Academic Advancement in Composition Studies

Scholarship, Publication, Promotion, Tenure

Richard C. Gebhardt, Barbara Genelle Smith Gebhardt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415515634
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136686917
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This volume deals with a number of related issues that are becoming increasingly crucial for English studies during this time when most faculty in the field are assistant professors approaching tenure review or associate professors seeking promotion. These critical issues focus on:
* The diversity of research and scholarly publication in composition studies;
* The fact that composition studies faculty are often evaluated by personnel committee members, department chairs, and deans unfamiliar with the nature and demands of the field;
* The way that American higher education is rethinking "scholarship" and the role it plays in the work and evaluation of faculty members; and
* The role composition studies faculty can play in this review of scholarship and professional advancement.

This book seeks to address the entire spectrum of "composition studies" -- expository and argumentative writing, personal essay, literary nonfiction, technical and business writing, historical rhetoric, empirical research, and more -- by understanding the nature of and evaluating the work of faculty members in this broad field. Scholarship and advancement issues are discussed in a variety of situations including basic and regular first-year composition classes at four-year and two-year institutions or writing centers, advanced writing courses, ESL and skills-development programs, and writing classes and programs for teachers, administrators, and researchers. The chapters focus on a variety of subjects, including the importance of mentoring and faculty development in all departments and institutions; and how young scholar-teachers and assistant professors can prepare for a successful personnel or tenure review.

1

Evolving Approaches to Scholarship, Promotion, and Tenure in Composition Studies

Richard C. Gebhardt

Bowling Green State University

In 1987, representatives of 80 PhD English departments attended a conference on doctoral studies sponsored by a commission of the Modern Language Association, with funding by the Ford Foundation and the University of Minnesota. As the Introduction of The Future of Doctoral Studies in English reported it, conference participants “rejected historical coverage along with canonical unity as the invariable reference points that could guide our conceptualization of curricula” and sensed the need to find “an alternate way of conceptualizing what we do” (Lunsford, Moglen, and Slevin vi). Some discussions saw in rhetoric “a model for investigations of discourse broadly conceived—beyond the narrower concerns with canonical texts and forms that seem unnecessarily limiting to contemporary scholarship and criticism” (vii). Other discussions did “not so much argue for adopting rhetoric as our organizing principle . . . as . . . urge that reading and writing be reintegrated at all levels in theory and practice” (ix)—an integration that “would challenge curricular and institutional hierarchies at every turn and would demand basic renegotiation of disciplinary turf” (xi).

A few years later, George Levine of Rutgers University warned in the pages of the MLA’s Profession 93 that the “future of English, as a profession sustained by publicly and privately endowed institutions,” is at risk

because the two functions of English departments that institutions and the culture as a whole endorse, and pay for, are perhaps the two to which we as research faculty members are least committed. One is the teaching of writing as a basic skill that all educated people need to acquire, and the other is the teaching of literature as it is widely understood by those who don’t make the study of it their profession. (44)

If they want to survive, Levine wrote, English departments “should be rethinking their teaching responsibilities. They should be taking far more seriously than they at present do the disparity between their sense of what constitutes useful work in English and what the state and most people who send their children to universities think such work is.” Indeed, Levine wrote, “[o]ne of the most difficult questions the profession will have to face is whether the now prevalent model of the research-oriented career can (or even should) be sustained . . .” (44).

About the time MLA members were reading those words, AAUP members opened their Winter 1994 copies of Academe and found “The Work of Faculty: Expectations, Priorities, and Rewards.” This was a detailed report with much analysis and many tables by an interdisciplinary AAUP committee on teaching, research, and publication. Toward the end, in the fifth of the committee’s eight Conclusions and Recommendations, was this passage:

Research, generally undertood to mean discovery and publication, should be related to a broader concept of scholarship that embraces the variety of intellectual activities and the totality of scholarly accomplishments. Though discovery and publication are the core of scholarly endeavor, scholarship seen in its many forms offers a wider context within which to weigh individual contributions.

Innovative and integrative research are essential to research and graduate institutions as well as the capstone of many faculty careers. But scholarship can also mean work done to further the application and integration or synthesis of knowledge, and new directions in pedagogy clearly fall on both sides of the line between what we see as teaching and what can be classified as scholarship. In addition, work in the creative and performing arts, in applied fields of academe, and in areas that demand practical training is also . . . often best classified as research. By enlarging the perspective through which we judge scholarly achievement, we more accurately define the many ways in which intellectual inquiry shapes . . . our complex and interrelated roles as teachers and researchers in a multitude of institutional and disciplinary settings. (AAUP Committee 47–48)

No trio of prefatory paragraphs can adequately introduce a subject as broad and complex as scholarship, promotion, and tenure in composition studies. But those last three paragraphs should help establish some background for this chapter—and for this book—by reminding us all that many of our profession’s assumptions and practices are under review or revision. For this is a time of evolution in our field (English studies as a whole, composition studies, and the role of composition within English studies), in the role scholarship plays in the work and rewards of faculty members, and in ideas of scholarship and the way it should be evaluated.

Any responsible discussion of scholarship and its role in the job description and evaluation of college and university faculty members during the decade surrounding the year 2000 must be marked by awareness of and openness to change. This is especially true when the subject is scholarship and professional advancement in composition studies. For ours is a broad and evolving field that is, at once, part of English studies—with all its complexities and evolutionary tendencies—and part of a system of American higher education that is reappraising the work and evaluation of faculty members.

SCHOLARSHIP IN COMPOSITION STUDIES

Diversity of Scholarly Concerns

Composition studies is such a diverse field that, in Lester Faigley’s words, “[i]n some departments we now find scholars studying topics ranging from pre-Socratic rhetoric to interactive computer networks . . .” (48). A pamphlet issued by the Conference on College Composition and Communication notes that composition research “has taken as its subject the production, exchange, and reception of texts in a variety of settings,” and that it is concerned with reading and writing instruction at all levels” and with “the practice and uses of writing both inside and outside the academy . . .” (CCCC Executive). In the field’s oldest and largest journal, to quote a history of College Composition and Communication, articles on these subjects appeared between 1980 and 1994:

(a) assessment, both from political and practical perspectives; (b) cognition, particularly as it applies to the composing process or to the development of the student writer and thinker; (c) the composing process; (d) basic writers; (e) the state of the profession or discipline; (f) interaction among writing, reading, and speaking; (g) political or ideological concerns, such as the nature of literacy, pluralism in the classroom, or women as writers and/or teachers; (h) professional concerns, such as the exploitation of part-time faculty or the marginalizing of the discipline; (i) rhetorical concerns of the writer, specifically choices in invention, arrangement, and style; (j) textbooks; and (k) writing in disciplines other than English, both as it applies to specific composing processes and rhetorical choices, and as a program or curriculum. (Phillips, Greenberg, and Gibson 457–58)

In the program of the 1995 meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, these subjects, among others, were listed in the Topic Index to Concurrent Sessions: teaching of writing and rhetoric, nonfiction and creative writing, writing in professional and technical environments, teaching in the two-year college, institutional contexts for writing and literacy, teaching and learning in a global context, writing and difference, and computers and writing.

Diversity of Scholarly Approaches

Lists of scholarly topics—pre-Socratic rhetoric, workplace writing of software developers, tutorial instruction in writing centers, and what have you—may suggest the range of composition studies. But the diversity of the field involves more than that. To begin with, scholars investigating the same subject may employ very different research strategies or scholarly approaches. “To study the complex domain of rhetoric and composition,” wrote Janice Lauer and Andrea Lunsford, “scholars engage in multiple modes of inquiry, including historical scholarship, rhetorical or theoretical inquiry, and empirical research” (106). And in conducting these inquiries, scholars draw on anthropology, education, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines.¹

Another dimension of the field’s diversity is the fact that composition studies encourages—and honors—the whole range of scholarly endeavor outlined in the Carnegie Foundation’s much-quoted Scholarship Reconsidered: the scholarship of discovery, the scholarship of integration, the scholarship of application, and the scholarship of teaching (see Boyer 16–25). Janet Emig’s The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders is a work of discovery scholarship that has significantly influenced the way scholars view student writing and methods for studying writing. Just as influential, perhaps, is Emig’s “Writing As a Mode of Learning,” a work of integration and application scholarship that draws on research and insights from education, psychology, medicine, and other fields to enlarge understanding of writing and the relationship of writing to learning.

Both of Emig’s works—representing very different goals or motives in research—have been widely cited by scholars. For the field of composition studies understands that scholarship can pursue various ends and that the relationship between teaching and scholarship is both close and mutually supporting.² In this regard, composition studies is far ahead of the AAUP effort (mentioned in a prefatory paragraph) to enlarge “the perspective through which we judge scholarly achievement” (AAUP Committee 47–48) and even ahead of the effort of the Institutional Priorities and Faculty Rewards Project to expand the scope of scholarly and professional work to include such things as course development, K to 12 curriculum projects, and community outreach (see Diamond and Adam).

Yet another aspect of the diversity of composition studies is the fact that the field has no single form of scholarship. A few illustrations:

Scholars conducting empirical research may prepare research reports (abstract, introduction, research methods, results, and discussion) heavy with tables and statistical tests of significance.

Scholars studying written texts or historical topics may prepare books and articles containing many citations, block quotes, and analysis/commentary (which may be more or less textual, deconstructionist, feminist, Marxist, etc.).

Scholars using the methods and terminology of linguistics may explore written texts of various kinds (including transcripts of group discussions or comments individuals make while they are writing).

Scholars who take an anthropological approach may provide long passages of exacting detail about the activities of the professional or student writers they are studying.

Finally, composition scholars using almost any research strategy may use innovative personal approaches in their publications. Women and men committed to collaboration—in research and in writing—sometimes try to efface individual roles in coauthored works (as Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford do on the title page of Singular Texts/Plural Authors—“RDLISAEDEANDREALUNSFORDLIS . . .”). Or they may use type styles, by-lines, or other means to emphasize the individual voices of multiple authors (see Gebhardt, “Diversity” 8–9). Increasingly, too, composition scholars use their own experiences as illustrations, or as “personal validation and expression of knowledge” (Branscomb 477), or even as the central focus of scholarship. With regard to this personal focus, composition scholarship participates in a growing trend within English studies as a whole—a trend of “sharing and confiding, or even analytically exploring, our feelings and thoughts”—and a “recent increase in public interest in the theory and practice of autobiographical writing” (Bleich 44–45; also see Atkins 635–36).

Diversity—A Strength and a Problem for the Field³

When scholars discuss the diversity of composition studies, they usually see it as a source of the field’s strength and vitality. For instance, in a discussion of the field’s developing bibliography, Patrick Scott notes that “composition is a much more creatively heterogeneous discipline” now than in the 1970s and that this heterogeneity may be “the source of the field’s continuing intellectual interest” (91). And Andrea Lunsford writes that composition studies tends “to look well beyond its own borders and to challenge divisions between disciplines. . . . Thus a scholar may draw on anthropology, psychology, philosophy, literary theory, neurobiology, or other disciplines in studying the creation and dissemination of written texts” (9).

Diversity, however, can be a source of difficulty for scholars in the field. For instance, glance again at the last quotation of Lunsford’s, and then read her next few sentences:

The blurring of disciplinary boundaries raises a number of difficulties for graduate students and scholars in the field. How can any one person master the discourses of multiple fields? How viable and valid is the use of one discipline’s methodology transferred to another field? (Lunsford 9)

The two sides of diversity show, too, in Gesa Kirsch’s discussion of research methodologies in composition studies. She states that the “diversity of research questions raised by scholars, the broad territory encompassed by rhetoric and composition, and the multidisciplinary backgrounds of researchers all invite the use of multiple research methods” (255). But such methodological diversity, Kirsch immediately adds, “is not unproblematic”:

Researchers steeped in different research traditions often speak different languages and describe their observations with different sets of vocabulary. Anne Herrington suggests that “embedded in these languages are different views of issues to investigate, ways of defining the phenomena to be studied, and, more generally, valid ways of knowing. These differences make it all the more difficult to appreciate the value of other approaches, especially when one is struggling to authorize one’s own approach.” (Kirsch 255–56)

And Janice Lauer describes composition studies as a “multimodal discipline” that works “[t]hrough the use of at least three modes of inquiry—rhetorical, historical, and empirical” (44). But she also emphasizes the costs of multimodality: How the difficulty of studying several “forms of inquiry” can lead people “to ignore or marginalize a mode or two” (50), for instance, or the fact that, during review for promotion and tenure, faculty in composition studies “often face a double task—to produce first-rate scholarship and to explain its nature and value” (51).

It is a matter of real consequence for composition studies—and especially for faculty members preparing for personnel review—if a defining quality of the field undermines understanding among scholars, promotes privileging of some scholarly approaches by people who ignore other approaches, demands extraordinary efforts of scholars who want to do multimodal research, and burdens faculty preparing for tenure and promotion with the need not only to do good research but also to explain its nature and its value. To an extent, these problems affect all scholars in composition studies because so m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• About the Authors
• 1 Evolving Approaches to Scholarship, Promotion, and Tenure in Composition Studies
• 2 Scholarship in Composition and Literature: Some Comparisons
• 3 Nonacademic Publication As Scholarship
• 4 Writing Administration As Scholarship and Teaching
• 5 Scholarship, Tenure, and Composition Studies in the Two-Year College
• 6 Scholarship, Tenure, and Promotion in Professional Communication
• 7 Presenting Writing Center Scholarship: Issues for Faculty and Personnel Committees
• 8 Promotion and Tenure Review of ESL and Basic-Skills Faculty
• 9 Preparing Yourself for Successful Personnel Review
• 10 Special Challenges Facing Women in Personnel Reviews
• 11 Mentoring—and (Wo)mentoring— in Composition Studies
• 12 Mentor and Evaluator: The Chair’s Role in Promotion and Tenure Review
• 13 The Importance of External Reviews in Composition Studies
• 14 Scholarship Reconsidered: A View from the Dean’s Office
• Afterword: Re-Envisioning Tenure in an Age of Change Elizabeth Tebeaux
• Author Index
• Subject Index