The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors

Nicole I. Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, Rebecca Jackson, Nicole Caswell

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781607325369
• eBook ISBN: 9781607325376
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The first book-length empirical investigation of writing center directors' labor, The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors presents a longitudinal qualitative study of the individual professional lives of nine new directors. Inspired by Kinkead and Harris's Writing Centers in Context (1993), the authors adopt a case study approach to examine the labor these directors performed and the varied motivations for their labor, as well as the labor they ignored, deferred, or sidelined temporarily, whether or not they wanted to.

The study shows directors engaged in various types of labor—everyday, disciplinary, and emotional—and reveals that labor is never restricted to a list of job responsibilities, although those play a role. Instead, labor is motivated and shaped by complex and unique combinations of requirements, expectations, values, perceived strengths, interests and desires, identities, and knowledge. The cases collectively distill how different institutions define writing and appropriate resources to writing instruction and support, informing the ongoing wider cultural debates about skills (writing and otherwise), the preparation of educators, the renewal/tenuring of educators, and administrative "bloat" in academe.

The nine new directors discuss more than just their labor; they address their motivations, their sense of self, and their own thoughts about the work they do, facets of writing center director labor that other types of research or scholarship have up to now left invisible. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors strikes a new path in scholarship on writing center administration and is essential reading for present and future writing center administrators and those who mentor them.

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Introduction

The (Invisible) Labor of Writing Center Directors

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This is a book about a job. It is also a book about a profession and thus is a book about passion, identity, calling, preparation, and responsibilities. It is about luck, good and bad; relationships, difficult and easy. Ghosts of writing centers past and specters of writing centers future. This is a book about nine professionals working as new writing center directors: coming to understand the dimensions of their job, balancing disciplinary understandings with external pressures, being seen and heard as they keep their writing centers afloat.

In 1972, Studs Terkel published perhaps the most well-known American oral history project, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel About It, in which he captures the voices of Americans describing the day-to-day, hour-to-hour intricacies that compose their working lives. He observes, “I was constantly astonished by the extraordinary dreams of ordinary people. No matter how bewildering the times, no matter how dissembling the official language, those we call ordinary are aware of a personal sense of worth—or more often a lack of it—in the work they do” (Terkel 1972, xxiv).

Like Terkel’s participants, the nine writing center directors in this study were “ordinary people.” Yet ours, too, had extraordinary dreams despite bewildering and often difficult times. Each of our participants worked in educational environments in secondary or college-level, US or abroad, educational systems that strain under the residual effect of the recent global recession, the increased pressure for national standards packaged up by corporate interests, the yin and yang of the adjunctification of higher education and administrative bloat, and the increasing stratification of social classes resulting in even more unequal schooling for the poor. Given the times, each of our participants was glad to have a job—to have the job of writing center director—though most of our participants fell into this line of work serendipitously. This is a book of their stories: the day-to-day work they performed, the work they wanted to do but didn’t, and all the stuff that got in the way.

As much as this is a book about a job, it is not just a book about a job. Just as Terkel’s Working revealed as much as about American society as it did about work, The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors reveals something broader about the state of education in the early twenty-first century. What it is and what it means to be a writing center director is connected in a deep way to existing educational systems, values about learning and learners, and, particularly, conceptions of writing and literacy. Reading how the nine new directors individually navigated their local systems and individual careers reveals not just what it takes to be a writing center director but how, in a reciprocal move, a system uses a writing center director—what part of the load the writing center director carries, what personal worth a director finds in their work, and what worth the system places on the director’s work. Thus, this is a book about the intricacies and complexities of a job and the intricacies and complexities of a system wherein that job exists.

Writing Center Directors: What’s Typical?

Like many professions, the job of writing center director was not profiled in Terkel’s oral-history collection; more to the point, in 1972 it would have been difficult to find more than a few dozen Americans claiming this job title. Though origin stories of writing centers abound and conflict, what is clear is that the years since Terkel’s collection was published have been a time of momentum building for writing centers. In the late 1970s and 1980s, directors of existing centers found one another, started regional, then national, meetings, and established journals exclusively focused on the work of writing centers. Observers of these efforts often took initiative to start writing centers in their own contexts. Today, the majority of US colleges and universities, many international schools, and K–12 schools have writing centers. Rigorous, insightful scholarship on writing center issues continues in conferences, journals, and books.

Yet, despite these past thirty years of growth, we have seen precious little attention given in the scholarship to the directors who initiate and run writing centers, despite the number of directors now reaching into the thousands. As a result, the work of directing a center is often rendered immaterial and invisible. Mentors guess about how to best prepare future administrators. Job seekers have no way of judging whether a director position is fair or feasible, relying instead on writing center lore about the perils of this or that type of position. Search committees who craft job descriptions sprinkle in additional responsibilities (e.g., WAC/WID directing, heavy teaching loads, and committee assignments) without realizing the potential effect on the director and center. Those hired as directors may be hesitant to say no to additional responsibilities, as they are not sure what constitutes a “normal” directorship. Finally, those reviewing the work of writing center directors are often unsure what marks success (e.g., Is an increase in tutoring sessions a sign of success? The only sign of success? Conversations on WCenter and elsewhere sometimes suggest as much.).

The scholarship that does exist on writing center directors often tries to pin down what is “typical” about the work of directing a writing center. Dave Healy (1995), for example, reports on a national survey of writing center directors in “Writing Center Directors: An Emerging Portrait of the Profession.” He finds,

Writing center directors are disproportionately female: 74%. Nearly all directors (96%) have a graduate degree: 44% with an MA, 40% with a PhD, and 12% with another degree (e.g., MEd, EdD, MFA). Writing center directors are most likely to be trained in English/literature (66%), followed by education (20%) and composition/rhetoric (10%). Their salaries range from $9,600 to $71,000, with a mean of $33,323. Eighty-six percent of respondents teach in addition to their administrative responsibilities in the writing center, spending an average of 36% of their time teaching, while 25% also serve as writing program director. Sixty-nine percent of respondents have a faculty appointment, while 46% have a tenure-track position. Respondents work an average of 44 hours per week and spend half of that time on center-related business. (30)

Other surveys conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s offer similar findings on backgrounds, degrees, and appointment types for writing center director positions (e.g., Balester and McDonald 2001; Erwin 2002; Charlton 2009; WCRP as described in Griffin, et al. 2005; Isaacs and Knight 2014). In short, each of these surveys shows that aside from having a graduate degree, likely having a teaching responsibility, and likely being identified as female, there is no “typical” writing center director. Some positions are teaching intensive with minimal administrative responsibilities while some are administrative positions with no teaching; some require a terminal degree while some don’t.

There have been other attempts to typify who directs writing centers and the work that takes place there. In “Polylog: Are Writing Center Directors Writing Program Administrators?” Melissa Ianetta, Linda Bergman, Lauren Fitzgerald, Carol Peterson Haviland, Lisa Lubduska, and Mary Wislocki argue that while there isn’t one typical writing center director position, writing center directors do fall into more or less one of three types: the universal professional, the local professional, and the academic iconoclast (Ianetta et al. 2006). The universal professional has a PhD in rhetoric and composition, has experience in administrative work, and values engaging the disciplinary conversation, both as consumer and producer of scholarship. The local professional primarily values first-hand experience; they “understand the best practices circulating in the field, but more importantly, they should have the professional ability to understand their individual contexts” (15). The academic iconoclast promotes “attention to the individual”—individual students, campuses, and writing centers. Carried to the extreme, the academic iconoclast “rejects affiliation not just with other fields of writing studies but with its own institution’s priorities” (16).

Alternatively, Neal Lerner (2006) offers two classifications typical of writing center directors: the haves and the have-nots. In his view, some positions are tenable and optimal and others are not. He explains, “The terrain of our field seems separated into two types of directors: an active, enfranchised group with faculty or secure status and a part-time, contingent—and largely silent—group doing the best they can do under very difficult conditions” (10). Lerner’s classification assumes that those directors in more permanent positions are more likely to be active in disciplinary conversations than those whose roles are more tenuous.

In addition to survey and theoretical portraits of writing center directors, we also have access to anecdotal tales in writing center literature, so much so that Stephen North (1984), in “Writing Center Research,” conjectures that “as writing centers move toward the 1990s, though, [writing centers] are gaining some measure of professional stability, and we can expect their growth rate to level off. It is no longer necessary for all new writing center directors to compose a reflective essay detailing the experiences of their traumatic first year” (27). Though it may not be necessary, a number of directors still indulge in such reflection. For example, Amy Getty (2003) writes in “The Short and Sputtering Life of a Small Community College Writing Center: A Cautionary Tale” about her charge to open a center at a new job where she is given no funding and no space and a dean won’t answer her e-mails. And, Mike Mattison (2007; 2008) tells tales of his first years as a tenure-track director in an established center in “Someone to Watch Over Me” and Centered: A Year in the Life of a Writing Center Director. While insightful and engaging, these anecdotal accounts provide us a singular vantage point for understanding writing center directors. Because so many directors, as North has written, write about their struggles, the anecdotal scholarship tends to underscore only the difficulties of directing a writing center.

The final genre of scholarship on writing center directorships is the advice narrative. Though such narratives are grounded in personal experience, these narratives necessarily overgeneralize personal experience as the norm. That is, instead of saying how things are, advice narratives say how they ought to be. Instead of saying what writing center director positions are like, advice narratives say how they should be. Wallace and Wallace’s (2006) “Growing Our Own: Writing Centers as Historically Fertile Fields” in the Writing Center Director’s Resource Book is an example of this kind of narrative. Wallace and Wallace warn against falling into the “generalizing pit” when talking about the current state of writing centers, yet they also note that “we can make some statements [about writing centers and writing center directors] with a degree of certainty” (48). Wallace and Wallace conclude,

We have more writing centers now than ever before. They are lead [sic] now by more trained personnel than ever before. . . . We are in good shape, and we have produced a few generations of writing center personnel who have learned what it is to be involved in a movement. (48)

Truth is, these statements cannot actually be made with any certainty; no evidence is offered to support these claims of professionalization or directors’ sense of belonging. Wallace and Wallace continue,

A successful writing center director is an entry-level administrator and not a faculty member. This administrator relies on statistics, spreadsheets, budgets, Request for Proposals, attrition rates, pass rates, standardized testing norms, retention figures, graphs, and projections. A successful writing center director is a person others in administration can count on to demonstrate the real picture. A successful writing center director is not the same person as a successful tutor trainer, but, instead, this director is the person who leads both the center’s offense and defense. Therefore, when writing center personnel make the argument that their centers improve writing skills, they had better be able to prove it, and prove it with real statistics that others outside of the humanities can comprehend. (50)

Paradoxically, although Wallace and Wallace warn that writing center directors will always need evidence (i.e., statistics) for their claims, they—and other writers of advice narratives—make fairly unsubstantiated claims like these about writing center directors and their responsibilities.

Another example of the advice narrative is Sally Crisp’s (2000) “One Leading the Writing Center: A Sort of Credo and Some Advice for Beginners and Oldtimers, Too.” Crisp begins by situating the need for her advice.

A young colleague and I visited as we left a session at the first NWCA conference in New Orleans. We were continuing the conversation the session had inspired when she asked me—with some urgency, some frustration in her voice—“Why don’t they tell us how it’s really done?” She went on, then, to confess a feeling of inadequacy as a new writing center director. She told me she had “grown up” professionally as a tutor in the writing center and had come to feel confident and competent in one-on-one teaching. Now she needed to supervise the center’s staff, plan the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Elizabeth H. Boquet
• Preface: On Collaborative Research
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Methods
• 3 Allison
• 4 Anthony
• 5 Darya
• 6 Isatta
• 7 Jennifer
• 8 Joe
• 9 Katerina
• 10 Mandy
• 11 Sara
• 12 Discussion and Conclusion
• Appendix: Participant Matrix
• References
• About the Authors
• Index