Ecologies of Writing Programs: Program Profiles in Context

WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION | Series Editors: Susan H. McLeod and Margot Soven | ECOLOGIES OF WRITING PROGRAMS: PROGRAM PROFILES IN CONTEXT contributes to our understanding of writing programs as complex ecological systems. The collection includes profiles of fifteen exemplary and innovative writing programs in their fluid, dynamic, and relational contexts, highlighting the ways in which writing programs-like all discursive systems-are ecologies. By examining writing programs as they exist within the context of interrelated, emergent institutional systems that are in constant flux, this collection complements broader perspectives on the history, theory, and practices of writing program administration, shifting the focus to how research and theory within the field of rhetoric and composition get enacted in particular programs and how histories and practices are enabled and constrained by particular institutional locations, contexts, and exigencies. With a focus on the constraints and challenges of developing writing programs, ECOLOGIES OF WRITING PROGRAMS also extends important critical discussions of the working conditions of WPAs, highlighting material and managerial matters, along with the conflicting cultural and institutional issues that shape and are shaped by WPA work. The organization of each section highlights these complex and dynamic interrelationships, reflecting how writing programs are located in their institutional sites (from first-year composition to writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines to undergraduate majors in rhetoric and composition); how the activities of writing program administrators carve out new spaces for collaborative relationships and interactions; and how WPAs reposition programs and are themselves repositioned as they explore new sites for writing program administration.

Bawarshi is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington, where he teaches courses in composition theory and pedagogy, genre theory, discourse analysis, and language policy.