTE’s Principle 11: “Sound writing instruction is provided by instructors with reasonable and equitable working conditions.” For example, the adjunct faculty are unionized, meaning that they have a union that votes for their benefit, such as ensuring particular class-size, ensuring course load for adjunct faculty, etc.

Lacey notes that sometimes there are issues in compromising what the institution asks you to do as a WPA that might not align with your ethical values in terms of academic labor; however, she has been supported quite a bit with her decisions in the program. Lacey is considered by the adjunct union as management, so she has to handle the union’s negotiations. If there are violations and grievances with the institution, adjunct can formly lodge complaints and have the union back them up. Seth Kahn lays out the do’s and don’t’s of unionizing in his piece “What is a Union” where he also notes that, “on a union campus, the odds are very high that you’ll find a very detailed hiring protocol…[it’s important] to follow it” (263). However, Lacey, while working with the adjunct union, notes that the hiring is fully up to her.

Term faculty decided a few years ago not to unionize, according to lacey, because there’s “not that much the union could get us that we don’t already have… There’s language in the faculty manual that addresses most of the things that the union would be able to get for us. We’ve pretty much accomplished everything a union could do on our own already…” (Lacey 2020)

Reviewing Faculty

Every year, there is a reappointment committee made up of senior writing faculty. Term faculty construct a full dossier of teaching documents that go through the reappointment committee, there’s an interview and review discussion, and then the documents are approved and sent upward through the department chair and then to the dean. None of the term faculty (Lacey included) are tenure-track.

There is no room or growth that could become tenure track. There are creative writing faculty in the literature department who are tenure-line, but no WSP faculty are tenured. I asked if this was a source of contention within the department and Lacey noted that there used to be sharper tensions with this issues due to status issues. For example, there were tenured faculty in the department who were dismissive (sometimes very overtly) of the writing studies program.

However, writing faculty have always had a vote in the department and overtime, as those with higher status in the university joined in the writing studies program (such as one faculty who doubles as the Gen Ed Program Coordinator and Lacey being a former faculty senate chair), the faculty in the WSP gained more respect within the department.

The only decisions that Lacey makes in these cases are either involved with the adjuncts or made alongside other faculty. She notes that they have a flattened hierarchy and feminist model of collaboration in order to stress the inclusion and best practices of hierarchical decisions within the program. While there are downsides to this model (for example, the faculty has to do more work), this model gives power to faculty decisions.

However, Lacey notes that there are still beliefs that she has more power than she actually has and she has to do a lot of convincing to new term faculty that she is not their boss.

Terminating or Re-Appointing

For many years, literature faculty reviewed the writing studies faculty reappointment files. Recently, the review process has broken off from the literature department and the writing studies program formed their own review committee, and Lacey notes that this has helped senior faculty give and receive better feedback as well as gain confidence in the department as a whole.

In her piece, “Professional Identity in a Contingent-Labor Profession: Expertise, Autonomy, Community in Composition Teaching,” Nancy Penrose discusses the struggle for teaching track faculty, especially in writing studies, to feel like true academics and professionals. One solution she offers is the communal atmosphere of pedagogical praise and commitment that AU has created.

Works Cited

CCCC Position Statement of Principles and Standards for the Post-Secondary Teaching of Writing http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/postsecondarywriting

Kahn, Seth. “What is a Union?” A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators, in Malenczyk, pp. 211-222.

Penrose, Ann M. “Professional Identity in a Contingent-Labor Profession: Expertise, Autonomy, Community in Composition Teaching.” WPA 35.2 (Spring 2012): 108-126.

Personal Communication with Lacey Wootton via. Zoom on February 7th, 2020.

Value of Writing for Undergraduates: Placement Guidelines & Requirements

At American University, every undergraduate (according to section 8.5 of the Handbook) “must satisfy the Written Communication and Information Literacy I requirement” in one of the three following ways:

1. Complete either  sequence of WRTG-100 and WRTG-101 combined or WRTG-102 and WRTG-103 combined;
2. Satisfy exam placement test scores of a 4 or 5 on the AP Language example, AP Capstone, or a 5+ on the Higher Level IB and complete WRTG-106 with a C or better; or
3. Transfer with a satisfying credit equivalent as well as complete with WRTG-101 or WRTG-103 with a C or higher.

This literacy requirement is invaluable to undergraduates and unavoidable as it is not only required to graduate but if students do not satisfy this requirement “within the first 30 credit hours in-residence after matriculating”, they will be blocked from further course registration within the system.

L2 Speakers & Writers

I asked Lacey how L2 speakers function within the department and she noted that while international students must satisfy a particular TOEFL score to continue the writing requirement like everyone else or join courses exclusive to L2 speakers (in a program called IAP: International Accelerator Program” which is “a newer recruitment and bridge program run by a private company who recruit students and provide bridge courses”), the transfer is not always smooth.

IAP students (95% or more generally come from China) generally take WRTG 100 in IAP student specific sections, taught by faculty specialized in L2 writers and composition. These faculty are highered by the writing program but funded by IAP. Once students pass the 100-level course, they can “officially matriculate into the university and take classes with all other students, including WRTG 101.

Lacey notes that “an unanticipated consequence, though, is that these students tend to enroll in sections in large groups, and we’ve ended up with some WRTG 101 sections where 17/19 students are Chinese.  This obviously creates problems for the faculty member and for the other two students in the class—as well as for the Chinese students.”

While there is an international student coordinator for the program, which is staff with TESOL expertise, the student populations are growing more and more. While the coordinator is, as Lacey notes, “an amazing resource for faculty and for students… [who] provided training… [and] teaches one section of College Writing each semester,” there probably needs to be more support from IAP and from international offices on campus.

One idea I had as I was reading through this work was for all sections of WRTG to emphasize linguistic differences, dialects, and cultural rhetorics of writing. For example, discussing how the five paragraph essay, thesis in the beginning, etc. are very American ways of writing. This could help bridge the gap between international students in the classroom as well as domestic, native-speaking students. If the populations are increasing, I also wonder if emphasizing more TESOL/L2 training for all faculty might be beneficial.

Susan Miller-Cochran in her piece “Language Diversity and the Responsibility of the WPA” notes that “Determining placement and curricular options needs to be context-specific and a placement strategy needs to be realistic, given the institution’s mission and resources” (215). If AU has the resources from the IAP as well as the international student population increase (i.e. the exigence for such change), perhaps taking Miller-Cochran’s advice would be necessary.

For example, Miller-Cochran advices incorporating “attention to second language writing issues into preparation of teaching assistants” as well as training faculty. When I was going through my own TESOL training, even though I would go onto continue teaching English 101 at NC State the following semester, I was able to use what I learned in my ELL classes with native speaking students and emphasize different cultures of writing. International students in my classroom appreciated the focus on what it means to write as an American and were more willing to voice concern as they evolved as writers. I wonder if this could be a helpful tactic.

Program-Specific Training and Professional Development

AU’s writing program has two key committees that keep faculty and staff updated with different forms of continuing education.

There is the Mentoring Committee (MC), which plans an all-day pre-Fall day of workshops and presentations to prepare teachers for the new school year. The morning sessions are for new/newer faculty and then the afternoon workshops are structured for everyone. The MC also assign “mentors to new and newer faculty, with class visits and work on materials”, and they schedule several “Teaching Roundtables” (TRTs) throughout the year, which I assume are discussion groups for faculty to voice concerns from their classrooms and get additional pedagogical support.

Second, there Professional Development Committee (PDC) which keeps faculty up-to-date in the field of writing studies. For example the PDC “chooses readings for our twice-a-year reading groups when we devote one of our program meetings to discussing readings in writing studies”, says Lacey. She goes on to note that they design events to support faculty’s public academic identities as well through publication and conference presentation support and guidance.

Finally, the university itself offers “a wide variety of professional-development opportunities (including a university teaching conference in January), which a number of faculty take advantage of”, plus the Writing Studies Program offers money for conference attendance.

Course Objectives for the First Year Writing Courses

Below are the course objectives that every introductory writing course follows. These objectives are divided between course levels and are organized into four chief categories:

1. Writing and Research = Metacognitive Processes (focus on metacognition)
2. Information Has a Life Cycle and Value (informational literacy)
3. Writing Requires Entering an Ongoing Conversation (akin to the Burkean parlor); and
4. Structure, Style, and Mechanics are Rhetorical

See the individual outcomes below.

Writing and Research Are Meta-Cognitive Processes.

Level One: Writing 100, Students will…	Level Two: Writing 101 / 106, Students will…
Identify and evaluate other creators’ projects and argumentative moves in response to the needs of rhetorical contexts.	Develop and evaluate research and writing processes and modes that can be adapted to a variety of rhetorical contexts.
Reflect on the efficacy of researching, inventing, drafting, offering and enacting constructive feedback, and revising for their own writing.	Experiment with and refine reflective strategies that can be applied to researching, inventing, drafting, feedback, and revising for a variety of projects.
Study the importance of academic inquiry for knowledge creation and testing the soundness of beliefs.	Formulate strategies for academic inquiry as part of their processes for creating new knowledge and testing the soundness of their beliefs.

Information Has a Life Cycle and Value.

Level One: Writing 100, Students will…	Level Two: Writing 101 / 106,  Students will…
Revise their existing research strategies to reflect intellectual curiosity and discover a variety of authoritative perspectives.	Practice dynamic and adaptable research strategies that respond to mode, genre, and/or discipline.
Acknowledge the factors that govern authority are complex and dependent on rhetorical context.	Choose information that will be persuasive in specific rhetorical contexts.
Practice rhetorically appropriate strategies for integrating information.	Enact increasingly sophisticated strategies for integrating existing information and creating new knowledge within and across disciplines and genres.
Take responsibility for crediting others not only to avoid plagiarism, but also to participate in the exchange of ideas.	Enact academic integrity principles and citation conventions as a way to establish credibility and acknowledge intellectual debts within disciplines and genres.

 Writing Requires Entering an Ongoing Conversation.

Level One: Writing 100, Students will…	Level Two: 101 / 106,  Students will…
Develop and practice rhetorical reading strategies across modes and genres.	Use rhetorical reading strategies in their writing practices.
Recognize that writing responds to conversations in and across fields of knowledge, modes, and genres.	Participate in conversations that move within or across fields of knowledge, modes, and genres.
Recognize persuasive moves within or across modes, genres, and/or disciplines.	Employ persuasive moves within or across particular modes, genres, and/or disciplines.
Accurately and effectively summarize, paraphrase, and quote, accounting for the creators’ aim. Practice synthesizing multiple points of view.	Preserve creators’ positions within conversations while also synthesizing multiple points of view, including their own.
Distinguish between ambitious and unambitious theses, and practice developing appropriate theses.	Develop an ambitious, thought-provoking, arguable thesis in their writing projects.

 Structure, Style, and Mechanics Are Rhetorical.

Level One: Writing 100, Students will…	Level Two: Writing 101 / 106,  Students will…
Explain the rhetorical importance of organizational strategies when constructing an argument. Identify and practice strategies for successful transitions within paragraphs and between paragraphs.	Practice project-driven organizational strategies, including mode-, genre-, or discipline-driven conventions of organization. Adapt transition strategies to a variety of rhetorical contexts.
Identify and practice strategies to develop concision, precision, freshness, and sentence variety through specific choices in syntax and diction.	Identify and practice project-, mode-, genre-, or discipline-driven approaches to syntax and diction, including the relationship between rhetorical context and tone.
Describe how mechanical choices are rhetorical.	Practice and refine strategies for making mechanical choices.
Articulate the rationale behind format and citation as a response to rhetorical context and follow appropriate citation conventions.	Identify and practice discipline- and genre-specific formatting and citation conventions.

Themed Instruction

Courses are twice a week for 75 minutes each during a 15-week semester in both the Fall and Spring.  Last time, I noted how the WRTG-101 courses are “themed.” Lacey elaborated this week that instructors design their own themes by proposing them to the WPA, ensuring that they will be teaching mostly writing instead just the content, and then these themes are distributed to students and advisors so they are able to choose a course intelligently. This approach was referred to by David Smit as the “epistemic approach” (used originally by Kenneth Dowst) (191). The themes are linked to the website as well.

For example, in a sample syllabus I was given, the theme is “history” but the opening notes:

First and foremost, this is a writing class, not a history class.  But examining and challenging presentations of history will give us the material for our writing.

Thus these themes help ground the different writing courses, and perhaps give students a sense of agency in choosing which theme they would relate to. When reading Matthew Heard’s “Repositioning Curriculum Design”, his argument that curriculum design should be “an act of invention–an act that prolongs our engaged inquiry into the values, habits, and assumptions that we practice as students and teachers” applied here as well (316).

By giving instructors the freedom to not only theme their courses but choose other required texts and class writing projects, the WPA encourages the inventive nature of curriculum design.

Finally, Lacey noted that they as a program are “wrestling with some of the implications of anti-racist assessment for sentence-level work” in relation to grammar assessment. Since grammar and current-traditionalist instruction has long been a form of gatekeeping within academia, I can see this being a difficult problem to address and I plan on asking her to elaborate on what those conversations look like next week.

Works Cited

Miller-Cochran, Susan K. “Language Diversity and the Responsibility of the WPA.” Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Ed. Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Logan, UT: Southern Illinois UP, 2010. 212-220.

Heard, Matthew. “Repositioning Curriculum Design: Broadening the Who and How of Curricular Invention.” College English 74.4 (2014): 315-336.

Smit, David . “Curriculum Design for First-Year Writing Programs.” The Writing Program Administrator’s Resource: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Practice. Ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart Brown. New York: Erlbaum, 2002. 185-206.

Wootton, Lacey. “WPA Course: Shaping the Curriculum (Report 2) Questions.” Received by Bethany Van Scooter, January 29, 2019.

Overview of American University

American University is a private research (R2) institution in Washington DC with over 14,000 students. They have a 12:1 student-faculty ratio and an average undergraduate class size of 22 students per class. There are eight separate colleges within the university system: the College of Arts & Sciences (the largest school at AU with more than 100 degree programs), Kogod School of Business, School of Communication, School of Education, School of International Service, School of Professional & Extended Studies, School of Public Affairs, and the Washington College of Law.

The Writing Studies Program at American University rests within the College of Arts & Sciences’ Literature department. This program values students’ innovation, faculty’s Writing in the Disciplines (WID)/Writing Across Curriculum (WAC) program curriculum writing, and the love of writing and its pedagogy. Lacey Wootton (MA) is the Director of the Writing Studies Program and was able to shed some light on the program’s nuts and bolts of operation.

Writing Studies Program

WPA: Lacey Wootton, Director

Courses Offered

The following course prefix “WRTG” stands for “WRITING” and the numbers in the parentheses stand for the credit hours per course. WRTG 100, 101, 102, 103, and 106 are among the required courses, which AU Core required two (2) writing courses.

• • WRTG-025 STEP Pre-College Writing Seminar (0)
  • WRTG-100 College Writing (3)
  • WRTG-101 College Writing Seminar (3)
  • WRTG-102 College Writing (3)
  • WRTG-103 College Writing Seminar (3)
  • WRTG-106 College Writing, Intensive (3)
  • WRTG-194 Community Service-Learning Project (1)
  • WRTG-200 On the Ethics of Rhetoric: The Suspect Art (3)
  • WRTG-201 The Art of Persuasion FA1 (3)
  • WRTG-210 The Rhetoric of Digital Culture (3)
  • WRTG-301 Writing Across the Curriculum (3)

Lacey clarified to me that “even though our program is in the Department of Literature, we don’t call our classes “English” or “Literature” classes—always “writing” classes. That’s been the case for a long time, and it led to our changing our course prefix from LIT to WRTG a number of years ago” (Wootton 2019). I believe this reflects, while maybe not on a hierarchical level, the idea of a separate program giving a separate “mind, energy, and resources” so that the “sole charge…[is] the teaching of writing” (Gottschalk 25).

The overall program’s philosophy is focused on writing across the disciplines, transferable writing skills, and adaptability. Not only can these commonalities be seen on the website’s descriptions of the program, but in the learning outcomes for each first year writing class, available here:  Outcomes

Faculty

There are sixty-five (65) faculty members in the Writing Studies Program. Thirty-five (35) of them are full-time, non-tenure-track and the other half are adjunct/part-time. Lacey noted “We have a handful of grad students who teach, after going through the two-semester teaching track in their master’s/MFA program. They are considered adjunct faculty, not GTAs, even if they’re still students.” This could illustrate a more collaborative administrative style for AU’s writing program.

AU’s WPA Position

After talking with Lacey, I don’t think they have what Gunner referred to as a “flattened hierarchy” since Lacey coordinates many of the programs and oversees the courses’ structures. There is an international student coordinator who helps with staff and faculty supporting international students and their faculty; however, all of the Writing Studies Program is mostly run by the WPA.

This seems like a large workload for Lacey, especially since she is in the PhD program at George Mason University. She says that while she’s done with her coursework semesters, “it’s still overwhelming.” She tells me that she gets a month of vacation time every year and in the last year, she’s had to use three weeks of it “to read for exams” and the last week “to take [her] exams.” On the bright side, she notes this division other time helps her keep consistent hours for AU.

Because she took the WPA position long before she started her doctorate program, Lavey notes that she had “a lot of contact already” and “[knew] the institution and how to navigate it — and senior administrators already knew [her] because [she’d] been so active in faculty governance” as chair of their faculty senate, so it was easier to play  both roles of WPA and graduate student.

Program Overview

In Peggy O’Neill and Ellen Schendel’s chapter of Field of Dreams, “Locating Writing Programs in Research Universities”. they discussed the stereotypes of research institutions either being mostly run by English departments with many graduate students or “boss compositionists” (186). However, this is where American University’s program stands out. According to Lacey, writing is an invaluable part of AU’s new “Core” (general education) program as there are two writing course requirements (W1 and W2) for first-year students.

She notes, “Most students fulfill that requirement by taking WRTG 100 and WRTG 101 in the fall and spring of their first year. Students who get a qualifying score on the relevant AP or IB exams can take WRTG 106, a one-semester “intensive” first-year writing class. No students “test out” of the W1 requirement.”

While the 101 courses are “themed,  developed by the faculty…[whose challenge] is to make sure it’s still a writing course, and not a course about the theme/content”, Wootton clarifies that the 100 level is more meant be a flat writing skills course.  WRTG 102 and 103 are versions of 100 and 101 offered to students “in a special program through our Academic Support and Access Center; these students have learning disabilities and receive extra support through ASAC” (Wootton 2019).

For international students, there is a specific WRTG 100 class dedicated specifically for L2 speakers and is taught by faculty with expertise in first year writing and multilingual instruction. After this course, international students take WRTG 101 with the general student population.

The W2 requirement is a one-semester writing-intensive class, ideally a class in the student’s major. They can take that any time after completing their W1 requirement. These classes are taught by disciplinary faculty, not by faculty in the Writing Studies Program.

Keeping Courses on Track 

While there is a good bit of curriculum design freedom for instructors due to the lack of mandatory syllabus, there are common learning outcomes and an expectation that “faculty will teach rhetorical strategies, rhetorical awareness/adaptation, information literacy, and generalized forms and moves of academic argument” (Wootton 2019). She notes that there has been a shift toward the “teaching for transfer” approach and stress on rhetorical and genre awareness since the courses are not discipline specific so skills need to carry students across fields.

As the WPA, Lacey “monitor[s] the adjunct faculty for ‘drift’…[meaning] when they might move too far from the outcomes and our core mission.” She also observes full-time/full-term faculty who “are reviewed for reappointment by a committee, so we keep track of our curricular coherence over time” (Wootton 2019).

Common Texts & Philosophy

Teachers also have the ability to use a well of student exemplar writings in the shared text Atrium, an “annual collection of student work, drawn from the College Writing courses.” These works are selected in order to help faculty as well as students navigate different writing projects. Faculty can use these examples as models for genres, examples of how rhetorical moves are made, etc.

Additionally, the program chooses a “Writer as Witness” text, which is a yearly common reading, that students work with in their WTRG 100 or 106 class frequently. They usually have the author come to campus during the second week of classes to meet with faculty and honors/scholar students first and then full first-year classes as a whole. The name “Writer as Witness” formed when the texts were mostly memoirs or personal narratives; however, they have been more often non-fiction or argumentation books recently, so they are possibly rethinking the name.

Other Campus Relationships

I noticed after perusing their website that the Writing Studies Program links students out to many helpful resources, including the Writing Center. Lacey clarified that the Writing Center used to be located in the same building as the Writing Studies Program, so it was more closely tied to the courses. However, when the center was integrated into the library’s student support services, the relationship was weakened a bit.

Works Cited 

Gunner, Jeanne. “Collaborative Administration.” The Writing Program Administrator’s Resource: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Practice. Ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart Brown. New York: Erlbaum, 2002, 253-262.

Gottschalk, Katherine. “The Writing Program in the University.” The Allyn and Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators. Ed. Irene Ward and William J. Carpenter. New York: Longman, 2002, 23-33.

O’Neill, Peggy, and Ellen Schendel. “Locating Writing Programs in Research Universities.” A Field of Dreams: Independent Writing Programs and the Future of Composition Studies, ed. Peggy O’Neill, Angela Crow, and Larry W. Burton. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2002, 186-211.

Wootton, Lacey. “Re: Re: Graduate Student Correspondent for Dr. Christopher Anson’s Writing Program Administration Course at NC State University.” Received by Bethany Van Scooter, January 14, 2019.