Council of Writing Program Administrators

Hello, Folks -- With our sojourn to Tempe rapidly approaching, Shelley Reid and I, co-chairs of the WPA's APA SIG, wanted to again invite untenured WPAs and interested others to a professional development workshop entitled, "Untenured WPAs as Change Agents: When to Rule, When to Run, When to Hide." (It's tentatively scheduled for the Fri. 2:45-4:15 session.) The workshop will provide a forum for assistant-professor administrators to share experiences an dlearn from each other, while Barry Maid and Rita Malenczyk will serve as our Wise Pragmatist tenured-WPA perspectivists.

We'd like for those who know they want to attend to submit, in the next couple weeks, scenarios from their own or others' actual experiences, to make the workshop as realistic and hands-on as possible. To know what might make a good scenario (or to know whether you're interested in attending), the premise of the workshop is this:

WPAs are often called upon to mastermind, contribute to, or respond to major institutional changes, in coordination with other, often more powerful, stakeholders across the institution. Our focus in this workshop is how untenured WPAs negotiate institutional politics when they choose to act or are required to serve as "change agents," working on major shifts in entrenched institutional conditions, structures, and attitudes. Participating in institutional change can risk APAs' already-slim political and institutional capital; however, not-participating in institutional change may be equally risky in both the short and the long term. If you've found yourself in such situations as an APA -- either ongoing, or resolved -- they'll make good points of discussion for this workshop, so go ahead and send them on to me (off-list, of course).

Cheers -- Doug