This Research Brief presents an overview of current research in community-engaged writing, particularly foregrounding the importance of praxis-oriented and collaborative approaches. Here, we articulate collaboration, reciprocity, and accountability as some of the main tenets of community-engaged writing, and we showcase the variety of projects that such work can include (from local food writing to prison literacy work to transnational social justice movements and beyond). Then, we explore some of the methods and methodologies that are central in this scholarship, drawing on examples that engage storytelling, oral history and interview methods, archival methods, ethnographic research, and even public performances and workshops. We conclude with a discussion of future possibilities for research, teaching, and the imperative to see community-engaged work as part of scholarly work in tenure, promotion, and review.

Taking stock of the diminishing material conditions faced by contemporary writers broadly conceived, this article (re)frames writing as a site and a practice of exploited labor. Arguing that writing scholars have often avoided interrogating writing’s links to labor, particularly with respect to declining working conditions and the appropriation of value from workers, I draw attention to the pervasive crisis of writing’s devaluation under late capitalism. To evidence this assessment, I apply political economist Harry Braverman’s conception of the “progressive alienation of the process of production”—the notion that labor is increasingly eroded through capitalism’s advancement—to the scene of contemporary gig writing, specifically Amazon’s microtask platform Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurk, I maintain, offers a paradigmatic illustration of contemporary writers’ material exploitation, both for its efforts to de-skill writers and for its conscription of writers to advance their own exploitation by employing them to train generative AI.

In response to disruptions introduced to the job market by AI resume screeners, this article introduces a novel theoretical framework for the life cycle of artificial intelligence systems to help unblackbox resume screening AI systems. It then applies the AI life cycle framework to a digital case study of RChilli’s job-resume matching algorithm. The article introduces an eleven-step computational job-resume matching assignment that writing instructors can use in their classrooms to explore the pedagogical implications offered by the AI life cycle framework. The assignment helps students simulate important phases in AI production and development while highlighting biases and ethical concerns in AI screening of resumes. By exploring job-resume analytics, this study helps to teach critical AI and data literacy, make job-resume matching algorithms more explainable, and transform how professional writing can be taught in the age of automated hiring.

This article uses the results of a five-year study of job seekers to argue for improving job search preparation. Graduate students entering the job market want advice that is knowledgeable, realistic, and honest and that goes beyond emphasizing tenure-track research jobs to include a consideration of their needs and interests.

This mixed-methods study reveals the underrepresentation of non-tenure-track (NTT) scholars in academic publications in English, even while they teach the majority of courses. Interviews with NTT scholars and editors reveal time, in several dimensions, as a significant barrier to publication. An analysis of interviews with editors and journal websites suggests models for change.

This article presents the findings from a small case study to examine how community-engaged research is systemically delegitimized over the course of a scholar’s career. Analyzing a genre system of university professionalization documents prior to tenure and promotion shows how such documents discourage emerging scholars from thinking of their community-engaged work as research, except when it results in traditional forms of scholarship like a publication or conference presentation. A more complicated understanding of this genre system reveals pressure points to leverage for institutional change that might allow community-engaged scholars greater institutional freedom to create and sustain strong community partnership projects.

This article provides precedent for publication expectations at a wide range of institutions and explores how more structure may mitigate the occupational stress that arises from role ambiguity. Clearer tenure guidelines and nuanced performance appraisals offer several benefits: reducing affective/emotional labor, improving work conditions, and providing consistent arguments to retain valuable faculty.

Women continue to be underrepresented at the highest academic rank of full professor. Studies show that once women earn tenure, they are inundated with teaching, service, and administrative responsibilities, which take time away from research and publication—the primary criteria for promotion. We believe that rhetoric and writing studies (RWS) faculty are uniquely situated to confront this challenge because of our disciplinary expertise, our experience administering writing programs, and our interest in equity. With the goal to increase the number of women full professors at our university, we created a year-long writing program for women associate professors. Based on results from this pilot study, we argue that RWS faculty can use their expertise to decrease the disparity at the highest academic rank and make the university more diverse and equitable. Moreover, we believe that RWS scholars can use their disciplinary expertise to address a range of other institutional and systemic challenges.

FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty is a peer-reviewed publication concerning working conditions, professional life, activism, and perspectives of non-tenure-track faculty in college

0Make, O Muse...0.1 Knowing I was speaking about disruption, I thought what's more disruptive than playing punk music for an academic talk? So I played punk for you. I'll play some more punk for you after the talk. It's hard to be complacent when you listen to punk. If you want, stick that in your head as the soundtrack for today's talk. Punk and disruption may also produce in your mind's eye the image of friends working in a garage or the basement, and I encourage you to keep that image in your head, because whether they're taking a new approach to rock and roll or inventing the Apple computer, the garage tinkerer and inventor is our muse today as we reflect on making disruptive and innovative action in our discipline and our organization.1CCCC1.01 I've been coming to the C's for a long time, since I was a graduate student in the '80s. For me (like many of you, I'm sure), the CCCC is a natural academic home. And it's easy to see why: a wide range of pedagogical approaches visible in the program, all our theories on display, varied interests (FYC, creative nonfiction, creative writing, linguistics, rhetorical theory, history, technical and professional writing), and a general concern about writing both in the classroom and in society. The convention has one of the friendliest and most helpful group of members in higher education. It's a culture of fun (witness C's the Day and its Sparkleponies), and a culture of sharing and learning, where most of us are like Chaucers Clerk in that would we [all] learn and gladly teach1.02 We have an acceptance rate that's stingy-but not too stingy- so that we can put a lot of people on the program. There are workshops on Wednesdays, and we serve as a magnet for other organizations such as TYCA, ATTW, and WPA-GO to meet at the same general time.1.03 And during this same span of time that I've been coming to our convention (which is, unbelievably, almost thirty years), I have seen the C's take steady and meaningful steps to become more than a guild of writing teachers and researchers, but also an organization committed to openness, access, inclusivity:We have established travel and research scholarships that are designed to enable travel to and participation in the convention for both international and domestic scholars who may not have travel support from their institutions. These awards, along with reduced registration fees, have benefited a host of traditionally marginalized scholars, including contingent faculty, graduate students, retired members, Latin American scholars, tribal fellows, LGBTQ scholars, among others. And the one that started it all, the Scholars for the Dream in 1993, includes membership in NCTE/CCCC, travel assistance, and mentoring to help foster future leaders in our organization.We have an inclusive leadership structure, where elected positions on the executive committee, nominating committee, and chair rotation are broadly representative of the diversity of our organization. And we continue to evolve in this respect. Did you know, for example, that we have in the last five years added elected positions on the EC for graduate students and contingent faculty?What sort of new discussions are possible in governance with broader representation?We have created and supported research throughout our organization, rewarding scholars at all levels, from our undergraduate posters to graduate students, our book and article awards, and our wildly successful research initiative.We have taken steps to ensure inclusivity without regard to rank, tenure, job title, or type of institution. We feature undergraduate research posters, a graduate student on the EC, a thriving cross-generational (XGEN) initiative, and SIGs for grad students and retired professors. The program includes papers and roundtables from graduate students, adjunct and contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty, non-academic or alt-ac practitioners-from private institutions, two-year, four-year, regional universities, and R1's. …

Drawing on forty-eight interviews with individuals who participated on the academic job market in rhetoric and composition between 2010 and 2015, this essay shows how conceptualizing the academic job search as an intimate endeavor can offer insights for understanding the rhetorical production of affective binds within institutional contexts.

FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty is a peer-reviewed publication concerning working conditions, professional life, activism, and perspectives of non-tenure-track faculty in college

We in composition studies have countered the suspicion that what we do is “simplistic in method and impoverished in content” by insisting on our own disciplinary expertise, an insistence that has gained us administrative support and, arguably, better working conditions. Yet this article explores a problem that arose for the author as a result of her own insistence on disciplinary expertise: she had great difficulty recruiting faculty from other disciplines to teach first-year writing classes. This article suggests a solution to this problem, a strategic disingenuousness derived from the strategy developed by popular sentimental women authors of nineteenth-century America to counter the disciplinary expertise of professional male orators and rhetoricians, who looked down on the untrained speaker. The stance of strategic disingenuousness that this article advocates is more radical than the denial of expertise touted by recent scholarship in WAC and WID: it requires WPAs to withhold their expertise in the absence of any assurancethat the faculty they are training already have within themselves the knowledge they need to teach writing. An admittedly inefficient and often exasperating stance, it nonetheless represents a way for WPAs to entice faculty to teach writing and build a strong community with them.

Dear Colleagues:I am writing this letter amidst the splendor of a New England fall, a time of year marked by transition from a leafy and robust spring and summer to the inevitable, if brilliant, decline preceding the coming of winter. This fall feels different, however. The loss that fall signifies seems deeper this year, its reach extending back to early summer. I'm referring to the passing of our beloved and inspiring NCTE Executive Director, colleague and friend Kent Williamson. Those who were fortunate to have known and worked with Kent can attest to his singular qualities. A visionary with a clear grasp of the here-and-now, Kent, like no other leader that I've known, saw the Big Picture-he was the best strategic thinker that I've seen-while recognizing the importance of paying attention to the details. He also had the gift of leading while making it seem as if WE were initiating. In other words, Kent was a first-rate listener and believed with his heart and soul that no group can thrive without the full engagement and collaboration of its members. In his memory and with his spirit, the CCCC Officers and NCTE staff will attempt to carry on Kent's work to the best of our abilities. I know that he would expect no less. Now onto my report. . . .FinancesThis organization continued to make investment gains ($216,922) even as it went $120,411 over budget on operations. We ran a genuine loss last year, as spending exceeded income from operations. In FY15 there were a few areas that led to the loss. Membership dues, as an example, are declining. Feedback on the work of the organization was positive, but many could get all they need from CCCC without being members. In the end, we were $13,938 below projections on membership dues.Ultimately, we need to focus more on strategic items based on our vision. We have $2.29 million in the contingency fund, but spending it wisely requires careful planning and making choices.Activities for FY16:* In addition to extending our substantial investment in access and equity ($32,829 for the PEP program to provide registration/support to contingent and adjunct faculty who need help to attend the CCCC Convention), we earmarked up to $3,000 of spending to match funds raised from the membership to provide a CCCC Contingent Faculty Travel Assistance Fund for convention attendance, and $3,000 to support the Chair's Scholarship Fund.* Now that the 5% amount from our contingency reserve is over $120,000, the FY16 budget splits that amount between research grants selected through an open application project (at least $100,000), and the cost of developing a database of graduate and undergraduate writing programs. This makes our investment in member research larger than it has been any year except for FY15, while also providing funds to build a renewable resource of benefit to students, faculty, and program administrators alike.* We included videotaping of member interviews and advocacy training across the convention.* We again provided $8,000 in funding to support a CCCC Policy Fellow position. This person has been working with our DC office to help coordinate follow-through actions in support of reports filed by our new state-based network of higher education policy analysts, and has provided research summaries and expert testimony/insights drawn from professional practice on public policy issues of concern to our organization. The funding provides a small honorarium ($3,000) and travel fund ($5,000) to help support these activities. The CCCC Policy Fellow is selected by the CCCC Chair and Secretary-Treasurer.* Under publications, we extended a third year of funding to support a CCCC Social Media Coordinator. This person works with staff as an independent contractor to both produce online events/discussions of interest to CCCC members (on the Connected Community and across other online social media platforms as well), and to more readily connect members to each other in social media contexts. …

Drawing on findings from three qualitative studies, this article explores the distinct professional identities of two-year college English faculty. We examine full-time faculty patterns of engagement with professional organizations, their assertion of professional authority in institutional decision making, and the role of organizational socialization in the shaping of part-time faculty professional identities.

This essay revisits and expands on Gary A. Olson and Joseph M. Moxley’s 1989 article “Directing Freshman Composition: The Limits of Authority” by looking at revised notions of writing program administrators’ work and authority in 2012. Whereas the original essay surveyed only department chairs, our study includes data from both department chairs and directors of first-year writing to explore issues of authority. The essay complicates Olson and Moxley’s notion of authority, distinguishing among power, authority, and influence, and examining how they inflect the work of directors of first-year writing. In addition, common assumptions about the connections between WPAs’ tenure status and authority are re-examined in light of survey results.

Based on interviews with fifty-seven scholars in rhetoric and composition, this article addresses multiple topics in relation to the job search process. I emphasize the need for a more critical examination of job market procedures field-wide, taking into consideration the ways in which hiring committees might be unknowingly enacting exclusionary practices.

This article argues that tenure and promotion decisions should reflect the fundamental ways in which the academy and our positions within it have changed. Calling attention to the role senior scholars can play, the article considers the challenges offered by activity in four areas: digital and new-media scholarship, editorial and curatorial work, administration and leadership, and mentoring.

In this Symposium focused on peer review, Irwin Weiser—drawing both on history and on his own experience as faculty member, WPA, department head, and dean—examines the set of practices we associate with the tenure and promotion process, finding that they differ across sites at the same time that they look very similar in their assumptions. Weiser’s review then culminates in a set of questions useful as a heuristic for the multiple stakeholders involved in the process. In the next and complementary article, Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher—drawing on their varied experiences as authors and publishers of a journal and several book series—provide a historical review and consideration of peer review in publishing. They find that scholarly peer review, from the question of signed reviews to the practices of digital publications, is in the midst of change, but that at the same time, a reviewing process of some sort is still the mainstay of publishing.

I draw upon Eileen Schell’s notions of “maternal pedagogy” and an “ethic of care” to analyze archival material from the National Education Association and Educational Testing Service pilot “lay reader” programs of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that there are striking similarities between the material and social circumstances of these postwar lay readers’ labor and that of contingent faculty in first-year composition today. I additionally contend that lay reader program narratives and policies evince a longer historical trajectory of labor problems in the teaching of writing than we typically recognize. Thistrajectory illustrates a continual need for various types of “help” in achieving effective writing instruction, yet paradoxically values labor-intensive models for teachers that emphasize the personal (and interpersonal). Such conditions create a problematic “motherly” discourse for the discipline that is magnified by the gendered imbalance already typically found in the first-year writing teacher workforce.

Newsletter for Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty

While Richard Weaver, R. S. Crane, Richard McKeon, and Robert Streeter have been most identified with rhetoric at the University of Chicago and its institutional return in the 1950s, the archival record demonstrates that Frederick Champion Ward, dean of the undergraduate “College” from 1947 to 1954, and Henry W. Sams, director of English in the College during Ward’s tenure, created the useful tensions for these positions to emerge.

This article explores the connections between literacy, economy, and place through an examination of labor market intermediaries (LMIs). In particular, the article addresses the shifting role of LMIs over the past thirty years in Lake County, Indiana, and how they have developed as literacy sponsors.

Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University exposes the poor working conditions of contingent composition faculty and explores practical alternatives to the unfair labor practices that are all too common on campuses today. Editors Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, and Leo Parascondola bring together diverse perspectives from pragmatism to historical materialism to provide a perceptive and engaging examination of the nature, extent, and economics of the managed labor problem in composition instructiona field in which as much as ninety-three percent of all classes are taught by graduate students, adjuncts, and other disposable teachers. These instructors enjoy few benefits, meager wages, little or no participation in departmental governance, and none of the rewards and protections that encourage innovation and research. And it is from this disenfranchised position that literacy workers are expected to provide some of the core instruction in nearly everyone's higher education experience. Twenty-six contributors explore a range of real-world solutions to managerial domination of the composition workplace, from traditional academic unionism to ensemble movement activism and the pragmatic rhetoric, accommodations, and resistances practiced by teachers in their daily lives.Contributors are Leann Bertoncini, Marc Bousquet, Christopher Carter, Christopher Ferry, David Downing, Amanda Godley, Robin Truth Goodman, Bill Hendricks, Walter Jacobsohn, Ruth Kiefson, Paul Lauter, Donald Lazere, Eric Marshall, Randy Martin, Richard Ohmann, Leo Parascondola, Steve Parks, Gary Rhoades, Eileen Schell, Tony Scott, William Thelin, Jennifer Seibel Trainor, Donna Strickland, William Vaughn, Ray Watkins, and Katherine Wills.

Over the past thirty years, has flowered as a discipline in the academy. Doctoral programs in abound, and its position in the pantheon of academic fields seems assured. There is plenty of work in composition. But what is the nature of that work now, and what should it be? James Slevin asks such probing, primary questions in Introducing English, an overdue assessment of the state of by one of its most respected practitioners. Too often, Slevin claims, representations of take the form of promoting the field and its specialists, rather than explaining the fundamental work of and its important consequences. In thirteen thematically and methodologically linked essays, Slevin argues toward a view of the discipline as a set of activities, not as an enclosed field of knowledge. Such a view broadens the meaning of the work of to include teaching and learning, a two-way process, creating alliances across conventional educational boundaries, even beyond educational institutions. Slevin traces how emerged for him not as a vehicle for improving student writing, but rather as a way of working collaboratively with students to interpret educational practices and work for educational reform. He demonstrates the kind of classroom practice - in reading accounts of the Anglicization of Pocahontas - that reveals the social and cultural consequences of language and language education. For good or ill, writes Slevin, composition has always been at the center of the reproduction of social inequality, or of the resistance to that process. He asks those in the discipline to consider such history in the reading and writing they ask students to do and the reasons they give for asking them to do it. A much-anthologized essay by E. B. White from The New Yorker is the site for an examination of genre as social institution, introducing the ways in which the discourses of the academy can be understood as both obstacle and opportunity. Ultimately, Introducing English is concerned with the importance of writing and the teaching of writing to the core values of higher education. Composition is always a metonym for something else Slevin concludes. Usually, it has figured the impossibility of the student body - their lacks that require supplement, their ill-health that requires remedy. Introducing English introduces a new figure - a two-way process of inquiry - that better serves the intellectual culture of the university. Chapters on writing across the curriculum, university management, and faculty assessment (the tenure system) put this new model to practical, innovative use. Introducing English will be necessary reading for all those who work with composition, as well as those engaged in learning theory, critical theory, and education reform.

CCCC Committee on Part-Time/Adjunct Issues, Report on the Coalition on the Academic Workforce/CCCC Survey of Faculty in Freestanding Writing Programs for Fall 1999, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Dec., 2001), pp. 336-348

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we read Michael Murphy's article, Faculty for a New University, we were surprised and troubled by the story about adjuncts that Murphy purports to tell. Murphy's argument, that a substructure in rhetoric and composition exists but remains invisible and that to recognize such a substructure would cost universities little, is based on a notion of universities that has not existed in most places for a very long time, if ever. Murphy's idea of a teaching track that supports full-time faculty research is based on a conception of a university at a handful of research institutions. Schools that train graduate students, produce the bulk of scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition, and grant PhDs are about 7 percent of the total number of universities in this country (Phelan 76). To make an argument about adjunct work and adjunct labor without considering the other 93 percent of us seems to us to be thoughtless, at best, and unethical, at worst. The other aspect of adjuncting that Murphy leaves out is, of course, gender. As Theresa Enos writes, When a field has been feminized and when a disproportionate number of its workers are female, that field is devalued and is subject to both disciplinary and gender bias (43). As the latest report on Women in the Profession indicates, women are still more likely than white men ... to obtain jobs in lower-paying institutions .., and they tend to linger

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I argue that we need to acknowledge how the material interests of part-time and adjunct teachers, graduate assistants, tenure-stream faculty, and administrators can come into conflict in composition in order to negotiate fairly among them. I then call on bosses and workers in composition to form a new class consciousness centered on the issue of good teaching for fair pay. I discuss how the culture of academic professionalism militates against such a consciousness, and I propose three ways to forge a more collective view of our work: involving faculty at all ranks in teaching the first-year course, devising alternatives to tenure as a form of job security, and pressing for more direct control over staffing and curricula.

Challenging the common assumption that the rise of an instructorate unsupported to do traditional forms of research will necessarily result in an exploited academic labor force, inferior teaching, and the final triumph of anti-intellectualism and bureaucracy in academia, this article explores the ways in which the “teaching substructure” existing now in composition and rhetoric has already begun to contribute substantially to the intellectual vitality and institutional standing of the discipline.

I value Gypsy Academics and the compassionate way in which Schell combines a feminist and materialist analysis of the historical and economic conditions that have led to the exploitation of adjunct faculty, the majority of whom are women. - College EnglishFully two-thirds of all part-time teachers in English studies are women, many with no permanent faculty standing, no benefits, no job security, and little or no chance for promotion. How does the feminization of writing programs affect the newly formed discipline of rhetoric and composition? Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers illuminates the complex gendered ideologies that surround writing instruction--drawing on feminist theories of women's work, Marxist theories of class and labor, sociological and economic studies of part-time academic employment, and personal interviews with part-time women writing faculty. Eileen Schell contends that part-time faculty members' interests and contributions have been underrepresented in our research narratives and professional histories in rhetoric and composition. Her book attempts to revalue practitioner knowledge and to reclaim the voices and perspectives of part-time women writing instructors as a vital part of the history and growth of rhetoric and composition as a discipline. Both a theoretical and practical study, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers not only theorizes the structures of gender and labor in writing programs; it also offers administrators, theorists, and practitioners ideas for improving the working conditions and professional status of part-time writing instructors.

American literary life has been enriched over the past generation by habits of criticism practiced at Amherst College during the tenure of William H. Pritchard. These essays, which were commissioned as a tribute to Pritchard, celebrate his fortieth year at Amherst and demonstrate the breadth of his influence in the fields of theory, criticism, and pedagogy. The occasion of forty years of teaching at Amherst by William H. Pritchard, the renowned critic of Frost, Jarrell, and many others, has generated a remarkable collection of essays by former students, colleagues, and friends. The essays themselves are a spectrum of contemporary criticism, ranging from classroom memoirs to analytic essay in criticism to assessment of the state of academic letters today. These contributions, a tribute, by reason of their very range, are a salute to the breadth of William Pritchard's circle of literary acquaintance. Under Criticism demonstrates the fine persistence in certain manners of approach and habits of focus that go, among that circle, under the name of criticism. Drawing foremost on their engagement with the literature before them, Christopher Ricks, Helen Vendler, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Neil Hertz, David Ferry, Paul Alpers, Joseph Epstein, and Frank Lentricchia-as well as fifteen other critics and men and women of letters-reinforce Professor Pritchard's prescription that in order to have a hearing, the critic needs to keep listening.

Composition (at its best) and feminism work against the grain of conventional institutional practices. Both challenge assumptions and seek to transform ways of thinking, teaching, and learning. Both are complex, containing different agendas and different voices. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words is a feminist project that boldly places at its center differences among women. Topics discussed include American history, politics, language, racism, pedagogy, contingent labor in the teaching of writing, e-mail behavior, and the need for educational and institutional reform. Teachers, graduate students, program administrators, and feminists will find valuable the critiques, theoretical as well as personal, contained in this unusually honest and thought-provoking volume.