Writing center scholars have long been interested in the configuration of administrative leadership, often focusing on the roles and designations of writing center administrators (WCAs), whether faculty or staff. This article builds on existing scholarship by examining the affordances—capabilities and limitations—of a mixed-designation administrative team composed of both faculty and staff. Using our writing center as a case study, we highlight the benefits and limitations of a leadership team composed of both faculty and staff. We outline our center’s transition to a mixed-designation leadership model and use affordance theory to delineate the potentials and constraints of such teams, exploring how this configuration impacts functionality, effectiveness, and reach. Capabilities of this model include institutional visibility and legitimacy, access to information and resources, institutional reach, tutor education and training, and mentorship. Limitations include time constraints and a split focus, communication challenges, role ambiguity, and potential reinforcement of hierarchical structures. We conclude with practical recommendations for WCAs seeking to enhance their team structure or add faculty or staff administrative roles. By exploring the unique potentials and limitations of mixed-designation teams, we aim to contribute to ongoing conversations about equity, inclusion, and effective leadership structures in writing center administration.

I propose spatial affordances as a tool for assessing pedagogical writing spaces such as writing centers. I outline a heuristic I used to evaluate the opportunities and limitations of two spaces and emphasize its adaptability to other learning spaces. Spatial affordances are useful because they underscore how place/space/location structures and facilitates writing practice.

This issue centers the stories of people who (re)define what meaningful literacy practices are from such positions as an aging mother, women refugees, a returning student, and formerly incarcerated people.These articles explore how literacy practices shift and change over the life course and across contexts in ways that ask us to reorient our own understanding of the relationship between literate subjects and the knowledge they produce.In this issue's lead article, "Bouncing Back: Resilience and Its Limits in Late-Age Composing, " Louise Wetherbee Phelps undertakes the study and analysis of an unpublished body of lifespan writing by her late mother, Virginia Wetherbee, as part of her own contribution to retrospective lifespan studies and "literacy lives in relation" (2).Phelps begins by asking how to undertake the daunting task of a project that has challenged her in multiple ways: "challenges of methodof genre of grief, responsibility, and learning under the condition and unpredictable trajectory of [her] own aging" (ibid).One of the sayings Phelps inherited from Wetherbee, "proceed as way opens, " provides a framework for a series of articles in which Phelps considers the intersections of longitudinal and lifespan studies, late-age literacies, cross-generational literacies, slow composing, and ecosystemic and chronotopic approaches to literacy.In this article, Phelps charts the relationship between her own composing project on parenting and her aging literacy in figures that visualize a pattern of moments of disruption and resilience that Phelps terms "bouncing back." Ultimately, Phelps reminds us that our understanding of the intersections of literacy and aging are, to quote an embroidered saying that Wetherbee passed on to her and that hangs by her desk, "It's not as simple as you think."Katie Silvester examines how women refugees living in "protracted displacement" (39), or "decades-long displacement and massive refugee resettlement process" (ibid), use dialogue, narrative, and re-story to offer perspectives on literacy learning across their lifespans.In "At the 'Ends of Kinship': Women Re(kin)figuring Literacy Practices in Protracted Displacement, " Silvester draws from an ethnographic study of women's literacy learning experiences in the Bhutanese refugees resettlement process and considers the relationality they take up as they negotiate various people, places, and contexts.Specifically, she elaborates on "the ends of kinship" (40), which she defines as "a dialogic space of negotiating relational ties that have become stretched and transformed by localglobal forces" (ibid).This dialogic space allows women to "kin-script and (kin)figure their own ideas about and practices of literacy in relation to kin and friends as these relational ties stretch, contract, and become transformed throughout a protracted displacement and ongoing resettlement process" (42).In the process of kinship, friendship, and woman-centered community, these women were able to redefine their literate subjectivities, relationships, and practices through grounded, embodied, and imaginal means.Silverster argues for a dynamic methodological and theoretical approach to better understand adult literacy learning in migration through "the tensions and contradictions of everyday living in relation to others over time" (46).Maggie Shelledy's "Precarious Citizenship: Ambivalence, Literacy, and Prisoner Reentry" uses case studies to explore "the literacy myths that surround higher education in prison" by foregrounding formerly incarcerated people's experiences with and the effects of their participation

In this article, we discuss how participating in a writing group during  and after the COVID-19 pandemic helped us reimagine what  scholarly productivity means for us as writing center professionals  (WCPs). Drawing on our experiences in an online writing group for  almost three years with WCPs from four different institutions, we  identify three themes that emerged across our experiences: (1)  writing center work as scholarly and intellectual; (2)  professionalization and mentoring; and (3) social support.  Identifying these themes made visible for us a broader notion of  scholarly productivity. It also helped us think more strategically  about the complex and layered work we do as WCPs as we  consistently juggle competing work demands. We hope this article  can help WCPs not only re-conceive what it means to be productive  as writing center scholars but also to integrate a broad range of  scholarly work more fully into what they are already doing.

With this issue, we welcome you to nearly a decade of Literacy in Composition Studies!We plan to recount and honor the work that has brought us this far in our spring issue, but for now we are delighted to welcome Al Harahap to our Editorial Team, as well as to express our appreciation to Kara Poe Alexander for stepping into the role of Submissions Editor.We send our heartfelt thanks to Chris Warnick for his ten years (so far!) of partnership with LiCS and wish him productivity and rest on

Preview this article: Mobilizing Women Associate Professors through Investment Mentoring, Cross-University Networking, and Social Support in a Faculty Write-on-Site Group, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/84/3/collegeenglish31679-1.gif

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.

This essay examines four disciplinary challenges that faculty from broad, diverse disciplines such as rhetoric and composition encounter during tenure, promotion, and reappointment (TP&R) and highlights the arguments and rhetorical strategies that can be utilized to demonstrate scholarly worth and significance.

This study investigates the usability of print and online video instructions for computer tasks. Usability tests, comprehension tests, and questionnaires were collected from participants, and 4 areas of usability were analyzed: effectiveness, retention, satisfaction, and preference. Findings show marginal differences between the 2 mediums, except in terms of user satisfaction and instruction length. This research helps technical communicators better understand the affordances, or potentials and limitations, of print and video instructions.

A multiliteracies pedagogy has renewed our interest in materiality, or how the physical text interacts with the author’s choices and the context to contribute to the message, yet little attention has been paid to materiality in analog texts, such as the scrapbook, even though this medium contains affordances (capabilities and limitations) that encourage active engagement with the materiality of composition. This essay demonstrates the pedagogical value of the scrapbook for how it encourages student composers to select, appropriate, and redesign external cover materials to communicate the message inside the book and how it emphasizes the haptic sense (touch). In short, the scrapbook assignment is pedagogically important because it teaches students the concept of affordances and demonstrates to them how materiality impacts design, composition, and rhetorical choices; it also provides a low-tech, low-stakes entry into multimodal composing and reflexivity on the rhetorical decision-making process.

This article examines the “master” and “little” cultural narratives students perform in literacy narratives. Results show that students incorporate the literacy-equals-successmaster narrative most often, yet they also include in little narratives figures such as the hero, victim, and child prodigy. I consider how these findings can improve instructionon this topic and conclude with pedagogical recommendations.

The authors describe two pedagogical strategies—rhetorical sentence combining and rhetorical pattern practice—that blend once-popular teaching techniques with rhetorical decision making. A literature review identified studies that associated linguistic and rhetorical knowledge with success in engineering writing; this information was used to create exercises teaching technical communication students to write Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRaD) reports. Two pilot studies report promising results: Preliminary findings suggest that students who were taught this method wrote essays that were perceived as significantly higher in quality than those written by students in a control section. At the same time, however, the pilot studies point to some challenges and shortcomings of exercise-oriented pedagogies.

Alexander, Powell and Green explore ways in which traditional, nontraditional, and basic writing students view the affordances (potentials and limitations) of multimodal composition. These potentials include layering, implicit persuasion, audience awareness, creativity, and affective appeals, and the limitation of a lack of a clear thesis. In conclusion, the authors offer pedagogical considerations for instructors who assign multimodal composition in their classrooms.

Much of the research on literacy sponsorship positions students as “sponsored” rather than “sponsor,” which promotes a view of sponsorship as a one-way, fixed endeavor. In this essay, I consider how, in the context of service-learning, students might sponsor literacy and how this literacy sponsorship has the potential to be reciprocal. I highlight a semester-long course project that aimed to develop a variety of literacies in students. Results show that students supported, enabled, and sponsored the literacies of the clients with whom they worked. Findings also reveal that this literacy sponsorship was reciprocated by the clients, which indicates that, at least in service-learning settings, literacy sponsorship functions as a dynamic, reciprocal process where both parties learn and grow through their relationship with each other. This research is significant because it brings students into the discussion on literacy sponsorship and shows how individuals can seize the literacy resources offered to meet their own goals, motivations, and needs.

When mixed-gendered student teams collaborate on technical writing tasks, a single male often emerges as the group computer expert. The effects of this trend on perceptions of workload are unknown. This article reports the results of a study in which 12 mixed-gendered teams answered questionnaires on the division and perceptions of labor in their teams. Detailed case studies of four teams supplement the questionnaires. Findings suggest that computer work was highly visible, highly valued, and dominated by men. By contrast, writing was less visible and selectively recognized. Some men were credited with strong writing skills even though they did not produce writing for the project. Moreover, some students explicitly leveraged their computer expertise to avoid writing; furthermore, these computer experts rarely shared technical expertise with others in the context of the team project.