Part-time practitioners: Deliberating the contradictions
Abstract
“Part-Time Practitioners: Deliberating the Contradictions” explores the problem of overreliance on part-time writing instructors in composition studies, the majority of whom are women and many of whom teach interinstitutionally. Using a multimodal method that combines rhetorical inquiry, informal empirical research, and Freirean theory, this dissertation draws on the Conference on College Composition and Communication's “Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing,” part-time labor studies, published part-time narratives, and surveys of interinstitutional writing teachers to argue against economic necessity and economic inevitability as rationales for overreliance, which impedes instructional quality, professionalization, and critical literacy practices. Coupled with the already labor intensive nature of writing instruction and the inavailability of full-time tenure-track positions, interinstitutional teaching relegates part-timers to a socioeconomic underclass within academe and hinders them from attaining a professionalized status. Although they have analyzed the correlation between postsecondary literacy practices and students' socioeconomic class, critical literacy scholars have ignored the correlation for part-time writing teachers. This gap contradicts critical literacy's aim to contextualize both students' and teachers' learning/teaching conditions and results in a split between theory and practice, thus posing a dilemma for composition studies, which is heavily invested in critical literacy theory. To maintain credibility in the commitment to educational quality, all segments in academe have a responsibility to deliberate the contradiction between promising instructional quality and using an exploited labor force to teach writing. Because of the complex and controversial nature of the part-time labor problem, this dissertation seeks to find and maintain common ground by focusing on instructional quality. ^
Subject Area
Sociology, Industrial and Labor Relations|Language, Rhetoric and Composition|Education, Higher
Recommended Citation
Helen M O'Grady,
"Part-time practitioners: Deliberating the contradictions"
(1999).
Dissertations and Master's Theses (Campus Access).
Paper AAI9945220.
http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dissertations/AAI9945220