"Effective mentors are much more than advisors or teachers. They are role models, consultants, problem solvers, and supporters. They provide timely and constructive feedback, career guidance, professional contacts, sources of information about research grants and fellowship and job opportunities, and letters of recommendation throughout your professional career.

A mentor can make a world of difference." (Columbia University: The Power of Mentoring)

Seeking a mentor is a smart thing to do. Being a mentor is paying it forward to the future of our profession. The CWPA Mentoring Project is designed to bring mentoring to those who request it and to provide opportunities for more experienced WPAs to offer their time and care to mentoring. Effective mentoring can often influence a developing professional to make informed decisions, make positive transitions, and make important connections with people and projects. Emerging professionals may be seeking a mentor beyond their graduate school advisor to help them enter the field; other newish WPAs may be seeking a mentor to help them test ideas; other WPAs recognize a professional juncture often requires an additional voice in their lives.

CWPA is committed to developing programs and initiatives that draw future and current WPAs into a pipeline of support. We are especially aware that our organization and field lacks the genuine diversity represented in our institutions by our students. As such, it is important that we actively seek to support WPAs of color and those from other underrepresented groups. To that end, we will strive to offer mentoring opportunities for individuals who do WPA work at whatever rank or status, with the understanding of how identity matters as WPAs shape the rhetorical and institutional contours of their particular programs.

        
We invite you to join us! Joe Janangelo, Tim Dougherty & Michele Eodice
Stay Tuned for an exciting initiative to be revealed in May, 2012

CWPA 2012 Mentoring Strand CFP

Mentoring to Build Pragmatic, Ethical, Strategic Rhetorical Action for WPAs in all Localities

“We as WPAs must construct our policy statements and program philosophies to reflect a mission to engage, challenge, and learn about difference. This is the type of rhetorical action that can work towards a strategic initiative plan for CWPA and our individual institutions to explicitly assert that identity matters in how we as writing program administrators go about shaping the social and cultural infrastructures of our writing programs.”

– Collin Lamont Craig & Staci Maree Perryman-Clark, “Troubling the Boundaries: (De)Constructing WPA Identities at the Intersections of Race and Gender.” WPA 34.2 (Spring 2011): (53-54).  

“By the end of first year composition, students should...

• Respond to the needs of different audiences
• Respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations...
• Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power.”

-- CWPA FYC Outcomes Statement

As evidenced by CWPA’s 2012 Theme of “Writing Directions: Connecting Literacies, Languages, and Localities,” writing instruction and writing program administration has become increasingly complex as teachers and administrators in varied localities must seek to navigate ethical and effective practice in their particular contexts. Following Collin Craig and Staci Perryman-Clark, the WPA Mentoring Project recognizes the need for WPAs to rhetorically design their writing programs for relevance in a contemporary world marked by cultural difference, continuing inequality, and both transnational and local connectivities. To be rhetorically successful, our students must learn to negotiate these tensions, to recognize the transformative potential of relation-building across difference, and to prepare to account for their writings’ circulation in publics beyond their control. Amidst such complexity and such opportunity, we need each other more than ever for support in building programs, curricula, arguments, skills, budgets, and best practices that can thrive in the many varied directions that writing and words work now calls us to go.

The Mentoring Project welcomes proposals in all formats and on all topics related to mentoring. In concert with the Mentoring Project's commitment to transformative inclusion, we especially welcome mentoring proposals that will help fellow WPAs or future WPAs:

• infuse, throughout their programs, the reality that effective 21st century rhetorical practice must account for and honor difference while naming the power differentials that continue to structure these differences
• ethically navigate shrinking budgets and continually fraught labor situations as they hew to disciplinary and pedagogical best practices
• make programmatic and rhetorical space for the contributions and needs of multilingual writers as they pay attention to the increasingly transnational political, cultural, and economic realities facing our students, our programs, and our institutions
• engage in transformative, ethical literacy relationships with varied community stakeholders on and off campus
• help their students gain rhetorical acuity across an increasingly dizzying number of writing interfaces and communicative technologies.

Please submit proposals through the CWPA proposal submission system. Please put the designation "MP" at the beginning of your proposal's title to help us with the review process.

Questions? Contact Joe Janangelo or Tim Dougherty.