GOING PUBLIC
What Writing Programs Learn from EngagementUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-769-8Contents
Introduction: The WPA as Citizen-Educator Shirley K Rose and Irwin Weiser...........................................................................................................................................................11 Infrastructure Outreach and the Engaged Writing Program Jeff Grabill..............................................................................................................................................................152 Centering Community Literacy: The Art of Location within Institutions and Neighborhoods Michael H. Norton and Eli Goldblatt.......................................................................................................293 The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project: A Hands-On, Experiential Course on School-College Articulation David A. Jolliffe.........................................................................................................504 The Illusion of Transparency at an HSI: Rethinking Service and Public Identity in a South Texas Writing Program Jonikka Charlton and Colin Charlton...............................................................................685 A Hybrid Genre Supports Hybrid Roles in Community-University Collaboration Timothy Henningsen, Diane Chin, Ann Feldman, Caroline Gottschalk-Druschke, Tom Moss, Nadya Pittendrigh, and Stephanie Turner Reich.....................856 Apprenticing Civic and Political Engagement in the First Year Writing Program Susan Wolff Murphy..................................................................................................................................1107 Wearing Multiple Hats: How Campus WPA Roles Can Inform Program-Specific Writing Designs Jessie L. Moore and Michael Strickland....................................................................................................1228 Students, Faculty and "Sustainable" WPA Work Thia Wolf, Jill Swiencicki, and Chris Fosen..........................................................................................................................................1409 The Writing Center as Site for Engagement Linda S. Bergmann.......................................................................................................................................................................16010 Not Politics as Usual: Public Writing as Writing for Engagement Linda Shamoon and Eileen Medeiros................................................................................................................................17711 Coming Down from the Ivory Tower: Writing Programs' Role in Advocating Public Scholarship Dominic DelliCarpini...................................................................................................................19312 The WPA as Activist: Systematic Strategies for Framing, Action, and Representation Linda Adler-Kassner...........................................................................................................................21613 Writing Program Administration and Community Engagement: A Bibliographic Essay Jaclyn M. Wells...................................................................................................................................237About the Authors....................................................................................................................................................................................................................256
Chapter One
INFRASTRUCTURE OUTREACH AND THE ENGAGED WRITING PROGRAM Jeff Grabill
This chapter is about writing programs, infrastructure, and the forms of work that can be supported by them. In particular, this chapter is about "engagement" as a form of intellectual work that writing programs are well-suited to support but that will, in turn, change the writing program that becomes engaged.
I argue here that a writing program constitutes a type of infrastructure that supports work. By "work," I am trying to name a category of activity that is broader than the commonplace activity of a writing program-teaching, learning, and administration. I mean that activity plus a range of activities associated with research and outreach in particular. Bounding or defining this activity is not important. What is more important is to understand a writing program as an infrastructure that "does work." That is, a writing program can be said to be the author of things such as a curriculum or a mission or an ethos. At the same time, a writing program enables the work of others-students, teachers, advisors, researchers-however that activity is understood. A writing program is both author and aggregator. As infrastructure, a program is a variable assemblage of people, technologies, missions, purposes, and other material and discursive things that is configurable. Because the meaning of infrastructure is emergent, I see the meaning of a writing program as something that is a function of the work of the writing program itself. In other words, infrastructure, as I will discuss below, is not stable, fixed-visible even-but rather emerges-becomes visible and meaningful-through use. What a writing program does, therefore, helps determine what it is. In many ways, this is an obvious statement, but the implications are potentially significant, as I hope to illustrate.
Given this understanding of institutional systems, I take up in this one recent challenge for writing programs: how various forms of outreach work (such as service learning) have required (or not) the support and resources of the writing program, and, therefore, have changed the very nature of programs themselves. Writing programs have become very complicated arrays of teaching, research, outreach, and service activity. I see tremendous potential in this situation for writing programs to become-much more explicitly-infrastructure that supports a range of intellectual activities of great value to the university. In particular, I take up the notion of "outreach" as a form of intellectual work that puts a particular kind of pressure on writing programs. I will then explore why I think writing programs constitute a powerful and potentially transformative infrastructure for outreach and engagement. Transformative for students and teachers, certainly, but-just as importantly-transformative for universities as a location for high impact experiences and not "merely" service.
OUTREACH AND THE WORK OF WRITING PROGRAMS
There is a distinction in this section that is important to keep in mind, and that is the difference among the work of faculty, the work of students, and the work of programs. This distinction is best understood as a tension, and it is a tension that I want to leave in place and just below the surface of the discussion here. In the interests of focus and space, I also set aside how we understand the work of students as part of the larger activity of a writing program. Student labor is often overlooked (see Horner 2000; DeJoy 2004 for examples to the contrary), and I believe this to be a significant mistake. I am mindful of making this mistake, but I need to do so largely because my concern here is for understanding "outreach" as a type of intellectual work and as a way of valuing intellectual work, and this is primarily a faculty and institutional issue. "Outreach" is not a common way to describe either faculty or programmatic work. The categories of research, teaching, and service are still the primary categories by which faculty work is understood and measured, despite many well-known attempts to displace or modify these categories.
Of these attempts to rethink the work of the university and establish new ways to understand and value intellectual work (e.g., Boyer 1997), one of the more interesting attempts is the 1996 report by the MLA Commission on Professional Service, which takes as one of its starting places the imbalance between research, teaching, and service. The commission notes that service in particular is almost completely ignored or seen as an activity lacking "substantive idea content and significance" (171). In response, the MLA Commission on Professional Service offers a rearticulation of research, teaching, and service into "intellectual work" and "academic and professional citizenship," with research, teaching, and service recast as sites of activity that can be found in both categories. I find this way of thinking compelling, but it doesn't seem to have caught on. There are at least three difficult issues here: one is the persistent problem with the category of "service" in terms of larger institutional value systems; a second (for my purposes here) is the fact that all of these conversations about work and value concern themselves exclusively with individuals and not groups; and a third (again for my purposes here) is the rather impoverished way that "off-campus" or "engaged" work is understood. Engaged or community work is often understood as "service," and "service" is no way to make a career or to build and maintain a program. I would like to cut across these categories by building on Michigan State University's (MSU) attempts to use "outreach" to name a form of intellectual work that may be particularly appropriate to describe the work of writing programs.
The MSU version of the story begins with a 1993 report to the provost entitled "University Outreach at Michigan State University: Enabling Knowledge to Serve Society." The committee that authored the report convened at the start of 1992 and was charged with "articulating an intellectual foundation for outreach and making recommendations for further strengthening university outreach at Michigan State University" (iii). Significantly for the report and for my purposes here, the committee argued for a notion of outreach that saw it as distinct from service, that was cross-cutting, and that was a mode of scholarship. While the authors recognize diversity and even disagreement regarding the concept of "scholarship," in this context, the committee understood scholarship as a research activity, a teaching activity, and even as a function of service: "Teaching, research, and service are simply different expressions of the scholar's central concern: knowledge and its generation, transmission, application, and preservation" (1). And so, consequently, "outreach has the same potential for scholarship as the other major academic functions of the University" (2).
In this respect, outreach serves two functions as the name for a category of work. It is a way of creating a new space within the typical trinity of university research, teaching, and service, and it is a way of calling attention to off-campus and engaged activity. Not surprisingly, the primary distinction in the 1993 report between outreach and non-outreach activities is where the activity takes place. Roughly speaking, off-campus work qualifies as outreach, on-campus work does not. But outreach as a category of work is not simply distinguished by location. It is meant as a value statement, and in particular, it is an argument for a type of work that should be integral to the mission of a university. The argument is that a university that doesn't see, encourage, and value scholarly work across its research and teaching mission and with those outside the university is diminished. I am being provocative with my language because the claim that outreach be central to the mission of a university has a specific history. If I were to be more tempered here, I might more modestly assert that outreach is integral to the mission of land and sea grant institutions and of institutions with similar missions. Indeed, the use of "outreach" in the ways that I have presented it here enables it to be a driver for change. Therefore, outreach research is necessarily different from "disciplinary" research. The same goes for teaching and service. Outreach transforms standard categories of work.
In Table 1, I attempt to capture the cross-cutting nature of outreach as a category of work and at the same time highlight gaps and problems in existing work categories. The shaded cells of the table are those categories of work that are discussed in the MSU report and also the categories that are relevant for promotion, tenure, and merit review for MSU faculty. Interestingly, this table calls into question the idea of "outreach" as a category of work parallel with research, teaching, or service. That is, it asks, is there such a thing as "pure" outreach? I don't think so, nor do I think that there should be. Instead, what MSU has in place-and what I am suggesting is appropriate-is a set of cross-cutting hybrids: outreach research that is research that takes place outside the normal on-campus spaces where research is thought to take place; outreach teaching, which is teaching that is said to take place in off-campus settings; and outreach service, which is the way to understand service to the broader community. This table illustrates, among other things, the basic spatial distinction between on-campus and off-campus work.
There are significant problems with this understanding of university work, however. For instance, one wonders if all research that takes place off-campus is "outreach research"? Of course not. In some disciplines, all inquiry takes place off-campus, and much off-campus research has no outreach component and no "engagement" ethic. The same sorts of questions can be asked of "outreach teaching." I have argued for community-based research as a particular methodological practice (see Grabill 2007), and I believe that outreach research (or teaching and service) should be similarly transformative for participants and therefore act as the driver for change that it was intended to be in the MSU context. There are, then, two components to the concept of "outreach." One is its concern with location and the other its focus on transformative engagement. The first value was clearly stated in the original 1993 report. The second value-engagement-was less visible, is less concrete, but nonetheless is part of the concept as currently understood.
Understanding and naming value is core to the project of establishing a concept like outreach. The authors of the 1993 report spend most of their time on issues of value, because they recognize that the institutional challenge is to make outreach work visible, rewarding, and rewarded. This is a similarly critical concern for any academic interested in outreach work as part of her own career trajectory or as a type of work to be valued by a writing program. If it is not visible and valuable to the institution, then it is risky work. For programs, it is probably then impossible work. Since that 1993 report, MSU has indeed created a category for outreach in reappointment, promotion, and tenure documents and forms. In 1996, another MSU faculty committee prepared an assessment tool called Points of Distinction: A Guidebook for Planning and Evaluating Quality Outreach, which is used as part of faculty review processes. MSU also collects regular data on outreach activity. Yet MSU is a research university, and so everyone at MSU understands that research activity is most valued and service least valued. What outreach as a category of work allows, however, is the ability to position community-based and other activity outside the university in a value system that avoids the label of service. This much is obvious, I know. What is more meaningful are the cross-cutting categories, particularly categories like outreach-research and outreach-teaching. Here it is possible not only to frame community-based teaching, for instance, differently and in a way that might more carefully capture its complexity, but it is also possible to use that teaching activity to drive change within a department, program, or college in terms of how that activity is understood and valued. Therefore, I don't see the use of outreach as a discrete category of work or the MSU model as an ideal system. Nor do I necessarily see it as a preferred model. Rather, I see this cross-cutting system as having heuristic value for making visible and intelligible the activity of a writing program that can easily be rendered invisible, making the writing program itself invisible. It is to this task that I turn next.
DISTRIBUTED WRITING PROGRAM, DISTRIBUTED WORK
I use the concept of "infrastructure" both conceptually and materially to describe chains of agencies that "get things done" (Grabill 2007; DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill 2005; Star and Ruhleder 1996; Bowker and Star 1999). For Star and Ruhleder (1996) infrastructure is significantly but not completely material. It can be understood as stable at a given time and space, but its meaning and value cannot be said to be stable. It is a function of activity-that is, infrastructure emerges as infrastructural because of activity. This variability in the status of infrastructure as infrastructure is due in part to its invisibility. Infrastructure is often invisible, especially if it is working well. Star and Ruhleder describe infrastructure as having qualities like embeddedness, transparency, spatial and temporal scope, modularity, and standardization. Infrastructure is also learned as part of membership in groups or communities and linked deeply to conventional practices, and it is these elements of infrastructure that give the concept its human and cultural dimensions (113). In many ways, infrastructure is object-oriented in that any given infrastructure describes a relationship among objects-including humans-that by their interactions "do work." Infrastructure emerges, then, in a given time and place as both visible and meaningful, often because it breaks-or is broken-by use. The argument that I make with this concept of infrastructure is that if we want to understand the rhetorical work that people do together, we must render visible the infrastructure that remains (or wants to remain) invisible and that supports, locates-participates in-that rhetorical work. We must assemble it, and in doing so, we begin to render visible and available to us a set of agencies that are not exclusively human but that are essential to rhetorical work.
That is, admittedly, a quick overview of a difficult and slippery concept. I use it here, however, in a rather simple way. I want to call attention to the fact that infrastructures are required for work to happen, that they can be designed (to some degree), and that they are composed of an articulation of material and conceptual, human and non-human elements. Writing programs are infrastructure. They are assemblies of things-sometimes assembled by design, often not. I intend to use this concept as I turn to a particular writing program infrastructure (MSU's) as an example of a writing program as infrastructure for a kind of out-reach-research work that I believe writing programs have the capacity to do better than most other university infrastructures. I focus on outreach-research because both terms are relevant here and perhaps unusual. To think of writing programs as infrastructure for outreach and for research is, in my view, to place writing programs in a new category within taxonomies of university programs.
What does the writing program at MSU look like? It consists of a number of degree programs, administrative entities, and institutional locations. There is a department (Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures-WRAC), a writing center, a graduate program that is a college-level program, and a research center (Writing in Digital Environments-WIDE). Faculty are commonly shared; most of the faculty in the graduate program have their tenure home in WRAC, for instance. And some physical space is shared-the graduate program and research center share some space and resources. However, each entity is independently administered. There are few shared students, however, as each of the degree programs serves a distinct group of students, the writing center serves the entire campus, and WIDE has no formal relationship with the teaching mission of any unit.
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