My research questions are grounded in how we can improve activities of study, administration, and pedagogy in writing studies. This means a focus on how writing program administration can be understood through design thinking because of a shared emphasis on flexibility and human-centeredness. In addition to theorizing and supporting what I’m calling agile writing program administration, I engage in research that promotes further advancement of empirical research in writing studies through areas like user-centered survey design and mentorship of early-career academic researchers in our field.
Agile Writing Program Administration
My dissertation project, “Mentoring, advocacy, resilience: Investigating strategies of agility by writing program administrators,” asks what we can learn from Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) who supported teaching and learning in a difficult time to understand teaching and administration within a framework that understands education is constantly undergoing change. My study began with a survey (n=55) collecting information from WPAs on how they targeted support to instructors in 2020’s Emergency Remote Teaching before moving to two-part interviews (n=13) that included narratives of that support, reflections on programmatic decisions, and analysis of texts created to support instructors and students.
My study’s questions have already led to two publications. In “New priorities in strange times: How writing programs navigated Emergency Remote Teaching” (Computers and Composition Online, 2023), I use my study’s survey to discuss how WPA work is rooted in institutional context–but that support and policy-setting necessarily keeps the wellbeing of students and instructors at its center. In “Agile writing programs” (PARS in Charge, ed.s Borgman & McArdle, 2023), I ask: what does it mean to not just be prepared for big events like the COVID-19 pandemic, but to be agile in the face of ongoing change? In addition, I have drafted an article with Kailyn Shartel Hall to be submitted for Writing Program Administration, “Programmatic assessment as administrative rhetorical mindfulness: Fostering community and professional development as gWPAs,” describing our experience as graduate WPAs strategically responding to changes in our local writing program.
A Toolkit for Agility
Administrative agility leads to my next step: “Staples, substitutions, and the kitchen sink: A toolkit for agile writing program administration,” currently under development. “Staples & substitutions,” an open-access, web-based resource, uses findings from my dissertation study to identify WPA practices and provide evidence-backed tools for reframing these practices to be agile for ongoing change. For example, how can WPAs support their programs in ways that make modality shifts smoother? The first iteration of this toolkit is being developed in collaboration with user experience design (UXD) majors in Purdue’s Experience Studio.
“Staples & substitutions” is necessarily an iterative project: more empirical research should be done on the work WPAs do, especially across institutional contexts, and research will continue on whether the toolkit is continuing to meet needs of the field. I will use my first two years as a faculty member to plan a cycle for content development, updating, and testing with room for mentorship of student research assistants and more interdisciplinary collaborations. For that content, it will be necessary to engage in more research–both of existing knowledge in the field and with original data collection–to ensure tools are updated for the adapting needs of higher education. I will conduct further user research including testing, as well, to ensure the tools are usable and helpful. I have already begun networking with potential collaborators in my discipline to find an online host for “Staples & substitutions.”
In the long-term, I hope to use “Staples & substitutions” for the mentoring of students–in writing studies, empirical research methods, and digital content development and testing–and for connecting with collaborators at other institutions and in other disciplines. Overall, this toolkit will serve as an example of nontraditional scholarship and of how design thinking can be applied to many facets of our work as educators.
Writing Program Administrator as Designer
“Staples & substitutions,” when paired with my dissertation work, leads me to my planned book project, The Writing Program Administrator as Designer, in whichI will theorize what it means to understand the WPA as a technical communicator to imagine how the many tasks of program administration can be supported by the iteration, flexibility, and human-centeredness of design thinking. The work I want to do in my ongoing scholarship, in part, will answer Purdy’s (2014) call to consider what design thinking can offer writing studies; while scholars like Tham (2021) and Bay et al. (2018) have discussed the usefulness of design thinking in technical communication pedagogy, my intervention brings it into conversation with practices of writing program administration.
As the pandemic highlighted (though WPAs were already aware), writing program administration work is frequently faced with wicked problems, and I want to follow the lead of scholarship like Leverenz (2014) to explore how design thinking, for this specific type of work, can help meet those problems. To do so will require that I approach my book project through a design thinking process: I will begin by empathizing through investigating (through interviews, surveys, and focus groups) the wide range of tasks WPAs undertake across varying contexts in higher education. I will then need to define the parts of these wicked problems as well as the components of those tasks, before ideating flexible, agile, and human-centered radical ways of addressing those problems. I will be able to use my toolkit “Staples & substitutions” to prototype and test these ideas, although the book project will not just be an extension of the toolkit’s work; however, the book will posit that this kind of research benefits from a lively, continuous design process like what I hope to undertake with the toolkit.
Empirical Research in Writing Studies: Beyond WPA work, Beyond the US
As above, I want my research to be applicable beyond the tasks of writing program administration, although that is my main field of study. This is another area, however, where I believe the field can benefit from design thinking. One project in particular I would like to pursue is a manuscript using expertise like Jarrett (2021) to improve the design of surveys in writing studies to make data collection for our empirical research more effective and user-centered. Design thinking–particularly empathizing with survey-users and testing survey usability before distribution–could not just make the survey process less frustrating for participants, but elicit more data for the researcher.
Additionally, in 2023 I attended the Writing Research Across Borders Conference and learned about writing and literacy research happening at multiple levels of education and in varying international contexts in a way that helped de-center US writing studies research in my mind. In that experience, I found that researchers across disciplines and institutional contexts still have shared questions we can work together on–one being mentorship of graduate students in humanities fields such as writing studies. I share this interest and want to examine further how research groups in the humanities which mimic lab groups in STEM (such as the one I participate in with my advisor Dr. Bradley Dilger) can help formalize some of this mentorship. I am also interested in how graduate researcher positionality plays into new empirical research in the field, and I have discussed editing a special journal issue on the subject alongside Dr. Allegra W. Smith. I aim to examine avenues for graduate mentorship in the humanities for a paper or panel in the 2026 WRAB Conference and to become more involved in the hosting organization, the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research, to continue to shift and challenge my understanding of what writing research can be.
Marisa Yerace 