Stories That Shape: The Work of Writing Program Administration

Assessment practices are part of the work of writing program administration (WPA), and the WPA function can take several forms. While some scholars champion certain constructions of WPA—be they collective, collaborative, post-masculinist, distributed, and so on—Stories that Shape: The Work of Writing Program Administration argues that what is most crucial isn’t that a program implements a particular construction, but that the specific construction in play suits the specific context of the program in which it is located. And because programs change—because the larger field of rhetoric and composition changes—the work of WPA, and the construction of the position of a writing program administrator, must change accordingly and appropriately. Stories that Shape outlines the history of URI’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric, starting with its housing in the English department, moving through the development of its major, and up through its existence as a stand-alone department that offers a bachelor of arts, situating these changes in a historical and local context. It then tells the story of the WPA work that two committees undertook. The first was the round of outcomes-based assessment of general education writing courses that the Assessment Committee orchestrated. The second outlines the changes that the First-Year Writing Committee made to the general education learning outcomes and to the department’s most frequently offered course, WRT 104: Writing to Inform and Explain. These stories illustrate the department’s collaborative, distributive WPA model. Further, they demonstrate the ways that WPA work is formative, generative, and rhetorical, capable of creating change at the department, program, and classroom level.   Nationally (and locally), the majority of general education courses (including writing) are taught by instructors off the tenure-track. This includes per-course instructors and graduate teaching assistants, a population whose professional identity is often in flux or under scrutiny. Gaining a sense of what the teaching majority values and believes about teaching writing is essential for anyone doing WPA work. Through anonymous surveys and semi-structured interviews with per-course instructors and graduate teaching assistants, Stories that Shape explores three issues that should be of interest to writing program administrators and those responsible for WPA work. Research participants were asked to outline their own teaching objectives (as they relate or do not relate to the department’s general education learning objectives); to define teachability (what they value in textbooks and teaching resources); and to reflect on the value of teaching disciplinary terms and concepts in first-year, general education courses. These instabilities can be perspectives that writing program administrators, compositions, and writing scholars use to understand the field—broadly and generally— and they can be perspectives that enable them to ask how, why, and whether or not a program or department—locally and specifically—can, should, or even wants to change.


List of Figures
and practices throughout their years in our major" (Miles,Pennell,et.al. 508). But for first-year, general education courses in the department, the answer is different: we advocate teaching first-year students to use and practice disciplinary concepts and principles. It is a case of "knowing how" versus "knowing that." (508 emphasis in original) The second theme that emerges, the second question that presses, is tied up to what students can learn: What can teachers teach? For Downs and Wardle, writing teachers need to be writing specialists, disciplinary specialists. They need to have the content mastered, and they need to be able to teach that content. What's interesting is that in "Thinking Vertically," this mastery of content is also referenced, as it relates to teaching: "Our teaching can be-and is-informed by our deep knowledge of the field without limiting the course to first-year writing or any single course" (Miles,Pennell,et.al 510).
But who is this "our"? And where does the "deep knowledge" come from? How is it constructed?
Downs and Wardle characterize their first-year writing course as a "truth-telling course," because it will tell the truth about who is qualified to teach writing, and what, precisely, those qualifications are (576). I wonder, though, if first-year writing might always be a truth-telling course, because if there was ever a moment when that sort of instructor-know-how and instructor-know-that, or that sort of students-learn-how and students-learn-that, came under question, if there was ever a moment when the truth about what we valued in our first-year writing courses came into question, it was in a round of outcomes based assessment. And the truth was neither easy nor clean cut.
Nothing ever really is.
! 9 In Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind, Mary Field Belenky et.al. present

a counter-point to William Perry's seminal Forms of
Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. Perry's work was based on his study of Harvard students (all male) throughout their college years. He traced the ways their thinking, and their thinking about thinking, changed. Through his study, he characterizes how students develop "from adolescence into adulthood," a "path," he believes, that is "relevant outside the boundaries of the college experience" (Perry xiii). Belenky et.al. focus their work on women-not men-and discover that Perry's scheme does not-and cannot-account for "those themes that might be more prominent among women" (9). Belenky et.al. argue for a more comprehensive approach to understanding intellectual and ethical development, one that accounts for variations not just in sex or gender, but those that stem from issues relevant to class, race, formal education, and, perhaps above all, experience. Belenky et.al. explain that, When scientific findings, scientific theory, and even the basic assumptions of academic disciplines are reexamined through the lens of women's perspectives and values, new conclusions can be drawn and new directions forged that have implications for the lives of both men and women. (8)(9) Helping to forge those directions are the stories that women in Belenky et.al.'s study share, the perspectives that their stories provide, and the ways that their experiences shape not just who they are, not just what they know, but how they know. Belenky et.al. learn (and teach) "how women's self-concepts and ways of knowing are intertwined" (3).
In terms of epistemology, this is inline with theories of constructivism, a "basic insight" ! 10 of which is that "all knowledge is constructed, and the knower is an intimate part of the known" (Belenky et.al. 137 emphasis in original). Constructivists-including some of the women in Belenky et.al.'s study-"see that all knowledge is a construction and that truth is a matter of the context in which it is embedded," and they assume the general relativity of knowledge, that their frame of reference matters and that they can construct and reconstruct frames of reference, they feel responsible for examining, questioning, and developing the systems that they will use for constructing knowledge. (138)(139) I suppose that here is where I explain that I am a constructivist.
I suppose I always have been.
I just didn't always know the word for it.
I imagine (or assume) that the first time I heard the word must have been in one of the Educational Theory and Practice courses I took as an undergraduate at SUNY Albany.
Or, perhaps I first heard the word during my Women's Psychology course at HVCC. I don't remember. But I do remember the first time I put this theory of learning/knowing into personal and academic context. I was a junior in an Expository Writing class at SUNY Albany, a class that underscored the learning and teaching potential of personal experience. I remember the professor explaining how every question we ask says as much about us as it does about the object of our questioning. I believed him, then. I believe him, still. Later, I would relate this concept to Kenneth Burke's terministic screen: the questions we ask are both informed and limited by our perspectives, by our subjectivities.
To believe Burke, and to believe Belenky et.al., is to complicate (or deny) any claim to a ! 11 purely-objective knowledge. Further and relatedly, it is to complicate (or deny) any claim to a purely-objective research methodology.
Terministic screens can change, but they cannot come off. We cannot take them off, never fully. The most we can do is be aware of them, anticipate (and interrogate) how they shape what we see, what we know, what we ask. We can also (and we should also) remember that others have screens of their own, knowledges of their own, their own questions that are shaped by their own stories. Although Belenky et.al. don't mention Burke's terministic screens, they still discuss how screens shape what we know, what we learn. They draw a contrast between what they call "separate knowers"and "connected knowers." Borrowing terms from Carol Gilligan and Nona Lyons, Belenky et.al. explain that separation / connection is not necessarily in terms of relationships between people; what distinguishes one from the other is the relationship between the knower and the known, although the known can, but doesn't have to, be a person (Belenky et.al 102).
They write, Separate knowers learn through explicit formal instruction how to adopt a different lens-how, for example, to think like a sociologist. Connected knowers learn through empathy. Both learn to get out from behind their own eyes and use a different lens, in one case the lens of a discipline, in the other the lens of another person. (115) Crucially, what differentiates these two epistemological orientations is that for the latter, for connected knowing, "the self is allowed to participate" (Belenky et.al. 112).
And so I participate, here, because to learn from it, to construct knowledge out of it, I must. I cannot feign objectivity because I cannot get outside of my own terministic screen, never fully. I can't take these glasses off. I can't look at my topics of inquiry-! 12 writing program assessment and administration, learning objectives and outcomes, material resources, institutional support, professionalization in writing, rhetoric, and composition-without seeing these topics, each and all, through my experiences. I can't separate what I learned in ENG 490 from where I found myself four years later. I can't separate who I was as a writing tutor at HVCC from who I was as a writing tutor at SUNY Albany, and I can't separate either from who I was as a graduate teaching assistant at URI.  seem, sometimes, to go unacknowledged or undervalued, un-or under-compensated. I know financial struggle. I know self-doubt. Acknowledging these and other screens is just a start. Conducting, writing, and sharing this research responsibly also means that I must use my own screen in ways, and for reasons, that are both critical and empathic.
Empathy is a prerequisite for connected knowing and for constructivism, as Belenky et.al. explain: Connected knowers develop procedures for gaining access to other people's knowledge. At the heart of these procedures is the capacity for empathy. Since knowledge comes from experience, the only way they can hope to understand another person's ideas is to try to share the experience that has led the person to form the idea. (113) Empathy is also a prerequisite for the methodologies that I have gravitated towards and that have informed this research: critical research practices and institutional critique.
Althusser taught us that persons are written by institutions. Patricia Sullivan, James Porter, and others suggest that through the use of rhetoric, persons can re-write institutions. We can, if we want to, re-write ours. We can, if we want to, re-write ourselves. In Belenky et.al.'s work, the "constructivist women aspire to work that contributes to the empowerment and improvement in the quality of life for others" (152); in critical research practices, "social change [is, or perhaps should be] the appropriate aim of research praxis" (Sullivan and Porter 20).
I'm not objective, but I aim to be empathic.
I'm not criticizing, but I aim for critique.
This makes it all critical.
! 14 I'm an endless optimist, and I believe that improved communication can happen in every exchange: between deans and administrators, between administrators and faculty, between faculty and students. Because my research grows out of an educational setting, of course there are educational threads: learning conditions, empowerment of students-undergraduate, certainly, although I focus more on graduate teaching assistants -and empowerment of part-time faculty . . . these concerns are absolute and inherent.
In critical research practices, the researcher must make constant efforts to be self aware. She must pay attention to and consistently critique her own position/positionality. It is paramount, for critical researchers, "to keep themselves alert to those elements in their practices that adopt positions or attitudes or actions without reflection" (Sullivan and Porter 16). The researcher's position-my position-matters, and she/I should acknowledge it and interrogate it; she should do this because her position contributes to the knowledge she constructs. In my effort to acknowledge and interrogate, I tell my own story/stories, an effort to identify my position, reflect on it, in hopes that not only will doing so draw my own attention to the shape of my terministic screen, but it will provide, for readers, the shape and scope of that screen. I don't want you, necessarily, to see what I see, but I do want to make transparent why and how I see what I see. I include it all here because I need to see it, too, in this context. In some cases, what I saw before-while I was composing survey questions, analyzing survey results, conducting interviews, listening back to interviews-isn't the same as what I see now. In revising this work, in recursively revising this work, there were some things I did re-see. There were some things that I re-saw again.

! 15
In critical research practices, praxis is paramount. As broadly-defined as possible, praxis is the recursive interplay of theory and practice. It's the name for the way(s) that each can and does circle back to the other, the way(s) that each can and does filter into the other. Broadly defined, praxis is the blend of theory and practice, though sometimes blending isn't enough. When Sullivan and Porter nominate praxis as the essential component and method of critical research, they show that more is possible; they provide an alternative to the blending. In critical research practices, praxis "recognizes the 'inseparable relation between reflection and action'" (26)(27). When research is praxis, it aims to be, a reflective, thoughtful practice that has critique and questioning built into its operation, an activity that merges theory and practice, and that adds to repeatability and transferability a further notion: revision. (Sullivan and Porter 22) Research-as-praxis means re-theorizing and re-practicing, not just examining how or watching the ways that theory and practice blend. Research-as-praxis means that the researcher intervenes and participates in that merging. And she merges, too. She applies the critique and questioning. She applies the reflection and revision. And she understands that none are always (only) what they first seem. To revise isn't just to re-see. To revise is also to re-make. To reflect isn't just to look back. It doesn't have to be so solo, private, or individual. To reflect can also be to mirror back or to bounce off. And in those acts, something else has to be involved.
We might change our practices based on learning new or different theoretical frames or approaches, but that's only half of it. We must be as open to changing our ! 16 theoretical frames or approaches based on what we learn through reflective practice.
That's harder even than it seems, but it is not impossible. Frames might not be easy to break, but they are breakable. What makes frames hard to break is that they are hard to see: we're so accustomed to seeing through them, and not so practiced in looking for them. To break frames, we must start by looking for them, by learning to see them.
Every research methodology needs triangulation, and Sullivan and Porter explain one that is suitable for critical research, though it is "not the kind by which you check results by using a variety of empirical or theoretical methods, or by collecting data through a variety of media" (27). It's not that familiar, procedural check. Critical research's triangulation is different. It's "a conceptual one that leads to research that privileges neither the theoretical foundation nor the observed practice," and it is "willing to critique both theory and practice" (27). In critical research, triangulation has a different sort of function. It puts theory and practice "in dialectical tension, which can then allow either to change" (27). But what does that kind of triangulation-that critical-researchtriangulation-look like? And what did I do to triangulate like that? What did I ask about my data? What did I ask about my methods? What does that kind of triangulation mean, for me, considering all possible subject-positions? What does that kind of triangulation mean, for me, for this? It depends on where I was at.
It depends on what I was doing.
It depends on who I was talking to, talking with.
It depends on what I was reading, what I was writing.

! 17
When I was developing questions, critical-research-triangulation means I began with one set of tightly focused research questions (because that's what's supposed to happen). It means that I thought about why I asked and why I wanted to ask those particular questions. It means that I kept myself suspicious of-or, at least, that I kept trying to be suspicious of-why I wanted answers to those/these questions. When I was collecting, reviewing, and making sense of survey data, critical-research-triangulation means that I used the answers that were surprising and unanticipated as springboards for interviews. It means I kept interrogating my survey questions, even after I collected results.
Critical-research-triangulation means that I conducted interviews individually and distinctly; in each conversation, with each of my colleagues, I tried to learn as much as possible about his or her terministic screen, as much as possible about the experiences and beliefs that shaped said screen, and as much as possible about what I didn't knowwhat I couldn't have known, without asking them. It means that I tried to understand each story as a story. But here's the catch: we're not isolated incidents; we're not entries in an encyclopedia. We're an anthology. We're in this together, and there's something that unites us. And so I conducted interviews also trying also, at the same time as I tried to respect their individuality, to put together a matrix: to take a thread from one person's story and to see if it had a place in another's, not just allowing for but making sure that As I thought about assessment results, I asked about pedagogical approaches. As I asked about pedagogical approaches, I questioned material resources. As I questioned material resources, I wondered about institutional support. And then emotional support.
And then the trials of graduate study. And then the nature and function of adjunct labor.
And then the effects that adjunct labor has on adjunct laborers. And then the meaning of, and the role and purpose of, professionalization. And then the connection all or any of it has to teaching writing.
In critical research practices, triangulation means never staying put, never being certain. Critical-research-triangulation means I took nothing for granted, and it means I take nothing for granted still. When URI's Department of Writing and Rhetoric asked if students enrolled in general education writing courses were meeting a crucial learning objective, it wasn't a simple question, and the answer they got wasn't so simple, either. Outcomes-based assessment revealed that 80% of students enrolled in general education writing courses were not demonstrating awareness of rhetorical situations, so it asked another question: What can we do?

Chapter 1: A History of Us
In the fall of 2013, The Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island implemented changes in its most frequently offered course, WRT 104: Writing to Inform and Explain. One change was the adoption of a new textbook. Members of the First-Year Writing Committee, myself included, believed that the new textbook-The Harbrace Guide to Writing (The Harbrace)-was more sophisticated, less introductory, than the textbook it was replacing-The Norton Field Guide to Writing (The Norton). We chose The Harbrace because the majority of us believed that out of all the textbooks we reviewed in our search, it most successfully included the features we determined were essential. The majority of us believed The Harbrace was more rhetoric-centric, while The Norton was too tightly and too narrowly focused on genres.
Curricular changes matter, though I think they matter in bigger, farther-reaching, deeper-meaning ways when the course itself is bigger, farther-reaching. As the Writing and Rhetoric department's most frequently offered general education course, WRT 104 is likely to be the only writing course many students outside of the major or minor will take.
In that way, it is representative: WRT 104 shows, presents, introduces students to this thing-this noun and verb-called writing. And at every university, within every department, writing-the noun and verb that it is-doesn't always mean the same thing(s).
One of the criticisms against national educational initiatives and standards is the inability for such endeavors to take into account local issues, and local issues should be primary. Accounting for a student body, the teaching staff, material and financial ! 21 resources, community membership, involvement, support . . . the list could go on and on.
In the scholarship and literature on assessment (as an educational initiative), there are repeated calls for taking contextual concerns and local issues seriously, not just accounting for them, but building assessment through them. Carter wrote that, institutional context is [. . .] critically important. The particular history and ethos of a college or university shapes its writing and/or speaking programs in particular ways. (269)(270) I agree with Carter, and part of what makes up institutional context is history. Sometimes we might forget that institutions do not exist apart from or outside of the people and the stories that create and shape them. Sometimes, we might forget that institutions are changeable, that they exist within-not outside of-historical and local contexts.
In their overview of institutional critique, James Porter et.al. explain that institutions need to be understood "as also operating locally," and that doing so helps to make "visible [the] contexts within which we conduct our lives and, again, have our lives conducted for us" (621 emphasis in original). To see, and to think about, institutions as local entities-instead of seeing them or thinking about them as "monoliths") is to begin to recognize them, to begin to see them, as and for what they are and always were: discursive spaces. To understand institutions as discursive spaces is to "make them more visible and dynamic and therefore more changeable" (621). The institution, here, is the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island. While it might be similar to other academic departments, writing or otherwise, it isn't other academic departments. It has its own, complicated history, and its past, present, and future are influenced by the department's own, complicated particulars.

! 22
Before I outline the work of the Assessment Committee, before I explain the results of our general education outcomes based assessment, before I retrace the work that the First-Year Writing Committee undertook, I want to map out some of those complicated particulars, some of that local context. It is important to understand that history, to understand the department's genesis, its undergraduate major, and its graduate specialization within the English department. You can't say what writing is, means, or does, across campuses; you need to determine what it is, means, and does at a particular campus. For all his tracing of historical shifts and changing perspectives, Richard Fulkerson missed this.
In "Composition Theory in the Eighties: Axiological Consensus and Pragmatic Diversity," Fulkerson outlines four elements that make up any "theory of composition," that is, any theory about what good writing is, how it's produced, how to teach it, and "what counts for knowledge" (410-411). Respectively, he calls those elements theories of axiology, process, pedagogy, and epistemology. He takes the time to situate each of these theories in a historical and somewhat holistic narrative-or, at least, a narrative that prioritizes holism. Fulkerson looks at composition studies-as a whole-in effort to identify what we do, what we value, what we teach, and why we teach it. Although he permits multiplicity in theories of processes, pedagogies, and epistemologies, what he seems to want (and what he nearly celebrates) in the article is a unified and unifying axiology: a shared, disciplinary position on "what good writing is." He writes, "I am not claiming that in the nineties we all accept a common paradigm. I am maintaining that we ! 23 are much closer to accepting one portion of it than we were a decade earlier" (424 emphasis in original). For Fulkerson, it seems, "closer to one" is a good thing.
He revisits these ideas, this argument, in his 2005 essay, "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century." Here, Fulkerson has changed his mind about where we're heading, and he claims, "that composition studies has become a less unified and more contentious discipline early in the twenty-first century than it had appeared" to him before (654). The "controversy," as he puts it, is "within the field, not in the eyes of the public, the administration, or the legislature," and it's "not just methodological, but axiological, pedagogical, and processual" (679, 681 emphasis in original). The controversy is about the entirety of "the goal of teaching writing in college" (679). For Fulkerson, this controversy is problematic, not productive. He explains that, if a university or a department is serious about seeing writing courses as constituting a "program" or some portion of a larger scheme of "general education," some degree of commonality is likely to be required. (680) Where Fulkerson sees the variations as "dangerous," I'm not so easily rattled (681). To be fair, though, it's no longer 2005. I'm not looking at the same field as Fulkerson was, and even if I were, my terministic screen wouldn't permit me to see the same things he saw, in the same ways he saw them. Like writing itself, writing departments and writing classes all, and also, have their own contexts, their own purposes and audiences. They have their own rhetorical situations. This isn't something bad, and it's not necessarily dangerous. Acting on or responding to these variations doesn't have to be a process of ironing out their differences. As I'll argue in Chapter 4, it can be a process of navigating and negotiating them. For the university, for the department, for the course, for the ! 24 instructor, and for the students, there's a better, more workable, approach: make the writing class in question (or the writing program in question) do what all good writing does: work within its idiosyncratic, ever-changing, ever change-able rhetorical situation.
How URI's Department of Writing and Rhetoric came to be is a long story, and for some it is a contentious story. Many histories are. Although I didn't live through or experience that history, I do hope the following provides an adequate account of the rhetorical situation of URI's Writing and Rhetoric department, and thus, perhaps, an adequate frame for understanding the WRT 104 course.
I've stitched together everything I could find and I tried to learn from everyone I could talk to. Casual conversations, proposals, memos from ad hoc committees, old syllabi and course descriptions . . . I use them all to provide, next, an overview of the department's formation, the genesis of its undergraduate major, and its service to the university through the general education program. English department" at URI ("Executive Summary" 3). The College Writing Program was URI's response "to a need for increased writing instruction" ("Executive Summary" 3). Prior to the College Writing Program, there was a writing program called SCRATCH, and it worked independently-that is, apart from the English department, who had previously "abolished its composition courses" ("Executive Summary" 3). The Faculty Senate Curricular Affairs Committee "defined many but not all of the terms of the relationship" between the College Writing Program and the English department ("Executive Summary" 3).
Twenty-three years later, in 2002, tensions were high between the College Writing Program and the English department. As the College Writing Program Faculty explain in their "Executive Summary of the CWP Self-Study and Program Review," it was the relationship between the College Writing Program and English-or the uncertain terms of that relationship-that would, at least in part, lead to the College Writing Program's need to separate from the English department: Faced with changes in the humanities generally, and between literature and composition more specifically, faculty and administrators can no longer ignore the growing differences between Writing and English. (3) Their "Executive Summary" works to place these tensions both nationally and locally.
They note the ways that "the discipline known as English has changed dramatically in the last few decades in response to changing social conditions," and one of those changes, nationally, involves rhetoric and composition studies "[becoming] a large and important ! 26 discipline in its own right" (3). Their summary also points out how, at URI specifically, the College Writing Program is not the first sub-discipline to break off from English; other programs include "women's studies, African-American studies, and film studies," fields that, they explain, might be "related to some areas of literary study but [are] also unrecognizable to traditional specialists in literature" (3). The English department at URI is/was concerned with literature.
The tensions between the College Writing Program and the English department made it difficult for the College Writing Program to do the work and perform the services they were developed to do and perform. In their summary, the College Writing Program faculty state that answering to "the Faculty Senate's ongoing charge to 'provide a more diversified writing program which can better serve the needs of URI students,'" is "impossible," given the "current conditions and practices within the English department" (3, emphasis in original). Part of those impossible conditions had to do with resources, and part of those impossible conditions had to do with the program design, development, and growth (or lack thereof). In their summary, the College Writing Program faculty argue that, Despite a persistent view that the CWP has "grown," or is in continually expanding, the College Writing Program has seen virtually no growth in FTE faculty resources and in course offerings from 1979 to present day.
[. . .] The CWP has added only one new undergraduate course of its own design, Writing in Electronic Environments. The CWP has made remarkable contributions and has persevered to offer innovative courses without new resources" (3 emphasis in original) The lack of growth in the College Writing Program wasn't due to a lack of imagination or design on the faculty's part. In 2001, the semester before their "Executive Summary," ! 27 College Writing Program faculty collaborated on a "Curriculum Revision Proposal." This was composed for and delivered to English department faculty, and it, developed out of [College Writing Program faculty's] concern for students' varied needs, responsiveness to the new writing minor, respect for the writing focus in the English major, and attention to disciplinary developments. (1) The "varied needs" of students included not just first-year writing students but students in the writing minor, which had been in place for a year. Course offerings, the College Writing Program faculty argue, were inadequate. At the first-year level, there was only WRT 101: Composition. In their Proposal, College Writing Program faculty explain that in rhetoric and composition, "the nature of the first-year course has evolved" (3). They imagine replacing this one, broadly conceived course with three more specific courses from which students could choose. The courses would all "provide instruction in composing, language use, and grammar," but each would do so within a different emphasis (3). The proposed courses include WRT 101: Writing to Inform and Explain; WRT 103: Forms of College Writing; and WRT 105: Writing from Field, Print, and Electronic Sources. Regardless of which first-year course students chose, they would "receive similar instruction in crucial basic material upon which they can build solid writing skills" ("Curriculum Revision Proposal" 3). Beyond the first-year level, the College Writing Program had only two courses.
The first was WRT 201: Intermediate Writing: Academic Contexts. The second was WRT 301: Advanced Writing: Special Contexts. In their "Curriculum Revision Proposal," College Writing Program faculty explain that these two courses, as they were constructed ! 28 at the time, were "so broadly conceived that their distinctive content is hidden" (1). They argue that the course titles and course descriptions obscure the fact that the field of composition studies has extensive, varied, and specific subject matter to offer students who seek to develop their skills beyond the first-year level. (1) College Writing Program faculty wanted, again, to "replace these 'blanket' courses with more specific, clearly defined courses," and they provided several possibilities ("Curriculum Revision Proposal" 1). They re-imagined WRT 201: Intermediate Writing: Academic Contexts as WRT 203: Writing Argumentative and Persuasive texts. They imagined replacing WRT 301 with four courses, "each with clearly delineated content" ("Curriculum Revision Proposal" 12). Travel Writing, Writing Culture, Public Writing, and Writing for Community Service would, together, replace WRT 301: Advanced Writing: Special Contexts.
Having "clearly defined courses," beyond the first-year especially, is important.
College Writing Program faculty explain that, At the 300-level, courses in any field should be advanced in content and skills, their subject matter should be somewhat narrowly focused within the wider specialty, and the field's generalized or basic content should be eliminated or held to a minimum. This is true for all disciplines at the university. Our courses at the advanced undergraduate level are specialized, different from each other, and based upon an expectation that there will not be a review of basic writing skills. ("Curriculum Revision Proposal" 12) In their defense of creating upper-level courses that are more specific, College Writing Program faculty draw on the fact that rhetoric and composition is a "field," itself, ! 29 separate from English, and that it has its own "subject matter," separate from the "basic writing skills" that students will learn in first-year writing courses.
But despite the arguments made in the "Curriculum Revision Proposal," the College Writing Program saw little change in the courses they were able to offer for general education students or writing minors. This frustration no doubt led to their request to separate from English and become an independent academic unit. The "Executive Summary" was part of that argument. The College Writing Program wanted the ability (and the resources, and the space) to oversee all that was or should have been part of the College Writing Program: curriculum, admissions, hiring, advising, scheduling, "and service at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels" (4).
As an argument, it worked. The English department and the College Writing The BA in Writing and Rhetoric was designed "for undergraduate students who seek a career in professional writing, teaching, or publishing," and "for students who want a liberal arts degree that also emphasizes the applied arts and the technical skills that employers value" ("Proposed Instructional Program Change" 1). The change from College Writing Program to Department of Writing and Rhetoric marks an important change from a program often associated with service courses to a degree-granting department of a distinct academic discipline, rhetoric and composition studies. Departments of Writing have been established at approximately 15 colleges and universities nationwide. (2) The "Proposed Instructional Program Change" gives a rationale for the program, describes the institutional role of the program, shares inter-institutional considerations, and provides a (detailed) overview of the program proposed. It lists the faculty and staff assigned to the program, describes the students who the program will work with and attract, and explains administrative structures and responsibilities. It also lays out financial resources, equipment needed, and evaluation procedures for program success.
In the two years that passed since they had received approval to separate from the English department, the College Writing Program had already put much of these details in place, or at least set the groundwork for successfully transitioning into them. They were offering the writing minor, offering a specialization within the English PhD and MA programs, working with Learning Communities and the Honors Program, and offering specific courses for the College of Business Administration ("Proposed Instructional Program Change" 4). The College Writing Program already offered twelve courses beyond first-year writing, and of the five courses that would become requirements for the major, only two were newly-proposed (6). In terms of faculty, the College Writing ! 31 Program anticipated that "once the program reaches the estimated 70 students, then additional part-time faculty will be needed to cover five sections of WRT above the 100 level" (11 emphasis in original). The estimate they reference was the number of majors they anticipated by September 2009.
In terms of administration, the College Writing Program explained that "the new department will be administered using the same administrative structure as in the current College Writing Program" (13). This included only two positions: the Chair, and the Director of the Writing Center. Functionally, if not technically, the College Writing Program already had a chair, but she was referred to as the "Director," as the "Proposed Instructional Program Change" mentions (13). The College Writing Program's proposal was successful, and the Department of Writing and Rhetoric was named, and they began offering a BA. In their "Proposed Instructional Program Change," the College Writing Program couldn't have foreseen or planned everything. Other factors would influence the growth of the major, the courses offered, and the resources needed.
Presently, there are currently two courses available at the 100 level (although there used to be three), and students can decide, to some degree, which course they'll enroll in. By a long shot, WRT 104 is offered most. In the fall 2014, for example, there were 42 sections of WRT 104, and 18 sections of WRT 106. The following spring, there were 67 sections of WRT 104, and 13 sections of WRT 106. Both WRT 104 and WRT 106 work to fulfill a general education requirement, but first-year courses aren't the only ones to do so. Some programs at URI require their majors to take additional writing courses, beyond the first-year writing course. Having a writing major has allowed the department to have different kinds of conversations, with different kinds of audiences. The department is able to have and to join conversations-sometimes debates-about the role of the first-year writing course, for the discipline of rhetoric and composition and not, say, for the discipline of English (where many other writing programs are still housed). The debates can be about first-year composition as a service course and about its role in a major/minor curriculum-as was the case when some of the faculty members in the department collaborated on "Thinking ! 33 Vertically," the response to Downs and Wardle's essay. Where the department members who co-authored "Thinking Vertically" part ways with Downs and Wardle is in the role and place of writing content in undergraduate courses, whether or not writing-as a capital D discipline, as a researchable field-is appropriate in the first-year writing course.
To be clear-well, maybe I'm trying to be fair more than clear-"Thinking Vertically" is collaboratively authored, but don't gloss over what collaboration is, means, does. Collaboration has its own constraints and possibilities, and both are important. In a practical sort of way, there's not enough words or space to say or write what everyone wants to say or write. If the collaboration is to be coherent (especially for anyone outside of the collaboration) some ideas and some positions-perhaps the ones that don't line up so neatly with the others-probably won't make it to the final draft.
So, addendum #1: While "Thinking Vertically" was collaboratively authored by the department, I can't say, and I won't say, that the essay fully and completely, or honestly and accurately, represents each individual author's-each individual faculty member's-entire position or perspective. There's no way it could.
Addendum #2: This one might be a problem that's always part of anything in print. Once something is published, it's published. When or if ideas change, and when or if one wants to explain those changes, the only option is to write something new.
While I don't know whether or not any of the authors of "Thinking Vertically" have changed any of their ideas, I can say that some things have changed since the essay's publication and that the changes matter: today's Department of Writing and ! 34 Rhetoric isn't the same as 2008's Department of Writing and Rhetoric. Not all of the authors of "Thinking Vertically"-that is, not all of the faculty members that spoke/wrote on behalf of or as the department-are still faculty in the department. Out of the eight authors, two have left (one retired and another took a position at a different university).
There are also new faculty members, three on the tenure track and one full time lecturer.
In that sense, the department isn't the same department, not anymore. It couldn't be. It's likely, then, that some of the ideas in "Thinking Vertically" could change, that some of the ideas-finalized then-have changed, now.
At each university, teaching writing is going to mean something different, because each university has its own purpose for (or defense of) higher education. I'm going to pick Fulkerson back up and say this: perhaps teaching writing at every university is different.
Downs and Wardle situate their pedagogy as one that "rejects ['teaching a universal academic discourse'] as a goal for first-year composition," and they explain that "in [they course they designed], students are taught that writing is conventional and context-specific, rather than governed by universal rules" (559). They aim to teach students realistic and useful conceptions of writing-perhaps the most significant of which would be that writing is neither basic nor universal but contentand context-contingent and irreducibly complex. and Rhetoric, from the 100 to the 300 level, is supposed to meet the same objectives. The department conceives (and conceived of) first-year writing courses as "rooted in the concept of 'rhetorical situation,'" and students enrolled in WRT 104 or WRT 106 can expect to-and can expect to learn how to-"approach different contexts and tasks from different directions" (Miles,Pennell,et.al. 504). All of the department's writing courses -from general education to advanced courses in the major-aim to develop and or build on this foundational outcome. The building is a matter of degrees, but it is also a matter of depth. Downs and Wardle's approach puts the weight of the discipline into one firstyear writing course, and this is the bit that the authors of "Thinking Vertically" took issue with.
For the department, and in the essay, thinking vertically means building a comprehensive curriculum-not designing one course-in which all courses build on both concepts and practices introduced earlier. A vertical curriculum relies on and builds from repeated exposure, but each moment of exposure also introduces depth, layers complexity. The idea that the department's general education outcomes are the same throughout 100, 200, and 300 level courses is evidence to the vertical curriculum; it demonstrates the first of three "guiding principles" to thinking vertically: "recursion over time" (Miles,Pennell,et.al. 505). As the authors explain, recursion over time means that, at the 100-and 200-levels, rhetorical concepts are introduced and practiced. At the 200-and 300-levels, those same concepts are reinforced through repeated, yet situationally different, practice. And the 400-level courses deepen, complicate, and extend the students' understanding of the core rhetorical principles underlying our curriculum as a whole, with its entire menu of options. (Miles,Pennell,et.al. 506) ! 36 That's the first guiding principle of a vertical curriculum. The other two are: "core courses common to all majors," and "situated production in a variety of contexts over time" (Miles,Pennell,et.al. 506). The department explains, "We do not [. . .] insist that the first-year course do all our educational work. To do so would demean the intellectual integrity of the discipline" (Miles,Pennell,et.al. 505). The Writing and Rhetoric major isn't simply just the most-vertical-extension-possible of those general education objectives. The major's learning objectives and outcomes are different than those for general education courses.
In November of 2005, when the Writing and Rhetoric department (still called the College Writing Program) submitted their "New Program Proposal," they detailed the major they were asking to develop. They crafted objectives and outcomes for the major that differed from the general education courses' objectives and outcomes. Both are included in the "New Program Proposal." As the two lists functioned in that proposal-to illustrate the differences between general education in an area of study and concentrated education in a field-so, too, might they function here. In the "New Program Proposal," when the Rhetorical Knowledge objective is broken down into outcomes for general education students, those outcomes are different than they are for majors. A side by side comparison: ! 37 The verbs in figure 1 are bold, and that's not arbitrary. It's crucial. When departments, programs, and faculty articulate objectives-to say what, exactly, students are supposed to be able to do, having learned concepts or habits of mind-verbs need to be chosen carefully. Students who successfully complete a general education writing course should be able to demonstrate their rhetorical knowledge through recognizing, practicing, and reflecting. Compare that to the ways that majors-having successfully completed their coursework-are expected to demonstrate their rhetorical knowledge. Not only are majors expected to do more with their Rhetorical Knowledge, quantitatively-there's four outcomes articulated for them, where the general education had three), but Writing majors are expected to use and apply their Rhetorical Knowledge more substantially.
Where general education students are expected to be able to recognize rhetorical situations, Writing majors are expected to identify them. That's the difference between familiarity and innovation, between "I've seen this before" and "Look at what I've found." It's that sort of development, that sort of growth, that sort of depth and layering of complexity, that the vertical curriculum aims to make possible.
The variations in the order of these objectives on these two lists matter, as do the variations in terminology. Some objectives are more important (or only important) for writing majors. One objective, though, is primary for both, and it occupies the first spot on each list: Rhetorical Knowledge. If objectives are conceptual, and if Rhetorical Knowledge is an objective, then outcomes related to the objective will ask that students demonstrate their conceptual understanding of it.
But what happens when they don't?

Chapter 2: Styles and Stories of Writing Program Administration
In "Who's the Boss?: The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Collaborative Administration for Untenured WPAs," Eileen E. Schell discusses the scholarship on writing program administration styles by distinguishing between two types. The first she characterizes as "might and right," and the second as "collaborative action." Scholarship that falls into the first category-might and right-positions the Writing Program Administrator (WPA) "as a powerful director with tenure in a hierarchical administrative framework," and it is "a leadership style [. . .] that does not question traditional lines of administrative authority" (66). The second leadership style-collaborative action-"constructs administrative power as a capillary, not individualistic, practice," as the "administrative power circulates among and between administrators, teaching assistants, and instructors" (66). The distinction isn't Schell's attempt "to create a neat binary [. . .] or to elevate one over the other;" rather, she considers this separation a useful way to look at the "particular challenges" that WPAs who are untenured might face as they determine and test out different leadership styles (66-67). I reference her terms of separation, here, not in light of those challenges, but in light of the challenges that a program might face, if and when the program lacks an official WPA. Whether or not a program has a WPA is as critical a question as whether or not that WPA is tenured. of temporary committees that, at times together and at times separately, perform multiple WPA functions. In a way, anyone/everyone who is part of the department-from the chair to lecturers, from GTAs to per-course instructors-has, at some point, either an obligation or an opportunity to participate in WPA work.
To determine which leadership style is at play-might and right or collaborative action-Schell suggests that one must ask questions about where "power, authority, and responsibility for writing program leadership" are located (66). Such questions include: In whom is the authority for the writing program invested? Is the WPA position conceived of as a directorship through which an authoritative individual exercises or wields power over others in a hierarchical structure? Or is the leadership of the program shared by an individual or a group who has power with others to make decisions about writing program policy? (66) These questions might suggest that leadership styles are easy to identify as either might and right or collaborative action, but the answers to these questions (and, thus, the administrative styles their answers illuminate) are not so easy to determine. Chances are good that the two styles blend, as Schell admits, "most WPAs employ a mixture of leadership styles to fit a given economic, political, institutional, and historical context" (66). When a program lacks a WPA, and when the WPA function operates instead through collaboration and distribution, these questions are directed not at a single person, but at the work that individuals and committees take up and who is responsible for coordinating the work within (and among) the committees. Adler-Kassner and O'Neill seem to find the most value-practically and ethically -in the final strategy they discuss, Issue-Based Alliance Building. This strategy somewhat "blends" the other two, as the WPA still explores values and identifies interests (her own and those of others), but she must also "consider questions of power and ideology," as they relate to everyone's values and interests (Adler-Kassner and O'Neill 96). The WPA must, "identify short-term, tactical actions that might represent both her own interests (and values) and those of potential allies" (Adler-Kassner and O'Neill 97).
Further, the WPA must always look toward "the long-term, values-based implications of these actions," in order to help her "make conscious decisions about how, when, and whether to take particular actions" (Adler-Kassner and O'Neill 97). It is an approach that is both pragmatic and hypothetical: one makes decisions in the present moment, in light of what one hopes to accomplish in the future, or in light of what one hopes the future will permit.
! 44 For a program that lacks a specific, official WPA, long-term visions for the program become a little problematic because participation-even by department chairs, committee chairs, and program directors-is not guaranteed to be long-term. When committee work rotates and is a matter of members electing to take part, then the "longterm, values-based implications" of the "short-term, tactical actions" become difficult to see.
What all models/strategies share is the belief that through a WPA's work-or, Writing Committee to replace The Norton, is so rhetoric-centric. Throughout all its chapters, it underscores and integrates rhetorical situation-a concept that directly connects to the learning outcome that a majority of students enrolled in general education courses were not demonstrating.
But changes in one dimension affect (or necessitate) changes in others. The adoption of a new textbook wasn't the only change made to WRT 104. The department's learning objectives and outcomes were also changed-revised and condensed. Another change was in the major projects for WRT 104. Each of the five major projects was re-! 45 considered in light of The Harbrace. For example, the literacy narrative-covered in The Norton-was revised in light of The Harbrace's food memoir. In WPA work, nothing happens in isolation, outside of issues or concerns of context, influence, effect. WPA work is work that revisits itself (that must revisit itself). It is work that reminds itself (that must remind itself) of its history as much as it looks ahead at its future. WPA work is work that circles back, and comes back again.
In light of this predisposition to interconnection, it is difficult to tell a local story of writing program assessment chronologically. and GTAs, I thought (and re-thought) about both of these issues, but I also started wondering about terminology, ideology, and professionalization.
The story here is not just chronological, and the changes made to WRT 104-the new textbook and the revised outcomes-are not just material, and they are not just textual. They are rhetorical and ideological, able to shape content, form, and behavior.
The changes affect the content, skills, and strategies that students are expected to learn, just as they affect the content, skills, and strategies that teachers are expected to teach.
The changes also affect how students and teachers both are expected to use resources.

! 48
When changes are made to a course, those changes can represent larger values, and when the changes are material and/or linguistic-as they are in textbooks and outcomes-then those changes can-through use-teach those values to others. At least we think so. At least sometimes.

Standard(izing) Courses, Teaching Teachers
Ronda Leathers Dively tells the story of standardizing ENG 101 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). While the required composition course had "department sanctioned objectives [. . .] it did not impose genres, topics, or sequences of assignments, nor did it prescribe classroom activities at any level" (Dively). This resulted in a "considerable disparity between the courses numerous sections," and it was questionable whether all of those sections were working to meet, or succeeding in meeting, ENG 101's learning objectives (Dively). At SIUC, the majority of course sections were taught by graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) who were new to the program, and who had, Dively writes, "an initial lack of specialized knowledge in composition pedagogy." For SIUC, implementing a standardized syllabus for ENG 101 seemed like an appropriate, coherence-making move. Dively explains that, direction in the form of a standardized syllabus not only helps to ensure that instruction, on large scale, remains consistent with program objectives, but it also drives inexperienced instructors beyond their own comfort zones, compelling (rather than merely encouraging) them to experiment with models and strategies for effective composition instruction that are informed by scholarship in the discipline. In other words, they are obliged (not merely invited) to develop their "composition literacy" or knowledge of the academic community that informs their teaching so that their capacity to reflect critically on their pedagogical ! 49 practices, to enact appropriate practices in future contexts, and to articulate the rationale behind those practices will grow. (emphasis in original) What gets standardized at SIUC isn't just the syllabus or the course; the instructors-the instruction-also gets standardized, not in the sense that everyone turns into the same thing, but in the sense that everyone comes to learn the same things, comes to know what "models and strategies" enable "effective instruction;" the GTAs overcome their "initial lack of specialized knowledge," when they "are obliged" to learn something about "the academic community that informs their teaching." This is reminiscent of Adler-Kassner we can be more certain that the assignments, activities, and readings that undergraduates encounter are collectively giving due attention to the entire set of 101 course objectives and that "best practices" are more consistently in play.
This strategy claims to have powerful ideological functions, and Sidney Dobrin would agree. In "Finding Space for the Composition Practicum," Dobrin explains that because ! 50 the teaching practicum is often a required course for GTAs, it is "one of the most powerful and most important spaces of occupation in composition studies" (21). It is powerful and important because not only do GTAs learn about "teaching methods and theories," but the practicum more often than not serves as an introduction to composition theory, to research methodologies, to pedagogical theories, to histories of composition studies as a discipline, and to larger disciplinary questions about writing, not just to teaching writing per se. 19) This, Dobrin argues, makes the practicum "a device through which ideologies are reinforced and programmatic cultures are created and maintained" (4 First, data suggest that our TAs were influenced more strongly by prior personal experiences and beliefs and their experiences in the classroom than by their formal pedagogy education. Second, TAs' responses reveal that new composition principles were unevenly integrated into their composition pedagogy worldview. Third, survey and interview responses from TAs showed little differentiation between the two sites; and finally, survey responses from TAs showed little statistically significant differentiation between first-year and beyond-first-year TAs. (32-33) But Reid, Estrem, and Belcheir don't use their findings to suggest giving up on teaching education programs or putting practica aside. Instead, they conclude that teacher educators need to re-think their teacher education programs. At the start of their study, Reid, Estrem, and Belcheir "assum[ed] that one key goal of the education process is to effect change in the teachers, their goals, their concerns, and their reflective practices" (37). But their study changes something else: "the way [Reid, Estrem, and Belcheir] view [their] own teaching" (49).
Thinking back to Adler-Kassner and O'Neill's strategies, the one most suited for the work Reid, Estram, and Belcheir anticipate might be Issue-Based Alliance Building.
As a blend of the other two models, this strategy explores the values of all parties involved as it also "considers questions of power and ideology" (96). If teachers are to re-! 52 think their teacher education programs, their consideration must include the values that GTAs bring with them as well as the the function (or mis-function) of ideological work.
While there's no consensus about the degree to which standardized course materials or teaching practica work to prepare (or indoctrinate) less-experienced writing teachers, it seems like both still offer up something productive: the opportunity for reflection. And perhaps reflection, itself, can instigate change.
At URI: Outcomes-Based Assessment, Standardized WRT 104 In order to assess their general education courses, URI's Writing and Rhetoric department orchestrated a round of outcomes-based assessment. As Michael Carter explains, outcomes-based assessment "invites us to view our courses and curricula from a different perspective," and it changes-if not the ways we think about education-at least the "assumptions" we might make about it (268). He writes, We assume that the inputs we provide for students will lead to certain outcomes, the knowledge, skills, and other attributes we believe graduates should possess. However, an outcomes-based approach does not rely on assumption. By that method, faculty identify the educational outcomes for a program and then evaluate the program according to its effectiveness in enabling students to achieve those outcomes. (268) Outcomes-based assessment doesn't assume that the program is working as-is, that it's "enabling its graduates to attain the outcomes;" and, crucially, outcomes-based assessment doesn't even assume the outcomes themselves (Carter 271). It doesn't assume that "inputs" lead to (or are able to lead to) direct outcomes, but, paradoxically perhaps, outcomes-based assessment doesn't assume that the results of assessment can't have a Outcomes-based assessment doesn't assess students, even "though it is likely to incorporate some materials produced by students," and in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, outcomes-based assessment did use student work (Carter 283). Relying on the reflective introductions that students composed for their final portfolios, (these were made anonymous in terms of both writer/student and instructor, but they were not made anonymous in terms of which general education course they were composed for) the Assessment Committee went in search of finding out how well-or whether or notstudents enrolled in general education Writing courses were meeting the department's general education learning outcomes. Put another way, we asked what Carter calls outcomes-based assessment's "central question": "To what extent is the full program enabling students to attain the outcomes designated by program faculty?" (283). It's an important question, and examining student work is one way of looking for an answer.
! 54 Portfolios are a common means of evaluating student work, and they are a common method to demonstrate learning (Elbow and Belanoff, Yancey, Reynolds). One reason portfolios are popular for/in writing courses is because they can capture some of what the discipline values: process, revision, peer feedback, collaboration, and reflection (Elbow and Belanoff 99). As a means of assessing students' writing in process-based or genre-based courses, the portfolio is more comprehensive than a single essay could be (Elbow and Belanoff, Yancey). Portfolios can include a variety of drafts, and these drafts can represent a variety of process stages-from exploratory to polished-and they can include drafts that represent a student's work in a variety of genres. In terms of assessing students, Kathleen Blake-Yancey calls the portfolio "the preferred technology of the third wave [of assessment]" (138). These waves, for Yancey, are the historical shifts of assessment, the ways the field has/had understood, used, and valued assessment. She calls them waves because, like tides, they are not distinct or clear cut. One flows into another, one is formed by what came before, and each continues to form what comes next.
Elbow and Belanoff outline a process of collaboratively grading students' final portfolios. In their model, student work is assessed, but instead of individual teachers performing the assessment, it is a group endeavor. Instead of using rubrics to rate the portfolios, the Elbow-Belanoff model uses a simple decision [. . .] pass or fail. The raters were not trained to agree, as in the holistic scoring model, but rather released to read, to negotiate among themselves, "hammering out an agreeable compromise." (Elbow,quoted in Yancey,(138)(139), emphasis in original).
! 55 Yancey explains that the model that Elbow and Belanoff use "functions [in] three ways: (1) as a sorting mechanism (pass-fail); (2) as a check on practice; (3) as a means of faculty development" (139-140). In URI's Department of Writing and Rhetoric, the outcomes-based assessment functioned in Yancey's second and third sense. Passing or failing, for students, had already happened (the portfolios' reflective introductions were collected and graded before the outcomes-based assessment took place). Passing or failing, for instructors, wasn't part of the purpose or the design of the outcomes-based assessment (which is why the reflective introductions were made doubly-anonymous).
But the outcomes-based assessment did provide for the department "a check on practice," and, further down the line, changes were made to the curriculum that, it was hoped, could provide "a means of faculty development," similar to the way it did for Dively and ENG 101 at SIUC.

At URI: Outcomes-Based Assessment
The reflective introductions were collected in the Spring of 2011, and the outcomes-based assessment took place the in the fall of 2011. At the time the reflective introductions were collected, the department had twenty-one learning outcomes, organized under five learning objectives. The difference between objectives and outcomes is one of "broad goals" versus "operational definitions," respectively (Carter 273). Objectives define "in relatively general terms the knowledge and skills the program faculty will help the students to attain," but because objectives are so "broadly stated, they do not provide enough detail to be teachable and measurable, that is, to guide ! 56 teaching in the curriculum and to be reliably assessed" (Carter 273). That's were outcomes come in; they are "operational definitions for each of the objectives" and they are "written in a way that is demonstrable" (Carter 273 were not doing well with it," and because it was an outcome that could be measured through the artifacts they collected (Miles).
The verb used in outcome 1C is reflect, and so the showable or demonstrable activity of 1C is reflection. But in this sense, in this outcome, and in the reflective introductions that (should) demonstrate it, reflection has a lot to do with the student's understanding of revision, as it informs and is informed by the rhetorical situation.
Students are expected to understand (after having learned) the purposes of their revision(s), and they are expected to understand (after having learned) the effects that In the standardized syllabus for the 2010-2011 academic year, the year in which the reflective introductions were collected for outcomes-based assessment, the course was explained, via the standardized syllabus's Course Description, as such: All first-year writing courses at URI require five major projects plus other brief or informal writings; a focus on revision, with peer review and formative teacher response; a class session with a reference librarian who introduces the use of reference databases; the use of research to inform or persuade; and a final portfolio prefaced by a reflective introduction. In completing this course successfully, you will become more confident in using a number of writing strategies; you'll be able to respond effectively to the writing of others; you'll recognize different genres and purposes and be able to adapt to different audiences or demands. Generally speaking, at the end of this class, you'll be better prepared to face any writing task. (Dept. of Writing and Rhetoric) The standardized syllabus also contains a schedule, broken down by class meetings, integrating work from three textbooks, and outlining the activities in each class meeting. In "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers," Nancy Sommers explains how the students in her research "understand the revision process as a rewording activity" (326). Her student writers do not conceive "revision as an activity in which they modify and develop perspectives and ideas," and they lack "strategies of handling the whole essay. They lack procedures or heuristics to help them reorder lines of reasoning or ask questions about their purposes and readers" (Sommers 327). For these student writers, revision is somewhat superficial in that it focuses on a text's surface level features.
The "experienced adult writers" in Sommers's research, however, conceive of and practice revision differently, and these writers have two concerns: one is "a concern for form" and the other is "a concern for their readership" (Sommers 329). The concern for form is a concern for structure, not necessarily a concern for/of genre or medium. All writers in Summers's study were tasked with writing in the same three essay genres: "expressive, explanatory, and persuasive" (325). The concern for readership, though, approximates rhetorical awareness, even though Sommers doesn't call it that: The experienced writers imagine a reader (reading their product) whose existence and expectations influence their revision process. They have abstracted standards of a reader and this reader seems to be partially a reflection of themselves and functions as a critical and productive collaborator-a collaborator who has yet to love their work. The anticipation of a reader's judgment causes a feeling of dissonance when the writer recognizes incongruities between intention and execution, and requires these writers to make revisions on all levels. Such a reader gives them just what the students lacked: new eyes to "re-view" their work. The ! 60 experienced writers believe that they have learned the causes and conditions, the product, which will influence their reader, and their revision strategies are geared towards creating these causes and conditions. (329) Sommers characterizes the revision strategies of the experienced adult writers as "strategic attempts" that "[they] use to manipulate the conventions of discourse in order to communicate to their reader" (329). She doesn't argue for writing instructors to teach rhetorical awareness, at least not in those terms. Sommers's concern is one of process, and she argues that the main difference between the revision strategies of students and those of experienced writers is how they enact that process, its steps or phases. She identifies four kinds of revision: "deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering," and they can happen locally or globally (325). She argues that experienced writers operate in these steps recursively and strategically, keeping their imagined audience in mind.
Writing in 1992, Toby Fulwiler, like Sommers, prioritizes the role of revision in writing instruction. He explains that "teaching writing is teaching re-writing," and that, "for novice writers, learning to re-write is an alien activity that doesn't come easily" (1).
While Sommers identifies the types or stages of revision, Fulwiler outlines some techniques, some strategies. He argues that revision should be "provocative," that is, it should provoke the kinds of changes that will result in the "evolution, maturation, and improvement" of "both thinking and writing" (1). In this way, he both adds to and steps away from the kinds of revision Sommers identifies-deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering. Fulwiler's strategies include: limiting (in terms of time, place, and action; ! 61 and/or scope and focus); adding (dialog; interviews); switching (point of view; voice); and transforming (3-12).
Fulwiler's revision seems largely concerned with genre, as the example he gives is of a group of his students "transforming" their collaborative research report into a "script for 60 Minutes." If Sommers's revision was process-centric, Fulwiler's is genrefocused. While Fulwiler and Sommers present revision a bit differently, their works share two important arguments: revision is related to development of writing and thinking, and revision doesn't happen via sentence-level word choices. Revision is bigger than that.
We'd be hard pressed to find a writing or composition scholar who would debate that, as this position is somewhat ubiquitous.
In the standardized syllabus for WRT 104, the schedule included work and reading assigned from three different textbooks, and although there's no way to be certain that all instructors assigned those readings (and we can be even less certain that, if the readings were assigned, students actually read them), some of those readings did cover revision strategies. The primary textbook for WRT 104, The Norton Field Guide to Writing, did contain a section on revision, and revision was presented as a set of strategies (some less "provocative" than others) for student writers to use. At the Assessment Committee's first meeting, we reviewed the results from the department's previous outcomes-based assessment (that is, we looked at our previous loop), and we decided which outcome and objective we would narrow in on this time.
There were five people on the committee, and they represented somewhat of a spectrum, though, admittedly, not a very colorful one; that is, there weren't too many shades represented. There was one associate professor, one assistant professor, one full time lecturer, one recent PhD student who graduated halfway through the process (but continued her committee work), and there was me. I was the newest to the specialization, the newest to the program. At the time, I was a second-year PhD student, still in coursework. I had taught three sections of WRT 104, but that academic year, I was teaching a Short Story class for the English department.
The make-up of the Assessment Committee isn't arbitrary. , a group of people who accept, and whose work is guided by, the same paradigms and the same code of values and assumptions. (642) Although we weren't peers in the strict sense of the term (we didn't all occupy the same institutional position), we were peers in Bruffee's sense of the term: we shared the same field, we were all invested in it, we all valued it. There was no one in the committee to challenge those values, no one to ask why they were values to begin with, no one to question the worthwhileness of our work. There was no one to disrupt our normal discourse, no one, that is, to make abnormal discourse.
Abnormal discourse happens "when consensus no longer exists with regard to rules, assumptions, goals, values, or mores;" it's "'what happens when someone joins the discourse who is ignorant of' the conventions governing that discourse" (Bruffee 648).
Although he focuses on collaboration in the classroom (i.e., students collaborating), Bruffee's discussion of the learning and teaching potential of abnormal discourse applies here, too. He explains that abnormal discourse, serves the function of helping us-immersed as we inevitably are in the normal discourse of our disciplines and professions-to see the provincial nature of normal discourse and of the communities defined by normal ! 64 discourse. Abnormal discourse sniffs out stale, unproductive knowledge and challenges its authority, that is, the authority of the community which that knowledge constitutes. (648) Bruffee claims that abnormal discourse is "necessary to learning," but I wouldn't go that far (648) Yancey called writing assessment rhetorical, by which she meant that it is "positioned as a shaper of students and as a means of understanding the effects of such shaping" (144). Writing Program Assessment is an activity rooted in practices: the practice of teaching, the practice of reading, the practice of change, the practice, ultimately, of reflection and critique. Writing Program Assessment "reflects back to us that practice, the assumptions undergirding it, the discrepancy between what it is that we say we value and what we enact" (Yancey 494). Assessment is one practice, one space, that is particularly potent as a space for reflection, critique, praxis. It's one space for change.
At a local level, at the department or program or classroom level, assessment can and does offer space for reflection, critique, and change. It's not merely or only grading.
Grading is an end: a last word, a letter or a number that we put on a product we probably ! 65 won't see again. Outcomes-based assessment doesn't expect (or want) the final word, doesn't expect (or want) not to see "it" again. Outcomes-based assessment is generative, looking for growth, change. It's not a line, but a loop, a circle, whose curves can always change. In this way, outcomes-based assessment is, as Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell define the concept, more like evaluation, and evaluation is not the same as grading.
Evaluation asks different kinds of questions: Evaluation requires us to answer all the hard questions that students should ask but often do not know, or dare, to ask: What, specifically, seems strong about my work? What is not so strong? What might I do to make some progress, either in revising this draft or in working on a comparable assignment in the future? (viii) Outcomes-based assessment asks similar questions, but not of students' submissions, necessarily; it asks them of our program, our curriculum. Recasting Cooper and Odell's questions in outcomes-based assessment terms: What, specifically, seems strong about our work? What, specifically, is not so strong? What can we do in the future to make some progress on teaching our relevant learning objectives?
Outcomes-based assessment can supply answers to the first two questions. Answers to the third, though, can't come from assessment results alone. This is where assessment gets used, where it opens up possibilities for change, where it starts to show some possibilities, and where (perhaps) it starts to shut others down.
At URI: Asking and Answering, "What, specifically, is not so strong?" The outcomes-based assessment took place in the fall of 2011. The Assessment Committee collected 1412 reflective introductions, from eleven different general ! 66 education Writing courses at the 100, 200, and 300 level. From those 1412, we selected a stratified sample of 308. We predicted, perhaps even hoped, that 50% of students would meet expectations of Outcome 1C (Rhetorical Knowledge: Students reflect on the appropriateness of their choices for the rhetorical situation). We didn't think this prediction was good, but it ended up being generous. Of the stratified sample, only 20% met expectations. When that sample was filtered to include reflective introductions only from WRT 104, the percentage of students who met expectations was still low: just 23% (Miles). That the percentages of this outcome were so terribly low was "devastating," because the rhetorical situation is a concept that the Assessment Committee, in its report, characterized as "the most important one that we teach" (Miles). Roughly two-thirds of students enrolled in general education writing courses were not meeting this objective. The Assessment Committee's report explains that 70% of the department's general education courses "are taught by instructors who neither have nor are seeking an advanced degree in our discipline" (Miles). This percentage accounts for non-tenure track lecturers with advanced degrees in fields other than Rhetoric and Composition, for GTAs who are not seeking a Rhetoric and Composition specialization, and for those part-time ! 67 instructors who have at minimum a master's degree, although their advanced coursework wasn't necessarily in Rhetoric and Composition. These employment conditions are typical. And they provoke two questions: • What counts as specialization?
• What does specialization mean (or what should it mean) when it comes to teaching writing?
One functional, forward-looking effect of outcomes-based assessment has to do with the interpretation of results, and using those results to implement change. Outcomes Hansen, in "Doubling Our Chances: Co-Directing a Writing Program," relay the benefits of their co-directorship, which they describe as an "arrangement [that] has resulted in ! 68 personal, departmental, or institutional benefits" (23). Using the terms "co-directing" and "co-chairing" interchangeably, they explain, co-chairing a writing program has allowed us to shift responsibilities between us, to accommodate the demands of our individual workload or professional lives. On a departmental level, co-chairing depersonalizes the role of chair or director, reducing political risk for the co-chairs and fostering a departmental identity separate from the person of the chair or director. Finally, co-chairing challenges some traditional notions of bureaucracy, and in our own case, offers some interesting insight into cross-gender, shared leadership. (23) The situation Aronson and Hansen describe is not a distributed model, even though, they admit, "when we introduce ourselves as co-chairs to people who don't know us, we typically make some distinctions in our roles" (24). Such distinctions, they go on to explain, are only "apparent division[s]," because "the vast majority of what we do is shared," and "we frequently shift duties to meet our individual needs" (24-25). This makes their arrangement more collaborative than distributive, more shared than separated.
A reconception of administrative models or styles does not count as a revolution of said models or styles, as even a collaborative action model cannot escape what Schell calls the "material conditions of its practice" (69). Referencing Marcia Dickson's feminist model of administration, Schell explains: Dickson's theory of ideal administrative practice is premised on the idea that writing faculty (whether they are non-tenure-track faculty or teaching assistants, or tenured faculty) will be willing to work together to form and enact program policy and make curricular decisions. This is an admirable egalitarian assumption, but a writing program-like any institutional structure-is not a level playing field where all faculty members have equal time, energy, expertise, or the material incentive to participate fully in shared leadership. Thus the key issue is not should writing faculty No matter how much data one collects, in order to be useful the data must be interpreted and presented succinctly to those who will use it. Audience is a crucial consideration when interpreting the data. Faculty developers will likely have both internal and external users of their assessment results. the over-reliance of part-time faculty trained in other disciplines is negatively impacting student learning. Without the ability to hire permanent staff more highly trained in our discipline, we see little chance of improvement. (Miles) New faculty lines weren't likely-at least not to any degree that would have a marked effect on the course's core teaching population, and so the Assessment Committee did make other recommendations in its report, ones that were more possible, in part, because they were changes the department could make on its own, changes that didn't need funding or a Dean's approval. These recommendations were what were shared with the internal audience: those who taught for the Writing and Rhetoric department. instructors," an admittedly "huge charge" (Reynolds). The synthesis of the Assessment Committee's report and recommendations contained four total tasks, two of which were additional-to be taken up only if the First-Year Writing Committee had the time and the inclination. The other two charges were more pressing, "most urgent" (Reynolds). The first task, characterized as "the most obvious" way to "improve" the course was for the committee "to consider new textbook choices" (Reynolds). The chair asked, Are there any new books on the market that will give our 104 course a fresh approach? Are we committed to genre-based instruction, or is there something that would put more attention on rhetorical situations? Is there a new textbook that would address our learning outcomes more directlyor might inform revision of those outcomes? (Reynolds) Related to selecting a new textbook (and related to deciding what the Committee valued in/about a textbook) was the First-Year Writing Committee's second task: revising the General Education Learning Outcomes. The chair explained, "It seems clear that we have, overall, too many outcomes; that they are redundant and simply not 'studentfriendly'" (Reynolds). These two tasks-selecting a new textbook and revising the general education learning outcomes-were interconnected, and the committee worked on them recursively. We discussed outcomes and objectives at the same time as we evaluated textbooks, with one conversation's insights informing the others. In total, the First-Year Writing Committee reviewed twelve textbooks, evaluating them in light of the above criteria. We kept track of our reviews online, using a shared Google-doc spreadsheet. Some evaluations are more in-depth than others. One reason for the variations in length/detail is that there were a few textbooks that were cut from consideration early in the review process, when the reader felt that a primary or essential feature was missing. For example, one textbook was "all about academic writingwriting academic essays. No other genres," and the reviewer asked, "Cut on that basis?" ("FYW Textbook Review"). And the First-Year Writing Committee did.
Some textbooks were reviewed by two or three committee members, while others were reviewed by only one. Some reviews were shorter than others, as some reviewers were brief (responding to questions of criteria with only a "Yes" or a "No"). Some reviewers also reviewed more textbooks. We announced our decision to the entire teaching population via email and invited instructors to peruse the book (we left copies of it in the department office). We explained that, as a committee, "we gravitated to texts that were more different than our status quo," ! 76 and we described the provocation for our committee work and the mainframe we shared (to greater or lesser degrees) as we entered into our review of textbooks: Among the reasons for considering a textbook change is a renewed departmental focus on enhancing the rhetorical approach in our first year classes. We determined that while many of our faculty teach the course rhetorically, not every instructor has the experience and foundation to do so, and The Norton Field Guide was perhaps not providing as much support for a rhetorical approach as a textbook could. We also determined that we wanted to keep the course genre-based. (Hensley Owens) We also introduced the rest of the department to the book we chose, The Harbrace Guide to Writing. We explained, The Harbrace Guide to Writing won us over because of its deeply rhetorical approach to writing, including several chapters on rhetoric, sections on analyzing the rhetorical situation embedded in each genre chapter, and peer review questions that draw responders' attention to the rhetorical situation and rhetorical features of students' texts in ways no other textbooks seemed to. We were very drawn to the extensive rhetorical positioning and the language of genres as 'real responses to real situations,' rather than as checklists of features. We felt this textbook's pedagogical approach best matched the vision we have for WRT 104, and that it would provide instructors and students alike with a foundation and a vocabulary for thinking of and approaching writing truly rhetorically. Additionally, the instructors' guide offers extensive bibliographic information for instructors inspired to learn more. (Hensley Owens) But choosing a new textbook was only half of our task. While we were reviewing and deciding on a textbook, we were also revising the general education outcomes.
(Revising) Outcomes When outcomes are "well-crafted," they can "constitute a common language that clarifies what we mean by effective performance" (Hokanson 150). The clarification isn't just or only for the students' sake. It's not just or only students who learn from (or based ! 77 off of) outcomes, and it's not just student performance that outcomes help shape.
Hokanson explains that the shared, common language that outcomes help determine "benefits everyone involved in the learning process" (150). This includes faculty, as one of the benefits of outcomes is that they can "provide a basis for coherent curriculum design and informed pedagogy" (Hokanson 150). Understood this way, outcomes can aim to ground instructors in disciplinary values and the practices that might best translate them. Or, at least, we assume. In light of Reid, Estrem, and Belcheir, this assumption is questionable.
The First-Year Writing Committee worked to make the general eduction outcomes and objectives more teachable, approachable, and learnable. By revisiting and revising outcomes, we had the opportunity to look at how we articulated those values, the opportunity to ask how we might be able to articulate them more effectively (if not more representatively). Articulating, developing, or revising outcomes is a reflective and generative process-for departments, instructors, and students alike-because it "encourages engagement with fundamentals" (Harrington xvi). It asks questions about the aims of the courses, the purpose of experiences, the nature of learning, and how that learning should be sequenced (Harrington xvi). Outcomes are "shaped by the expertise of writing specialists in dialogue with the disciplines, professional areas, and the various publics with which the institution is engaged," and they "can be used to define a range of theory and practice that constitutes a working consensus on what writing means on a campus" (Hokanson 157).
! 78 Key here is the "working" that modifies "consensus," and so is the specificity of location: what it means on a campus. A working consensus is always underway, influencing and influenced by the changing demographics of a campus, the changing needs of students, the changing nature of a discipline, and the changing population that represents it, and the changing population responsible for teaching it. Consensus is always underway because context is always changing (or, at least, always susceptible to change, expected or otherwise). To that extent, there will never be an absolute or entirely settled consensus, and that's not such a bad thing. Hokanson admits this, and he even encourages it; outcomes statements are a "continuing dialogue," and he explains that this dialogue, can help maintain awareness and develop understanding of the role of writing (and effective writing instructions) in college-level learning-both for newer faculty and on a continuing basis. (157) He mentions newer faculty as an aside, though maybe he shouldn't.
Who Are You? (Who Are We?) Doug Downs begins his essay, "What Is First-Year Composition?," with an answer that someone who doesn't teach composition might find a little cheeky: "It depends whom you ask" (50). Providing a brief sketch of the variations of "whom," Downs identifies five possible answers: the institution; parents, politicians, and the public; other professors; students; and graduate teaching assistants (50). Not included in his list, but brought up several times throughout the essay, is another whom: "expert practitioners" (51). Via a historical overview, Downs traces the ways the answers to the ! 79 question of "what is first-year composition?" have changed, in part an effect of (or at least related to) the answer to another question-"What does good writing mean to stakeholders?" (54, emphasis in original). For Downs, "stakeholders" are those "interested others" that Adler-Kassner and O'Neill mentioned; they're the "public," at least in as much as they are not themselves compositionists and writing instructors.
These two demographics-the stakeholders and the "experts"-have diverging views of good writing. The former, Downs writes, carry "convictions that writing is the basic, transferable, grammatical skill of transcribing speech to print, a skill essential to both social standing and employment prospects" (54). For the latter, though, for the experts, good writing is quite a bit more nuanced than that. Downs  Although I firmly believe that voice (transcribed or otherwise) contributes to character, I have edited any extra-, non-, and/or sub-textual details. These details are perhaps too telling, and eliminating them is another effort to preserve the anonymity of my colleagues.

Graduate Teaching Assistant, Rhetoric and Composition track
Morgan, a third-year PhD student, came to URI after completing her MA. She had taken a pedagogy course while she was an MA student, but she had no formal classroom teaching experience when she began her PhD studies as a graduate teaching assistant.
That academic year, Morgan had sat for and passed her comprehensive exams, worked on her submittable article, her oral exams, moved, TA'd a course, and had to give up her outside-of-the-university work (this provided her some extra time to focus on academics and teaching, but it had a serious drain on her financial stability).
Morgan and I were friendly even before she agreed to participate in my research.
Although we were part of separate cohorts, there was a year of overlap in the time we each spent in coursework. We were in at least two courses together. And during one semester, our office hours overlapped.
My initial impressions of Morgan-as a classmate, as a colleague-were positive.
I admired her. I thought she was clever, and I thought she was careful in the best kind of Morgan values civility, kindness, and she sees the opportunity to develop these social skills in Writing courses, just as she sees the risk of developing their opposite: disrespect.
When students respond to other students' writing by focusing on "finicky details," it demonstrates a lack of "respect for somebody else's ideas." In Morgan's classes, she ! 88 wants students to understand that writing is about writers. She wants them to learn (if they don't already know) that a writer's ideas are more substantial, more important, more worthy of attention, than the purely-textual expression of those ideas.

Per-Course Instructor, PhD student, Rhetoric and Composition track
Margot is a fifth-year PhD student. She had a teaching assistantship for four years-the standard at the University of Rhode When we met on May 9, 2014, both of those Margots showed up. At times, she was the friendly, personable woman I remembered from the grad-student holiday party, the one who made me feel like we were just two people talking, two people relating.
Other times, she was the nervous, cautious student I worked with in graduate classes, the one whose anxiety wasn't just palpable, but somehow . . . pressing for space of its own, like it wanted a seat at the small table we sat at. As we tried to talk about teaching and textbooks and outcomes and objectives . . . there was this poltergeist, shaking our small From here, Margot begins to explain how she breaks down assignments in classes other than WRT 104. She talks about presenting different stages of research to students, often situating those stages as "sub-genres," each with its own set of rules and conventions, its own expectations, its own appropriate style and tone.
Along with issues related to, and struggles stemming from, funding and finances, Margot spoke often and in detail about the lack of community, the lack of support, she experiences at URI.

Per-Course Instructor, MA in Literature
Lucy started teaching college courses when she was studying at another university, working on her MA in English. She had two semesters of teaching experience when she started teaching per-course at URI, and although she has been teaching at URI for three years, she still feels "relatively new" to teaching. That semester, she was also taking classes at a fine arts and design college, working towards a certificate in illustration. Lucy's two primary teaching goals both center on making students comfortable: first in the Writing classroom, then, and from there, in the writing process. And the connection between these two stages or phases of comfort makes sense to me: it's unlikely that students would be comfortable sharing messy, in-process drafts with their peers and with the teacher if they don't, first and already, feel comfortable with their peers and the teacher. It's a type of trust, and Lucy seems committed to building it.

Per-course instructor, MA in English
Although she wanted to teach after earning her MA in English, Amy "ended up in the work world" for a number of years. She left her full-time job when her children were young, not just because she "needed a break," but also because she wanted to be a Amy: "certain skills. When you can speak and write in a more direct, concise . . ."-I say, I use the word "professional," because that's what they're going to be-"way, that you're in tune with that, I'm happy with that." And that, and that is much less said than this. But it's the truth.
This moment happens 68 minutes into a conversation that lasts just over two hours. It's close enough to the halfway point, and Amy and I have already talked about so much: the differences between The Norton Field Guide and The Harbrace, the assignments she's chosen from the menu-packet, the turnover rate for per-course instructors, the shortcomings of peer review, the revised outcomes and objectives . . . yet Amy is still hesitant, at least initially, to tell me that she wants WRT 104 students to learn to write in a more "professional" way. This matters, because in our conversation, I learned just how much language matters to Amy. In the last line above, Amy says that what she wants students to learn, and what she explains to students about what they can learn, "is much less said than this." The "this" she's referring to is the list of revised outcomes and objectives. I'll say more, and more in-depth, later, but Amy has strong opinions about the ! 100 language of the outcomes and objectives. She finds it all too disciplinary, too specialized.

The language represents (or reveals) what Amy sees as a very real disconnect between
what "academics" value about teaching, and the actual world her students will enter (the "work world," which Amy has experienced, which she wants to help prepare students to succeed in). She tells me a quick story in which this discrepancy plays out: with the ability of the teacher to use the textbook in her teaching, and it has more to do with the ability of the textbook to do the teaching, the ability of the textbook to teach. at pronouns/pronoun-use in terms of power and authority in teaching. She pays careful attention to the pronoun we. It's a slippery one. As Baecker explains, we is, an example of an ambiguous marker of power, which can be used both to indicate solidarity or community and as a means to coerce the audience into behavior that benefits the reader. (58-59) We "can be both inclusive and exclusive, as well as coercive" (Muhlhausler and Harre, referenced in Baecker 59). When we is inclusive, the writer is signifying an alliance with her readers. When we is exclusive, the opposite: the writer is signifying her alliance with a group that her readers are not a part of. But there's more: both the inclusive and the exclusive we can be used coercively, because either one can be used deceptively. This is not to say that writers always know when they are using we coercively (though some do).
We can be an effective way for writers, to distance themselves from whatever is being said, thus making it more palatable because it appears to come from the group as a whole rather than from a particular individual. (Muhlhausler and Harre, referenced in Baecker 59) In her analysis of syllabi, Baecker finds that many "of the wes that were used [. . . ] were false or coercive wes" as opposed to "wes of genuine community" (60). To illustrate the false we, Baecker includes and close-reads excerpts from a section of one instructor's syllabus in which she outlines the "Purposes and Goals" of the course. Baecker writes, Midway through the paragraph she switches [from you] to we: "We will increase our awareness of the intimate connections among writing, ! 104 reading, speaking, and listening . . ." This, of course, is an instance of the false we, because it can be assumed that her [the instructor's] awareness of the connection between writing, reading and so on has already been developed. (60) We are unsure whether or not the author of the syllabus intended to use we coercively.
And we are unsure whether or not the author was cognizant of the rhetorical device she employed, using it deliberately. But in that syllabus, as in other texts, the author's But Glenn uses we in an inclusive-coercive sort of way. It's similar to the false we that appears in the syllabus Baecker analyzes. Glenn's false we appears in the Preface.

She writes,
[M]ore than ever before, we need to learn how to use language ethically, effectively, and appropriately to address and ultimately resolve conflictso we can move ahead together and make our world a better place. We need to learn how to use rhetoric purposefully. (xxiii emphasis mine) Glenn's we is a false and coercive we, because the chances are very good-one might say they're excellent chances-that Glenn already knows how to use language ethically, that she already knows how to use rhetoric purposefully. She wrote the book. Glenn's use of we is a device to encourage-Baecker would say "coerce"-the audience into a false or ! 105 inaccurate understanding of kinship, suggesting to her audience that she will be learning alongside and with them.
There's more. The inconsistent use of pronouns becomes most apparent when pronouns are absent and/or when Glenn attaches pronouns to specific subjects. The inconsistency magnifies when Glenn writes more precisely, names more definitely. At times, she writes about students, like she does here: "[The Harbrace], Brief Second Edition, helps students do just that: It helps them use rhetoric to move forward by addressing and resolving problems" (xxiii, emphasis mine). If she was writing to students, to those who had yet to learn (from a teacher? from The Harbrace? it's unclear) about rhetoric and purposeful writing, why wouldn't Glenn substitute you? Why does she rely on students? Why does she rely on them?
Equally interesting-maybe even more interesting because it's more ambiguous and more inconsistent-is when Glenn does use you (because of who that you might be), and when she uses their (because of who that their might be). In some cases, the you seems to be the instructor, as it does here: "In this edition, you'll find many innovations (large and small) that help students understand [. . .]" (xxii, emphasis mine). Here, whoever the you is, I don't think it's the student. But if Glenn isn't writing to students, is she writing to teachers? Again, it's tough to say, because, again, her choice of subjects and pronouns is dizzy with ambiguity: A comprehensive and richly flexible guide for first-year writers-and their teachers-[The Harbrace] includes a rhetoric, a reader, a research manual, and a rhetorical handbook. (xxiii) ! 106 Perhaps this multi-pronoun-ed, ambiguously addressed Preface reveals that The Harbrace is a textbook-teacher: for all and for anyone who might not (yet) understand or appreciate rhetoric and purposeful writing, The Harbrace can help. During First-Year Writing Committee meetings, this is something we talked about. We thought that GTAs and percourse instructors could also learn about rhetoric and purposeful writing-maybe even enough to feel confident teaching rhetorical knowledge, that all-important learning objective. It's "the most important one we teach" (Miles). ! 107 The choice of the verb "to incorporate" matters, as does the decision to make "all classes" the subject of the sentence. It's not that all instructors need to assign, or that all students need to read. If an instructor-GTA, per-course, tenure-track, or tenured-is to incorporate the chapters from The Harbrace, then the content of those chapters becomes the content of the course. It's worked with, not assigned externally. For instructors who may not be as familiar with rhetoric and purposeful writing, the required chapters from The Harbrace could, potentially, get them up to speed, similar to the way the chapters could teach WRT 104 students.
I asked my colleagues, the part-time instructors and GTAs I talked to, what teachable means to them.
Teachable in Focus: Language, Terms, and Translations I asked each of the GTAs and per-course instructors that I spoke with to define teachable in their own words, their own terms. What does it mean to them? What qualities make a textbook teachable? Which textbook-The Norton Field Guide or The Harbrace-did they consider more teachable? They shared with me their insights, provided me access to their perspectives, and I worked (well, I tried my best) both to overlap and contrast their separate screens. What teachable means began to take shape; out of that fuzzy, blurry concept, I started to distinguish features. A textbook's teachability came down to the language it uses, the terminology it relies on. To unpack what my colleagues said about teachability, how they spoke about language/terminology, I will rely on a more precise sub-question. It's a different kind of bite out of that larger, less-digestible question of what teachable means. Much like a book in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, the answer to the sub-question will make possible, open up, a certain pedagogical path, a path that each instructor and his or her students will (must, and did) navigate.

Sub-Question: Can students understand rhetorical concepts, in the terms The Harbrace
provides?
Path 1: Yes, and the rhetorical concepts and terms help clarify class objectives and/or writing projects.
Path 2: No, and the rhetorical concepts and terms over-complicate class objectives and/or writing projects.
! 109 For some of my colleagues, the language of The Harbrace-while more aligned with the language of the department's general education learning outcomes-was simply (and way) too complicated. The consequence-trying to navigate Path 2-took up valuable class time, as instructors worked to decipher the language, trying to translate rhetorical concepts into terms they felt students could more easily comprehend.
But for some of my other colleagues, the language of the rhetorical conceptsthat is, the language The Harbrace used as well as the language of the general education learning objectives-was a good complication. From there, Path 1 was a pleasant and stable route to travel. It provided a solid grounding for rhetorical knowledge. It introduced WRT 104 students to disciplinary terms. The rhetorical concepts and the language of the rhetorical concepts provided the class with a shared language. As one colleague comments later, it gave the entire class a legitimacy.
For Vance, for something to be teachable, it had to meet relatively high standards.
When I asked him to explain what makes a textbook teachable, he responded: Vance: For something to be teachable, I think that you have to be able to see it as multiple layers. m: mm hmm. Vance: Like, you start with a general understanding of "what are we doing in this class? Is this a writing class? Is it a rhetoric class? Is it a class where we're just gonna kind of like pump out a lot of essays, and I'm gonna watch and make sure they're clear?" I felt like with The Harbrace, as far as being teachable, it provided a very clear layer of rhetoric, m: uh huh Vance: and, this is something that, all semester long, we came back to that big foundation layer. And then we kind of added these layers on top. Skills you learn in research. Or, I would say, first we probably started with organization. The memoir kind of taught us how to organize a narrative, ! 110 how to put different parts together, and so those skills even though they're specific to the memoir, they became very useful when we started writing evaluations and critical analyses. So it's another layer to add on to it. For something to be teachable, there needs to be a series of layers that we can keep building on, m: Yup. Vance: knowing that organization isn't only for memoirs, but for everything.
For Vance, a textbook is teachable when its functions are multiple and formative. The textbook has to help identify (or cement, or clarify) the goals, purpose, and focus of the course; It has to assist in scaffolding course concepts-setting down basic principles, "that big foundation layer," and demonstrating methods that students (and even the instructor) can build on and also return to, recursively adding "layers on top" of layers.
Assignments are sequenced, connected in ways that don't just permit students to draw on techniques and strategies introduced in earlier assignments, but developed and arranged in ways that require them to keep practicing, keep building. All of these features, Vance believes, are present in The Harbrace. He was impressed with the textbook, overall, at one point saying that, it "just suited what I wanted to teach a little more accurately," than The Norton Field Guide had.
But not everyone was as impressed with the textbook, so while it's important to take seriously and thoughtfully praise like Vance's, it's just as important to take the criticisms as seriously and as thoughtfully. No matter where on the spectrum of teachability my colleagues placed The Harbrace, that placement matters. Their reactions to The Harbrace, or to any major resource, matter in big, consequential ways. One such way is articulated well by Amy when she states, "Somebody may say, 'This is great.' I ! 111 just couldn't get into it. So, if I can't get into it, it's going to be hard for me to sell it to students." And it was hard for Amy to "sell it to" her students.
Amy had a lot to say about The Harbrace, and not much of it was complimentary.
None of it, actually, was complimentary. For Amy, The Harbrace was a big step away from The Norton Field Guide, but it was a big step in the wrong direction, taking the course down a route unnecessarily complicated and cluttered with "esoteric" language.
Plainly put: Amy didn't like the language of/in The Harbrace. She found herself on Sub-Question #1's Path 2.
The First-Year Writing Committee appreciated The Harbrace's focus on rhetorical situations. They (we) appreciated that it integrated rhetorical concepts-in the language that it did-throughout all chapters. It's not that Amy didn't approach WRT 104 as a class that helped students learn to write rhetorically. And it's not that Amy didn't teach students to be aware of rhetorical situations (or something like them) and to respond appropriately within their constraints. Throughout our conversation, Amy talks a lot about how important it is for students to develop sensitivity to audience, clarity of purpose, to learn how to strategize the decisions they make in word choice, in style, and in design. Amy values these course objectives, and she values teaching them. But for Amy, the language of the textbook and, consequentially if not connectedly, the language of the general education outcomes, is just too disciplinary. Amy thinks that it's inappropriate for general education writing courses (like WRT 104) to rely on rhetorical terms that are part of a language that she believes should be reserved for Writing majors and minors to learn.
! 112 Amy believes that students enrolled in general education writing courses, like WRT 104, should not be bogged down by disciplinary terms. She explains that she spends a lot of time rephrasing, rewording, or otherwise translating The Harbrace and the general education outcomes into plainer English, trying to define rhetorical concepts and terms more simply so that her students might have a better chance of understanding them.
She is not alone in her position. Amy believes that students are best served if and when their instructors keep in mind what students need from the course. When identifying the needs of her students, Amy takes into account what they will be responsible for knowing and for doing when they graduate and enter the workforce. Amy believes that The Harbrace overcomplicates WRT 104's primary goal and basic purpose: for students to learn how to keep their audience in mind, how to use appropriate language when communicating with that audience, and how to just say what they mean to say.
When our conversation moves to The Harbrace and The Norton Field Guide, it is just after Amy remarks on the skills and abilities first-year students bring to college. Here is the exchange: Amy: I don't know, maybe, that's the other thing. I have, in teaching almost eight years, I have witnessed a decline m: Have you? Amy: in the aptitude and the skill set of freshmen coming in. m: Okay. Amy: So I started eight years ago. m: Uh huh. Amy: That's, like, several cycles of high school students. m: Yeah, yeah. Amy: I just find, some of them, I've been like, "How did you even get," I mean URI's a state school, not that it's bad, but, "how did you get in?" m: Yeah. It can be tough.

! 113
Observations along these lines aren't uncommon. Amy's evaluation is not peculiar or odd or aberrant. I've heard and read (and sometimes argued against) similar observations before, and so, I imagine, have countless others. While I don't challenge Amy's observation, while I don't speak against it in our conversation, I also don't do much to speak to it. I don't suggest that I believe or agree with what she says. In the recording, there is an obvious awkwardness in the come-and-go of Amy's laugh. During the actual conversation, I felt as though I was working to understand her perspective, her experience. I thought I was listening. Transcribing this dialog showed me I wasn't, not really. But if Amy holds it against me, she doesn't do so for long. Or, perhaps she has just grown accustomed to talking with people in the department who don't see education or their work with students the way that she sees education or her work with students.
What Amy shares about the "decline" she's witnessed brings up the ways that teachers' expectations of students can influence-or at times inhibit-what students are capable of accomplishing in a class. It's possible that Amy's perspective on studentability, and the decline she's witnessed in it, shapes her expectations of what first-year students can accomplish. It's possible this includes whether or not first-year students can learn, comprehend, use, and apply rhetorical concepts when those concepts are presented in language like that of The Harbrace, or like that of the general education learning outcomes. And it's possible, further, that when Amy makes these expectations (or doubts) explicit, they turn into expectations (or doubts) the students have for themselves. When students are given simplified translations of the more-complicated terms from The Harbrace and the general eduction outcomes, do they trust that they wont, or that they For one group, he made no special effort, and that group did far worse on the examination than did their male counterparts. For the other group, he convinced them before they took the examination that there would be no gender differences and there were none. (Bain 196) It's interesting, and in a way, kind of reassuring and up-lifting, to think that students will do well if, as teachers, we expect them to do well and if we make those expectations clear. But it's not as simple as the short notes to Steele's study make it seem. A change in ! 115 a teacher's expectations will not result so simply in a change in student accomplishment.
There are other factors at play, what Bain characterizes as a "web," or "a series of attitudes and tendencies that underlie teachers' efforts" (72). Three such attitudes and tendencies include (1)"a strong trust in their students' abilities to meet" high standards; (2) "reject[ing] power over students" by leaving them "in control of their own education;" and (3)  Amy's concern with student ability might not be ubiquitous, but it's certainly familiar. It's why assessment conversations never disappear. And her concern with student ability seems to influence her overall approach to WRT 104. When she talks about her approach, when she talks about the purpose of the course, Amy often references the real-world, work-world experiences she gained before she began teaching at URI. The exchange that follows is just one example: Amy: And I sometimes think, even looking at the outcomes, we're a communication school. We're trying to teach students how to communicate well, to the point. And then we give them this. And this. And I think, "That's not what we're doing." And I just know they're not going to, most of them, like I said, aren't going to be M: Writing and Rhetoric majors. Amy: Yeah. M: Yeah. Amy: So let's give them what they need to know to be well-rounded students, good communicators. But then they're gonna go into a professional career. So I guess I may see it more plainly than a lot of people see it in the department, but having come from years of working before this . . . M: No, your perspective is a valuable one. Amy: Just give them what they need, but in an intelligent way, but not with a lot of hoopla around it.
! 120 When Amy cites her years of experience in the work world, it functions as her ethos: she knows what's out there; she knows the world that students will enter into in a way, it seems, other instructors or professors don't. Amy understands, via her lived experiences, the demands that will be made of students and the expectations employers will have for them and their work; she understands what it will take for them to develop into competent workers and employees. The "hoopla" around that development, the stuff that gets in the way of instructors providing students with the tools and knowledge they need -and I'm interpreting here, but I think it's accurate-is all the rhetorical concepts, and the complicated language that muddles them.
Amy's past experiences in the work world inform her current classroom practices, and they also stretch forward, predicting workplace demands and workplace performances. Her past experiences also span horizontally: The same sort of prediction/ Fulkerson: our theories of composition aren't coming together, they aren't being toldand they aren't being told in a synchronous union-in larger outside discussions.
That's not to say that others shouldn't be interested in or care about writing.
Adler-Kassner and O'Neill appreciate that interest and care, and it seems they want other writing specialists and writing instructors to appreciate it, too. The problem, they argue, is that we, writing instructors and writing specialists, need to communicate more, and more effectively, with those outside of our programs and classes. They call assessment "a powerful form of communication," because "it tells a story about writing, writers and the teaching of writing" (144). When it comes to that story, they want us to say more, explain better, provide context to those "interested others." We need, they argue, to tell "a story of us," one, that brings together the interests and values of others and the values and interests we hold as individuals and as writing professionals whose work is rooted in research-based best practices. (88) This story of us is collaborative, and it crosses the academic/public divide-in some cases, it has to first cross the department/university divide. A story of us is a one that builds alliances between those who are inside the program, department, classroom, and those who are not. Malenczyk looks at this history generationally when she explains that, Those of us who began administering writing programs in the middle to late 1990s might view our work through a more theoretical lens than those who began twenty years earlier, when they may have been appointed WPAs simply because they were the only faculty members on campus with even a remote interest in teaching writing. In contrast, WPAs beginning their work now may be markedly more invested in that work to the point of its being an essential part of their careers and identities. (5) In the almost forty-years that WPA: Writing Program Administration has been in publication, the training/preparation for WPAs has changed, but so too has the work that WPAs do-in terms of their understanding of it, how others understand it, and the methods or strategies of defining and delineating it. Within ten years of the journal's initial publication, Jeanne Gunner explains, the initial conception of the WPA as a unitary figure-position is joined by a proliferation of studies that treat the position as a dispersed range of activities and roles, situated within and delimited by disciplinary and social forces. (32) She calls this the "post-unitary WPA," as the WPA changed (or the conception of its function changed) "from single and static to multi-positioned and multiply located" (32).
It is around the period of time that Gunner is referring to (between 1978-1988)  Administrators." She asked survey participants about their "academic training, job responsibilities, rank and tenure patterns, and professional goals" (11).
Twenty years later, Jonikka Charlton and Shirley K. Rose replicated Peterson's study, asking their survey respondents the questions Peterson had asked hers, but also asking additional (and at times more-specific) questions. The similarities between the two studies, just as much as the differences, highlight the ways that WPA work has grown and professionalized-at least for some programs and in some contexts.
One of the questions on Peterson's survey asked respondents what responsibilities they had as administrators. She provided them a list of options to choose from, and she asked that they "check all that apply" (12). Her results:  (127) With WPA growing as a researchable field, as an area of specialization within rhetoric and composition, with rhetoric and composition itself growing, and with writing programs also ever-growing, it becomes unlikely (in some cases even impossible) for one person to do all the work involved in, and to know all there is to know about, writing program administration. Charlton and Rose explain that the change in responsibilities "is also consistent with moves to a more collective or collaborative administrative structure" (127). While, in many institutions, "a single WPA is responsible for a variety of programs on his or her campus," in other institutions, "often larger universities, there are multiple WPAs serving a single program" (Charlton and Rose 124 When explaining why they preferred rotation, "one common defense [. . .] is 'burn-out'" (16). But the "most common reason for rotation" was that the person serving as WPA would leave that position and enter a different one: "the typical WPA rotates out of the director's position and into another position of academic service" (16). None of Peterson's respondents-whether former or current WPAs-preferred rotation simply because it was rotation. As one of her respondents phrased it, "Rotation is better assuming the availability of more than one knowledgable faculty member; rotation from knowledge to ignorance is no help" (Peterson 16 the field of composition and rhetoric has become 'brilliantly professionalized'" (106).
Miller situates this process of professionalization as a "response to 'major social forces,'" among them, the university's (post-cold-war) mission of "'preparing a skilled workforce for competition in the global marketplace" (106). There are alternate takes on the rise of rhetoric and composition, or at least other writers will underscore other "major social forces." Regardless of the catalyst, though, one element of that history is constant: the demand for general education writing courses not only brought more writing teachers and scholars into universities, it also provided more academic space for writing, as a discipline. And as writing took up more disciplinary space, sub-disciplines, like writing program administration, also started to take up more disciplinary space-first broadly, perhaps (as Peterson's survey demonstrated), but eventually sub-categories or sub-foci began to take shape. We saw it in the breakdown of types of WPA work, from Charlton and Rose, and we saw it, also, in their argument that graduate courses about writing ! 134 program administration and dissertations about writing program administration have both seen an increase.
After laying out some of the arguments for-and against-graduate students taking on administrative roles in their departments, Anson and Rutz share a familiar insight: "By its very nature, composition unites teaching, research, administration, and service into an integrated whole" (110). The "integrated whole" bit might be easy to challenge-there's a lot to say about how one learns (or doesn't) to balance professional interests and responsibilities-but that's not where Anson and Rutz take it. Instead, they explain how the graduate teaching assistants who once participated in the University of Minnesota's Composition Program's shared governance and consensus-based management system have come to credit that participation and experience for the careers they went on to.
Anson and Rutz write that "most" of their former "graduate-student-administrators [. . .] are now well-positioned in academic and professional careers" (118). The authors argue that such experience is necessary for graduate students to professionalize, and that what holds graduate students back from such "opportunities to engage" are the ways that, administrators and faculty in English departments continue to act upon inherited beliefs about the proper roles and work of professors. Students come to a university to learn, and faculty to teach. Each has a socially inscribed status and set of goals. To blend their roles is to blur important notions of expertise, control, and earned privileges of rank. (118) I bring this up not to debate with Anson and Rutz (or with those they're debating with), but to point out two things. The first is the (common) practice of involving graduate students in administrative work (including writing program administration). I'll return to this shortly.
! 135 The second is to point out one way of determining the kinds of qualities or abilities involved or invoked when the issue is professionalization. These qualities are "socially inscribed" at the same time as they work to inscribe; they perpetuate those "inherited beliefs about proper roles." Those three qualities, again, that faculty have that graduate students do not (yet) have: "expertise, control, and earned privileges of rank." Fourteen years later, in 2012, Ann M. Penrose, without citing or drawing from Anson and Rutz's article, relies on three very similar words when she takes a closer look at this thing called professional. She looks at issues related to expertise, autonomy, and community. Instead of looking at how professionalism/professionalization relates to or matters for graduate students and the administrative experiences they can or cannot engage in, Penrose looks at this concept of professional identity in a way that's arguably more comprehensive in that it accounts for more than the next batch of PhDs. She writes, The CCCC's 2008 survey of programs indicates that roughly two-thirds of writing instructors hold degrees other than the PhD, and these degrees are typically in fields other than rhetoric and composition. Thus, though many FYC faculty have made long-term commitments to the teaching of writing, most are not members of the established profession as represented in our disciplinary discussions [. . .]. It is worth exploring how a profession so constituted maintains itself as a coherent community, as well as how its members define themselves as professionals. The concept of professional identity is particularly intriguing in our field, where staffing practices intersect with disciplinary indeterminacy to create a teaching community comprising professionals with widely varying preparation, knowledge, philosophical commitments, and disciplinary allegiances. Because professionals had knowledge others didn't, they were granted authority not only to apply their craft but also to develop and maintain their own standards of performance and ethics and to regulate and monitor each others work. In education, "forms of autonomy and discretionary decision making . . . have been the traditional keystones of teachers' professionalism." (Day et al, quoted in Penrose 115) The third dimension of professionalism that Penrose outlines is what she calls Professional as a Community Member. As she defines it, community is "a profession's internal social structure and cohesiveness, including its attitudes, norms, and group identity as distinguished from other groups" (117). Penrose underscores this dimension, even placing the others within its context: Professional identity [ . . . ] is not simply accumulation of knowledge of even production of scholarship that marks one as a professional but participation in the community's knowledge building and self-definition.
And a community like the one Penrose describes-wherein community members (professionals) are part of community decisions, wherein they contribute to the community's knowledge, and where the work they do is a process of engaging with others-that sort of community, I argue, is always possible, regardless of the particulars of any institutional culture or context (120).
In his work with community college WPA models, Taylor draws on the work of Victoria Holmstein, who also looks at WPA work in two-year colleges. The argument she makes is that WPAs at community colleges aren't called WPAs, or, at least, they're called other names: "'department chairs, assessment coordinators, assistant deans, writing ! 138 administrators, lead instructors, and more'" (Taylor 124). In contexts like this, the role of writing program administration gets-in Taylor's terms-"decentered" (121). In two-year colleges, this often happens "out of necessity" (Taylor 121). Taylor calls it a "paradox": Some two-year colleges have established "postmasculinist" models of WPA work (Miller) while yearning for a traditional WPA to hold it all together and exert power within institutions. (121) Charlton and Rose also bring up the role of institutional context, as it relates to WPA positions. Some of the changes they made to the wording of their survey questions were due, in part, to institutional variations, recognizing that their survey participants, even though they were all current members of the Council of Writing Program Administration, "might be doing WPA work without holding a formal position" (135). Issues of contextsuch as the type of institution, the permanence or transience of teaching staff, and the history of the program itself-can influence not only how the WPA functions, but whether or not there is a specific WPA or specific WPAs. While there are certainly benefits to collaborative models, distributive models, rotation models . . . and all other versions of a de-centered WPA role, there are also significant drawbacks, limitations, when there is no specific WPA. what it wants to do (or be) when it gets there. Such information is crucial for a writing program and for all those responsible for teaching in it. Shirley K. Rose, in "What is a Writing Program History," explains this well when she writes that, Within a program, an account of its past has value for the former, current, and future participants in the program. A writing program's history can inform the current work of that program. Knowing how and why specific practices such as curricular models, administrative structures, and policies were originally designed can help current participants in the program recognize how the program has developed and carried out its mission in the past, and to understand as well why current practices that might seem problematic were initially put into place. Outside the program, a history of its development can serve to make the ongoing work of the program-the work of its teachers, students, and administrators-more visible to program stakeholders who may have misconceptions or misunderstandings about the program. (240-241) Building and putting together this history is cumulative, on-going work, and it involves multiple methods of research, archiving, and documentation. In programs that rely on rotation, new/incoming WPAs don't necessarily have to start from scratch: they can pick up where others left off. But someone-someone-has to start that work, someone who is either interested in writing program administration, hired as a writing program administrator, or committed in other ways to the future of a specific writing program.
It is here, I am hoping, that I can contribute to the larger discussion of the work of writing program administration. This is where and how I want to bring up the first issue I noted earlier, from Anson and Rutz's work on the benefits of involving graduate students in administrative work. At URI, graduate teaching assistants on the rhetoric and composition track were often given opportunities to gain experience in writing program ! 140 administration. We worked as directors and assistant directors of the writing center. We worked as assistants to first-year writing. We worked in assessment committees and textbook committees. Not everyone who participated in this work developed an academic or professional interest in it . . . but some of us (like myself) did. Who is involved in a specific program's WPA work is an important part of that program's contexthistorically, contemporarily, and in light of the program's future.
When Shirley Rose defends the importance of composing/collecting a writing program history, she takes time to explain the relation of these to-as well as how they are different from-WPA biographies: Although WPA biographies are often integral to writing program histories, an account that focuses on an individual figure responsible for leading a program, without attention to other program participants, is not a writing program history. (240) In the context of URI's Writing and Rhetoric department, the fact that graduate teaching assistants were involved in the distributed work-and the multiple roles-of writing program administration is important. Historically, it demonstrates the department's support of the teacher/scholars in their charge. It shows (or will show) the ways that program faculty saw such experience as valuable work for graduate teaching assistantsnot only inviting us to take part in committees, but providing us with course releases for larger WPA responsibilities (as was the case when I was interim director of the writing center). The fact that graduate teaching assistants were involved in writing program administration work might even show, someday, the ways that graduate teaching assistants shaped (or contributed to the shaping of) what the department develops into.
! 141 Althusser taught us that persons are written by institutions, but institutions are not made without persons. Patricia Sullivan, James Porter, and others suggest that through the use of rhetoric, persons can re-write institutions. We can re-write institutions. In some ways, we always (already) are.
In this work, I'm not objective, but I aim to be empathic.
In this work, I'm not criticizing, but I aim for critique.
This makes it all critical.
In critical research practices, as articulated by Sullivan and Porter, the critical In critical research practices, praxis is paramount. As broadly-defined as possible, praxis is the recursive interplay of theory and practice. It's the name for the way(s) that each can and does circle back to the other, the way(s) that each can and does filter into the other. Broadly defined, praxis is the blend of theory and practice. But sometimes blending isn't enough, because sometimes blending doesn't really do anything substantial to the blended. Sometimes blending doesn't change anything, because sometimes it can't.
That's okay, if we're not looking to make change. But if we are, we might consider other ways of influence, other ways of affecting.
When Sullivan and Porter nominate praxis as the essential component and method of critical research, they show that more is possible; they provide an alternative to the blend. In critical research practices, praxis "recognizes the 'inseparable relation between reflection and action'" (26-27). When research is praxis, it aims to be, a reflective, thoughtful practice that has critique and questioning built into its operation, an activity that merges theory and practice, and that adds to repeatability and transferability a further notion: revision. (Sullivan and Porter 22) ! 143 Research-as-praxis means re-theorizing and re-practicing, not just examining how or watching the ways that theory and practice blend.
We might change our practices based on learning new or different theoretical frames or approaches, but that's only half of it. We must be as open to changing our theoretical frames or approaches based on what we learn through reflective practice.
That's harder even than it seems, but it's not impossible. Frames might not be easy to break, but they are breakable. What makes frames hard to break is that they are hard to see: we're so accustomed to seeing through them, and not so practiced in looking for them. To break frames, we must start by looking for them, by learning to see them.
Institutional critique recognizes and always positions institutions as "rhetorical systems of decision making;." they are created through rhetorical acts, and so they can also be recreated through rhetorical acts (Porter et.al. 610,621). These rhetorical acts can have ethical implications: the consequences of those acts matter, to and for people.
Institutional critique aims "to improve the conditions of those affected by and served by institutions: especially [. . .] those not traditionally served by the university" (Porter et.al. 611). This is tied to-not distinct from-the critical implications of critical research practices. The contingent labor force-here, per-course instructors-is not traditionally served by universities, though, arguably, departments make efforts and do what they can.
The question, though: Do those efforts work, for that population? And more: In what ways might those efforts-or other efforts-be able to work better? Are there other ways of doing, or being, that we haven't yet considered?
! 144 These are questions that this research, and that this researcher, is invested in.
Porter et.al. explain "that institutions, as unchangeable as they may seem (and, indeed, often are), do contain spaces for reflection, resistance, revision, and productive action" (613). Institutional critique insists-even presupposes-that institutional change is possible, and "that sometimes individuals [. . .] can rewrite institutions through rhetorical action" (Porter et.al. 613). Though it hasn't always been the case, I now understand assessment as one such rhetorical action. If we understand and practice (especially if we practice) assessment as something that is useful beyond counting beans or weighing bananas, then we can appreciate it, occupy it, and use it-rhetorically.
Assessment can be a space not just for evaluation, but for reflection and revision. It can create a space-a wide and open and institutionally supported space-in which rhetorical action and re-invention aren't just possible, but probable.
But this doesn't apply only to a writing program-its courses, objectives, or even instructors. Stemming from the work of writing program assessment, rhetorical action and re-invention can happen for the function of writing program administration, and it can happen for the institutional space provided for the person or people responsible for that work. At URI, and through this research-research that was informed by critical research practices and institutional critique-I've come to see something I didn't see before: a zone of ambiguity.
Institutional critique investigates "boundaries in order to interrogate zones of ambiguity" (630). I understand boundaries as both conceptual and physical, the lines between the spaces. There are conceptual boundaries-what we might call distinctions, ! 145 classifications, divisions: the distinction (boundary) between a part-time instructor and a tenure-track faculty member, between a part-time instructor and a graduate teaching assistant, between a graduate teaching assistant on a Rhetoric and Composition track and one on a Literature track. Between a specific writing program administrator and a writing program administration function.
There are physical boundaries-actual, material boundaries: the walls that create (or hide) a classroom, that make actions (and those who act) more or less visible.
Conceptually and materially, these boundaries are important-no, crucial-spaces. Porter et.al. argue that the blurry spaces, the boundaries, the "gaps or fissures" discovered/ revealed through institutional critique "are often discursive (places where writing [. . .] can be deployed to promote change)" (631). They argue that institutions "can be rewritten [. . .] through rhetorical action" and that "a seemingly minor rhetorical adjustment aims to effect systemic change in a large institution" (sic 610).
Some "seemingly minor adjustments" happened (are happening) in the University of Rhode Island's Department of Writing and Rhetoric. The adjustments are material, textual, but they are not only material, not merely textual. They're more rhetorical than that, more discursive than that, more formative, or maybe more re-formative, than that.
The adjustments to the curriculum only seem minor, maybe. They aren't. The changes are significant. For one: they signal a moment when the department had to confront discrepancies between pedagogical aims and practical outcomes. Two: the adjustments to the curriculum are significant because through them-through the rhetorical acts and adjustments-instabilities became visible: blurry spaces, boundaries, ! 146 zones of ambiguity. Now they are visible, now they are documented-via writing.
Writing that, maybe, can be used to make change. there is no specific person, no specific persons, who are institutionally responsible for this formative, generative, rhetorical, academic, scholarly, professional work. And that might be a problem . . . if not know, perhaps soon.
Zones of ambiguity "highlight instabilities," and instabilities, like assessment itself, beg for reflection, critique, and change (Porter et.al. 624). These zones of ambiguity pose questions of what it means-institutionally, pedagogically, personallyto teach writing. They pose questions about what it means-for the field, for the department, for the classroom, and for the teacher-to be or become, to be treated like or feel like a professional. These instabilities ask what it means not just for a writing program, but for a writing department, not to have a writing program administrator.
These instabilities can be perspectives we use to understand our field-broadly and generally-and they can be perspectives we use to ask how, why, and whether or not we-locally and specifically-can, or should, or even want to change. Zones of ! 147 ambiguity let us ask questions. They give us access to an unstable place, one where we can put theory and practice into a dialectical tension. And that's a good thing.
Finally, and crucially, Porter et.al. lay down a ground rule: To qualify as institutional critique, a research project has to actually enact the practice(s) it hopes for by demonstrating how the process of producing the publication or engaging in the research enacted some form of institutional change. This proposition is, of course, a difficult one. It necessitates that changed practices be incorporated into the very design of the research project. (628) The question ahead is one that I will not be able to answer because, like so many others who have worked and served in various WPA capacities in URI's Department of Writing and Rhetoric, I will not be here to see what unfolds. As I write these words, I finished my contract and coursework with URI, and I am preparing to begin at another university. But In 2014, the department announced its suspension of the graduate specialization in rhetoric and composition. This creates a question of what will happen to the WPA work that I and other graduate students took up-out of interest or otherwise. It asks who will take up that work, and will they do so out of professional interest or academic specialty.
There is at least one hopeful sign: the university has approved the hiring of a full-time Writing Center director. This is a first for the Writing Center. This is a new institutional ! 148 space-one that is less ambiguous, less transient, than before. But there are other spaces, still, and there are still loops to close. In the work of writing program administration, there will always be loops to close.
And so URI's Department of Writing and Rhetoric must continue asking itself three crucial questions: