My dissertation study focuses on writing program administration work because I think the ways that administration puts disciplinary knowledge, research, and teaching into practice is a rich site of exploration. As reflected in my dissertation title, I understand these practices through three principles: mentoring, advocacy, and resilience. These guide policymaking and programmatic decisions to focus on the most important part of any educational unit–its people.
Mentoring
Frequently, WPAs provide one-on-one guidance and assistance to teachers and students. In my own experience, this mentorship must be personalized, context-specific, and aware of the power dynamics at play. For example, when I worked as Assistant Director of Composition at Purdue and college-wide teaching awards were announced for graduate assistants, I, with the writing program team, identified teachers who could nominate themselves and offered hands-on help and feedback with their applications. I regularly collaborated with instructors who were innovating in their courses and developed opportunities for them to share their good work as part of our program’s ongoing professional development initiatives like workshops and online resources. Finding these opportunities to professionalize instructors leverages our existing local strengths in the writing program to uplift instructors into leaders among their peers–it also means, as administrators, that we can continue to find ways to learn from smart people in the program.
Advocacy
In addition to the personal connections needed to support administrative work, another side of administration is frequently advocating for teachers and students to stakeholders outside of your program or department. In this, I focus on claims that are evidence-based and student-centered. Through discussions with instructors who complete program assessment rating, we draw evidence for reports to the institution. Instructors and the writing program team revisit these processes for collecting evidence and identifying student needs regularly to iterate on them. This ensures our evidence and goals are meeting the advocacy needs of the program and are offering the professional development desired by our instructors. Further, my experience and research shows that student-centered arguments are the best framing for teachers, administrators, and other audiences. To support these arguments, I have helped to strengthen collaborations between the Composition program and offices like Summer Sessions, Undergraduate Research, and the Writing Lab, leading to initiatives like collaborative grant applications for curriculum development. These collaborations add evidence for those arguments and offer new opportunities to center student needs in curriculum and instruction.
Resilience
In my research on WPA work in the early pandemic, and in my own administrative efforts as education changed after the initial crisis, resilience has arisen as a problematic term that has long been used to discredit underserved communities disproportionately impacted by crises and as a buzzword used to enforce a “work as normal” ethic in a time that was not normal. Instead, through my research and practice, I try to reframe these work ethics while still understanding that many see teaching as a calling and can often fall into overwork. I and my colleagues think about agility in terms of program design, asking how the next crisis can be navigated without leaving behind teachers and students. Indeed, my research shows that WPAs often create their own definition of resilience–aided by that agility–wherein success is defined by the wellbeing of teachers and students rather than more quantitative measurements. This remains a core principle in my own administrative practice.
Marisa Yerace 