Grounded in the authors’ dissatisfaction with academic leadership after the 2016 presidential election, this article complicates the idea of the WPA-as-manager by introducing the framework of feminist, transformational, and intersectional writing program leadership. As writing program administrators, the authors identify the problems with calls for civility and neutrality post-election, particularly as these calls came down… Continue reading Beyond Management: The Potential for Writing Program Leadership During Turbulent Times by Casie Fedukovich & Sue Doe

In responding to conversations on engaged infrastructure, racial and reparative justice, and transformational WPA leadership, I call for more writing teachers and writing programs to take up grantwriting as a way to create much needed infrastructure for small, struggling grassroots nonprofits (NPOs). I detail G.I.V.E. (Grantwriting in Valued Environments), a community writing project at Towson… Continue reading Grantwriting Infrastructure for Grassroots Nonprofits: A Case Study and Resource for Attempting to ‘Return Stolen Things by Zosha Stuckey

Early, theoretically informed program assessment can be particularly beneficial for professional and technical writing programs that seek to incorporate and sustain service-learning approaches. This article adapts Burkean pentadic analysis for use as a form of institutional critique and illustrates the power of this method through a case study of its application at one state university.… Continue reading Pentadic Critique for Assessing and Sustaining Service-Learning Programs by Amy Rupiper Taggart

The CCCC position statement on student veterans (2015) reminds writing program administrators (WPAs) of their responsibility to prepare faculty to understand not only the challenges these returning students may face but also the assets they bring with them. This essay argues that writing programs must develop faculty education programs that go beyond solo workshops to… Continue reading Articulating Veteran-Friendly: Preparing First-Year Writing Instructors to Work with Veterans by Thomas Sura

A few years ago I served as a graduate assistant in an experimental course for freshmen at Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk, Virginia. New Portals to Appreciating our Global Environment (NewPAGE) united faculty and graduate students across disciplines to tackle instruction on pressing global issues such as climate change, health, sustainable development, and environmental… Continue reading Courage, Commitment and a Little Humility: The Path to Civic Engagement by Jennifer J. Kidd

Compositionists have long been calling for scholarship aimed at productively reshaping various institutional and public discourses of writing instruction. Jeanne Gunner, for instance, has called for more scholarship that can help Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) to formulate “critical questions” about their “historical practices and modes of self-representation” (275) in order to address how “writing program… Continue reading Review of The Activist WPA by Linda Adler-Kassner by Steve Lamos

Writing program administration was once an area within rhetoric and composition where little research emerged due to misperceptions about the viability of research and the availability of time for research. Fortunately, more and more quality scholarship is being brought forth by WPAs centered around the writing programs they serve, such as that found within Ecologies… Continue reading Review: Ecologies of Writing Programs: Program Profiles in Context by Jennifer Herald Koster

Composition’s public turn has been rendered most often in pedagogical or theoretical terms. To expand this legacy, Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser offer the field an insightful new portrait, one that features the writing program in the public turn. Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement identifies valuable theoretical and practical implications of… Continue reading Review of Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement edited by Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser reviewed by Emily Donnelli-Sallee

During the post 9/11 period, veteran writing programs—led by grassroots movements such as Warrior Writers and the Combat Paper Project—have proliferated across the US. Clinical and anecdotal evidence shows writing is an effective means to address the trauma of warfare; focusing on the unnatural experience of combat, PTSD and moral injury. Most importantly, the writing… Continue reading Writing to Bear Witness: A Grass Roots Healing Movement by Melissa Whitworth