Making Administrative Work Visible: Data-Driven Advocacy for Understanding the Labor of Writing Program Administration

Making Administrative Work Visible brings together voices from graduate students, associated faculty, administrative staff, and tenured and tenure-track faculty at community colleges, regional state universities, liberal arts colleges, private colleges, and research-intensive institutions across the country to speak to the challenges, both named and unnamed, faced by those who do writing program administration work. These authors call explicit attention to this work and examine WPAs’ lived labor experiences and research methodologies to truly understand the scope of lived WPA labor.

The collection has three parts, each of which focuses on the most confounding challenges facing WPAs as well as the most compelling sites of their contributions to administration, labor in higher education, and the discipline’s collective obligation to forwarding the goals of social justice and advocacy: Advocating through Representations of WPA Labor, Advocating by Accounting for Time and Labor, and Advocating in and through Complex Institutional Contexts. The chapters use data to share and track the work functions, job titles, grand narratives, program assessments, tenure and promotion, email practices, and more undertaken by WPAs in their administrative capacities. Chapters also surface narratives for future data and studies to be done by other scholars.

By taking up and answering questions about the range of WPA work—and the invisibility of much of that work—Making Administrative Work Visible creates avenues toward accounting for and acknowledging the complex activity systems in which WPAs lead the work of the university and advocate for data-driven strategies needed to sustain this foundational area of higher education.

Contributors: Kamila Albert, Brooke Anderson, Sheila Carter-Tod, Amy Cicchino, Ana Cortés Lagos, Kristi Murray Costello, Jennifer Cunningham, Ryan Dippre, Kimberly Emmons, Genevieve García de Müeller, Jill Gladstein, Caleb González, Michael Healy, Lyra Hilliard, Kristine Johnson, Seth Kahn, Rita Malenczyk, Troy Mikanovich, Lilian Mina, Angela Mitchell, Greer Murphy, Kate Navickas, Michael Neal, Patti Poblete, Jan Rieman, Heather Robinson, Katelyn Stark, Mary Stewart, Natalie Stillman-Webb, Lizbett Tinoco, Lisa Tremain, Martha Wilson Schaffer

Leigh Graziano is associate professor of English and director of the First-Year Writing program at Western Oregon University.
Kay Halasek is professor of English at The Ohio State University.
Remi Hudgins is a freelance writer and holds an MA from the Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Program in the Department of English at The Ohio State University.
Susan Miller-Cochran is professor of English and executive director of General Education at the University of Arizona, where she served as director of the Writing Program from 2015 to 2019.
Frank Napolitano is associate professor of English at Radford University, where he coordinated the Graduate Teaching Fellows Mentoring Program for ten years.
Natalie Szymanski is director of the College Writing Program at Buffalo State College, where she teaches courses in the College Writing Program and Writing and Rhetoric.