Using the WPA Website

The WPA website runs on Drupal, a content management system that provides numerous document management, communication, and membership subscription services. Be sure to register and login to take full advantage of site features such as

• Through the my account interface, site members can
  • manage passwords and contact information
  • create program and institutional profiles
  • view WPA membership subscription and ordering information
  • sign up for daily email notification of new and updated site content
  • track individual participation on the site
  • enable others to contact them using a site email interface
• The community weblog on the home page allows registered site members to publicly share news and announcements about new writing programs, CFP's, conferences, interesting Internet resources, etc. Each weblog post includes comment boards where other members can discuss these announcements.
• The WPA Guide, a collection of official WPA documents--i.e. position statements and grant opportunities--and more general information about joining the WPA, the WPA Journal, and the WPA-L listserv, among others. New documents added to the guide will be promoted to the community weblog home page.
• The WPA journal archives include digital archives of WPA: Writing Program Administration dating back to 1977.
• Private forums for committee work.
• Electronic membership subscription services where new members can join the WPA and existing members can renew their membership through PayPal using a convenient shopping cart.
• WPA membership privileges such as automatic renewal notices and access to all WPA Journal archives.
• A news aggregator which collects the latest posts from other weblogs around the Web. RSS syndication for the home page and individual forum areas.

Consult the FAQ for more specific information on the WPA and some site features.

Additional Contact Information

You can also contact the WPA directly from this website

Questions or suggestions about the mission, activities, or initiatives of the organization:

Linda Adler-Kassner
President
English Department
Eastern Michigan University
612 Pray-Harrold
Ypsilanti, MI 48197
Office Phone: (734)487-4220
linda.adler-kassner@emich.edu

Questions about Joining, Membership Status, Subscriptions to WPA: Writing Program Administration

Keith Rhodes
Secretary, WPA
312 Lake Ontario Hall
Grand Valley State University
Allendale, MI 49401
rhodekei@gvsu.edu

WPA: Writing Program Administration (official journal of the WPA)

Articles and Editorial Correspondence

Email: journal@wpacouncil.org
OR
Alice Horning
Department of Writing and Rhetoric
378 O'Dowd Hall
Oakland University
Rochester, MI 48309
Phone: 248-370-4134
Email: horning@oakland.edu

Book Reviews

Ed White
Email: emwhite@u.arizona.edu

Advertising

Susan Miller-Cochran
Advertising Manager, WPA
English Department, North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC, 27695
E-mail: susan_miller@ncsu.edu

Consultant Evaluator Service

Deborah H. Holdstein, PhD
Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Columbia College Chicago
33 E. Congress, Suite 518
Chicago, IL 60605
Office Phone: 312.344.8219
Fax: 312.344.8403
dholdstein@colum.edu

CWPA Institutional Home - Call for Proposals

Call for Proposals: WPA Institutional Home

The Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) invites proposals from colleges and universities wishing to serve as the organization’s institutional home. This is a terrific opportunity for an institution to gain visibility and provide professional development opportunities for faculty and graduate students.

While the ideal starting date will be no later than March 2009, WPA will negotiate the beginning date with the successful institution. The agreement will be through July 2012, with the option of continued renewals with the consent of both parties.

Basic Responsibilities of the WPA Institutional Home

1. Provide the function of WPA Secretary, including maintaining current and historical membership records (which include current contact information and membership status), and coordinating and tallying votes of the membership and the Executive Board via the WPA web site in collaboration with the Digital WPA coordinator. Handle reprint permissions related to WPA publications and position statements.

2. Provide the function of WPA Treasurer, including collecting, depositing, investing, and keeping secure membership dues and other income; paying bills as authorized by the Officers of WPA; keeping accurate financial records; coordinating the completion of the Form 990 required by the IRS, and providing regular reports to the Executive Board twice yearly. It is desirable for the Treasurer candidate to have experience with Quick Books and experience with budgeting processes.

Both the secretary and treasurer positions (which can be filled by one or two individuals) serve as ex officio members of the WPA Executive Board. As members of the Executive Board, the Secretary and Treasurer must attend two meetings of the Board each year. CWPA will provide (economy class) travel to CCCC and WPA conferences, one night’s lodging and two days’ meals at established government per diem rates at CCCC, and all nights’ lodging and registration costs (including conference meals) and non-conference meals at the WPA annual meeting. Note: the offices of Secretary/Treasurer may be divided among two individuals.

3. Provide clerical support for WPA, for answering e-mail, telephone, or written queries about the organization and for referring individuals to appropriate contact persons. Support may take the form of clerical/graduate/student worker assistance; reassigned time; space; compensation; or the like.

WPA may be able to cover some costs associated with clerical support for the organization from institutional staff or undergraduate or graduate employees. If this is desirable, please specify the range of duties that will be associated with this request, the approximate number of hours associated with the duties, and an estimate of the budget amount associated with this request.

4. Maintain the circulation of WPA Journal, including maintaining back issue inventory and mailing lists. Ensure that the journal is mailed out to subscribers on a timely basis after publication, and that back issues are mailed out on a timely basis and consistently.

Additionally, the institutional home may host an occasional summer conference, also a fantastic opportunity for institutional visibility, program promotion, and professional development.

The institutional home may also consider maintaining the archive of WPA records, including publications, minutes, programs, correspondence, historical accounts, financial histories, and other materials related to the Council of Writing Program Administrators. The archive should be organized and secure, yet accessible to scholars and WPA members who articulate legitimate needs for access to them. This also can offer excellent research opportunities for faculty and/or graduate students.

To Apply:

Send (1) a detailed proposal that articulates the institution’s ability to perform the responsibilities as described above (and any optional roles the institution may wish to address); (2) the CV(s) of the person(s) to be designated as Secretary/Treasurer, along with the CVs of any other professionals who may contribute to the effort; (3) if desired, a request for funds to support clerical support including a description of the duties to be performed and an estimate of the number of hours associated with those duties and an estimated budget; and (4) a letter of endorsement from the administrator(s) (chair, dean, vice-president) with the authority to describe and confirm institutional support.

We welcome inquiries about this CFP or any aspect of serving as the WPA institutional home. Please send inquiries to Linda Adler-Kassner at Linda.Adler-Kassner@emich.edu. Proposals should be sent by December 1 to Linda Adler-Kassner, Chair, Search Committee for WPA Institutional Home via MS Word 2004 to Linda.Adler-Kassner@emich.edu. Please do not send proposals with a .docx extension.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What does the WPA acronym stand for?

WPA stand for Writing Program Administration and in some contexts "Writing Program Administrator." Learn more on the About page.

How do I find out more about the Council of Writing Program Administrators?

Consult the WPA Guide. This FAQ page is in the WPA Guide. Use the table of contents structure on the right navigation area or the paging mechanism at the bottom of each page to move through the WPA Guide. Should you need to access the guide again later on, you'll find a link to it on every page in the header directly below the WPA banner.

I'm already a WPA member. How do I sign in for the first time?

1. Visit http://wpacouncil.org/user/password
2. Enter your WPA email address in the "Username" box. Your WPA email address is the one you provided to the WPA secretary when you joined. If the system doesn't accept your username, you can try entering your email address in the "email address" box.
3. The system will generate a new password and send it to you.
4. Return to the site and log-in with your username and your new password.
5. Click on the "My Account" link that you see in the right-side column of links.
6. Select "Edit" from the tabs at the top of the My Account screen.
7. Change your username and password to whatever you'd like. Most people will want to use their name as the username.
8. You can now complete other information in your profile by clicking on the relevant tabs.

I'm not a WPA member. Can I register on this site?

You do not have to be a WPA member to register on this site. However, WPA members have some preferred services and access on this site, such as access to all WPA journal archives and member forums. The Council of Writing Program Administrators is a nonprofit organization and thus needs to membership dues to continue to serve WPAs everywhere.

How do I subscribe to the WPA Journal and become a WPA member?

Regular members and graduate students should

1. Visit the Joining WPA membership page
2. Select the proper membership link
3. Add it to your shopping cart
4. Then checkout.

Library subscriptions should follow the instructions on the Joining WPA membership page for submitting your membership application and payment by mail.

How will I know when it is time to renew?

WPA site subscription services sends out a reminder email prior to membership subscription expiration. Alternatively, members can check their subscriptions via their my account page.

How do I change my password?

After logging in to the Digital WPA website with your username and password

• find the block of links in the right hand menu with your username
• select my account
• on the new account page that opens in the main content area, select the edit tab near the top
• fill in both of the password boxes under password
• be sure to select Save account at the bottom of the page

How do I change my WPA Journal shipping address?

• If you are renewing your membership at this time, the system will ask you for a new shipping address during your order.
• If you have a current WPA Membership and need to change your shipping address, contact the WPA Treasurer and provide the following: WPA website username, first and last name, mailing address info.

I understand I can get daily email notification of new and updated site content. How do I enable this option?

Visit your my account page and choose the my notify settings tab at the top. Enable the various settings.

I have an announcement for the WPA. How do I post to this site?

Once you have registered and are logged in, you can post a blog entry. Submitted blog entries appear on the WPA home page in reverse chronological order based on the date they were created, and, by entering keywords, your blog posts can be listed on the WPA Job Board and CFP Central pages. The process is fairly easy once you've tried it a few times. At first, you may want to review this user documentation on How to Post to the WPA Job Board for an example.

Can I post in plain text or do I have to use HTML?

When creating a story, forum topic, or other content, you'll be asked to choose between Filtered HTML (default) or Full HTML. The Filtered HTML setting is for plain text, but you may also use some HTML formatting such as emphasis, blockquotes, and hypertext links. For fancier formatting, use the Full HTML option, but make sure the HTML is well-formed. Do not use Word to generate HTML because you will find that it inserts strange and often nonfunctional code that must be stripped out later (if you want your text to display across browsers nicely).

Why, after copying my post from MS Word into the Body field, does my text contains funky characters such as ’?

Our website uses the UTF-8 character set, the international standard, which is different from the one used by MS Word. It cannot properly interpret curly quotes and some other special characters when they are pasted into the browser. You can edit your post directly in the browser and correct those characters.

My question remains unanswered. How can I get some help?

Review other support options or use the WPA contact form to send a message .

Constitution of the Council of Writing Program Administrators

The National Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) is a non-profit, professional organization. Its goal is to provide opportunities to focus on matters attendant to the administration of college and university writing programs. Its membership includes administrators of writing programs, writing-across-the-disciplines programs, writing centers, professional writing programs, and technical writing programs; teachers of writing; researchers in rhetoric and composition; editors; and other parties interested in teaching, service, and scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition. A PDF of the constitution is available as an attachment (see link below).

Past WPA Presidents

Since 1978, the Council of Writing Program Administrators have had these presidents: 

• Harvey Weiner (1979-1985)
• Winifred Horner (1985-1986)
• Linda Peterson (1987-1988)
• Lynn Z. Bloom (1989-1990)
• Ben McClelland (1991-1992)
• Barbara Cambridge (1993-1994)
• Charles Schuster (1995-1996)
• Theresa Enos (1997-1998)
• Doug Hesse (1999-2000)
• Kathleen Blake Yancey (2001-2002)
• Chris Anson (1/2003 - 6/2005)
• Shirley K Rose (7/2005 - 6/2007)
• Joseph Janangelo (7/2007-6/2009)

Recognizing and Remembering WPAs and Friends

These pages recognize and remember WPA members and friends who have made special contributions to the life and work of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. Please use the "comment" feature to add your words of thanks, memories, or other tributes.

• Thank You to Miami University, Institutional Home 1987-2006
• Thank you to Rich Haswell and Glenn Blalock for CompPile and CompFAQs

Institutional Home: Call for Proposals

Call for Proposals WPA Institutional Home The Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) invites proposals from colleges and universities wishing to serve as the organization’s institutional home. WPA will negotiate the beginning date with the successful institution but hopes the start will be no later than fall 2006. The agreement will be for three years, with the option of continued renewals with the consent of both parties. Basic Responsibilities of the WPA Institutional Home 1. Maintain an archive of WPA records, including publications, minutes, programs, correspondence, historical accounts, financial histories, and other materials related to the Council of Writing Program Administrators. The archive should be organized and secure, yet accessible to scholars and WPA members who articulate legitimate needs for access to them. 2. Provide the function of WPA Secretary, including maintaining current and historical membership records (which include current contact information and membership status). The WPA Institutional Home is also responsible for answering e-mail, telephone, or written queries about the organization and for referring individuals to appropriate contact persons. 3. Provide the function of WPA Treasurer, including collecting, depositing, investing, and keeping secure membership dues and other income; paying bills as authorized by the Officers of WPA; keeping accurate financial records; and providing regular reports. 4. Designate an individual with professional expertise in writing program administration to serve as Secretary/Treasurer. The Secretary/Treasurer is an ex officio member of the WPA Executive Board and must attend two meetings of the Board each year. Therefore, he or she should have support sufficient to cover the costs of attendance, as well as support to perform his or her roles adequately. Support may take the form of clerical/graduate/student worker assistance; reassigned time; space; compensation; or the like. Note: the offices of Secretary/Treasurer may be divided among two individuals. Additional, but Optional, Responsibilities

WPA welcomes proposals that address one or more of the following potential roles. These functions are currently performed somewhere other than the institutional home. While that may continue to be the best arrangement, the WPA Board would like to consider options. 1. Maintain a Web presence for the Council of Writing Program Administrators (currently at www.wpacouncil.org). 2. Coordinate design, printing, and distribution of the organization’s journal, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and other potential publications. 3. Host an occasional WPA summer meeting. To Apply Send (1) a detailed proposal that articulates the institution’s ability to perform the Basic Responsibilities as described above (and any optional roles the institution may wish to address); (2) the CV of the person(s) to be designated as Secretary/Treasurer, along with the CVs of any other professionals who may contribute to the effort; (3) a letter of endorsement from the administrator(s) (chair, dean, vice-president) with the authority to describe and confirm institutional support. Send Proposals by 3 March 2006, to Doug Hesse, Chair Search Committee for WPA Institutional Home 6100 Honors Program Illinois State University Normal, IL 61790-6100 Proposals sent as e-email attachment are welcome. Send to ddhesse@ilstu.edu. See link below for a copy of this proposal in pdf format.

Join or Renew

To Join or Renew Your WPA Membership Using a Credit Card

• Regular One Year Membership ($30/year)
• Graduate Student Membership ($10/year)

Visit the two preceding links to find the appropriate membership and pay for your membership online using our secure PayPal credit card processing system. Use the "add to cart" link found on each page to add the specific membership to the shopping cart. Then check out. Note: You don't need to have a PayPal account to charge your membership dues to your credit card, but you do have to use the PayPal payment option to pay the order.

Need to Pay by Check? Join by Mail

Fill in the individual membership form and send along with dues to:

Charlie Lowe
Treasurer, WPA
341 Lake Ontario Hall
Grand Valley State University
Allendale, MI 49401
lowech@gvsu.edu

Note: Please allow 2 to 3 weeks for processing your mailed in membership form and payment.

Library Subscriptions?

Libraries may purchase subscriptions to the WPA Journal for $40/year.

Review Your Membership Order History

When logged in, use the "Profile" link at the top right of the page. Then click on "View your order history." If you have an active subscription, you will see it listed.

To Change Your WPA Journal Shipping Address

• If you are renewing your membership at this time, the system will ask you for a new shipping address during your order.
• If you have a current WPA Membership and need to change your shipping address, contact the WPA Treasurer and provide the following: WPA website username, first and last name, mailing address info.

Praxis and Allies: The WPA Game

Game Writing and Design: Harris Bras, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Cristyn Elder, Megan Schoen, Tom Sura, and Jaclyn Wells

Graphics and Packaging: Dana Lynn Driscoll

Overview

In spring 2008, the authors participated in a seminar on writing program administration, taught by Shirley Rose at Purdue University. The theme for the course was "WPA Ways of Knowing" and our class project needed to address this theme in some manner. As the semester progressed, we grappled with issues of what could be taught about writing program administration that would help pre-service WPAs and how to teach it.

A key moment for us came when we read Trudelle Thomas's 1991 essay on graduate students as apprentices. She writes:

This morning I teach two classes and hold conferences with students. Then I meet with the academic vice president and my department chair to discuss plans for a writing assessment program for the six hundred students who move through our composition program each year. By mid-afternoon, I hope to escape to the library to fine-tune plans for a faculty workshop later this week. It's a typical day in the life of this writing program administrator. I delight in the variety of tasks and relationships that make up my job, but sometimes I think back on graduate school and wonder: how did all of those captivating seminars in Barth and Berthoff and Woolf prepare me for this? (41).

What we realized was that part of WPA knowledge is what might be referred to as procedural knowledge. In other words, WPAs need to know procedures for navigating the many complex challenges they encounter in their work. The only other place we'd seen discussion of procedural knowledge was in the context of gaming (e.g. computer games). Ian Bogost has argued that "procedurality refers to a way of creating, explaining, or understanding processes. And processes define the way things work: the methods, techniques, and logics that drive the operation of systems, from mechanical systems like engines to organizational systems like high schools to conceptual systems like religious faith" (3). This game extends that notion of procedurality, that definition of how things work, to writing program administration.

George’s story about WPA work is one of many WPA narratives we encountered in our WPA seminar. WPA literature abounds with narratives about the joys, opportunities, challenges, and grief of writing program administration. As Shirley Rose argues, narratives are extremely powerful because they “impose order and coherence by sequencing and suggesting cause-effect relationships, making experience predictable by fitting it into familiar patterns and making it make sense by transforming it into stories with recognizable characters, conflicts, and resolutions” (222). As players of Praxis and Allies move around the board, they effectively become characters in their own narrative, developing their own stories about how best to juggle their tasks, manage their resources, and achieve their objectives.

Praxis and Allies articulates particular arguments about the nature of WPA work and how prospective WPAs can learn about such work. First, by adopting a team-play model, we aligned ourselves with scholars such as Jeanne Gunner who suggests that WPA work is best conceived as collaborative. Additionally, by creating a text intended for use in a graduate WPA seminar, we have asserted that writing program administration is scholarly work, a notion championed by foundational documents in our field such as “The Portland Resolution,” “Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Program Administration,” and Christine Hult’s “The Scholarship of Administration.” Another argument implicit in the game is that we can learn about and prepare for this scholarly work in the graduate school context. In this way, the game underscores the work of Louise Phelps, Edward White, Trudelle Thomas, and many others who have advocated a greater role for pre-service WPA preparation in graduate school through formal coursework and experiential learning. We happily invite you now to develop your own arguments, your own narratives, your own procedures for writing program administration as you play Praxis and Allies: The WPA Board Game.

The WPA Game PDF contains all that you need to play Praxis and Allies: The WPA Game. The PDF includes: game construction guidelines, rulebook, game board, deck of scenario cards, set of energy tokens, deck of chance cards, knowledge tokens, ethos tokens, funding tokens, and decks of activity cards for the various locations on campus where resources can be collected.

Please see our article in WPA: Writing Program Administration Spring 2009 32.3 for full bibliographic citations and more information about the game’s development.

Download

Download Praxis and Allies: The WPA Board Game (11MB--updated 8/31/09).

The WPA-L Listserv

WPA-L is an international e-mail discussion list intended primarily for individuals who are involved in writing program administration at universities, colleges, or community colleges. Faculty or students interested in program administration are welcome to join.

Please note that WPA-L is not owned or sponsored by the Council of Writing Program Administrators. Rather, it is a discussion list created (with great foresight) and moderated (with great aplomb) by David Schwalm at Arizona State University-East. More recently, Barry Maid, also at ASU-East, has helped moderate and manage the list.

How do I subscribe?

To subscribe, send the following message to LISTSERV@ASU.EDU

Subscribe WPA-L Firstname Lastname

Leave everything else in the subject line and message field blank.

How do I unsubscribe?

To unsubscribe from WPA-L, send the following message to LISTSERV@ASU.EDU

unsubscribe WPA-L

Leave everything else in the subject line and message field blank.

How do I stop my subscription while I'm on vacation?

To temporarily suspend email from WPA-L, send the following message to LISTSERV@ASU.EDU

set WPA-L nomail

Leave everything else in the subject line and message field blank. To start up again, send this message to the same address:

set WPA-L mail

How do I subscribe to the digest version?

Send an email message to LISTSERV@ASU.EDU

Leave the subject line blank In the message body, write:

set wpa-l digest

(Be sure that's all there is in the message field.)

List Questions?

Barry Maid
Arizona State University East
Barry.Maid@asu.edu

WPA-L Archives

The WPA-L listserv is fully archived and powerfully searchable at

http://lists.asu.edu/archives/wpa-l.html

WPA Consultant-Evaluator Service for Writing Programs

The WPA consultant-evaluator service helps colleges and universities develop and assess their writing programs. Operating on a method similar to regional accreditation agencies, WPA evaluations have several stages. WPA requests a written program self-study, sends a team of two trained consultant-evaluators to campus for interviews and on-site evaluation, and then compiles a final report. A six-month follow-up report from the campus completes the process.

WPA consultant-evaluators are leaders in the field of composition. They come from four-year colleges, community colleges, and universities. All are experienced writing program administrators with a national perspective on composition teaching and program administering. As evaluators, their primary goal is to determine a program's unique strengths and weaknesses, not to transform all writing programs into clones of their own. They recognize that every program must retain its individual character, serve a particular community, and solve special problems.

Institutions pay $3000 to cover honoraria for consultant-evaluators, a $250 administrative fee, and transportation and other related, appropriate expenses.

Applications for the service should be initiated 3 months before consultant-evaluators visit a campus. WPAs, department chairs, or college administrators may apply to:

Dr. Deborah H. Holdstein
Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Consultant-Evaluator Service/CWPA
Columbia College Chicago
33 E. Congress, Chicago 60605
Phone: 312.344.8219
dholdstein@colum.edu

(Title the post “C-E Visit.”)

To download a one-page flyer describing the C-E Service, see attachment below.

To download a copy of the "Guidelines for Self-Study to Precede WPA Visit" see attachment below.

Writing Program Websites

Alabama

• Auburn University
• University of Alabama at Huntsville (Writing Center)
• University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa): First-Year Writing Program
• University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa): Writing Center
• University of South Alabama (Writing Center)

Alaska

• University of Alaska - Fairbanks (Writing Center)

Arkansas

• University of Central Arkansas
• University of Arkansas at Little Rock
• University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (Writing Center)

Arizona

• Arizona State University
• Arizona State University Polytechnic
• Northern Arizona University
• University of Arizona

California

• California State University, Fresno
• California State University, Los Angeles
• California State University, Monterey Bay
• California State University Northridge
• California State, San Marcos
• Grossmont College
• Humboldt State University
• Long Beach City College
• San Francisco State University
• San Jose State University
• Stanford University
• University of California at Berkeley
• University of California at Davis
• University of California at Irvine
• University of California at Santa Barbara
• University of Southern California
• San Francisco State University

Colorado

• Colorado State University
• Colorado School of Mines
• Fort Lewis College
• University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
• University of Denver

Connecticut

• Trinity College
• Wesleyan University
• University of Connecticut (Writing in the Disciplines)

Delaware

• University of Delaware

District of Columbia

• American University
• Georgetown University

Florida

• Florida Atlantic University
• Florida State University
• Florida Gulf Coast University
• Florida International University
• Florida State University
• Stetson University
• University of Florida
• University of Miami
• University of South Florida

Georgia

• Emory University
• Georgia Southern University
• Georgia State University
• North Georgia College and State University
• Spelman College
• University of Georgia

Hawaii

• University of Hawai'i

Idaho

• Albertson College of Idaho (Writing Center)
• Boise State University (Writing Center)
• Brigham Young University – Idaho (Writing Center)
• College of Southern Idaho
• Eastern Idaho Technical College
• Idaho State University (Writing Center)
• Lewis-Clark State College (Writing Center)
• North Idaho College
• University of Idaho (Writing Center)

Illinois

• DePaul University
• Illinois Institute of Technology
• Illinois State University
• Loyola University Chicago
• Northern Illinois University
• Northwestern University (Writing Center)
• Southern Illinois University
• Western Illinois University
• University of Chicago
• University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana

Indiana

• Ball State University
• Indiana University
• Indiana University Northwest
• Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
• Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
• Purdue University
  • Introductory Composition
  • OWL
  • Professional Writing
• University of Notre Dame

Iowa

• Drake University
• Iowa State University
• University of Iowa

Kansas

• Kansas State University
• Midwest Writing Centers Association
• University of Kansas

Kentucky

• Murray State University
• Northern Kentucky University
• University of Kentucky
• University of Louisville

Louisiana

• Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge
• University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Maine

• Bowdoin College
• Colby College
• The University of Maine
• The University of Maine at Augusta
• The University of Maine at Farmington
• The University of Southern Maine

Maryland

• Johns Hopkins University
  • Program in Expository Writing
  • Writing Center
• Towson University
• The University of Maryland
  • The Freshman Writing Program
  • The Professional Writing Program
  • The Writing Center
  • University of Maryland University College

Massachusetts

• Bentley College
• College of the Holy Cross
• Harvard University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• University of Massachusetts at Boston
• Westfield State College

Michigan

• Eastern Michigan University
  • First-Year Writing Program
  • Writing Center
• Ferris State University
• Grand Valley State University
• Michigan State University
• Michigan Tech
  • Humanities Program
  • Writing Center
• Saginaw Valley State University
• University of Michigan
• Wayne State University

Minnesota

• Bemidji State University
• Capella University (Writing Center)
• Carlton College
• University of Minnesota--Twin Cities
  • First-Year Writing Program, Department of Writing Studies
  • Center for Writing, Student Writing Support

Mississippi

• University of Mississippi
• Mississippi State University

Missouri

• Northwest Missouri State University
• University of Missouri - Columbia
• University of Missouri - Rolla
• Southeast Missouri State University

Montana

• Montana State University

Nebraska

• Creighton University
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Nevada

• University of Nevada, Reno

New Hampshire

• Dartmouth College
• University of New Hampshire (PhD Program in Comp)

New Jersey

• College of New Jersey
• Drew University
• Montclair State University
  • First-Year Writing Program
  • Writing Center
• Princeton University
• Rutgers University

New Mexico

• New Mexico State University
  • Writing Center
• University of New Mexico

New York

• Binghamton University (SUNY)
• Clarkson University
• Colgate University
• Cornell University
• New York University
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) (Dept. of LL&C)
• Skidmore College
• St. John's University
• State University of New York at Albany
• State University of New York at Buffalo
• State University of New York at Stony Brook
• Syracuse University

North Carolina

• Duke University
• Elon College
• University of North Carolina
• North Carolina State University (Public site) | Faculty site (WPA Members will get the username and password with this link)
• Western Carolina University
• Wingate University

North Dakota

• University of North Dakota

Ohio

• Bowling Green State University
• College of Wooster
• The Kent State University
• The Ohio State University
• Ohio Northern University
• University of Toledo
• Wright State University

Oklahoma

• Oklahoma State University
• University of Oklahoma

Oregon

• Eastern Oregon University
• Linfield College
• Portland State University
• University of Oregon
• Willamette University

Pennsylvania

• Bucknell University
• Bucks County Community College
• Drexel University
• Gettysburg College
• Indiana University of Pennsylvania
• Lehigh University
• Lincoln University
• Moravian College
• Pennsylvania State University
• Philadelphia University
• Temple University
• University of Pittsburgh (Writing Resources)
• University of Pennsylvania
• St. Vincent College
• Villanova University

Rhode Island

• University of Rhode Island

South Carolina

• College of Charleston
• Winthrop University

South Dakota

• Dakota State University
• South Dakota State University
• University of South Dakota

Tennessee

• Austin Peay State University
• East Tennessee State University
• University of Memphis
• Vanderbilt University

Texas

• Abilene Christian University
• St. Edward's University
• Stephen F. Austin State University
• Texas A&M University - College Station
• Texas A&M - Corpus Christi
• Texas Tech University
• University of North Texas
• University of Texas
• University of Texas at El Paso
• University of Texas at Tyler

Utah

• Brigham Young University
• University of Utah
• Salt Lake Community College

Vermont

• Marlboro College
• The University of Vermont
  • Writing Center
  • Writing in the Discplines Program

Virginia

• George Mason University (Writing Center at GMU)
• James Madison University
• Longwood College
• University of Richmond
• University of Virginia
• Virginia Military Institute
• Virginia Tech

Washington

• Eastern Washington University
• Gonzaga University
• University of Washington - Seattle
• University of Washington - Bothell
• University of Washington - Tacoma
• Washington State University

West Virginia

• Shepherd College
• West Virginia University

Wisconsin

• Marquette University - Milwaukee
• University of Wisconsin - La Crosse
• University of Wisconsin - Madison
• University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
• University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh

Wyoming

• University of Wyoming

Canada

• Memorial University of Newfoundland
• University of Calgary
• University of Toronto

There are of course many more colleges and universities in Canada that teach writing. Writing programs in Canada consist mostly of Writing Centers and Professional Writing Programs. Here are two lists maintained by Canadians:

• List of Canadian Writing Centers
• Programs in Professional and Technical Writing and Rhetoric in Canada

WorldwideEnglish Department Home Pages Worldwide

Graduate WPA Listserve: GWPA-L

In 2003, a handful of Purdue graduate students proposed the idea of a WPA listserve for graduate students, a place for us to discuss issues particular to our group: juggling graduate student and administrative responsibilities, job search issues, dissertation work, etc. The WPA Council approved the proposal and the list was created during the spring semester of 2004.

If you're interested in subscribing, please go to: http://virtualparlor.org/mailman/listinfo/gwpa-l_virtualparlor.org. All the directions you will need to subscribe can be found there.

Journals in Rhetoric and Composition

If you notice a broken link, please let the WPA Web Developer (Charlie Lowe) know.

The ACE Journal
Abstracts from the Assembly on Computers in English's print journal.

Across the Disciplines
Lots of resources, including journals and books. The primary emphasis is writing across the curriculum. Academic.Writing and Language and Learning Across the Disciplines merged in 2004 to create this journal. " Across the Disciplines provides CAC researchers, program designers, and teachers interested in using communication assignments and activities in their courses with a venue for scholarly debate about issues of disciplinarity and writing across the curriculum." 2.13.06

Assessing Writing
Welcomes submissions that address writing assessment issues from diverse perspectives: classroom research, institutional, professional, and administrative.*

Basic Writing e- journal
An electronic peer-reviewed journal designed to be an electronic forum to broaden conversations about Basic Writing.*

CCC Online
College Composition and Communication website. CCC Online has begun archiving abstracts of the major articles and features published in the print edition of CCC, beginning with Volume 49. Full-text versions of editorials, news, and Interchanges/Letters will be provided as well.*

College English
Full text of selected articles and reviews available online. TOCs of print issues.*

Community Literacy Journal
The Community Literacy Journal publishes both scholarly work that contributes to the field’s emerging methodologies and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff. We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members.

Composition Forum
Composition Forum is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal of pedagogical theory in rhetoric and composition.

Composition Studies
TOCs only for current issues. Abstracts on all articles for back issues.*

Computers and Composition: An International Journal
A refereed professional print journal devoted to exploring the use of computers in composition classes, programs, and scholarly projects. It provides teachers and scholars a forum for discussing issues connected to computer use.

Computers and Composition Online
A refereed online journal for scholar-teachers interested in the impact of new and emerging media upon the teaching of language and literacy in both virtual and face-to-face forums.

Currents in Electronic Literacy
Addresses the use of electronic texts and technologies in reading, writing, teaching, and learning in literature, rhetoric and composition, languages, communications, media studies, and education.*

Enculturation
A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.*

://English Matters
Invites teachers and students of English who are questioning and creating new texts and pedagogies on the web to submit essays, exhibits, and performances.

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion
A digital magazine and web forum dedicated to exploring rhetoric in everyday life. As the name suggests, Harlot is not another academic journal, nor is it a pop culture magazine. It's a combination of both and neither, and its goal is to provoke real conversations in the public sphere about how communication shapes our world -- from topics on reality television to public monuments to religion to pop music, and so on.

Inventio: "creative thinking about learning and teaching"
Features peer-reviewed articles on instructional research, instructional philosophy, pedagogy, learning theory, and other significant issues related to excellence in learning and teaching.

J.A.C.: A Journal of Composition Theory (Formerly Journal of Advanced Composition)
Annotate online articles. Respond to archives. Authors' responses to reviewers. Abstracts of print articles.*

Journal of Basic Writing
JBW is a juried journal that publishes essays about the theory and practice of teaching basic writing, first-year composition and, when related to issues involving basic writers, the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. The editors encourage research-based analyses of claims of successes, as well as rigorously, tightly argued discussions about non-traditional students as unique learners, relations between writing and reading processes, the training of MA and PhD candidates to teach basic writing, and descriptions of innovative basic writing programs with data to support claims of success.

Journal of Second Language Writing
A refereed journal appearing four times a year, features theoretically grounded reports of research and discussion of central issues in second language and foreign language writing and writing instruction. TOCs and abstracts online.*

Journal of Teaching Writing
A journal devoted to the teaching of composition and the language arts.*

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy
Kairos is a refereed online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. Each issue presents varied perspectives on special topics, such as "Critical Issues in Computers and Writing," "Technology and the Face of Language Arts in the K-12 Classroom," and "Hypertext Fiction/Hypertext Poetry."

KB Journal
The journal of the Kenneth Burke Society. Publishes open-access, Creative Commons licensed articles, reviews, and bibliographical projects.

Philosophy and Rhetoric
Publishes articles on theoretical issues involving the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. Sample past texts available online.

PreText
All things PreText.*

PreText: Electra (Lite)
The e-journal.*

Programmatic Perspectives
Journal of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC). See the blog also.

Readerly/Writerly Texts
Essays on Literature, Literary/Textual Criticism, and Pedagogy. The journal publishes essays on critical theory, literary and textual criticism, editorial theory and practices, the interrelations between literature and the social sciences, rhetoric and composition, and related pedagogies. Some online issues. TOCs for print issues.*

Reflections
A peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for scholarship on community-based work in college writing courses and related issues. Some materials online.*

RhetNet
A cyberjournal for rhetoric and writing.

Rhetoric Review
Browse TOCs from past issues. Now an Erlbaum journal so look for a new site soon.*

Rhetorica
Published for the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica's articles, book reviews and bibliographies examine the theory and practice of rhetoric in all periods and languages and their relationship with poetics, philosophy, religion and law.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Abstracts online.*

Teaching English in the Two-Year College
Scholarly journal specifically directed to those who teach English in two-year colleges or in the first two years at four-year colleges and universities. TOCs for print journal. Some editorials, letters, and news reports are posted full text.

Technoculture (Coming 2009)
A journal for cultural studies of technology. The Letter from the Editors is available now.

Writing Center Journal
The official publication of the International Writing Centers Association, publishing since 1980. From the "Aim and Scope" page: "The Writing Center Journal's primary purpose is to publish articles, reviews, and announcements of interest to writing center personnel. We therefore invite manuscripts that explore issues or theories related to writing center dynamics or administration. We are especially interested in theoretical articles and in reports of research related to or conducted in writing centers. In addition to administrators and practitioners from college and university writing centers, we encourage directors of high school and middle school writing centers to submit manuscripts."

Writing on the Edge
An interdisciplinary journal focusing on writing and the teaching of writing aimed primarily at college-level composition teachers and others interested in writing and writing instruction. TOCs online.*

The Writing Instructor
A Digital Community and Networked, Refereed Journal.*

Writing Lab Newsletter
A forum for exchanging ideas and information about writing centers in colleges, universities, and high schools. Articles focus on challenges in directing a writing center, training tutors, adding computers, designing and expanding centers, and using tutorial theory and pedagogy.*

WPA: Writing Program Administration
WPA publishes articles and essays concerning the organization, administration, practices, and aims of college and university writing programs.*

Written Communication
Provides a forum for the free exchange of ideas, theoretical viewpoints and methodological approaches that better define and further develop thought and practice in the exciting study of the written word. (Sage)

Other Sites of Interest

NCTE Assemblies
The NCTE Assemblies have evolved out of groups with similar interests wishing to affiliate in some way within the structure of the National Council of Teachers of English. Each of these assemblies has been authorized by the NCTE Executive Committee to serve the interests and purposes of persons who share special interests or who have jobs alike. Each offers a forum for discussing common interests through workshops, sessions, or exhibit booths at NCTE conventions, through newsletters and/or journals.

Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ)
An organization of editors of learned journals devoted primarily but not exclusively to the study of language and literature and related humanistic disciplines.

Journal of Electronic Publishing
A REALLY interesting ejournal on publishing ejournals.

EJournal
An electronic journal concerned with the implications of electronic networks and texts.

JStor
"Redefining Access to Scholarly Literature."

Project Muse
Project Muse provides online, worldwide, institutional subscription access to the full text of over 100 scholarly journals.

* Indicates that editors of this journal are members of the Editors Group, an informal consortium of journal editors in Rhetoric and Composition.

Guidelines for Affiliate Organizations

The goal of The National Council of Writing Program Administrators is to provide opportunities to focus on matters attendant to the administration of college and university writing programs. Its membership includes directors of writing programs, directors of writing centers, teachers of writing, researchers in rhetoric and composition, editors, and other parties interested in teaching, service, and scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition. To provide opportunities for members to participate in advancing WPA's goals, the National Council encourages the formation of regional affiliates. The following guidelines govern the formation of operation of affiliates of WPA.

1. Groups wishing to become affiliates of WPA should send a letter to the WPA Executive Board requesting affiliation and providing basic information such as the group's name, a roster of officers, an estimate of membership, and a list of schools represented by members. The Executive Board will consider the application and communicate a decision to the group.
2. Proposed affiliates must demonstrate a commitment to the formation and sustenance of the affiliate. In other words, proposed affiliates should have membership that represents various schools and types of schools in several parts of the region or state; core founding groups should have at least 5 members, each of whom has agreed to take on a specific role within the new organization (e.g., secretary, treasurer, convener or chair, membership coordinator).
3. All affiliate officers will hold dues-paid membership in the national Council of Writing Program Administrators. Affiliates must demonstrate commitment to the national organization.
4. Affiliates must present a clear plan for the organization which must not conflict with the WPA Constitution. The plan should include a schedule of meetings, dates of mailings and solicitations, and a clear statement of the organization's rationale and goals. It should address the benefits the affiliate can offer to the region's WPAs that are not presently being offered, and the needs the affiliate can meet.
5. Affiliates may not begin their own consultation services under the auspices of WPA.
6. International affiliates should meet most, if not all, of the following criteria:
   • International affiliates should develop dialogically with people in the region.
   • International affiliates should include one or more individuals from the home culture who are intimately familiar with the literacy traditions of the culture.
   • International affiliates should include one or more individuals intimately familiar with current Western assumptions about literacy, composition, and rhetoric.
   • The motivation to affiliate should be independent of any private US interests such as expanding the international presence of a particular US-based campus.
   • International affiliates should include faculty from more than one campus, and, ideally, from at least two campuses whose home base is in that country.
7. Affiliates requesting funds from WPA must present budgets covering anticipated income and expenses for the funding period.
8. New affiliates may request start-up grants from the national organization. Startup grants will be limited to a maximum of $500 and may be used for membership solicitation (mailing lists, brochures, trips to conferences and meetings within the state or region, etc.); communication (printing of letterhead and newsletters, postage, telephone charges); costs associated with a regional meeting or conference (to subsidize costs over and above those covered by the conference fee); and other costs associated with starting up the affiliate.
9. Established affiliates may also apply for grants. These grants are unrestricted in scope. Normally, though, proposals most likely to be funded will involve activities resulting in:
   • expansion of the membership base of the affiliate;
   • improvement of communication among affiliate members;
   • improvement of writing instruction across the region served by the affiliate;
   • greater understanding of writing and program administration through research activities conducted throughout the affiliate's region.
   Proposals asking for less than $2000 are more likely to be funded than larger ones; proposals demonstrating matching funds or institutional commitments are welcomed. Grants to individuals or groups from single institutions and proposals for the purchase of equipment are unlikely to be funded. Normally, grants will be funded for 1 calendar year.
10. The WPA Research Grant Committee will review all grant proposals and recommend approval, denial, or approval with modifications. The Executive Board will approve or deny all grants. Grant awards will be announced at the annual business meeting.
11. Affiliates receiving grants must submit a report to the Executive Board at the conclusion of the grant period which outlines how the money was spent and which assesses the perceived results.
12. All affiliates must submit to the national Council's Executive Board a report by March 1 of each year that includes the following information:
    • number of members, with analysis of membership patterns by type of institution, regional distribution, etc.
    • activities carried out during the previous year, including meetings, mailings, reports, research, actions, elections, etc.
    • plans for the coming year
    • a descriptive report on the overall health and vigor of the affiliate.
    • a budget including anticipated revenue from dues, grants from participating schools, regional conference fees, other sources; anticipated expenses from mailings, solicitations, travel expenses, guest speakers, etc.
13. Affiliates may be removed from the national organization by majority vote of the Executive Board if any of the above rules are not followed.

Approved by the Executive Committee of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, 1993, revised March 2001, revised January 2005.

2009-2010 Election for WPA Executive Board

WPA is holding elections for three Executive Board members. We will say thank you and goodbye to Executive Board members Jeff Klausman, Eli Goldblatt, and Barbara L’Eplattenier, whose terms end in June 30, 2010.

Voting tokens for the election will be distributed electronically to current WPA members in late January. Only current members are eligible to vote. Voting will take place for three weeks, and results will be announced shortly after the vote closes.

The Executive Board oversees WPA's events and activities, creates policies and procedures for its management, and engages in special projects and initiatives. The new Executive Board members will serve for three years, with terms beginning in July 2010 and ending in June 2013.

Continuing Executive Board members are Linda Adler-Kassner, President, Eastern Michigan University (term ends 2011; will succeed to Past President); Duane Roen, Vice President, Arizona State University (term ends 2011; will succeed to President); Joe Janangelo, Immediate Past President, Loyola University (Chicago)(term ends 2011); Melissa Ianetta, University of Delaware (term ends 2011); Brian Huot, Kent State University (term ends 2011); Susan Thomas, University of Sydney (term ends 2011); Chuck Paine, University of New Mexico (term ends 2012); Doug Downs, Montana State University (term ends 2012); Darsie Bowden, DePaul University (term ends 2012). Ex-Officio members are Charles Lowe, Treasurer and Web Developer, Grand Valley State University; Keith Rhodes , Secretary, Grand Valley State University; Deborah Holdstein, Director, Consultant Evaluator Service, Columbia College Chicago; Charles Schuster, Associate Director, Consultant Evaluator Service, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee; Alice Horning, Journal Editor, Oakland University; Debra Dew, Journal Associate Editor, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs; Glenn Blalock, Journal Associate Editor, Our Lady of the Lake College.

Members will vote for one candidate in each of the three pairings below:

Executive Board Member #1: Vote for Eileen Ferretti or Clint Gardner

Eileen Ferretti is Associate Professor of English and Director of developmental English at Kingsborough Community College (CUNY). Her responsibilities include curriculum supervision of approximately 150 sections of several levels of developmental reading and writing and mentoring the instructional staff, of which approximately 70% are part-time faculty. One of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of her position is the opportunity it presents to nurture and hone a variety of instructional approaches through faculty development initiatives. Her participation as a seminar leader in “Looking Both Ways” (2000-2005) – a series of collaborative workshops for high school teachers and college professors co-sponsored by the NYC Board of Education and the City University of New York – illuminated the significance of faculty development at the two-year college. Her article, “The LBW Co-Leader: Under Construction,” which appears in Facilitating Collaboration: Issues in High School/College Professional Development (2005), examines the dynamics and processes of small teacher communities. She found this model truly creates a climate of respect among part-time and full-time instructors by leveling the perceived status and power of the various participants. This sharing of power and collaboration challenges teachers to practice the very kind of cooperation that we expect from our students. As a result of her LBW seminar leadership, Eileen introduced an integrated approach to best practices. As Director of developmental English she provides multiple forums for reviewing scholarship, sharing teaching models, and collaborating in assessment of student work and curriculum design. These forums include small teacher cohorts organized by a leader. As the cohorts encourage collaboration among faculty at various levels of experience and expertise, they evolved into “think tanks” and took on various projects. The cohort project produced an increase in passing rates for students on both the departmental and university-wide assessment. Under Eileen’s leadership the developmental English program at Kingsborough received the 2009 Diana Hacker Two-Year College Association (TYCA) Outstanding Programs in English Award. Eileen is currently on the Editorial Board of the Conference on Basic Writing (CBW) that selected her for the 2005 CBW/CCCC Fellowship Award.

Statement: The Council of Writing Program Administrators provides access to a national forum on the issues faced by composition faculty who take on the responsibility of shaping and preserving best practices in the field throughout the university system. No constituency needs this life preserver more than administrators of writing programs at the two-year colleges. More than half of America’s college population now attends community colleges, where increasing numbers of under-prepared students inhabit a subculture currently known as “developmental English” or “basic-writing.” More often than not, administrators of these programs are situated within continuing education or other pre-college venues, cut off from meaningful interactions with their peers in the English department. On the other hand, I have been fortunate enough to head an exceptional developmental English program at Kingsborough Community College (CUNY) that is part of the English department and plays an integral role in the college community. Over the past decade, I have worked to maintain a cohesive structure, while striving to create a coherent and forward-looking vision through an integrated approach to course design and faculty development that serves the literacy goals of at risk- students. I hope to bring my experience with course design and faculty development at the two-year college into the conversation of Writing Program Administrators. Kingsborough’s Developmental English program benefited greatly from my collaboration with other college and high school faculty through CUNY’s “Looking Both Ways” initiative and the introduction of small teacher cohorts at Kingsborough. I hope that my participation as an executive board member on the Council of Writing Program Administrators will foster a more complete understanding of the literacy goals of under-prepared students and mission of the community college faculty who serve them. At the same time, I want to increase my knowledge of the larger community of writing program administrators and the ways in which they contribute to the institutional practices and policies in higher education.

Clint Gardner is the Coordinator of the Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) Student Writing Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. He recently completed his term as Past President of the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA), and is currently Secretary of the Two-year College Association (TYCA) of the National Council of Teachers of English. His writing center research focuses on the development of peer writing consultants (tutors) at community college writing centers and the uses of online writing center resources. One the most important aspects of his writing center work is to support and offer feedback to the student writers who come to the SLCC Student Writing Center, as well as to the SLCC Students who work as peer writing consultants in the Center. Clint teaches college composition and literature with a particular interest in writing center studies, discourse studies, and genre theory.

Statement:  While I believe that the CWPA is an extremely useful organization and provides our field with many important resources, I believe that we can work to broaden our membership to include people from different institution types and institutional settings.  I have already been working with others on the Council to start that effort.  Given my situation in the leadership of both the TYCA and in the International Writing Centers Association, I believe that I can provide connections to and insights of professionals in those two areas.  The common interests of people who work in writing programs around the world would best be addressed by a CWPA that represents the broadest range of people.

Executive Board Member #2: Vote for Barbara Lutz or Sheldon Walcher

Barbara Gaal Lutz is the assistant director of the University Writing Center at the University of Delaware and an instructor in the Department of English. In addition to training undergraduate and graduate tutors for the center and providing leadership to the writing center, Barbara also coordinates both the Writing Fellows initiative in the WAC program and the ESL conversation classes for the general university community. In addition to this WPA work, she co-teaches literacy courses with colleagues in the School of Education and teaches first-year writing and first year seminar courses. Currently, she is in her fourth year of teaching a grant-funded advanced composition course she designed that links education majors with middle school students in an online tutoring environment. Barbara presents regularly at regional and national conferences. Her most recently published scholarship is “English as a Second Language: How Can We help?” in Teaching Language and Literacy: Preschool through the Elementary Grades. Eds. James F. Christie, Billie Jean Enz and Carol Vukelich. Barbara has participated in professional organization leadership at the regional and national level. Regionally, she served as president of Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association (MAWCA) for five years, and Executive Board member of Pennsylvania Writing Program Administrators (PWPA) for three years. She also helped organize the 2004 Council of Writing Program Administrators conference in Newark, DE, and has served as co-chair to the 2000 International Writing Center Association (IWCA) Conference in Baltimore, MD. Currently, she is co-chairing the MAWCA 2010 conference at the University of Delaware and the International Writing Centers Association-National Council of Peer Tutors in Writing (IWCA-NCPTW) 2010 joined conference in Baltimore, MD. She is also serving as a member of the 2010 CCCC WPA Breakfast Committee.

Statement: As the description of my background might suggest, service to the profession has both grounded and defined my growth as a writing teacher and a writing program administrator. My tenure on the Executive Board for PWPA, for example, provided the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues to address local concerns in the field, such as adjunct labor issues and program assessment. Additional service to CWPA, as a member of the conference site committee for two years as well as a participant in the WPA/NSSE collaborative, strengthened my commitment to CWPA’a initiatives. I value the opportunities CWPA has provided for my professional growth and am honored to be considered for the Executive Board. If elected, I would contribute to CWPA’s leadership in several critical areas: in writing centers, by advocating for institutional recognition of writing center administration; in ESL programs and courses, by addressing the special needs of both instructors teaching ESL courses and non native speakers of English; in community outreach, by encouraging service-learning programs that use online tutoring and hybrid courses; in adjunct and part-time faculty advocacy, by working on CWPA initiatives that address adjunct and non tenure track faculty concerns; and finally in networking with other organizations, by helping CWPA strengthen ties with writing center organizations. To each of these critical areas, I bring considerable expertise: as writing center assistant director, I can speak to the daily and long-range administrative concerns of running a successful center; as a non native speaker of English myself, I bring special insight to my instruction of ESL composition courses, my training and mentoring of ESL tutors, and my years of item writing for the TOFEL exams; as the designer and instructor of a grant-funded advanced composition course that links education majors with middle school students, I continue to advocate for greater collaboration between composition programs, teacher education programs, and public school teachers; and finally, as a long-time member of regional and national writing center organizations, I can contribute to CWPA’s interest in dialoging with writing center organizations.

Sheldon Walcher is Director of Composition and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He joined the faculty in 2007 as part of a Quality Enhancement Plan committed to improving writing and speaking across the curriculum. His initiatives include redesigning the first-year curriculum, implementing portfolio assessment throughout all levels of the program, and developing several new courses. One such course is Expanded Composition, a program developed in partnership with the campus writing and speaking centers, university library, and other support units aimed at improving traditionally marginalized students’ retention and success. In 2008, he secured a $50,000 grant from the National Center for Academic Transformation to create a hybrid upper-division course titled, “Writing in Academic, Professional and Public Contexts,” in which students collaborate with area non-profit organizations to create multimedia projects. Sheldon has been involved in several regional initiatives seeking to improve the status and practice of writing instruction. With Anita DeRouen (Millsaps College) and Doug Robinson (Ole Miss), he helped found the Mississippi Council of Writing Program Administrators, and is currently collaborating with colleagues from the South Mississippi Writing Project and Southeast Two Year College Association to host a Teaching, Writing and Technology conference at USM in 2010. He also serves as special advisor to the Developmental Education Task Force of the Mississippi Institutes of Higher Learning. In addition to research on program administration and technology, he focuses on discursive constructions of “deviance” and “unconventionality” within professional and academic communities, and the implications these have for how members understand and react to change. He regularly presents at CCCC and WPA, and has published in a variety of journals. He is currently working on two book projects: Writing With Power: A Social Rhetoric (under contract with Fountain Head Press), and Riddled: Error, Productivity and Change in Discourse.

Statement: My administrative work is guided by the belief that great writing programs must do four things well: (1) offer challenging courses that help students engage the world in meaningful ways; (2) provide ongoing training, professional development and support to writing teachers; (3) promote a culture of excellence in writing and research across their campuses; and (4) serve as centers for writing and civic engagement both regionally and nationally. In all these areas, my efforts have been guided by the outstanding work of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and as a member of the Executive Board, my primary goal would be to seek opportunities to help others develop their programs in similar ways. One initiative I am proud to be involved with is the WPA Mentoring Project, which emerged out of conversations at the 2008 WPA Conference concerning how to provide additional opportunities for exchange among our members. Along with Joe Janangelo and Duane Roen, I coordinated several panels devoted to professional development at the 2009 WPA Conference. We also created an online survey to assess the needs and expectations of CWPA members, and the viability of implementing a formal mentoring system. Based on these efforts, the Executive Board recently approved several new projects, including a partnership with the International Writing Center Association to plan additional professional development sessions at the 2010 conference. We are also building a range of online mentoring tools, including an ongoing blog featuring writers from a range of professional contexts and perspectives. This work is extremely important because mentoring plays such a crucial role in many writing programs’ success, and as a large organization representing increasingly diverse constituencies, I believe the future success of the Council depends on how well we can expand the range of voices, perspectives, and interests we reflect and serve.

Executive Board Member #3: Vote for Shelley Reid or Kelly Ritter

Shelley Reid is associate professor of English and Director of Composition at George Mason University. Before coming to GMU, she served as Associate Director of Composition at Oklahoma State for four years. (And before that, she taught multicultural American literature at a small college in northern Texas for four years, and was a writing center tutor and technical writing teacher in Wyoming for a year.) She has been a member of WPA since 1999 and has worked with the Assistant Professor Administrator SIG of the organization. In 2007 she was awarded a WPA Grant in support of her three-year study of teaching assistant development, and she's been known to post to WPA-L now and then. Her primary professional interests focus on writing-teacher preparation and support, which she has argued can and should be addressed through writing curriculum development, administrative actions and approaches, expert- and peer-mentoring programs, and TA education courses and programs. Learning to teach (writing) is no more a fourteen-week task than is learning to write; in articles on the abovementioned topics (in journals such as Pedagogy, Composition Studies, WPA, and CCC), she affirms that writing teacher education is most successful when it is addressed via a long-term, multifaceted collection of strategies—and that orchestrating such a collection is a primary responsibility of a writing program administrator.

Statement: I took a temporary WPA job in 1999 despite knowing from long family experience that it was an insane job to accept; I kept the job and subsequently switched my professional field in large part because I discovered that the WPA organization had the highest concentration of sane and supportive colleagues I have encountered anywhere in academia. I'm honored to be in the very good, very sane company of the current nominees for Executive Board, and would be delighted to work with any of them and the continuing members on a range of issues we all see as pressing: publicity and political advocacy for writing programs and writing teachers, establishment and revision of curricular and professional standards, encouragement and support of research that helps substantiate our professional intuitions. I would also bring to the Board my own interest in creating, formalizing, and extending outreach and mentoring programs to increase and diversify our membership and provide clear avenues of support to members at various stages of their careers. As an organization, WPA has done very well at both big-ticket support (the summer workshops, the CE service) and the small daily support available online or through chance meetings. I'm interested in the ways in which WPA Affiliates, SIGs, a nascent Mentors program, tools available through the website, and other kinds of continuing education coordinated through the main organization could enable more of us to step into the gap between those poles in order to serve more of our colleagues in ways that meet their local and professional needs.

Kelly Ritter is Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year Composition at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. She was previously (2000-2008) an associate professor of English and the first-year composition director at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, Connecticut. Kelly is a current member of the CCCC Executive Committee and the CBW Executive Board, as well as the MLA Delegate Assembly. She is the author of Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960 (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric/Southern Illinois UP, 2009) and Who Owns School? Authority, Students, and Online Discourse (Hampton Press, forthcoming December 2009). She is also co-editor, with Stephanie Vanderslice, of Can It Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy (Boynton Cook, 2007). Kelly’s articles and essays on writing pedagogy, history, and theory have appeared in College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, Pedagogy, Rhetoric Review, and WPA, among others. Her current project is on women’s literacy education, specifically the institutional intersection of composition and creative writing pedagogies and the influence of general education initiatives in the postwar public women’s college.

Statement: As someone whose graduate degrees are in creative writing, and whose knowledge of the field of composition and rhetoric is thus largely self-taught, I am grateful for the professional support of organizations such as WPA, which encourages me to continue to grow as an administrator, scholar, and teacher of writing and values my current and potential contributions to this field, without concern for where I began. Because my background is, perhaps, different than many of my fellow WPA members, I am especially sensitive to the ways in which we might continue to grow our organization by attracting members such as myself, who have been trained in allied fields outside of composition and rhetoric, but who are nonetheless invested in the work of writing programs and the challenges of administrative work. I am also sensitive to sustaining the notion that what we do, as WPAs, is indeed informed by—and often takes the shape of—research and scholarship in writing studies, broadly construed; as such, as a board member, I would strive to vigorously promote the scholarly dimensions of administrative work (whether this be in FYC, WAC/WID, or WC administrative work), and to support the individual research agendas of its members. I feel strongly that WPAs, like any other writing faculty, need to find their own logical and situated scholarly positions within the wide range of research and publication on college writing and its related endeavors that appears in our journals and at our conferences today. I would thus support an even greater attention within our organization to supporting junior WPAs in their scholarly work, and to providing mentoring opportunities in research and scholarship for members at all levels of their careers.

2006 Election for CWPA Executive Board Members

This information that follows is for the 2006 election Council of Writing Program Administrators 2006 Election of Executive Board Members

Please vote to fill three positions on the WPA Executive Board. Board members’ terms will begin July 1, 2006 and end June 30, 2009. Please read the following information about the Executive Board candidates: Eli Goldblatt, Rita Malenczyk, Carol Rutz, Tom Reynolds, Joe Marshall Hardin, and Jeff Rice.

Continuing Executive Board members are: Chris Anson (Past President), Shirley Rose (President), Joe Janangelo (Vice President), John Tassoni (Secretary pro tem), John Heyda (Treasurer), Marty Patton, Rebecca Moore Howard, Dominic Delli Carpini, Carrie Leverenz, Steve Wilhoit, Susan Miller-Cochran, Deborah Holdstein (ex officio, Consultant Evaluator Service), Greg Glau, Barry Maid, and Duane Roen (ex officio, co-editors of WPA Journal), and David Blakesley (ex officio, Digital WPA).

Please vote for one candidate in each pairing for each of the three vacant positions on the Executive Board. You will receive a separate email with information on how to cast your vote electronically. Please cast your vote by Friday, February 24, 2006.

Board Member #1 Vote for one: Eli Goldblatt or Rita Malenczyk

ELI GOLDBLATT is Associate Professor of English and University Writing Director at Temple University. He is both a compositionist and a poet. His book ‘Round My Way: Authority and Double-Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (U of Pittsburgh P, 1995) draws on his six years of high school teaching in urban Philadelphia. His article on Saul Alinsky and community/university literacy partnerships won the 2005 Ohmann award, and other essays have appeared in College English, CCC, Linguistics and Education, Writing on the Edge, and the Journal of Peace & Justice Studies. His poems have appeared in journals such as Ixnay, Another Chicago Magazine, Hambone, Louisiana Literature, Hubbub and 6ix, and his book-length collections include Sessions 1-62 (Chax P, 1991), Speech Acts (Chax P, 1999), and Without a Trace (Singing Horse P, 2001). He has also published two children’s books and a verse play.

Statement: “Universities are changing rapidly as employers, knowledge producers and preservers, licensing agents. As WPA’s, we are deeply involved with (or implicated in) these changes. I want to strengthen our resolve to fight for justice in employment for adjunct and graduate composition instructors. I also believe we must articulate a new vision of WAC that will guide writing programs as they go beyond the curriculum: K-16 connections, community-based learning, writing for the workplace, and action research off the campus. I hope to help in an effort to expand the active membership of WPA and encourage the growth of regional affiliates.”

RITA MALENCZYK has been Director of the University Writing Program at Eastern Connecticut State University since 1994. As WPA at ECSU, she oversees the first-year writing and WAC programs, works on helping her colleagues in all disciplines develop sound strategies for teaching and assessing writing, and is currently chairing a committee working on developing communication-across-the-curriculum outcomes for ECSU’s new general education requirements. For the last year she has chaired the CCCC Committee on Academic Quality, which works to research and publicize successful efforts to improve the conditions under which writing is taught and learned. She presents regularly at CCCC and WPA, has served as a discussion leader and program committee member for the WPA conference, and was a member of the Steering Committee for the group that developed the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the journal WPA: Writing Program Administration. Her scholarly work, which is focused primarily on the rhetoric and politics of writing program administration, has appeared in that journal and in edited collections; with Susanmarie Harrington, Keith Rhodes and Ruth Overman Fischer, she co-edited The Outcomes Book (Utah State University Press, 2005).

Statement: “WPA is the professional organization I feel most committed to; having already served it in a number of capacities, I would very much like the opportunity to serve it as an Executive Board member. In addition to doing all the things Board members normally do—serving on standing committees, attending meetings, advising the officers—I would like to work with other relevant organizations such as the CCCC Committee on Academic Quality to help WPAs improve the conditions under which writing is taught. The Chattanooga conference will publicize successful efforts to convert temporary part-time lines to permanent full-time ones with better salary and benefits; how can we help all WPAs build on these local successes to better the learning conditions of our students?”

Board Member #2 Vote for one: Carol Rutz or Tom Reynolds

CAROL RUTZ has served since 1997 as Director of the College Writing Program and adjunct lecturer in English at Carleton College. She teaches undergraduate writing seminars, often linked with a history course, and she also collaborates with an astrophysicist to teach “Writing Science.” Much of her work concerns faculty development and writing assessment in the context of WAC. Rutz presents regularly at CCCC, WAC, and WPA (including co-leading the Assessment Institute on Portfolio Assessment in 2003), and has also presented at AAHE, AAC&U, MLA, MMLA, NCTE, and RSA. Recent publications include an article co-written with Jacqulyn Lauer-Glebov in Assessing Writing (2005), “Assessment and innovation: One darn thing leads to another,” and a collection co-edited with Ed Nagelhout that theorizes the composition classroom in space and time: Classroom Spaces and Writing Instruction (Hampton, 2004). Other publications are pending, including a chapter on delivery of composition in the liberal arts college, forthcoming in a collection edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey. Carol Rutz is the current secretary of CCCC, and she serves as a reviewer for CCC, Writing Program Administration, and WAC Journal.

Statement: “As a professional organization, WPA has the strength of numbers combined with the agility of a lean, efficient administration. Given the work its members do, it should come as no surprise that WPA’s signature qualities are reflected in the effectiveness of the Executive Board in recent years. I see the continued promise of WPA in the domain of genuine leadership in higher education. As secretary of CCCC, I have participated in deliberations about responses to national conversations on writing instruction and assessment that impinge directly on our work. Consequently, I am convinced that it is up to us to anticipate critique and to advocate for best practices. If elected to the Executive Board, I will argue for increased attention to assessment, curriculum, and faculty working conditions—all with the primary focus on student learning. Our public identity must match and endorse our private, classroom-based goals as teachers of writing and administrators of writing programs.”

TOM REYNOLDS is associate professor of writing at the University of Minnesota. He has co-directed and taught basic writing in the University of Minnesota's General College writing program since 1995. He has also served on the Center for Basic Writing's Executive Board, and was co-chair of that organization from 2001-2004. In addition, he co-edited BWe, an online journal devoted to the study and teaching of basic writing. Statement: “I'd like to serve WPA because of the organization's ability to influence those for whom writing instruction is more than a matter of just scheduling and teaching writing classes. I'm interested in how WPA carries awareness of writing programs as progressive, well-informed proponents of effective literacy instruction into academic and public forums. I'm also interested in serving WPA because of its support for writing instruction at the heart of college learning, on a par with any other subject in the curriculum. I have often drawn on WPA statements and policies, as well as the support of valued national colleagues, when working for the best possible writing instruction on my campus and in the local community.”

Board Member #3 Vote for one: Joe Marshall Hardin or Jeff Rice

JOE MARSHALL HARDIN is currently Composition Director at Western Kentucky University and was formerly Director of Writing at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. His major activities as Composition Director for Western Kentucky University (2004-present) and as Director of Writing for Northwestern State University (1999-2004) have included designing the handbook for teachers of all writing courses at both universities and designing the composition websites. At both schools, he participated in hiring, supervising, and evaluating adjuncts, teaching assistants, and office staff. He scheduled classes; reviewed, selected and ordered texts; and conducted orientation sessions for teachers. As the head of writing committees at both universities, he designed, wrote grants, planned, administered, and evaluated the departmental assessment of writing courses. He has also led colloquia for faculty on evaluation, assessment, and best practices. Day-to-day activities included the general support of teachers in writing and handling of student and teacher and student problems and complaints. He also evaluates CLEP exams for the general education courses. At Western and at Northwestern State, he aided in the design of new computer environments for the departments.

Statement: “Increasingly, the Council of Writing Program Administrators finds itself in a leadership role in the discipline, through the popularity of its listserv, the research and publication of its members, its representation at CCCC and MLA, the prominence of its program evaluation service, and the hard work of its members to represent the discipline on national and local committees and through public outreach. As composition comes under increased scrutiny through academic and public interest in such subjects as literacy, standardization of language and language conventions, plagiarism and copyright issues, and testing, it is imperative that qualified and experienced writing program administrators continue to address these issues and to speak out at disciplinary and public forums. This is a project I feel called to participate in, and I hope that through the WPA executive board, I may contribute to the leadership role the writing program administrators can take on these issues.”

JEFF RICE was Assistant Professor of English and the WPA at the University of Detroit Mercy from 2002-2004. Since 2004, he has been Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University where he teaches the graduate practicum in writing for new GTAs, graduate courses in composition theory and digital theory, and undergraduate courses in writing. His research has appeared in several journals and book collections. His textbook Writing About Cool was published by Longman Publishers. He recently completed a book manuscript on writing and new media entitled The Rhetoric of Cool: A Theory of Writing and New Media.

Statement: “My interests are in working with WPAs to think about the role technology plays in writing instruction (explicitly and implicitly) and how WPA work can better work with technology in ways that don't overburden already heavy workloads, but instead complement and improve the work already being done. Some of this work involves rethinking practices; some of it involves learning new skills for new types of instructional settings.”

2007 Election for Vice-President and Executive Board Members: Candidates' Information and Statements

WPA is holding elections for three Executive Board members and for a Vice-President. We will be saying thank you and goodbye to Executive Board members Rebecca Moore Howard, Martha Patton, and Susan Miller-Cochran, whose terms end in June 2007. The Executive Board oversees WPA's events and activities, creates policies and procedures for its management, and engages in special projects and initiatives. The new Board members will serve for three years, with terms beginning in July of 2007. Nominees for Vice-President make a six-year commitment to WPA, first serving as vice-president for two years, as president for the next two years, and as immediate past president for a final two years.

On February 13, 2007, current members of the Council of Writing Program Administrators will receive a separate email with information on how to cast their votes electronically. Please cast your vote by Monday, February 26, 2007.

For instructions on checking your membership status: http://wpacouncil.org/membership

Candidates' statements follow...

Nominees for Vice-President

LINDA ADLER-KASSNER is Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at Eastern Michigan University, a position she has held for seven years; she has also been a writing center director and director of graduate instructors. At EMU, she directs a large and robust writing program that was honored with a CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence in 2005. Her previous positions as a writing center director, a full-time lecturer and a graduate instructor have allowed her to experience the profession from a number of different vantage points.

Linda's research, like her teaching and work with the EMU First Year Writing Program, begins with questions about teaching and advocacy: How is literacy defined in particular contexts? Whose interests are represented, whose not, from these definitions? In the last five years, her work has focused on considering these questions in the public sphere, especially in media coverage of and policy reports about writers and writing, and developing strategies for WPAs and writing instructors to advocate for their views with audiences outside the writing program. She is currently completing a book on the subject, Activist Writing Program Administration: Changing Stories. She has authored and co-authored articles and book chapters about various aspects of writing program administration published in WPA Journal, The Outcomes Book, and elsewhere. She also has published extensively in the area of basic writing, often with co-author Susanmarie Harrington. Together, they authored Basic Writing as a Political Act: Public Conversations about Writing and Literacy (Hampton, 2002) and numerous articles, including the forthcoming The Public Work of Basic Writing in Journal of Basic Writing's 25th anniversary issue. Additionally, she has published articles in CCC, College English, English Education, and other journals, and she is on the editorial board of WPA Journal and Journal of Basic Writing.

As an executive board member on the Council of Writing Program Administrators, Linda was a co-author of the WPA Statement Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices and chair of the WPA Media Committee. With that group, she collaborated with others to conceive and develop the WPA Network for Media Action, which she continues to help coordinate. WPA-NMA (wpacouncil.org/nma) provides talking/writing points and writing tips for writing instructors and WPAs who want to communicate with mainstream media on issues relevant to writing instructors, such as plagiarism, 'grammar,' and machine scoring of writing.

Statement: What does it mean to teach writing? Who gets to respond to the question? What stories do WPAs want to tell about what teaching writing means? What stories does the Council of Writing Program Administrators want to tell? What stories--about teaching writing, about learning writing, about students and teachers--do others tell?

Stories about writing programs -- what they are, what is taught in their names, and who does that teaching -- are powerful. They shape the ways our work is understood and represented by WPAs and by people outside of our programs, departments, and institutions. A Test of Leadership, the report from the Spellings Commission on Higher Education, is but one of a spate of recent narratives that have the potential to fundamentally change the work of college faculty, especially WPAs and writing instructors.

As a CWPA executive board member, I learned first-hand the power of the expert knowledge that CWPA brings to discussions about writing instruction. As a coordinator of the WPA Network for Media Action, I've also seen the passion and desire that WPAs and writing instructors bring to these discussions. When we get involved in these discussions we can make a difference -- inside and outside of our programs.

At the same time, I understand that that when WPAs become involved in work that lies outside of the traditional boundaries of faculty reward structures, there can be (sometimes unanticipated) consequences. One possible contribution that CWPA can make to this dilemma is to help frame the public work of program administration, including work that involves communicating about the profession to those outside of it, as part of our intellectual endeavor.

As CWPA Vice-President, I would continue to work with the entire organization to make sure that our stories -- those of WPA as an organization, those of WPAs and writing instructors at institutions of all types -- are represented. This work involves building on CWPA's already-strong foundation to:
*encourage research that investigates best practices in writing program administration and instruction, and publicize the results of that research widely;
*help people outside of our profession understand how and why our work is (or can be) effective by speaking about our research and our commitments;
*continue efforts to expand WPA's membership base and ensure that CWPA speaks with and includes a broad constituency of 2- and 4-year instructors and administrators.

At the same time, I would work to ensure that the CWPA plays four important roles in gathering and promoting WPA's and writing instructors' stories about writing and writers:
*organizing writing instructors at all levels by learning about their stories, their interests, and their concerns;
*developing leaders to help promote those stories and address concerns;
*identifying local/national issues where CWPA members' expertise can shape and frame the conversation; and
*planning action to influence the discussion of writing and writers at the college level.

CWPA is an organization that brings together some of the most passionate and committed instructors in our field. As an organization it is nimble, flexible, and proactive. As Vice President and, later, as President, I would work to continue putting our passions and our abilities to important uses.

MARTY TOWNSEND was hired as Director of the University of Missouri's Campus Writing Program (fresh out of Arizona State University with a new PhD) in 1991, a position she held until just last summer. She is a Fellow of the Bryn Mawr Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration and a former literacy consultant for The Ford Foundation. Having earned tenure and promotion while serving as WPA--and, in part, for her work as WPA--she is now just an associate professor directing graduate studies in MU's English Department. Her professional interests focus on WAC/WID program development and assessment in the U.S. and abroad. As Campus Writing Program (CWP) director, Marty taught first-year composition, the department's capstone course, graduate seminars in composition and WAC/WID, and faculty seminars for writing-intensive instructors. Townsend presents regularly at CCCC, WPA, and WAC conferences and has consulted on writing for over seventy colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad, including China, Romania, Thailand, South Korea, and Costa Rica.

Along with CWP colleagues Marty Patton and Jo Ann Vogt, Townsend hosted the 2004 National WAC Conference in St. Louis, the first with an international focus. Because of the positive reception, the conference was subsequently renamed the International WAC Conference. Also in 2004, CWP was recognized with one of CCCC's first Writing Program Certificates of Excellence. Marty previously served on the WPA Executive Board and currently serves on the WPA Editorial Board and the WAC Board of Consultants. She has twice been co-leader of WPA's summer workshops. Marty is the subject of a recent WAC Journal interview, A Different Kind of Pioneer, in which author Carol Rutz notes that CWP is among the largest and sturdiest examples of WAC. CWP's example is reflected in MU's citation for Writing in the Disciplines in U.S. News & World Report's America's Best Colleges every year that WID has been featured. Townsend's most recent publication, co-authored with MU sociologist Edward Brent, is "Automated Essay Grading in the Sociology Classroom" in Ericsson and Haswell's Machine Scoring of Student Essays (Utah State UP, 2006). Her chapter "Negotiating the Risks and Reaping the Rewards" is forthcoming in Dew and Frank's Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators (Parlor Press, 2007).

Statement : For over two decades, I've been learning from WPA's collective membership, first as a graduate student, then as a writing program administrator myself, via the organization's pre-conference workshops at CCCC, summer conferences and workshops, Consultant/Evaluator Service, journal, newsletters, website, and other events. Serving as an executive officer would be a privilege--and an opportunity to repay a portion of the organization's fundamental contributions to my career.

National trends in higher education suggest that the stakes for our field are higher than ever. Virtually all aspects of college writing--programs, curricula, funding, assessment, technologies, hiring practices--are impacted by an array of forces both within and outside our control. It is incumbent on WPA to keep our membership apprised of new developments and to offer support to the best of our organizational ability. I'd like to work with WPA's leadership on a range of issues including:

• continuing WPA's long history of providing professional education for our field,
• promoting more research in the field and showcasing exemplary models,
• exploring how WPA might increase knowledge of key issues for our members but also for the deans, provosts, and presidents to whom we report: could we be more proactive on behalf of pre-tenured faculty in WPA jobs? is it time to go beyond our well-crafted Intellectual Work document to make a broader case about the benefits academe derives from our members' work? can we foster a better understanding of assessment's complexities?
• supporting WPA's ongoing exploration of international connections, to find new venues for conversation, research, and collaboration; the international work I've been doing in WAC/WID since 1995 has taught me a great deal, and I'd like to encourage other WPAs along these lines.

I don't claim to have answers for the myriad issues that writing program administrators face, but I do know that I'm energized daily by the camaraderie and good will of the people in our field and by the desire we have to do our jobs well. I'd welcome applying that energy to this leadership role in our organization.

*Nominees for Executive Board Members

*Board Member #1: Vote for One of These Two Candidates
ELI GOLDBLATT is Associate Professor of English and Director of First Year Writing at Temple University. He is both a compositionist and a poet. His forthcoming book is Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy beyond the College Curriculum (Hampton P). His book 'Round My Way: Authority and Double-Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (U of Pittsburgh P, 1995) draws on his six years of high school teaching in urban Philadelphia. His article on Saul Alinsky and community/university literacy partnerships won the 2005 Ohmann award, and other essays have appeared in College English, CCC, Linguistics and Education, Writing on the Edge, and the Journal of Peace & Justice Studies. His poems have appeared in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Ixnay, Another Chicago Magazine, Hambone, Louisiana Literature, Hubbub and 6ix, and his book-length collections include Sessions 1-62 (Chax P, 1991), Speech Acts (Chax P, 1999), and Without a Trace (Singing Horse P, 2001). He has also
published two children's books and a verse play.

Statement: Universities are changing rapidly as employers, knowledge producers and preservers, and licensing agents. As WPA's, we are deeply involved with (or implicated in) these changes. I want to strengthen our resolve to fight for justice in employment for adjunct and graduate composition instructors. I also believe we must articulate a new vision of WAC that will guide writing programs as they go beyond the curriculum: K-16 connections, community-based learning, writing for the workplace, and action research off the campus. I hope to help in an effort to expand the active membership of WPA and encourage the growth of regional affiliates.

ALICE HORNING is Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics and Director of the Rhetoric Program at Oakland University. She provides leadership to a program that offers courses in first-year writing, upper-level courses that satisfy writing intensive requirements in General Education. The Rhetoric Program faculty have submitted a proposal for a major and minor in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, currently undergoing review. Her educational background and scholarly work focus on the cross-disciplinary nature of human literacy; her publications seek to explore the psychological and linguistic bases on which literacy rests. In addition, she has made use of research in applied linguistics to understand basic writers, revision processes and the teaching and learning of literacy. Her books have been published by Hampton Press, Parlor Press, Ablex and Southern Illinois University Press, and her articles have appeared in College English, JAC, The Reading Matrix and other journals, with work forthcoming in WPA. Her concern for untenured faculty serving as WPAs appears in a volume co-edited with Debra Dew called Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics (Parlor Press 2007).

Statement: I owe a tremendous debt to the WPA organization that I hope I can repay in small part by serving on the Executive Board. Nearly all of the positive changes I have been able to make in the Rhetoric Program at OU have come about, in one way or another, as a result of my membership in WPA, my participation in its workshops and conferences, and my reading of the listserv. I have been the founder and co-leader of the Michigan affiliate of WPA (with Roger Gilles), developed a Festival of Writing modeled on a great idea stolen from Linda Adler-Kassner, lowered class size in my program, and created a small pool of money for program enhancement and project support from a custom version of our program-wide handbook; all of these ideas have come through my interaction with WPA. I hope to bring my cross-disciplinary background and understanding of the psycholinguistics of reading and writing to bear on the work of the organization and to support all WPA enterprises that help students develop critical literacy urgently needed for their higher education and participation in democratic society.

Board Member #2: *Vote for One of These Two Candidates

JEFF ANDELORA has taught writing and literature for twenty-one years, the past eleven at Mesa Community College, located just outside of Phoenix. Prior to that he taught high school English for ten years. Jeff completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Arizona State University in 2005. His dissertation examined the impact of the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) on the professionalization of two-year college English faculty. He has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and has presented at CCCC, WPA, and TYCA West. Additionally, Jeff is a consulting reader for TETYC, has served on the 2006 James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation Award Committee, and serves on the CCCC Basic Data Task Force.

Statement: The Council of Writing Program Administrators has done remarkable work with four-year college and university writing programs; however, for a variety of reasons, the CWPA has had little success working with two-year colleges. The primary reason for this, I believe, is that two-year college English departments rarely have a WPA, so they don't readily see the relevance of the CWPA. Instead of a WPA, the duties of overseeing first-year composition in two-year colleges typically fall to an already overburdened department chair, leaving little time to coordinate the challenges of student placement, course outcomes, textbook selection, and program evaluation. In many two-year colleges, these tasks go on as they have for decades, without a coherent vision driving them. Given that half of America's college students take their composition courses at the more than 1200 two-year colleges, a stronger relationship between two-year colleges and the CWPA would benefit students, the colleges, and the organization.

If elected, I would help the CWPA work more deliberately with two-year colleges. The first step would be to forge an alliance with TYCA to examine the current state of writing programs in two-year colleges. Once we have a better understanding of how composition is administered at two-year colleges, we can develop strategies to help with some of the challenges they're facing. Some possibilities: I'd like to see members of the CWPA speak at TYCA's regional conferences about the work the CWPA is doing. I'd like us to devote a special issue of WPA to two-year college writing programs, and, as interest and membership grow, I'd like us to regularly solicit articles from two-year college faculty. I'd also encourage members of the CWPA and graduate students to view two-year college writing programs as important sites for research. In short, I'd like two-year college English departments to see the CWPA as an organization that is interested in and relevant to the work they're doing in two-year colleges, and I'd like to help in that effort.

MILES McCRIMMON is Professor of English at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, Virginia, where he has been teaching composition and literature for more than fifteen years. He served as English Department Chair from 1998-2001 and he is beginning a new three-year term in 2007. He currently holds the Chancellor's Commonwealth Professorship, a state-wide award for excellence in teaching and scholarship. He has published articles in Teaching English in the Two Year College (March 2005) and College English (November 2006) and has contributed pieces to a forthcoming NCTE collection, Creating the Teachable Moment (2007). He wrote the Instructor's Manuals for the first two editions of The World is a Text (2003 and 2006) and he is at work on a writing guide designed for first-year experience programs. He was Program Chair for the 38th TYCA-Southeast Annual Conference, served on the Regional Executive Committee of TYCA-SE from 2000-2002, and served as a Site Leader for a FIPSE Dissemination Grant from 2001-2004. His college service work has included co-directing the most recent self-study, coordinating dual enrollment offerings, writing and editing major federal grant proposals, serving as co-chair of his college's first-ever Major Gifts Campaign.

Statement : More than half of America's college students and more than half of all WPAs are at two-year institutions. As a former and returning WPA, I can represent this vast constituency and bring a valuable perspective to the board about the unique and dynamic relationships two-year colleges hold with senior institutions, the workforce, and K-12 education. Community colleges are contact zones (between disciplines, literacies, ethnicities, and levels of acculturation) where rich moments of generous and fruitful collaboration take place daily. Virtually every significant insight in my career has arisen when I stepped outside my comfort zone. My mission with WPA is to help to make these sorts of 'border crossings' a productive part of everyone's professional experience.

Board Member #3: Vote for One of These Two Candidates

BARBARA L'EPLATTENIER is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in historical studies, technical writing, theories of technical communication, grant writing, gender studies, and queer theory. She has been published in The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher: Inquiry in Action and Reflection, (editors Shirley K Rose and Bud Weiser); Calling Cards (editors Jackie Jones Royster and Ann Marie Simpkins); and the forthcoming Labor of Love, (editors Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohen). Her co-edited collection, Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline, published by Parlor Press, won the 2004-2005 Award for Best Book on Writing Program Administration.

Statement: I look to WPA as a model of administrative structure and professional organization development; WPA's strength is its ability to create standards and outcomes for a field as diverse and complex as college writing. I'm deeply interested in seeing WPA continue to develop its presence on a national level. WPA needs to continue pushing forward to gain the respect of university officials, elected officials, and others who criticize or have an impact on writing programs and writing projects. I would like to see WPA develop stronger public relations strategies, make more explicit connections with non-profit and advocacy groups vested in writing, promote and disseminate WPA research, and have a more prominent voice in national discussions about writing.

BARBARA GAAL LUTZ is assistant director of the University Writing Center at the University of Delaware and, with her colleagues, hosted the well-attended 2004 WPA Conference. Her administrative work at Delaware includes coordinating a writing program for developmental students which was run through the Writing Center; in addition, she teaches freshman composition courses, ESL composition classes, and honors composition courses through both the English department and Honors College. Currently she is in her second year of teaching a grant-funded advanced composition course she designed that links education majors with middle school students in an online tutoring environment. Lutz presents regularly at regional and national conferences, including IWCA, CCCC, and WPA. Her most recent published essay English as a Second Language: How Can We Help? was reprinted in Teaching Language and Literacy: Preschool through the Elementary Grades. Eds. James F. Christie, Billie Jean Enz, and Carol Vukelich. Boston: Pearson Education, 2007, 299-300.

Lutz brings twenty years of experience working with professional organizations: she served as co-president of Interstate Developmental Educators Association (IDEA) for five years, president of Mid Atlantic Writing Centers Association (MAWCA) for five years, and Executive Board member of Pennsylvania Writing Program Administrators (PWPA) for three years. In all, she organized or helped organize ten regional conferences, co-chaired two national conferences and served on several national committees for IWCA and WPA.

Statement: WPA continues to be a dynamic and critical voice in the field, one that assesses, addresses, and advocates best practices and policies within the educational community as well as the public sphere. Sustaining this high level of leadership requires commitment and strategic direction from its members and executive board to ensure that the organization remains unified in its goals. I believe that I can contribute to this mission in several areas: having learned English as a second language, and having designed and taught EFL composition courses for many years, I would advocate for the special needs of EFL students in both writing centers and composition classes; as a veteran writing center tutor and now an administrator, I would represent the needs and concerns of writing centers; and working in a continuing non-tenure track position, I would speak to the ongoing policy discussions concerning the use of adjunct and non-tenure track faculty in teaching and administration.

Overall, from twenty-five years of teaching experience and almost as many in board involvement, I have learned how people collaborate effectively in order to bring an organization's goals to fruition. I hope that the WPA membership will give me the opportunity to serve on the executive board as the organization confronts upcoming challenges in reaching its goals.

2008 Election for CWPA Executive Board Members

WPA is holding elections for three Executive Board members. We will say thank you and goodbye to Executive Board members Steve Wilhoit, Dominic Delli Carpini, and Carrie Leverenz, whose terms end in June 2008.

The Executive Board oversees WPA's events and activities, creates policies and procedures for its management, and engages in special projects and initiatives. The new Board members will serve for three years, with terms beginning in July of 2008 and ending in June 2011.

Continuing Executive Board members are Shirley Rose (Past President); Joe Janangelo (President); Linda Adler-Kassner (Vice President); Linda Bergmann (Secretary); Rick Johnson-Sheehan (Treasurer); Joe Marshall Hardin; Rita Malenczyk; Carol Rutz; Jeff Andelora; Eli Goldblatt; Barbara L'Eplattenier; Deborah Holdstein and Charles Schuster (ex-officio, Consultant Evaluator Service); Deirdre Pettipiece, Timothy Ray, and William McCauley (ex-officio, WPA Journal Editors); and Dave Blakesley (ex officio, Digital WPA).

Please vote for one candidate in each of the three pairings below .

Board member #1: Vote for Brian Huot or David Schwalm

BRIAN HUOT is in his fourth year as Writing Program Coordinator at Kent State University. Before his present WPA position, he had been Director of Composition and Writing Across the Curriculum Corrordinator at the University of Louisville as well as Writing Center Director at Lane College and the University of Northern Iowa. He is a long time member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and a three-time contributor to WPA: Writing Program Administration. He has published essays in College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition and other journals and collections devoted to the teaching and learning of writing at the postsecondary level. He is co-editor of four collections and author of the monograph (Re) Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning. He co-founded Assessing Writing and The Journal of Writing Assessment, which he continues to edit. He has been active in The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as a member and chair of the College Section and as a member of the executive committee from 2005-2007. He is currently a member of the WPA/NCTE Joint Ad Hoc Task Force on Assessment.

Statement: Current Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) live in interesting times. While college administrators and public policy makers heartily acknowledge the importance and centrality of a strong literacy education for all college students, many WPAs still administer under-funded programs that continue to exploit contingent faculty who often teach the majority of first-year courses (FYC), while these same WPAs face increasing demands for standardized accountability that ignores important educational goals and student outcomes. The Council of Writing Program Administrators has and continues to provide support for individual WPAs and the profession of WPAs to harness the potential and meet the challenges of these "interesting times." Projects like the WPA Network for Media Action and the Joint Ad Hoc Task Force on Assessment highlight the importance of basing WPA practice upon recognized and established principles in literacy learning that are the corner stones of recognized professional practice. While individual WPAs can have a difficult time making a case for better working conditions and contextualized forms of assessment (among other issues), I believe that the Council of WPAs allows these individuals and their concerns to be heard and listened to. I am honored to be considered for the executive board of this vital organization.

DAVID E. SCHWALM

Background and Statement: I would enjoy having the opportunity to serve as a member of the WPA executive committee, and I would bring to the position a wide range of relevant and useful experience as a faculty member, as a WPA, and as a college and university administrator. I was directly engaged in teaching writing and/or administering writing programs in various roles for the first 24 years of my professional life. I taught writing as an adjunct in colleges and community colleges in the Chicago area and subsequently as a full-time faculty member in the Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley and in English departments at Ohio State, UTEP, and Arizona State (Tempe). I started a National Writing Project site at UTEP, and this gave me a close-up view of the challenges faced by K-12 teachers. I was a WPA at both UTEP and at ASU for a total of about 8 years. Since 1992, I have been an academic vice provost first at ASU West and then at ASU Polytechnic, also serving a college dean at ASU Polytechnic—where I am now Dean of the School of Applied Arts and Sciences. During my entire time at ASU, I have been deeply engaged in community college-university transfer articulation issues, both at the local, state, national level, dealing not only with transfer of composition courses but generally with policy and structural issues. And, while I have not been exclusively involved in rhetoric and composition since I assumed my general administrative roles, I have kept watch over the WPA-L listserv since establishing it in 1991 (my colleague Barry Maid and I now serve as co-listowners) and have thus been able to stay in touch with the major issues of our profession and discipline. As a result of these experiences, I am knowledgeable about issues of writing instruction from kindergarten through college at many different kinds of institution. I have seen writing programs from different points of view as a faculty member, as a program director, and as a central administrator. With this knowledge and these different perspectives, I believe I can help us to work our way through some of the challenges ahead, such as the call for K-16 curriculum alignment, more accountability, seamless transfer, and greater effectiveness and efficiency in instruction.

Board Member #2: Vote for Darsie Bowden or Melissa Ianetta

DARSIE BOWDEN began her WPA work in the late 1980s as a graduate student at the University of Southern California’s First-Year Writing Program where she served as a program coordinator. In 1992, one year after taking her first job at DePaul University, she became director of DePaul’s Writing Center, then subsequently worked as co-director of DePaul’s first WAC program (with David Jolliffe) and Director of the MA in Writing at DePaul. She is currently director of First-Year Writing, a post she has held intermittently since 1994. She also served as Director of Composition at Western Washington University (2000-1). She is a member of the steering committee for the WPA’s Network for Media Action, served on the local arrangements committee for CCCC in Chicago in 2006 and also on the WPA breakfast committee that same year. She collaborated on two video projects, Writing as Writing Program Administrators (with Peter Vandenberg, 2006) about the WPA conference in Anchorage and Who is a Writer? What Writers Tell Us (2007), produced with Peter Vandenberg, Linda Adler-Kassner and Dominic Delli Carpini, as part of the WPA’s National Conversation on Writing initiative (NCoW). She received an MFA in cinema, worked for eight years as a screenwriter, then obtained a PhD from the University of Southern California in Rhetoric, Linguistics and Literature. She currently specializes in the teaching of composition, composition theory and literacy with articles published in WPA, CCC, Rhetoric Review, and WCJ. She has completed two books, The Mythology of Voice (1999, Heinemann), a critique of the voice metaphor, and Writing for Film (2006, Erlbaum), a screenwriting textbook.

Statement: Like most writing teachers and WPAs, I have struggled to do my job in the face of institutionalized lack of funding, status, and power. As most of us are all too aware, many of the challenges we face stem from a general and often profound lack of knowledge about writing, writers, and the teaching of writing among people outside our field. Public ignorance, compounded by myth and misinformation, contribute, I believe, to the enactment of such dubious projects as NCLB and the popularity of commercial models of assessment that assess very little. The WPA, working in conjunction with CCCC and NCTE, has done much to call into question the development of these programs and practices. My work with the Network for Media Action has provided ways for me to contribute to this project. I believe that WPA needs to continue our nascent media campaign—compellingly making the case for the connection between writing, power, and democracy through the diverse media at our disposal. Over the past few years, I have found a professional home in the WPA and have benefited enormously from support, advice, and professional development that mark this organization. I would be honored to be given the chance to give back.

MELISSA IANETTA is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing at the University of Delaware where she teaches writing and administers the writing center, composition program and writing-across-the-curriculum program. With Doug Downs, she co-founded APA-SIG, a cross-organization special interest group for assistant professor administrators in CWPA and the International Writing Center Association. She has twice chaired a CCCC pre-convention workshop focused on working as a tenure-track WPA. Melissa also served as an IWCA executive board member, and she and Lauren Fitzgerald are the incoming editors of The Writing Center Journal. Melissa’s scholarship focuses on the political and intellectual impact of disciplinary-based thinking in both our practices of writing program administration and our conceptualizations of the history of rhetoric. Her research has appeared in College English, Composition Studies, PMLA, Rhetoric Review, Writing Center Journal, Writing Lab Newsletter and WPA. Her current administrative research concerns the impact of continuing non-tenure track faculty positions on the evolution of English department culture.

Statement: Being the first in my family to attend college has meant my path into the professorate has been a winding one. After being a student at a range of institutions, including an urban community college, a suburban state college and an urban research university, I’ve had the opportunity to occupy a variety of teaching and administrative roles: graduate student TA, graduate student WPA, adjunct faculty member and non-tenure track WAC consultant. Further, as a tenure-track assistant professor, I’ve administered the full gamut of writing programs -- writing center, WAC and a composition program that ranges from basic writing to technical communication. This combination of experiences, I think, have prepared me well to speak with the diversity of writing program professionals who comprise WPA.

As I’ve moved into ever-expanding roles of administrative responsibility, CWPA has been foundational to my continued success, and I would consider it an honor to serve the organization that has served me so well. If elected, I would work on the executive board by drawing upon my scholarly interest in and practical experiences with crossing departmental/institutional/disciplinary borders. More specifically, I envision continuing my active participation in the International Writing Center Association, thus contributing to cross-organizational conversation with WPA. Likewise, I would continue my support of the Assistant Professor Administrator’s SIG and workshops that support the individuals in these often-challenging roles. Finally, I would continue my research on writing program employment conditions and hope to contribute to WPA through this work.

Board Member #3: Vote for Asao B. Inoue or Susan Thomas

ASAO B. INOUE is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition, the Assessment Expert for the College of Arts and Humanities, and the English 5A Coordinator at California State University, Fresno. He was a member of the NCTE and WPA Ad Hoc Task Force on Writing Assessment (2007-08), and is a current member of the CCCC’s Committee on Diversity. He teaches graduate courses in composition pedagogy and theory, writing assessment, and racism studies. He has published scholarship in both Assessing Writing and The Journal of Writing Assessment.

Statement: I bring to the WPA Executive Board a sensitivity to issues of race and racism in writing assessment, as well as a sensitivity to historically marginalized bodies in the academy generally. As a first-generation college graduate, a former remedial English student in public schools, and an academic of color who at times still finds his voice strange and uncomfortable in the academy, I know how many FYC students feel when they bring their own seemingly strange discourses to that foreign space. I’ll strive to represent the voices and bodies that often are not represented enough, are usually at the margins, but always help define the mainstream.

My priorities are first concerned with teachers and students who are not always well-represented, including TAs and part-time instructional faculty. I often advocate institutional change, not simply for its critiques to be heard (although critique is important), but because the structures that make some lives and working conditions more comfortable and profitable often make many others’ lives and work considerably less so. And these arrangements often seem to hurt students, and hurt students of color and poor students more than others. I believe that coalitions across multiple borders (racial, social, disciplinary, etc.) are crucial to improving the quality of education and lives of our students and the WPAs and teachers who serve and work alongside those students. And finally, I believe writing assessment is one important node in the network for making institutional changes in writing programs, in constructing more meaningful education and pedagogies, and more equitable material lives for all. There should be few gates or guarded towers in WPA work; instead, I prefer to think of literacy and writing instruction as pastures that we invite all to cultivate with us, nurturing and encouraging the work done, endeavors that expand, complicate, and problematize the academy, its discourses, and even the bodies that constitute it.

SUSAN THOMAS is Senior Lecturer (equivalent of US Associate Professor) at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she directs writing and WAC programs based on American models—the first such programs in the University’s 158-year history. Susan’s work focuses on strengthening the relationship between the University and the communities it serves, in order to promote ‘real world’ writing pedagogies and develop meaningful service learning, research, and internship opportunities for students—and a writing center informed by ‘real world’ practices and needs. Her duties include assessing courses and online delivery models across four faculties, and mentoring teachers. For the past two years, Susan has served as Associate Dean for the Faculty of Arts, where she chairs the Teaching and Learning Committee and advises working groups on assessment and student diversity. Due to Susan’s work, ‘proficiency in academic writing’ and ‘social citizenship’ are now named as expected outcomes for all University of Sydney graduates. Susan has recently been appointed Director of Teaching Development for the Faculties of Arts, Music, Education, and the Sydney College of the Arts.

Susan’s research brings her home to the US, where she presents at WPA, MLA, and 4Cs. She is the editor of What is the New Rhetoric? (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), which focuses on contemporary applications of rhetoric to technology, pedagogy, and WAC. Susan has published articles and chapters on teaching and learning, assessment, and academic writing, and is completing a monograph entitled Teaching Writing Beyond US Borders, which traces the development of the writing and WAC programs, comparing them with North American programs. Susan serves on the editorial board of Young Scholars in Writing and is treasurer of the Australian Association of Writing Programs. She has received national teaching grants and is the winner of the 2007 Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, Sydney University’s most prestigious award.

Susan’s work with the WPA includes collaborating with officers, the Executive Board, and committee members to develop internationalization initiatives, including generating a cross-national dialogue among WPAs, identifying cross-cultural teaching and research opportunities, and investigating the possibility of hosting international WPA conferences in ways that offer access to all members.

Statement: “As a WPA a long way from home, I have relied on our organization’s expertise and mentoring. It would be a pleasure to serve WPA in a more formalized way and repay its generosity. My primary goal would be to share what I have learned in Australia in order to help WPA broaden its international scope. Specifically, I would like to:

• Build a research database of theoretical and practical wisdom, including the ‘transferability’ of WPA work to broader university administration;
• Use new technologies to facilitate cross-cultural conferences, mentoring programs, and ‘virtual exchange’ opportunities for faculty and students;
• Create additional professional opportunities for graduate students;
• Create venues for WPA members to participate in cross-cultural research projects and publish their work in international journals, which would further develop WPA’s capacity for mentoring and supporting international WPAs and American WPAs working in international contexts;
• Facilitate further collaborations on cross-cultural approaches to WAC and writing program assessment.

2008-09 Election for WPA Executive Board Members and Vice President

UPDATE: The election was over on December 11, 2008.

WPA is holding elections for three Executive Board members and a Vice President. We will say thank you and goodbye to Executive Board members Joe Hardin, Rita Malenczyk, and Carol Rutz as well as Past President Shirley Rose, whose terms end in July 2009.

Voting tokens for the election will be distributed electronically to current WPA members in early December. Only current members are eligible to vote. Voting will take place for one week, and results will be announced in mid-December.

The Executive Board oversees WPA's events and activities, creates policies and procedures for its management, and engages in special projects and initiatives. The new Executive Board members will serve for three years, with terms beginning in July of 2009 and ending in June 2012. The new Vice President will serve for two years, then succeed to President (2 years) and Past President (2 years).

Continuing Executive Board members are Joe Janangelo (President, will become Past President); Linda Adler-Kassner (Vice President, will become President); Linda Bergmann (Secretary); Rick Johnson-Sheehan (Treasurer); Jeff Andelora; Eli Goldblatt; Barbara L'Eplattenier; Melissa Ianetta; Brian Huot; Susan Thomas; Deborah Holdstein and Charles Schuster (ex-officio, Consultant Evaluator Service); Deirdre Pettipiece and Timothy Ray (ex-officio, WPA Journal editors) and Charlie Lowe (ex officio, Digital WPA).

Members will vote for one candidate in each of the four pairings below.

Vice President

DOMINIC DELLI CARPINI, Associate Professor of English, is the Writing Program Administrator at York College of Pennsylvania. In that position, he has directed the first-year writing program (a two-course sequence) for twelve years; he also planned, implemented, and now directs, a thriving major in Professional Writing that is in its seventh year. A WPA member since 1997, and an WPA Executive Board member from 2005-2008, DelliCarpini has served the organization through initiatives such as the Network for Media Action (co-director), the National Conversation on Writing (co-director), WPA at MLA Committee (Chair for 2 years), WPA summer conference planning committee (member), and other subcommittees. His research focuses upon the intersection of writing, civic engagement, and Deweyan theories of experience-based education. In addition to two composition textbooks based in civic rhetoric, he has published recent articles on WPA work at small colleges, on the effect of writing majors upon college English Departments, and on library/writing program collaborations in preparing informed citizens. He has forthcoming book chapters on the often-neglected “middle sisters” of the rhetorical canons—style and memory—and on the role of academic research in developing a deliberative citizenry. He presents regularly at WPA and CCCC, as well as at NCTE, the National Writing Project, and MLA. DelliCarpini has had further administrative at York College, serving in positions such as Academic Senate President and Chair of the College’s General Education Review Committee.

VISION STATEMENT:The journey into my current WPA position informs the vision I would hope to bring to my service as Vice President of the organization. I was originally hired to direct a first-year writing program at a college where writing instruction was seen purely as “service” and something that was almost wholly relegated to adjunct faculty. But my attendance at a WPA workshop the summer before I began my current position opened my eyes to the larger vision of the work of writing programs advocated by this organization. Because of WPA, I came to this job with an idealistic perspective on what writing programs can be and how they can change an institution; I also brought with me first-hand understanding of the time, effort, and negotiations that are required to approach those ideals, taught to me by my WPA colleagues. Over the years, with the nurturing help of WPA, we now have a first-year writing program that has its own physical classroom spaces designed specifically for the teaching of writing; we have a thriving peer writing fellows program; we have a very successful Professional Writing Major of about 90 students, the largest program in our English and Humanities Department; and we have a professional writing studio outfitted with hardware and software that helps to prepare our students to thrive as 21st century writers. This growth also prompted the college to hire more full-time faculty in writing; the program now has six full-time faculty in the program, four of which are tenure-line, in an undergraduate institution of only 4,500 students. Most recently, we have hired two tenure-line faculty to expand our teaching of digital media.

None of this would have been possible at our small college without the community I found in WPA; this community has given me consistent and well-reasoned advice on what can and cannot be accomplished. Put most cogently, it has given me are arguments—arguments that have the ethos of a national organization but which can be used locally to promote best practices as more than just one person’s opinion. To me, that is what this organization does best. It supplies program administrators with the opportunity to share scholarship and in-the-trenches experience, to discuss theory and weigh it against practice, to balance our scholarly attachment to the life of the mind with the often-trying, and quite corporeal, experience that is administration.

As Vice-President, then, I would feel a deep obligation to keep this vision of the WPA as a pragmatic, helpful, and grounded organization alive. My consistent measure of the value of new and existing initiatives would be how well they will serve the needs that current and potential members of the organization face at their home institutions. I would also hope to continue current efforts to diversify and internationalize this organization in several ways—not only by outreach to individuals and institutions that serve underrepresented groups (which is crucial), but also by reminding ourselves that Doug Hesse’s question, “Who owns writing?” also applies to writing program administration. That is, the organization should consistently ask “Who owns writing program administration?”—if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that we do not. As I see it, what we do is support writing program administration at as diverse a body of institutions as we can. And my own history as a program administrator reminds me that here are many individuals who function as WPAs at their institution without the title or the support that some of us now enjoy. I believe that our council should continue to make its invaluable pool of scholarship and experience available to those individuals; we should remember that the more diverse the institutional types that are represented in this organization, the closer we will come to truly understanding the variety of ways that writing is taught and the ways programs are administered.

In short, I believe that the primary goal of this organization is to work, both directly and indirectly, to bring about the conditions under which writing instruction can flourish. Directly, the organization has an obligation to continue recent efforts to act as advocates for our important work, lobbying government bodies for the resources to do our important work and speaking directly to the public through media outlets about why resources spent on writing instruction are spent well—why, as our WPA Network for Media Action campaign proclaimed, “Writing Makes Democracy Happen.” Indirectly, WPA must also recall that we are a community of scholars, whose national organization should prompt, stimulate, and support the development of new knowledge about the work of writing instruction—and to be sure that that knowledge is circulated to those who can use that knowledge on the local level. Those goals would act as my barometer should I be given the opportunity to serve this organization as Vice-President.

DUANE ROEN is Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he serves as Head of Humanities and Arts in the School of Applied Arts and Sciences. At Arizona State University he served as Director of Composition for four years before directing ASU's Center for Learning and Teaching Excellence. Prior to that, he directed the Writing Program at Syracuse University, as well as the graduate program in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. Early in his career, he taught high school English in New Richmond, Wisconsin, before deciding to complete a doctorate at the University of Minnesota.

Duane’s professional commitments have included the following: WPA Executive Board; Co-editor, Writing Program Adminstration; WPA Conference Program Committee; WPA Conference Siting Committee; WPA Graduate Writing Awards Committee; CCCC Secretary; CCCC Committee on Issues in Higher Education; CCCC Executive Committee; NCTE Task Force to Support and Advance Members of Color; Chair, CCCC Ad Hoc Committee to Design Writing Program Awards; CCCC Ad Hoc Committee on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing Digitally; CCCC Local Arrangements Chair, 1997; NCTE Nominating Committee; Chair, NCTE College Section Nominating Committee; NCTE Ohmann Award Committee; Treasurer, Arizona English Teachers Association (AETA); conference co-chair, AETA.

In addition to more than 160 articles, chapters, and conference papers, Duane has published the following books: Composing Our Lives in Rhetoric and Composition: Stories About the Growth of a Discipline (with Theresa Enos and Stuart Brown); The Writer’s Toolbox (with Stuart Brown and Bob Mittan); A Sense of Audience in Written Discourse (with Gesa Kirsch); Becoming Expert: Writing and Learning Across the Disciplines (with Stuart Brown and Bob Mittan); Richness in Writing: Empowering ESL Students (with the late Donna Johnson); Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition (with Lauren Yena, Susan K. Miller, Veronica Pantoja, and Eric Waggoner); Views from the Center: The CCCC Chairs’ Addresses, 1977-2005; and Writing for College, Writing for Life (with Greg Glau and Barry Maid), a guide to first-year composition.

For those with inquiring minds, Duane’s CV can be found at www.public.asu.edu/~dhroen.

Statement: When I served as a member of WPA’s Executive Board, I gained a stronger sense of the organization’s diverse efforts to enhance the effectiveness and status of the work that WPAs do on a daily basis. While WPA has done much to professionalize the field, I'd like to explore ways for the organization to invite even more colleagues to benefit from the organization’s many programs. For example, WPA has helped to establish so state and regional affiliates, but the organization might consider ways to encourage even more affiliates to achieve the greatest possible participation among faculty and graduate students who have not been active nationally. Involving graduate students offers the mutual benefits of bringing fresh perspectives to the organization and of establishing some life-long professional commitments.

Although WPA has collaborated effectively with CCCC and NCTE, I’d also like to see us consider possible collaborations with other professional organizations with similar struggles and goals (for example, mathematics and languages). In working with those units at my university, I've come to appreciate how much we have in common and how much we could benefit from collaborating on a larger scale to achieve our mutual goals.

Similarly, I'd like to see us build on the highly succcessful WPA Network for Media Action to tell our stories to colleagues in other disciplines, to the general public, and to legislators. We have compelling narratives, and we're pretty good at telling them. Adapting our stories to these other audiences can yield wonderful dividends.

Members of this organization have moved to other administrative positions in higher education—department chairs, associate deans, deans, vice provosts, provosts, presidents. As an organization, we might find systematic ways to support colleagues so that they feel even better prepared to make such transitions. One possibility, of course, would be to develop a summer experience analogous to the the existing summer workshop for new WPAs or the one-day institutes. With the critical mass of experienced college-level and university-level administrators in the organization, we could certainly draw on that pool of talent to offer a workshop or institute just as invigorating, insightful, and practical as the current ones.

It’s fun to imagine the possibilities.

Executive Board Members

Vote for one candidate in each pairing below.

Board member #1: Vote for Doug Downs or Jeffrey Klausman

DOUG DOWNS is assistant professor of Rhetoric & Composition and serves on the Composition Committee in the Department of English at Montana State University, and was previously chair of the Writing Program at Utah Valley State College. He has been a member of WPA since 2001 and has participated in a number of projects in the organization, including managing the annual workshop in 2002, serving on the WPA Network for Media Action steering committee since 2004, helping establish and chairing the Assistant Professor Administrator SIG, and serving on the Task Force on Students’ Research and Human Subjects Issues 2006-2007. Doug’s research interests center on cultural and personal conceptions of writing—how they influence writers’ processes and shape writing instruction, and the ways writing curricula might shape them in turn. This core interest leads to scholarship of many shapes: numerous conference presentations on FYC curricula, instructor preparation, disciplinary writing instruction, and undergraduate research; publications including the 2007 CCC article with Elizabeth Wardle, “Teaching About Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning FYC as Intro to Writing Studies” as well as book chapters on mentoring and on bringing students of religious faith into university discourses of inquiry; facilitation of numerous instructor-development workshops at WPA, CCCC, and elsewhere; and textbooks including the tutorial CD-ROM i-Cite: Visualizing Sources and the forthcoming Writing Inquiry. His current focus on the influence of undergraduate research experiences on students’ conceptions of writing has him working toward a book as well as co-editing Young Scholars in Writing’s Feature on First-year Research.

Position Statement: Since Raul Sanchez introduced me to WPA-L and WPA-L introduced me to WPA in 2000, this organization has been my professional home. WPA embodies an amazing and unique blend of support, development, advocacy, mentoring, resources, scholarship, and identity for writing program administrators and composition instructors. I am excited to serve on the Executive Board for the same reason I have so valued WPA itself: the chance to work with excellent people on a shared passion, that of making present the research and teaching of writing, not only to university stakeholders but, increasingly, among other publics. The initiatives of the past several years have done groundbreaking ambassadorial work: the Network for Media Action and the National Conversation on Writing, NSSE collaboration, and Digital WPA have all helped advocate for high quality writing instruction based on high quality writing research. We should continue such movement: in the digital realm, for example, by further coordinating Digital WPA with other top web resources in the field (e.g., CompPile, Kairos, the WAC Clearinghouse); in institutional realms, by increasing the attention WPA pays to vertical programs (e.g., CAC or WID); in public realms, by increasing advocacy with policy makers and other education systems. Also importantly, in light of increased interest among rhet/comp grad students in wpa-ing and the continuing strength in this job market, it is time to reassess current possibilities for administrating without tenure to ensure that CWPA is positioned to mentor, support, and advocate for this growing group of WPAs.

JEFFREY KLAUSMAN is Senior Faculty in English at Whatcom Community College, in Bellingham, Washington, where he has been serving since 2006 as his department’s first WPA and since 1998 as his college’s second WAC coordinator. He has served as both President and Chief Negotiator for his AFT local, lobbying and negotiating on behalf of all faculty with special emphasis on equity pay and just treatment for adjunct faculty. His research focuses on WPA work in two-year colleges, specifically on working with and for large contingents of non-tenure track faculty; and on collaborative program development, including assessment, faculty development, and curriculum design. He chaired a pre-conference workshop on WPAs in two-year and small colleges at CCCC ‘08 as well as presented research results on adjunct faculty attitudes toward WPAs in two-year colleges; he will present follow-up research at CCCC ’09. He is a member of IWCA and is working with his colleague and wife, Sherri Winans, an IWCA Board member, on the intersection of writing-center theory and composition pedagogy. He has published articles on WPA work, writing assessment, hybrid and online course environments, and writing-center theory and pedagogy, including “Mapping the Terrain: The Two-Year College Writing Program Administrator” (TETYC March 2008). He is currently working with Joe Janangelo and Jeff Andelora on an ad-hoc committee to enhance the CWPA role in two-year colleges. On his campus, he is building a program collaboratively with adjunct and tenured or tenure-track faculty, heading up faculty teams on curriculum design, assessment, and faculty development.

Statement: Having worked at a community college for over a dozen years, I have become acutely aware of the need for program development at two-year and small four-year colleges. I have seen colleagues burn out from excessive workloads and the pedagogy of many lose touch with current research and practice. The two issues are not unrelated. What can CWPA do? It can act on what we know about program administration at two-year colleges (following research by Helen Howell Raines of nearly twenty years ago, Tim N. Taylor in 2007, and my own recent research) to forge an alliance with TYCA to promote the creation of a program administrator position or equivalent at every two-year college. It can work to promote reducing workload while increasing faculty development opportunities and professionalism, especially for adjunct faculty, who teach the majority of writing classes. And it can do so through its journal, its conference, and its standing in the field. As we know, half of all undergraduates in the United States—and traditionally the most marginalized—take writing courses at two-year colleges; they deserve the best educational opportunities we can provide. I have seen first-hand what a WPA position can do at a two-year college and believe more students should benefit. Since I have for many years considered my intellectual home the WPA community (via the WPA listserve and at conferences), I would be honored to have the opportunity to work with board members of the CWPA.

Board member #2: Vote for Dennis Lynch or Chuck Paine

DENNIS LYNCH is director of composition at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and has been a member of the WPA for 10 years. Prior to moving to Milwaukee, he was at Michigan Technological University where he served as director of the writing program for 9 years and graduate director for 3 years. While at MTU, he also was co-editor of the WPA journal from 1998 to 2004 and co-organizer of the 1997 WPA conference at MTU. He has co-authored two textbooks with Anne F. Wysocki, compose/design/advocate: a rhetoric for integrating written, visual, and oral communication, and The DK Handbook. He co-authored a Braddock Award winning article with Marilyn Cooper and Diana George, and has published articles in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and WPA: Journal of the Council of Writing Program Admistrators. His areas of study are argumentation theory, rhetorical ethics, the history of relations between composition and communication studies, and the rhetorical study of emotion. Dennis teaches courses in composition studies, modern rhetorical theory, and civic rhetorics.

Statement: The WPA has been and is a strong presence in my professional life: it offers us the opportunity to engage with others who deeply care about the conditions that make possible the teaching of writing. Having recently moved from one college and writing program to another, I especially appreciate the ways the WPA encourages its members to attend to the institutional and philosophical differences among writing programs across the country and around the world. The shape and location of writing instruction—the very notion of composition—has been changing, and it reflects well on the WPA that it so thoughtfully embraces and considers these changes. If elected, I would continue to support the WPA’s ongoing efforts to make sure everyone involved with the teaching of writing feels a part of the organization: lecturers graduate students, and professors; two-year and four-year colleges; writing centers and WAC programs; creative writing and professional and technical communication programs; general education programs; and ESL and international writing programs. The issues that occupy us are scholarly, practical, and political—and I will work to keep all three of these emphases equally balanced.

CHUCK PAINE is a teacher and administrator at the University of New Mexico, where since 1998 he has served as director/co-director of rhetoric and writing, associate dean of the University College, and, currently, assessment coordinator for Arts & Sciences. His earlier work focused on the history of rhetoric and composition history, but he currently focuses most of his efforts on assessment, program administration, and teaching writing. He has published in College English, Rhetoric Review, and Technical Communication Quarterly and has published a book, The Resistant Writer. Currently he is co-editing a collection with the provisional title “Teaching with Student Texts” and co-authoring a rhetoric textbook. Working with WPA and many WPA members, he heads the WPA collaboration with the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and coordinates the NSSE-based Consortium for the Study of Writing in College.

Statement: I think I would be a good board member. I’m like most of the people I meet through WPA. I’d rather work with others than work alone, and I like projects that return tangible benefits and help solve problems faced by students, teachers, and administrators. At my school I have a reputation for being, as one of my colleagues put it, a “harmonizer,” someone who fosters connections across groups and who helps groups work together effectively and enjoyably. Like most of the WPAs I know, I work hard at being a good colleague. These inclinations are shown, I think, in the way I’ve headed up the WPA/NSSE collaboration. Working with WPA members and the researchers at NSSE, we’re getting some interesting things done. Early analyses of the responses from over 23,000 students affirm that many of our best practices for teaching writing do in fact lead to enhanced engagement and learning. Soon, we hope to have some answers about what precisely drives these results and which practices are most significant. But the work has just begun. In the months and years ahead, more WPAs and other researchers can and should get involved. The collaboration succeeds in part because WPA and NSSE benefit mutually. NSSE benefits when we in WPA combine our expertise and resources with theirs to enhance their surveys and produce and analyze data through the consortium. NSSE’s reputation and mission are advanced when we WPAs use their instruments to help answer our local research questions. We benefit from this powerful assessment tool that helps us prove and improve at the national, institutional, and program levels. We benefit because NSSE (especially its Senior Scholar and Director George Kuh) has a “big microphone” that gets bigger every year. NSSE’s findings are heard and heeded by administrators, faculty, legislators, and the general public.

I would work to broaden and systematize WPA’s and WPA members’ connections to NSSE and other organizations with which we can combine expertise and resources. We want to share microphones, but we also want to work with other groups so that everyone (us included) gains a better understanding for what works and what doesn’t when it comes to writing.

Board member #3: Vote for Darsie Bowden or Jeanne Rose

DARSIE BOWDEN began her WPA work in the late1980s as a graduate student at the University of Southern California’s First-Year Writing Program where she served as a program coordinator. In 1992, one year after taking her first job at DePaul University, she became director of DePaul’s Writing Center, then subsequently worked as co-director of DePaul’s first WAC program (with David Jolliffe) and Director of the MA in Writing at DePaul. She is currently director of First-Year Writing, a post she has held intermittently since 1994. She also served as Director of Composition at Western Washington University (2000-1). She is a member of the steering committee for the WPA’s Network for Media Action, served on the local arrangements committee for CCCC in Chicago in 2006 and also on the WPA breakfast committee that same year. She collaborated on two video projects, Writing as Writing Program Administrators (with Peter Vandenberg, 2006) about the WPA conference in Anchorage and Who is a Writer? What Writers Tell Us (2007), produced with Peter Vandenberg, Linda Adler-Kassner and Dominic Delli Carpini, as part of the WPA’s National Conversation on Writing initiative (NCoW). She received an MFA in cinema, worked for eight years as a screenwriter, then obtained a PhD from the University of Southern California in Rhetoric, Linguistics and Literature. She currently specializes in the teaching of composition, composition theory and literacy with articles published in WPA, CCC, Rhetoric Review, and WCJ. She has completed two books, The Mythology of Voice (1999, Heinemann), a critique of the voice metaphor, and Writing for Film (2006, Erlbaum), a screenwriting textbook.

Statement: Like most writing teachers and WPAs, I have struggled to do my job in the face of institutionalized lack of funding, status, and power. As most of us are all too aware, many of the challenges we face stem from a general and often profound lack of knowledge about writing, writers, and the teaching of writing among people outside our field. Public ignorance, compounded by myth and misinformation, contribute, I believe, to the enactment of such dubious projects as NCLB and the popularity of commercial models of assessment that assess very little. The WPA, working in conjunction with CCCC and NCTE, has done much to call into question the development of these programs and practices. My work with the Network for Media Action has provided ways for me to contribute to this project. I believe that WPA needs to continue our fast growing and energetic media campaign—compellingly making the case for the connection between writing, power, and democracy through the diverse media at our disposal. Over the past few years, I have found a professional home in the WPA and have benefited enormously from support, advice, and professional development that mark this organization. I would be honored to be given the chance to give back.

JEANNE MARIE ROSE has been an active member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators since 2002, when she became Composition Coordinator at Penn State Berks, a campus college within the Penn State University System. Currently Associate Professor of English, Rose teaches courses in a range of areas, including rhetorical theory, peer tutoring, business and professional writing, first-year composition, and American Literature. Her research focuses on the institutional and pedagogical intersections between composition and literature, and her most recent work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Composition Forum, and the edited collections Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction: First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars (MLA, 2007) and Collaborating(,) Literature (,) and Composition: An Anthology for Teachers and Writers of English (Hampton, 2007). Her scholarly work has also addressed business and professional writing and theories of administration, and her article “Coming of Age as a WPA: From Personal to Personnel” appeared in WPA Journal in 2005. Rose sees service to the profession as an integral part of her professional identity. From 2006-2007, she served as Co-Chair of the Philadelphia Writing Program Administrators, a regional affiliate of WPA. She currently serves as one of two Book Reviews Editors for WPA Journal and has recently joined the Network for Media Action.

Statement: Election to the WPA Executive Board would be an extension of my longstanding interest in the intellectual work of writing program administration. Energized by my own early-career involvement in WPA, I am committed to working to sustain WPA’s commitment to mentoring its members through both formal channels, like the Summer Workshop and Assistant Professor Administrators Special Interest Group, both of which I’ve participated in and benefited from, and the informal networking that routinely takes place through our conferences, listservs, and friendships. If elected, I hope to foster WPA’s emphasis on professional development for its members, all of whom face increasing challenges in light of recent trends in educational policy. I see WPA as a locus of outreach and activism, work already underway thanks to the efforts of the Network for Media Action (NMA) and the National Conversation on Writing (NCoW). I am interested in creating opportunities to bring even greater awareness of national concerns to WPAs’ work at their local institutions, specifically as legislative calls for accountability position WPAs in new and demanding situations. To that end, I am committed to sustaining WPA’s efforts to recruit new members and provide resources that enable them to succeed at their home institutions. Finally, as a WPA at an institution that is at once a small college and a part of a large research university, I will bring a unique perspective that enables me to maintain WPA’s commitment to working on behalf of WPAs at diverse colleges and universities.

Election for Executive Board 2007: Candidates' Information and Statements

Council of Writing Program Administrators 2007 Election of Vice-President and Executive Board Members Slate and Candidates’ Statements

WPA is holding elections for three Executive Board members and for a Vice-President. We will be saying thank you and goodbye to Executive Board members Rebecca Moore Howard, Martha Patton, and Susan Miller-Cochran, whose terms end in June 2007. The Executive Board oversees WPA’s events and activities, creates policies and procedures for its management, and engages in special projects and initiatives. The new Board members will serve for three years, with terms beginning in July of 2007. Nominees for Vice-President make a six-year commitment to WPA, first serving as vice-president for two years, as president for the next two years, and as immediate past president for a final two years.

On February 13, 2007, current members of the Council of Writing Program Administrators will receive a separate email with information on how to cast their votes electronically. Please cast your vote by Monday, February 26, 2007.

For instructions on checking your membership status: http://wpacouncil.org/membership

Candidates' statements follow...

Nominees for Vice-President

LINDA ADLER-KASSNER is Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at Eastern Michigan University, a position she has held for seven years; she has also been a writing center director and director of graduate instructors. At EMU, she directs a large and robust writing program that was honored with a CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence in 2005. Her previous positions as a writing center director, a full-time lecturer and a graduate instructor have allowed her to experience the profession from a number of different vantage points.

Linda’s research, like her teaching and work with the EMU First Year Writing Program, begins with questions about teaching and advocacy: How is literacy defined in particular contexts? Whose interests are represented, whose not, from these definitions? In the last five years, her work has focused on considering these questions in the public sphere, especially in media coverage of and policy reports about writers and writing, and developing strategies for WPAs and writing instructors to advocate for their views with audiences outside the writing program. She is currently completing a book on the subject, Activist Writing Program Administration: Changing Stories. She has authored and co-authored articles and book chapters about various aspects of writing program administration published in WPA Journal, The Outcomes Book, and elsewhere. She also has published extensively in the area of basic writing, often with co-author Susanmarie Harrington. Together, they authored Basic Writing as a Political Act: Public Conversations about Writing and Literacy (Hampton, 2002) and numerous articles, including the forthcoming “The Public Work of Basic Writing” in Journal of Basic Writing’s 25th anniversary issue. Additionally, she has published articles in CCC, College English, English Education, and other journals, and she is on the editorial board of WPA Journal and Journal of Basic Writing.

As an executive board member on the Council of Writing Program Administrators, Linda was a co-author of the WPA Statement “Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices” and chair of the WPA Media Committee. With that group, she collaborated with others to conceive and develop the WPA Network for Media Action, which she continues to help coordinate. WPA-NMA (wpacouncil.org/nma) provides talking/writing points and writing tips for writing instructors and WPAs who want to communicate with mainstream media on issues relevant to writing instructors, such as plagiarism, ‘grammar,’ and machine scoring of writing.

Statement: What does it mean to teach writing? Who gets to respond to the question? What stories do WPAs want to tell about what teaching writing means? What stories does the Council of Writing Program Administrators want to tell? What stories—about teaching writing, about learning writing, about students and teachers--do others tell?

Stories about writing programs – what they are, what is taught in their names, and who does that teaching – are powerful. They shape the ways our work is understood and represented by WPAs and by people outside of our programs, departments, and institutions. A Test of Leadership, the report from the Spellings Commission on Higher Education, is but one of a spate of recent narratives that have the potential to fundamentally change the work of college faculty, especially WPAs and writing instructors.

As a CWPA executive board member, I learned first-hand the power of the expert knowledge that CWPA brings to discussions about writing instruction. As a coordinator of the WPA Network for Media Action, I’ve also seen the passion and desire that WPAs and writing instructors bring to these discussions. When we get involved in these discussions we can make a difference – inside and outside of our programs.

At the same time, I understand that that when WPAs become involved in work that lies outside of the traditional boundaries of faculty reward structures, there can be (sometimes unanticipated) consequences. One possible contribution that CWPA can make to this dilemma is to help frame the public work of program administration, including work that involves communicating about the profession to those outside of it, as part of our intellectual endeavor.

As CWPA Vice-President, I would continue to work with the entire organization to make sure that our stories – those of WPA as an organization, those of WPAs and writing instructors at institutions of all types – are represented. This work involves building on CWPA’s already-strong foundation to: *encourage research that investigates best practices in writing program administration and instruction, and publicize the results of that research widely; *help people outside of our profession understand how and why our work is (or can be) effective by speaking about our research and our commitments; *continue efforts to expand WPA’s membership base and ensure that CWPA speaks with and includes a broad constituency of 2- and 4-year instructors and administrators.

At the same time, I would work to ensure that the CWPA plays four important roles in gathering and promoting WPA’s and writing instructors’ stories about writing and writers: *organizing writing instructors at all levels by learning about their stories, their interests, and their concerns; *developing leaders to help promote those stories and address concerns; *identifying local/national issues where CWPA members’ expertise can shape and frame the conversation; and *planning action to influence the discussion of writing and writers at the college level.

CWPA is an organization that brings together some of the most passionate and committed instructors in our field. As an organization it is nimble, flexible, and proactive. As Vice President and, later, as President, I would work to continue putting our passions and our abilities to important uses.

MARTY TOWNSEND was hired as Director of the University of Missouri’s Campus Writing Program (fresh out of Arizona State University with a new PhD) in 1991, a position she held until just last summer. She is a Fellow of the Bryn Mawr Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration and a former literacy consultant for The Ford Foundation. Having earned tenure and promotion while serving as WPA—and, in part, for her work as WPA—she is now “just” an associate professor directing graduate studies in MU’s English Department. Her professional interests focus on WAC/WID program development and assessment in the U.S. and abroad. As Campus Writing Program (CWP) director, Marty taught first-year composition, the department’s capstone course, graduate seminars in composition and WAC/WID, and faculty seminars for writing-intensive instructors. Townsend presents regularly at CCCC, WPA, and WAC conferences and has consulted on writing for over seventy colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad, including China, Romania, Thailand, South Korea, and Costa Rica.

Along with CWP colleagues Marty Patton and Jo Ann Vogt, Townsend hosted the 2004 National WAC Conference in St. Louis, the first with an international focus. Because of the positive reception, the conference was subsequently renamed the International WAC Conference. Also in 2004, CWP was recognized with one of CCCC’s first Writing Program Certificates of Excellence. Marty previously served on the WPA Executive Board and currently serves on the WPA Editorial Board and the WAC Board of Consultants. She has twice been co-leader of WPA’s summer workshops. Marty is the subject of a recent WAC Journal interview, “A Different Kind of Pioneer,” in which author Carol Rutz notes that CWP “is among the largest and sturdiest examples of WAC.” CWP’s example is reflected in MU’s citation for Writing in the Disciplines in U.S. News & World Report’s America’s Best Colleges every year that WID has been featured. Townsend’s most recent publication, co-authored with MU sociologist Edward Brent, is "Automated Essay Grading in the Sociology Classroom" in Ericsson and Haswell’s Machine Scoring of Student Essays (Utah State UP, 2006). Her chapter “Negotiating the Risks and Reaping the Rewards" is forthcoming in Dew and Frank’s Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators (Parlor Press, 2007).

Statement: For over two decades, I've been learning from WPA’s collective membership, first as a graduate student, then as a writing program administrator myself, via the organization's pre-conference workshops at CCCC, summer conferences and workshops, Consultant/Evaluator Service, journal, newsletters, website, and other events. Serving as an executive officer would be a privilege—and an opportunity to repay a portion of the organization’s fundamental contributions to my career.

National trends in higher education suggest that the stakes for our field are higher than ever. Virtually all aspects of college writing—programs, curricula, funding, assessment, technologies, hiring practices—are impacted by an array of forces both within and outside our control. It is incumbent on WPA to keep our membership apprised of new developments and to offer support to the best of our organizational ability. I’d like to work with WPA’s leadership on a range of issues including: • continuing WPA’s long history of providing professional education for our field, • promoting more research in the field and showcasing exemplary models, • exploring how WPA might increase knowledge of key issues for our members but also for the deans, provosts, and presidents to whom we report: could we be more proactive on behalf of pre-tenured faculty in WPA jobs? is it time to go beyond our well-crafted Intellectual Work document to make a broader case about the benefits academe derives from our members’ work? can we foster a better understanding of assessment’s complexities? • supporting WPA’s ongoing exploration of international connections, to find new venues for conversation, research, and collaboration; the international work I’ve been doing in WAC/WID since 1995 has taught me a great deal, and I’d like to encourage other WPAs along these lines.

I don’t claim to have answers for the myriad issues that writing program administrators face, but I do know that I’m energized daily by the camaraderie and good will of the people in our field and by the desire we have to do our jobs well. I’d welcome applying that energy to this leadership role in our organization.

*Nominees for Executive Board Members

*Board Member #1: Vote for One of These Two Candidates ELI GOLDBLATT is Associate Professor of English and Director of First Year Writing at Temple University. He is both a compositionist and a poet. His forthcoming book is Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy beyond the College Curriculum (Hampton P). His book ‘Round My Way: Authority and Double-Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (U of Pittsburgh P, 1995) draws on his six years of high school teaching in urban Philadelphia. His article on Saul Alinsky and community/university literacy partnerships won the 2005 Ohmann award, and other essays have appeared in College English, CCC, Linguistics and Education, Writing on the Edge, and the Journal of Peace & Justice Studies. His poems have appeared in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Ixnay, Another Chicago Magazine, Hambone, Louisiana Literature, Hubbub and 6ix, and his book-length collections include Sessions 1-62 (Chax P, 1991), Speech Acts (Chax P, 1999), and Without a Trace (Singing Horse P, 2001). He has also published two children’s books and a verse play.

Statement: “Universities are changing rapidly as employers, knowledge producers and preservers, and licensing agents. As WPA’s, we are deeply involved with (or implicated in) these changes. I want to strengthen our resolve to fight for justice in employment for adjunct and graduate composition instructors. I also believe we must articulate a new vision of WAC that will guide writing programs as they go beyond the curriculum: K-16 connections, community-based learning, writing for the workplace, and action research off the campus. I hope to help in an effort to expand the active membership of WPA and encourage the growth of regional affiliates.”

ALICE HORNING is Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics and Director of the Rhetoric Program at Oakland University. She provides leadership to a program that offers courses in first-year writing, upper-level courses that satisfy writing intensive requirements in General Education. The Rhetoric Program faculty have submitted a proposal for a major and minor in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, currently undergoing review. Her educational background and scholarly work focus on the cross-disciplinary nature of human literacy; her publications seek to explore the psychological and linguistic bases on which literacy rests. In addition, she has made use of research in applied linguistics to understand basic writers, revision processes and the teaching and learning of literacy. Her books have been published by Hampton Press, Parlor Press, Ablex and Southern Illinois University Press, and her articles have appeared in College English, JAC, The Reading Matrix and other journals, with work forthcoming in WPA. Her concern for untenured faculty serving as WPAs appears in a volume co-edited with Debra Dew called Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics (Parlor Press 2007).

Statement: I owe a tremendous debt to the WPA organization that I hope I can repay in small part by serving on the Executive Board. Nearly all of the positive changes I have been able to make in the Rhetoric Program at OU have come about, in one way or another, as a result of my membership in WPA, my participation in its workshops and conferences, and my reading of the listserv. I have been the founder and co-leader of the Michigan affiliate of WPA (with Roger Gilles), developed a Festival of Writing modeled on a great idea stolen from Linda Adler-Kassner, lowered class size in my program, and created a small pool of money for program enhancement and project support from a custom version of our program-wide handbook; all of these ideas have come through my interaction with WPA. I hope to bring my cross-disciplinary background and understanding of the psycholinguistics of reading and writing to bear on the work of the organization and to support all WPA enterprises that help students develop critical literacy urgently needed for their higher education and participation in democratic society.

Board Member #2: *Vote for One of These Two Candidates

JEFF ANDELORA has taught writing and literature for twenty-one years, the past eleven at Mesa Community College, located just outside of Phoenix. Prior to that he taught high school English for ten years. Jeff completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Arizona State University in 2005. His dissertation examined the impact of the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) on the professionalization of two-year college English faculty. He has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and has presented at CCCC, WPA, and TYCA West. Additionally, Jeff is a consulting reader for TETYC, has served on the 2006 James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation Award Committee, and serves on the CCCC Basic Data Task Force.

Statement: The Council of Writing Program Administrators has done remarkable work with four-year college and university writing programs; however, for a variety of reasons, the CWPA has had little success working with two-year colleges. The primary reason for this, I believe, is that two-year college English departments rarely have a WPA, so they don’t readily see the relevance of the CWPA. Instead of a WPA, the duties of overseeing first-year composition in two-year colleges typically fall to an already overburdened department chair, leaving little time to coordinate the challenges of student placement, course outcomes, textbook selection, and program evaluation. In many two-year colleges, these tasks go on as they have for decades, without a coherent vision driving them. Given that half of America’s college students take their composition courses at the more than 1200 two-year colleges, a stronger relationship between two-year colleges and the CWPA would benefit students, the colleges, and the organization.

If elected, I would help the CWPA work more deliberately with two-year colleges. The first step would be to forge an alliance with TYCA to examine the current state of writing programs in two-year colleges. Once we have a better understanding of how composition is administered at two-year colleges, we can develop strategies to help with some of the challenges they’re facing. Some possibilities: I’d like to see members of the CWPA speak at TYCA’s regional conferences about the work the CWPA is doing. I’d like us to devote a special issue of WPA to two-year college writing programs, and, as interest and membership grow, I’d like us to regularly solicit articles from two-year college faculty. I’d also encourage members of the CWPA and graduate students to view two-year college writing programs as important sites for research. In short, I’d like two-year college English departments to see the CWPA as an organization that is interested in and relevant to the work they’re doing in two-year colleges, and I’d like to help in that effort.

MILES McCRIMMON is Professor of English at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, Virginia, where he has been teaching composition and literature for more than fifteen years. He served as English Department Chair from 1998-2001 and he is beginning a new three-year term in 2007. He currently holds the Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship, a state-wide award for excellence in teaching and scholarship. He has published articles in Teaching English in the Two Year College (March 2005) and College English (November 2006) and has contributed pieces to a forthcoming NCTE collection, Creating the Teachable Moment (2007). He wrote the Instructor’s Manuals for the first two editions of The World is a Text (2003 and 2006) and he is at work on a writing guide designed for first-year experience programs. He was Program Chair for the 38th TYCA-Southeast Annual Conference, served on the Regional Executive Committee of TYCA-SE from 2000-2002, and served as a Site Leader for a FIPSE Dissemination Grant from 2001-2004. His college service work has included co-directing the most recent self-study, coordinating dual enrollment offerings, writing and editing major federal grant proposals, serving as co-chair of his college’s first-ever Major Gifts Campaign.

Statement: “More than half of America’s college students and more than half of all WPAs are at two-year institutions. As a former and returning WPA, I can represent this vast constituency and bring a valuable perspective to the board about the unique and dynamic relationships two-year colleges hold with senior institutions, the workforce, and K-12 education. Community colleges are contact zones (between disciplines, literacies, ethnicities, and levels of acculturation) where rich moments of generous and fruitful collaboration take place daily. Virtually every significant insight in my career has arisen when I stepped outside my comfort zone. My mission with WPA is to help to make these sorts of ‘border crossings’ a productive part of everyone’s professional experience.”

Board Member #3: Vote for One of These Two Candidates

BARBARA L'EPLATTENIER is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in historical studies, technical writing, theories of technical communication, grant writing, gender studies, and queer theory. She has been published in The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher: Inquiry in Action and Reflection, (editors Shirley K Rose and Bud Weiser); Calling Cards (editors Jackie Jones Royster and Ann Marie Simpkins); and the forthcoming Labor of Love, (editors Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohen). Her co-edited collection, Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline, published by Parlor Press, won the 2004-2005 Award for Best Book on Writing Program Administration.

Statement: I look to WPA as a model of administrative structure and professional organization development; WPA's strength is its ability to create standards and outcomes for a field as diverse and complex as college writing. I'm deeply interested in seeing WPA continue to develop its presence on a national level. WPA needs to continue pushing forward to gain the respect of university officials, elected officials, and others who criticize or have an impact on writing programs and writing projects. I would like to see WPA develop stronger public relations strategies, make more explicit connections with non-profit and advocacy groups vested in writing, promote and disseminate WPA research, and have a more prominent voice in national discussions about writing.

BARBARA GAAL LUTZ is assistant director of the University Writing Center at the University of Delaware and, with her colleagues, hosted the well-attended 2004 WPA Conference. Her administrative work at Delaware includes coordinating a writing program for developmental students which was run through the Writing Center; in addition, she teaches freshman composition courses, ESL composition classes, and honors composition courses through both the English department and Honors College. Currently she is in her second year of teaching a grant-funded advanced composition course she designed that links education majors with middle school students in an online tutoring environment. Lutz presents regularly at regional and national conferences, including IWCA, CCCC, and WPA. Her most recent published essay “English as a Second Language: How Can We Help?” was reprinted in Teaching Language and Literacy: Preschool through the Elementary Grades. Eds. James F. Christie, Billie Jean Enz, and Carol Vukelich. Boston: Pearson Education, 2007, 299-300.

Lutz brings twenty years of experience working with professional organizations: she served as co-president of Interstate Developmental Educators Association (IDEA) for five years, president of Mid Atlantic Writing Centers Association (MAWCA) for five years, and Executive Board member of Pennsylvania Writing Program Administrators (PWPA) for three years. In all, she organized or helped organize ten regional conferences, co-chaired two national conferences and served on several national committees for IWCA and WPA.

Statement:WPA continues to be a dynamic and critical voice in the field, one that assesses, addresses, and advocates best practices and policies within the educational community as well as the public sphere. Sustaining this high level of leadership requires commitment and strategic direction from its members and executive board to ensure that the organization remains unified in its goals. I believe that I can contribute to this mission in several areas: having learned English as a second language, and having designed and taught EFL composition courses for many years, I would advocate for the special needs of EFL students in both writing centers and composition classes; as a veteran writing center tutor and now an administrator, I would represent the needs and concerns of writing centers; and working in a continuing non-tenure track position, I would speak to the ongoing policy discussions concerning the use of adjunct and non-tenure track faculty in teaching and administration.

Overall, from twenty-five years of teaching experience and almost as many in board involvement, I have learned how people collaborate effectively in order to bring an organization’s goals to fruition. I hope that the WPA membership will give me the opportunity to serve on the executive board as the organization confronts upcoming challenges in reaching its goals.

Conferences, Workshops, and Institutes

Each summer, WPA hosts a 4-day intensive workshop for new and renewing writing program administrators and a 3-day conference. Workshops are generally limited to 25 participants. The conference generally has space for 30 panels or roundtables, each with 3 to 6 presenters. Workshop Announcements and conference Calls for Papers are generally issued in the late fall and early spring.

Upcoming Conferences and Workshops

2008 location and dates: Denver, CO--- Workshop: July 6-9; Assessment and Research Institutes: July 10

Conference: July 10-13

Past Conferences

2007 location and dates: Tempe, AZ--- Workshop: July 8-11; Assessment and Research Institutes: July 12

Conference: July 12-15

• 2006 Chattanooga, Tennessee (U of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
• 2005 University of Alaska Anchorage (website)
  
• 2004 University of Delaware
• 2003 Grand Rapids, Michigan (Calvin College and Grand Valley State)
• 2002 Salt Lake and Park City, Utah (U. of Utah and Brigham Young)
• 2001 Oxford, OH (Miami U) special fall conference
• 2000 Charlotte, North Carolina (UNC-Charlotte)
• 1999 West Lafayette, IN (Purdue University)
• 1998 Tucson (University of Arizona)
• 1997 Houghton, MI (Michigan Technological University)
• 1996 Oxford, OH (Miami University of Ohio)
• 1995 Bellingham, WA (Western Washington U)
• 1994 Oxford, MS (University of Mississippi)
• 1993 Oxford, Ohio (Miami University)
• 1992 Denver/Breckenridge
• 1991 Saratoga Srpings, NY
• 1990 Portland, OR (Portland State U)

2008 WPA Conference, Workshop, and Institutes

Sponsored by the Council of Writing Program Administrators & Hosted by The University of Denver at the Grand Hyatt, Denver, CO, July 6-13, 2008

PROGRAM, Detailed Workshop, Institute, and Conference Information, including Travel and Things to Do, remain available at: http://www.du.edu/writing/WPA2008.htm

Call for Conference Proposals NOTE: Call is now closed.

Conference Proposal Submission Form

Accommodations

About the Workshop

About the Institutes

Registration

Program

Complete information about the Conference, Workshop, and Institutes, including final prices, is available in PDF form at http://www.du.edu/writing/documents/WPA_informational_brochure.pdf

Registration. Registration is now available. Workshop (including 8 meals): $650. Institutes (includes lunch, break, materials): $140. Conference (includes 6 meals and social event): $295 before June 20, 2008; $315 after ($150 for graduate students). Combination pricing includes Workshop and Institute: $760, Workshop and Conference: $900, Workshop, Institute, and Conference: $1000. There are no refunds after June 28, 2008, alas, something that makes WPA feel hard-hearted; however, the no-refund cut-off date is due to unrefundable deposits that WPA must make to hotel by that time.

Detailed Denver Information and Local Website: http://www.du.edu/writing/WPA2008.htm

Join Colleagues in the Mile High City

Attend an intimate professional meeting with friends at the foothills of the Rockies, in one of America's most invigorating summer cities. The annual WPA Workshop (a three-day intensive experience, July 6-9, for new and renewing WPAs, led by Susan Miller-Cochran and Chris Anson), Institutes (one-day (July 10) learning experiences led by national experts), and Conference (a highly interactive chance to present your work and interact with other national leaders, July 10-13) will be the heart of our gathering, of course, but there's more.

Everything will take place in thriving downtown Denver, near the bustle of Larimer Square, Writer's Square, the 16th Street Mall, Coors Field, a massive REI store, the world-famous Tattered Cover Bookstore, countless outdoor cafes, brewpubs, and high-end restaurants, and the trendy Lodo district, its lofts, clubs, boutiques, and places to watch Platte River kayakers. Yes, you can see the mountains. It will inevitably be sunny (as it is 300 days a year) and in the upper 80's by day, 50's and 60's by night, with scant humidity.

We'll plan a festive Saturday evening outing, and we'll surely offer a surfeit of culture, sports, and entertainment.

The gathering presents a fine stage for side-trips and vacations. Rocky Mountain National Park, Boulder (with a summer chautaqua and the Colorado Shakespeare Fest), Red Rocks, Winter Park, Breckenridge, and so on are easy jaunts; Vail and Aspen, not far. Denver is a great place for partners and family, too. In or adjacent to downtown are Elitch Gardens amusement park, the Denver Art Museum, the Aquarium, the Mint, the Children's musem, the Denver Performing Arts Center (second in size only to Lincoln Center), and a gauntlet of stores to test even the most intrepid shoppers.

2008 WPA Conference Institutes

WPA Conference Institutes are one-day (July 10), interactive seminars that are designed and led by experts, for a group of no more than 20 WPAs. Complete information about the Conference, Workshop, and Institutes, including final prices, is available in PDF form at http://www.du.edu/writing/documents/WPA_informational_brochure.pdf

This year, we’re pleased to offer two Institutes:

1. Research in Writing Program Administration Leaders: Irwin Weiser, Purdue, and Meg Morgan, North Carolina at Charlotte.

2. English Language Learners and Writing Programs Leaders: Vivian Zamel, U Massachusetts, Boston, and Gail Shuck, Boise State

Complete information about the Conference, Workshop, and Institutes, including final prices, is available in PDF form at http://www.du.edu/writing/documents/WPA_informational_brochure.pdf

Institute fees are $140, discounted for people attend both the Workshop and an Institute or an Institute and the Conference. Fee includes all materials, breaks, and lunch.

Call for Proposals: 2008 WPA Conference

Writing Program Administration and/as Learning

Denver Grand Hyatt Hotel
Denver, Colorado
July 10-13, 2008

Deadline for proposals: April 15, 2008 NOTE: Proposals submitted by the original deadline of 3/15/08 have already been reviewed and proposers notified. New proposals submitted by the final deadline will be reviewed in the weeks after that date.
Proposal Submission Form (log-in to view the form and submit a proposal)

The conference will begin Thursday evening, July 10, and continue through Sunday morning, July 13. We invite proposals for individual presentations, panels, workshops, forums roundtables and other sessions addressing the conference theme, "Writing Program Administration and/as Learning."

We also invite attendees to prepare poster presentations or other exhibits of their programs' special initiatives, research projects, or signature areas.

To allow conference attendees to begin planning as soon as possible, review of proposals for individual presentations, concurrent session panels, roundtables, poster sessions, and multimedia presentations will occur on a rolling basis after February 15, with notifications also sent on that basis. Proposals received after March 15 will be considered on a space-available basis only.

Explanation of Conference Theme

Our goal is to examine WPAs as learners - as teachers – and as learned contributors to students’ lives, to knowledge, and to higher education. We will come together in Denver to work toward a better understanding of WPA work as an intellectual and a pedagogical activity with a rich and complicated history. I invite you to think about some of the following topics and questions. --Joe Janangelo, Program Chair

This list is suggestive. You are welcome to propose any ideas not explicitly tied to the conference theme but important to writing program administration. WPA work occurs in multiple and intersecting spheres and arenas. Hence, these questions are meant to be generative, not exhaustive. We welcome your ideas and approaches!

• What have been our key or catalytic learning moments as individuals and as a profession?
• What have been—and should be—our sources of learning?
• How have evolving technologies and new media influenced our learning?
• How can we put our learning into practice with students, colleagues, administrators, accrediting agencies, the media, and the public?
• How can we best learn from the feedback—both laudatory and critical?
• How is student learning marked and (mis)measured?
• What have you had to “un-learn” or re-evaluate?
• Thinking about readiness, receptivity, and resistance, how does learning relate to timing?
• How can WPAs learn from failure and trauma? Thinking about learning as an ongoing and recursive process, how might we chart growth or development when it is attended by difficulty and setbacks? How can tension, censure, or failure contribute to learning?
• How can we better document, preserve, protect, and share our learning?
• How does WPA scholarship (e.g. conceived contextually as the work we do on campus as well as in grants, multimedia projects, and publications) reflect our learning as an intellectual community? How does it influence, direct, or constrain knowledge making?
• What are key differences between personal and programmatic learning? How can we bridge or reconcile them?

Once again, this list is suggestive. You are welcome to propose any ideas not explicitly tied to the conference theme but important to writing program administration.

WPA 2008 Registration

Registration for the 2008 WPA Conference in Denver, Colorado is now open.

To register for the 2008 WPA Conference in Denver, Colorado, select one of the following options. These options will take you to a page that briefly describes the event and will allow you to add the registration for the event to "your cart." Once you have selected all of the items you would like to register for, you can then checkout. Note: If you must pay by check and therefore need a paper registration form to print and mail, please scroll down through the questions below to see directions and a link to a PDF registration form. ALSO, there are no refunds after June 28, 2008, alas, something that makes WPA feel hard-hearted; however, the no-refund cut-off date is due to unrefundable deposits that WPA must make to hotel by that time.

• Workshop $650 (includes 8 meals) [Workshop registration is full]
• Institutes $140 (includes lunch)
  • Multilingual Students in Writing Programs
  • Institute Research and Writing Programs
• Conference $295 (includes 6 meals and a social event; before June 20, $315 after)
• Conference, Graduate Students $150 (includes 6 meals and a social event)

Combination Packages

• Workshop and Conference $900 [Workshop registration is full]
• Workshop and Institute $760
  • Workshop and Institute: Multilingual Students in Writing Programs [Workshop registration is full]
  • Workshop and Institute: Institute Research and Writing Programs [Workshop registration is full]
• Workshop, Institute, Conference $1000
  • Conference, Workshop and Institute: Multilingual Students in Writing Programs [Workshop registration is full]
  • Conference, Workshop and Institute: Institute Research and Writing Programs [Workshop registration is full]

FAQ

How is my payment processed?
Payment is processed through PayPal. You do not have to have an account with PayPal to register and complete your payment, but you do need to have a user account at the WPA website, so be sure to sign in or create a new account if you need to. At the first PayPal checkout screen, you'll have a choice to pay with your PayPal account or use another credit card.

How will I know what I registered for?
On the WPA Council website, you can select My Account from the left menu, View Order History, and then Operations, View. It will tell you what you have signed up for. You can also print your receipt from there.

What happens if I want to change the events I registered for. Can I still get the combination discount? What happens if I have to cancel my registration?
Unfortunately, we cannot process a change in your registration via this website. However, if you contact David Blakesley, he may be able to help you.

Is there any way I can register by mail?
You can print out and complete the PDF of the registration form with a check made out to Council of Writing Program Administrators. Mail both to:
WPA Conference Registration
ATTN: Amy Kho, Writing Program
2150 E. Evans Ave., Penrose Library #202
Denver, CO 80208.

If I have more questions, who should I contact?
For questions regarding this website and your registration through this website, contact David Blakesley.
For questions about local conference arrangements and Denver, contact Douglas Hesse or Richard Colby.
For questions about submissions, the conference program, or WPA in general, contact Joseph Janangelo

for more information about the 2008 WPA Conference, visit http://www.du.edu/writing/documents/WPA_informational_brochure.pdf

WPA Events Calendar

Full Calendar:Council of Writing Program Administrators Events

(we've just begun developing this calendar, so it doesn't have many dates on it yet.)

WPA at MLA 2006 (Philadelphia): Panels December 29 and 30 WPA at MLA 2006: the Party, December 29

2007 Summer Conference: July 12-15 in Tempe, Arizona

WPA at MLA 2007: The Panels

WPA-Sponsored Panels at the 2007 Modern Language Association ConventionChicago, Illinois, December 2007

The WPA Executive Board, and the committee on WPA at MLA (Dominic Delli Carpini, Chair, Joe Jananagelo, and Rita Malenczyk) are pleased to announce the following exciting and timely panels to be held at the 2007 MLA Conference in Chicago , Illinois . The panels address issues of concern for WPAs that have been raised at the 2006 and 2007 WPA Summer conferences.

In 2006, Past President of the WPA Chris Anson urged our membership to revitalize the important research agendas that have always been at the heart of our work, research that can then demonstrate to many publics what we have learned about the teaching and administration of writing. This topic is addressed in Panel 1. Chris Anson will act as a respondent for this panel.

At the 2007 WPA summer conference, the membership discussed its ongoing commitment to fair labor practices in the administration of writing programs. Panel 2 will offer discussions of programs that have attempted to address those issues.

We hope that many of you will be able to attend.

Panel 1: (Session #11) Current Research Agendas in Composition and Writing Program Administration

Thursday, 27 December: 3:30–4:45 p.m. , Columbus Hall G, Hyatt Regency Chicago

Presiding: Linda Adler-Kassner, Eastern Michigan Univ.

1. “The Search for ‘Replicable, Aggregable, and Data-Supported' Research: Rethinking What Actually Happens in Writing Center Tutorials,” Linda S. Bergmann, Purdue Univ. , West Lafayette ; Laurel Reinking, Purdue Univ. , West Lafayette

2. “But What Difference Can It Make? A Small-Scale Study of Course-Based Peer Tutoring,” Dara Rossman Regaignon, Pomona Coll.

3. “How Do Teaching Assistants Put Theory into Practice? Researching the Effectiveness of Teaching-Assistant Education in Composition,” E. Shelley Reid, George Mason Univ.

Respondent: Chris Anson, North Carolina State Univ.

--------

Panel 2: (Session #219) Ethical Practices in Delivering Composition: Beyond Labor Problems to Labor Solutions

Friday, 28 December: 10:15–11:30 a.m. , Water Tower, Hyatt Regency Chicago

Presiding: Joseph M. Janangelo, Loyola Univ. , Chicago

1. “Permanent Lecturers: Somewhere Sideways of Tenure,” Douglas Hesse, Univ. of Denver

2. “Intervening in the Adjunctness of It All: Compensation for Adjunct Faculty Members Who Participate in Faculty Development,” Christine Faye Ross, Quinnipiac Univ.

3. “Passing on the Directorship of a Writing Center ,” Bradley T. Peters, Northern Illinois Univ.

4. “The Custom Textbook as Professional Development,” Kim McDonald, Univ. of New Orleans

To entice you further to join us in Chicago, WPA and Purdue University, the organization's institutional home, will be hosting a WPA Social at the MLA Conference , to which all WPA members are invited. Join us for great Cajun food and a cash bar on Friday evening, December 28 at Heaven on Seven ( 111 North Wabash Avenue, 7 th floor) from 5:30-7:30 . Details and a more formal invitation will be forthcoming.

WPA at MLA 2007: The Party

WPA Social at the 2007 MLA Conference, December 28

The Council of Writing Program Administrators and the Department of English at Purdue University, the WPA’s institutional home, invite all WPA members and friends to a WPA Social at the MLA Conference in Chicago.

Join us for great Cajun food and a cash bar on

Friday evening, December 28 from 5:30-7:30

Heaven on Seven  (111 North Wabash Avenue, 7th floor, (312) 280-7774) .

Info about the WPA at MLA Panels is at this URL:

http://wpacouncil.org/node/969

2006 WPA Breakfast at CCCC in Chicago

You are invited!

2006 WPA Breakfast at CCCC in Chicago
Thursday March 23, 7:00-8:30 a.m.
DePaul Center Student Union Cafeteria

Enjoy an excellent buffet of Farm Fresh Fluffy Scrambled Eggs, with or without Cheese, Crispy Bacon and Sausage Links, Country Style Potatoes, Seasonal Fresh Fruit Platter, Chilled Juices, Assorted Mini Pastries, Starbucks Coffee (Regular and Decaffeinated) and Hot Tea with Lemon—as well as good company, presentations of awards, miscellaneous announcements, and as always a few surprises.

Directions from the Palmer House Hotel: Walk out the State Street exit of the Palmer House and turn left. Walk south two blocks to the corner of State and Jackson. The DePaul Center is on the southeast corner of State and Jackson. Take the elevators to the 11th floor and follow the signs to the breakfast. It's a five-minute walk once you’re out of the Palmer House.

If you paid online, you should have received a generic receipt from PayPal and then, not long after that, a more detailed receipt from Digital WPA. To speed up the check-in process at the breakfast, be sure to bring your printed Digital WPA receipt with you!

The deadline for mailing in your registration form or registering and paying online has passed.

Plan B: You can pay at the door on the day of the breakfast, but you must contact Lauren Fitzgerald at fitzger@yu.edu no later than Sunday, March 19 so she can include you in the final count--and make sure there are enough fluffy eggs! If you pay at the door, the price for faculty will be $20.00 (cash or check).

2008 WPA Breakfast at CCCC in New Orleans

Thursday April 3, 2008 at 7:00 a.m.
Creole Queen (docked near the conference hotel)
Ticket Prices: $30 (faculty; buy now); $20 (students; buy now)

Plan now to attend the usual Congenial, Caloric, and Conversational Community (how's that for 4 cs?) gathering on THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2008, AT 7:00 A.M., and be ready for a special treat.

The breakfast this year will be held aboard the Creole Queen, a paddle wheel steamer docked right near the conference hotel. We have reserved the boat from 6:30 - 8:30 a.m., and we will have plenty of room for the food, the program, and ourselves.

Directions: Exit the Hilton New Orleans Riverside (headquarters hotel) and cross the circle driveway. Walk to the right, crossing the streetcar tracks, and continue up the steps toward the Riverwalk Marketplace. You will see the ticket booth for the boat to the left, and the boat will be directly in front of you (you will see it as you walk up the steps). We will set up a check-in table in an obvious place, so look for wide-awake WPAs.

The menu includes:

Croissants & Biscuits
Scrambled Eggs
Sausage or Bacon
Cheesy Grits
Orange Juice & Coffee
AND
For a special taste of New Orleans: King Cakes!!

The cost for faculty is $30 per person. Graduate students pay only $20.

Donation to Connors Fund: We invite contributions to the Connors Fund to offset the subsidy to graduate students. For those who did not know him, Bob Connors was not only a superb rhetorician and scholar, but he never missed a WPA breakfast. Therefore, in honor of his commitment to the occasion, WPA has instituted a fund in his name to better enable graduate students to participate. Suggested amount: $7.50. Any amount welcome! You can contribute by choosing the $7.50 Donation to the Connors Fund or by selecting Variable Donation to the Connors Fund. In your shopping cart at check-out, click on "update" to change the quantity to whatever amount you'd like donate.

In addition to good food and conversation, a brief program of awards and announcements will conclude in time for everyone to attend the Opening General Session mere steps away at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside.

Purchase Your Breakfast Ticket Online

• Breakfast ticket for faculty ($30).
• Breakfast ticket for students ($20)

To purchase a breakfast ticket, visit the relevant product's page, then click on "add to cart." You can then add more items (extra tickets, donations) to your cart of check-out at any time. At check-out, you'll be prompted for your WPA site username and password, then you'll make your credit card or echeck payment through PayPal, where you can decide to use a credit card or an existing PayPal account. When finished, you will receive a generic receipt from PayPal by email and then can print a more detailed receipt after you're returned to Digital WPA (click on "view" in your order history next to the relevant purchase). To speed up the check-in process at the breakfast, be sure to bring your printed Digital WPA receipt with you!

See you there!

2009 WPA Breakfast at CCCC

The Executive Board of the WPA invites you to attend the annual WPA Breakfast at CCCC, to be held this year at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero, San Francisco, 5 Embarcadero Center. Plan on a 15-minute walk or a short cab ride from the conference hotel.

Mark your calendar now for Thursday, March 12, 2009, 6:30 - 8:00 a.m. (doors open at 6 a.m.)

As always, the event will include a short program and adjourn in time for everyone to attend the Opening Session of the CCCC convention. More important, WPAs from all over will have a chance to meet, chat, network, and make plans for the rest of the convention.

Because of high prices and low availability of suitable venues, we will have a plated breakfast this year with meat and vegetarian options. When you purchase your ticket, please designate your choice of breakfast. We will convey exact counts to the vendor, so please remember what you have chosen.

Menu Options

• Scrambled eggs and bacon, roasted potatoes with sweet peppers and onions, roasted tomato half, fresh fruit and berries
• Sourdough French toast, fresh berries and powdered sugar, warm maple syrup

Prices

We are able to offset exorbitant San Francisco prices, offering everyone a huge reduction from the hotel’s usual rates, thanks to a generous subsidy from WPA. We expect much more reasonable rates next year, when the convention is held in Louisville.

• Faculty breakfast (either choice): $31
• Graduate student or adjunct breakfast (either choice): $20
• Contributions to the Connors Fund (to subsidize graduate student and adjunct breakfasts): Any amount

Order Your Breakfast

Sorry. We are no longer taking breakfast orders as the caterers have to be informed as to the number of people attending.

Once you have purchased your breakfast, save your receipt and bring your receipt to the breakfast—it’s your entrance ticket. The doors will open at 6:00 a.m.

Directions

The Hyatt Regency Embarcadero is located just a fifteen-minute walk away from the conference hotel at 5 Embarcadero Center.

You can download directions for traveling from the conference hotel or view the Google map below.

WPA Breakfast at CCCC 2005

You are invited!

Thursday March 17, 7:00-8:30 a.m.

The Carnelian Room, 52nd floor of the Bank of America Building
555 California Street (corner of California and 3rd Street/Kearney)

Enjoy an excellent buffet of eggs, bacon, sausage, and potatoes; danishes and croissants; fresh fruit; yogurt and granola; juice and coffee--as well as good company, presentations of awards, miscellaneous announcements, and as always a few surprises. Reserve your spot now with the form below. Remember to include a check when you mail it to Clyde Moneyhun (instructions are at the bottom of the form).

Directions from the Moscone Center: The fastest way to get there is WALKING. From the 3rd Street side of the Moscone Center, just go north (in the same direction as the traffic on one-way 3rd Street) for about 15 minutes to the Bank of America Building on the corner of California and 3rd Street (which turns into Kearney). There's also a BUS that runs up 3rd Street. Get on across the street from the Moscone Center and get off at California. Fare is $1.25 (exact change only). You can also use a CABLE CAR. Use either Powell Street line to climb Powell to California, then walk two blocks down California to 3rd Street/Kearney (don't worry--it's downhill!). Fare is $3 (no transfers).

WPA Breakfast at CCCC in New York City

You are invited!

2007 WPA Breakfast at CCCC in New York City
Thursday March 22, 7:00-8:30 a.m.
3 West Club, 3 West 51st Street

Enjoy an excellent buffet of scrambled eggs and hash browns; bacon or sausage; assorted pastries, muffins, and bagels; fresh fruit, juice, and coffee -- as well as good company, presentations of awards, miscellaneous announcements, and as always, a few surprises.

Directions from the New York Hilton: : Walk out 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) exit of the Hilton and turn right. Walk south two blocks and turn left on 51st Street. Walk half a block (toward 5th Avenue). 3 West Club is on West 51st Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, a 5-10 minute walk from the Hilton.

Prices:

• $28.50 in advance for Faculty
• $30.00 at the door for Faculty
• $20.00 for Graduate Students

The deadline for purchasing breakfast tickets online has now passed. The deadline for mailing checks has also passed. To speed up the check-in process at the breakfast, be sure to bring your printed receipt with you!

If you have questions about the breakfast, you can contact:

Carol Rutz
Director, Writing Program
Willis 307
Carleton College
1 N College St
Northfield, MN 55057
507-646-4082
crutz@carleton.edu

WPA at MLA 2006

WPA at MLA: 30th Anniversary

The 2006 MLA Convention will mark the 30th Anniversary of the MLA session at which the Council of Writing Program Administrators was founded. To celebrate that occasion, this year’s panels look back at WPA’s efforts at inclusion over the past thirty years and discuss the great potential that increasing diversity provides for us, both as an organization and within our writing classes.

“Moving toward Inclusion: Thirty Years of the Council of Writing Program Administrators,” Friday, December 29th, 1:45–3:00 p.m., Room 307 of the Philadelphia Marriott. • Chris Anson, North Carolina State University: Drawing in, Reaching Out: The Problems and Prospects of Internationalization • Joe Janangelo, Loyola University, Chicago: Why Diversify? • M. Elizabeth Sargent, University of Alberta: On the Trail of the Outcomes Statement: Increasing the Work of the WPA in Canada • Joseph S. Eng, California State University Monterey Bay: WPA and Diversity: The Asian-American Locations in the Modern University Shirley Rose (Purdue University) will preside and serve as respondent.

“Challenges of the Future: Foregrounding Diversity in the WPA Palette” Saturday, December 30th, noon to 1:15, Room 302 of the Philadelphia Marriott.

• Juanita Comfort, West Chester University: Framing Diversity Issues for College Writers: Listening to a Multi-Vocal Writing Program • Wendy Olson, Washington State University, Pullman: Writing Programs, Diversity, and the Knowledge Economy: Some Implications • Ellen Strenski, University of California, Irvine: Electronic Equity or Exclusion: Four Campus Digital Divides • Jonathan Alexander, University of Cincinnati and William Banks, East Carolina University: Queer Eye for the Comp Program: Towards a Queer Critique of WPA Work Dominic Delli Carpini (York College of Pennsylvania) will Chair this session.

WPA 30th Anniversary Reception The Council of Writing Program Administrators, the Philadelphia Writing Program Administrators, Temple University, and York College of Pennsylvania will be sponsoring a reception at MLA from 5:00-7:00 on the evening of Friday, December 29 at the Hilton Garden Inn (1100 Arch St) in Philadelphia

Beer, wine, & appetizers will be provided and the Mike Frank Jazz Trio will play.

All WPA members and potential members are cordially invited. Save the date!

WPA Reception at MLA 2004

PLEASE JOIN US

AT THE

ANNUAL WPA RECEPTION

MLA CONVENTION

PHILADELPHIA, PA

WHEN: Wed., Dec. 29, 2004, from 5-7 p.m.

WHERE: 10th Floor, Hilton Garden Inn

DETAILS: If you'll be at the MLA convention in Philadelphia this year—or if you live in the Philly area—the Council of Writing Program Administrators is pleased to invite you and your guests for drinks, hors d'oeuvres, and the WPA's characteristic good cheer at the Hilton Garden Inn, located next to the Philadelphia Convention Center and close to all the major convention hotels. The hotel address is 1100 Arch St. The reception will take place on the 10th floor, next to "The Tenth Floor Grill," the hotel's rooftop restaurant.

Thanks to the generosity of McGraw-Hill and the University Writing Program at Temple University, the reception will feature a jazz band and food.

If you'd like to pinpoint the exact location of the hotel, you can find a map of the convention center area and locations of all the convention hotels at the MLA's website here:

Map: http://www2.expoedge.com/its/0412mlaphl/map.asp

Hilton's website: http://www.hiltongardenphilly.com/

Hope to see you there!

—Chris Anson, President, WPA