Writing at the State U

Instruction and Administration at 106 Comprehensive Universities

Emily Isaacs

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781607326380
• eBook ISBN: 9781607326397
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Writing at the State U presents a comprehensive, empirical examination of writing programs at 106 universities. Rather than using open survey calls and self-reporting, Emily Isaacs uses statistical analysis to show the extent to which established principles of writing instruction and administration have been implemented at state comprehensive universities, the ways in which writing at those institutions has differed from writing at other institutions over time, and how state institutions have responded to major scholarly debates concerning first-year composition and writing program administration.

Isaacs's findings are surprising: state university writing programs give lip service to important principles of writing research, but many still emphasize grammar instruction and a skills-based approach, classes continue to be outsized, faculty development is optional, and orientation toward basic writing is generally remedial. As such, she considers where a closer match between writing research and writing instruction might help to expose and remedy these difficulties and identifies strategies and areas where faculty or writing program administrators are empowered to enact change.

Unique in its wide scope and methodology, Writing at the State U sheds much-needed light on the true state of the writing discipline at state universities and demonstrates the advantages of more frequent and rigorous quantitative studies of the field.

1
Teaching, Administering, and Supporting Writing at the State Comprehensive University

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Why State Comprehensive Universities?

Writing at the State U: Instruction and Administration at 106 Comprehensive Universities¹ presents a detailed, contextualized, and empirical analysis of the state of writing programming at four-year state comprehensive universities, a broad classification that includes research universities, MA-granting universities, and BA-granting colleges. The idea of this book began with an idea for another book: I wanted to write about the challenges but also possibilities for great writing instruction and support at US state comprehensive universities (SCUs),² as this was a subject with which I was deeply, and personally, familiar. I believed I had figured out how to be an effective writing program administrator (WPA) at my school, Montclair State University in New Jersey, although it had taken close to a decade of hard work to create, organize, and support writing curricula, programming, and approaches to staffing and faculty development of which I could be proud. Along the journey I had often felt apart—and sometimes excluded—from the scholarly conversation on writing program administration, as it was so often set within the context of the research university or, less frequently, the small college. I received invaluable support from the WPA listserv and from conference conversations where WPAs from SCUs abound. But my long and often lonely journey to develop a strong and well-regarded writing program at an SCU made me want to reach out and provide support to writing faculty and WPAs in similar situations and also to graduate faculty at research universities whose preparation of these faculty is limited by their own research-university contexts. From my conversations with WPAs and writing faculty at SCUs, I know many wonder how they can shape a good program without what the doctoral programs they had graduated from had been equipped with: graduate students to teach the majority of the classes (and who could be required to take a graduate class in writing studies); a staff of directors, coordinators, and secretaries; and a cohort of writing studies colleagues to work with, among other assets. The book I thought I’d write was inspired by my wish to show what could be done. (In fact, a lot can be done, and many departures from what is possible at a research university actually amount to a superior writing experience for the undergraduates we are pledged to serve because comprehensive universities, like BA-granting institutions, are typically less beholden to research and doctoral-education imperatives that can deemphasize undergraduate education).

However, I soon realized that what I really knew was what I had done at Montclair State University. I had a great case study. But I didn’t know much about what was happening in other writing programs at other SCUs that weren’t specifically represented in the scholarship or run by personal friends. With experience working with my colleague Melinda Knight on a study that used publicly available information to study writing at 101 top universities, I believed publicly available information would allow me to sample and explore a large number of SCUs so as to draw a much fuller, albeit bird’s-eye, portrait. With Melinda, I had found that much can be discovered about how an institution teaches and administers writing by combing carefully and systematically through publicly available information. With these goals and primary method established, I developed these research questions:

1. To what extent have established principles and practices of writing instruction and administration been implemented at state comprehensive universities?

2. In what ways is writing instruction at state comprehensive institutions, as a class, different from writing instruction at other classes of institutions, and from writing instruction at different historical time periods?

3. How are the major scholarly debates in FYC instruction and WP administration reflected—or not—at state comprehensive universities?

My strategy for investigating these questions was to collect existing data that would reasonably be available at all institutions in a large sample, from catalogs and other publicly available data, to get a robust, bird’s-eye view. But first I had to select a sample, thus raising the question, what is a state comprehensive university?

State Comprehensive Colleges and Universities: How They Fit in the Higher Education Landscape

The category of SCUs, also called regional public universities, is fairly broad, including selective state institutions (e.g., James Madison University in Virginia), large research universities (e.g., Texas A&M, Northern Arizona University), and even very small institutions (e.g., University of Maine at Presque Isle and Mayville State in North Dakota). As an institutional class, the SCU is subject to less scholarly attention than is the flagship state university, yet according to the association that represents SCUs, the American Association for State Colleges and Universities, collectively, SCUs enroll 3.8 million students, occupying a kind of middle ground within the public-education landscape between the most elite research university and the small private college or the community college. Informally, the SCU is well known in higher education and to the public; there are approximately 420 such institutions nationwide (American Association of State Colleges and Universities 2010).³ Thus, greater understanding of writing programming at SCUs is valuable not only to the institutions that fall under this classification but also to higher education and writing researchers who wish to understand the state of college writing in the country today. Surprisingly, to date, in the robust and expanding body of scholarship devoted to writing program administration, no writing scholar has specifically attended to SCUs as a class, even though these institutions grant baccalaureate degrees to half⁴ the students enrolled in public US four-year colleges and universities and 28 percent of all students attending private or public four-year colleges or universities (American Association of State Colleges and Universities 2014, 11).

Study Design

Institutional class selected, I designed my methods for investigation. Following Richard Haswell’s (2005) call for empirically based scholarship and bolstered by Dan Melzer’s (2009, 2014) work analyzing writing assignments through an Internet-based search process, among others, I sought a method that would enable me to speak broadly about national trends. Although researchers in writing studies have historically developed samples by sending out invitations to participate in a survey, for this study I chose to select a representative sample and gather most of my data independent of these participants. In choosing a master list of institutions to sample from, I selected the membership list of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), as I wanted a list that would provide a cross-section of colleges and universities that represent a broad and diverse range of public four-year institutions. AASCU schools range from student enrollments of 845 to 58,000, with an average enrollment of 10,430; collectively, they are responsible for educating 51 percent of all minority students and 48 percent of students who enroll in public four-year institutions (American Association of State Colleges and Universities 2014, 9–11),⁵ facilitating my goals of discovering what is happening in the vast middle of public, four-year higher education. The 106-institution sample was pulled from the AASCU list randomly after stratification by region and size.⁶ (I aimed for a sample of about 100 and ended up with 106, as this was the number that allowed for statistical representation of the sample in respect to region and size). Building on previous researchers’ methodologies (Burhans 1983; Sideris 2004), during the fall of 2011, I collected all catalogs or bulletins and searched institutional websites to find documents that provided answers to the variable list I had identified, drawing on the methodologies developed with Melinda Knight for the “top university study.” Thus, for each institution I have a host of assessment reports, captured websites, and schedule snapshots along with official catalogs or bulletins. Data were located in similar places: catalogs first and foremost but also Institutional Research reports, department and program websites, assessment units’ publications, and registrar documents and reports. This primary data set was then amplified by a survey distributed to identified and confirmed leaders at each of the schools; this method provided some additional data and allowed for triangulation through cross-checking.

Preliminary data gathered, to develop specific questions and a first draft of categories to use for sorting data pertaining to these questions, I drew on previous state-of-the-field studies, of which there are many, beginning with Warner Taylor in 1929 (see table 2.1 for a comprehensive list of studies). For some areas of inquiry, scholarship within the field prompted me to develop additional categories (e.g., prominent discussion of the writing-about-writing movement led me to include this category). These initial drafts of variables and associated categories (or values), developed prior to data collection, were expanded and revised significantly as I collected and reviewed the data (e.g., I added categories in placement methods, such as the international baccalaureate, as the data taught me about possibilities that previous researchers hadn’t discussed.) Thus, like many other writing studies researchers (e.g., Barton and Donahue 2009; Brandt 2014; Dadas 2013; Gladstein and Regaignon 2012; Purcell-Gates, Perry, and Briseno 2011), I was guided by a grounded-theory approach (Birks and Mills 2015; Glaser and Strauss 1967). Through a process of moving back and forth from research on other data sets to reviewing data I had collected, I created a list of 148 variables to guide my further data collection. The variable list is too lengthy for inclusion here, so it can be found in appendix D. I have arranged the variable list with notations that explain my sources for each variable, notations about my sources, and notations about how conflicts were resolved when conflicts existed between two sources (e.g., between the catalog and the survey response).

In the presentation of my study discoveries, I c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword by Anne Herrington
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Teaching, Administering, and Supporting Writing at the State Comprehensive University
• 2 Assessments of Writing Studies’ Practices: 1927 to the Present Study
• 3 The Back End of First-Year Composition: Institutional Support through Infrastructure and Policies
• 4 What Are We Doing with First-Year Composition?
• 5 Beyond First-Year Composition
• 6 Writing at the State Comprehensive U
• Appendix A: Methods
• Appendix B: Survey
• Appendix C: Coding Sheets
• Appendix D: List of Variables
• Appendix E: Sample List
• References
• About the Author
• Index