For almost 30 years, our university has followed the single writing program administrator (WPA) model. This is not particularly unusual, though. Kelly Belanger and Sibylle Gruber (2005) note that at most universities, a single WPA oversees the key components of the composition program, such as curricular design of the entry-level course, the graduate teaching assistant (GTA) practicum, and program assessment. At our university, the WPA also chairs the departmental Composition Committee and oversees dual and AP credit. By design, our WPA has been the critical point of contact for any programmatic change.
Juan C. Guerra and Anis Bawarshi (2005) warn that the single WPA model can give the perception that the composition program is “so and so’s program” and morph into no less than a “cult of personality.” Because criticism of the program is construed as criticism of the WPA, faculty and administrators may become hesitant to vocalize concerns about the program. Gurerra and Bawarshi rightly contend that this “cult of personality” can thwart attempts to institute programmatic change (p. 54). This had been the case at our university.
“Out of sight and out of mind” was almost a guiding principle within our department. Faculty were thrilled when a national search over a decade ago culminated in finding someone who was willing to administer the writing program after the previous Director of Composition retired. Given that almost all sections of Writing I are staffed by graduate teaching assistants, the English Department is allotted the highest number of graduate teaching assistantships on campus. The hiring of a WPA assured departmental faculty that there would continue to be ample graduate teaching assistantships awarded to graduate students in their program areas (Composition Theory/Rhetoric, Creative Writing, English Education, Literature, Technical and Professional Writing, and TESOL).
A quick disclaimer may be needed. We are aware of Sidney Dobrin’s (2005) concern that texts addressing issues about the composition practicum tend to gravitate toward the personal/experiential (p. 30). Indeed, we openly acknowledge that we are grounding our discussion in the experiences and practices of our home institution’s practicum. However, as long as institutions conceive of a writing program as synonymous with a single administrator, discussions will continue to gravitate toward the personal. Contrary to Dobrin’s contention that such discussions fail to address “the very idea of the practicum in more theoretical/political ways,” we find ourselves reaffirming yet again that the personal is political. The composition practicum is not an isolated space/place; it is a symbiotic system, an ecosystem, within a specific department. Though institutionally specific experiences may not have direct applicability to other institutions, the lessons shared can serve as catalysts for other compositionists to gain institutional perspective about their particular ecosystem.
To understand the ecosystem of our unique composition practicum, it is necessary to first provide some institutional history. In typical academic years, the English Department awards approximately 30 graduate teaching assistantships to our master’s students. The awards are staggered so that approximately half of the GTAs are in their first year and half are in their second year of teaching. Each GTA is responsible for teaching two sections of Writing I. (Depending upon departmental need, a handful of second year GTAs may teach other courses, such as basic writing or Writing II.) To prepare for teaching Writing I at our institution, GTAs complete a 2-week orientation before the Fall semester, enroll in ENG 720: Composition Theory during their first semester, and participate in a weekly practicum (ENG 703) during their first year of teaching. The orientation, the three-hour graduate theory course, and the weekly practicum have historically been built into the faculty workload of the Director of Composition. Over the years, the single WPA model has led to less and less transparency about programmatic decisions, such as the discontinuation of GTA classroom observations, the lack of an ENG 703 syllabus, and a dormant Composition Committee. Because these were autonomous decisions made by the Director, there was growing concern about lack of oversight. Though a Composition Committee had been created to provide a venue for programmatic collaboration, the departmental bylaws designated the Director of Composition as the chair of the committee. More importantly, the bylaws clarified that the committee’s role was to “advise” the Director in matters concerning the composition program. This description gave quite a bit of leeway to the Director, especially given that the bylaws did not stipulate a required number of meetings per year or semester. If advice was not needed (or desired), the Director could make programmatic decisions in isolation.
Over the years, the composition practicum (ENG 703) had garnered the reputation of being a glorified “gripe session.” Many faculty were aware of the informal comments shared among GTAs in the hallways. Several GTAs would stand outside the practicum classroom lamenting “another wasted hour” before going into the classroom. A few GTAs even vented behind closed doors in confidence to faculty in a variety of program areas about the practicum. Still other GTAs made it known that they really did not need to attend the practicum and so would schedule student conferencing at the same time as the practicum. While faculty were empathetic to the concerns of the GTAs, none took their concerns to the Director or the Department Head. Thus, the GTAs took it upon themselves to initiate programmatic change. An informal anonymous survey was created and distributed by a handful of GTAs and given to all GTAs. The results were then shared with the Department Head. The results provided written evidence that over half of the GTAs questioned the value of the composition practicum. After scrubbing the survey results of identifying information, the Department Head shared the results with the Composition Committee. Several respondents referred to the practicum as a supportive “group therapy session.” While respondents acknowledged how the practicum was helpful for building community, comments revealed confusion about the purpose for the required composition practicum: “I don’t feel like much is accomplished in 703,” “If no one is having problems, the class becomes dead space,” and “It was just 2 hours out of my week where I sat and listened to people talk.” Perhaps the most disconcerting response was that “ENG 703 didn’t seem helpful to teaching composition.”
Upon being made aware of the informal survey, members of the Composition Committee urged the Director of Composition to convene a meeting. The delicate ecosystem of the composition practicum appeared to be out of balance. The practicum was not meeting the needs of the GTAs, and it was affecting the symbiotic relationship they felt with the host. In “What Are the Causes of the Destruction of Ecosystem?” Tamara Moffett (2018) identifies the two top causes of destruction as pollution and climate change. When the Composition Committee raised the concerns of the GTAs about the practicum, the Director quickly dismissed the concerns as “pollution”; one disgruntled GTA was trying to sway the other GTAs.
Pollution can certainly deplete resources and drive away local populations (Moffett, 2018). Any faculty member can vouch that it takes just one or two students to destroy the delicate ecosystem that is the classroom. Accepting this explanation, Composition Committee members asked the Director for a copy of the ENG 703 syllabus as a way to counter the characterization of the composition practicum as an isolated “gripe session” or “group therapy session.” After multiple requests, it became clear that no syllabus was forthcoming or on file with the departmental office, even though faculty are required to submit a copy of syllabi for all classes each semester.
The Director’s refusal to share a syllabus accentuated the concern about oversight. Catherine Latterall’s (1996) observation was quite accurate: a practicum meeting one hour per week can convey the message to colleagues that the Director simply passes out class activities and other quick fixes. Though Latterall urged WPAs to consider carefully the message that they send to colleagues about the practicum, the Director at our institution had not. By treating the practicum as an isolated space, the Director had disrupted the ecosystem, but this time externally. The Composition Committee felt at a loss for how to reestablish the equilibrium of this ecosystem. No longer was it assumed, by GTAs or faculty, that the composition practicum was a necessary or even useful course. Unlike the history of composition practicums articulated by Dobrin (2005) in his introduction to Don’t Call It That: The Composition Practicum, the concern surrounding the composition practicum at our institution did not seem to be simply a reflection of the infamous theory/practice debate, that is, the type of content taught within the course. Instead, the concern seemed more dire—more like the concern voiced by the Dean of the Graduate School at Marquette University. As Joseph Schwartz (1955) explains, the Dean wondered if there was even “sufficient content in a course of this nature to justify giving graduate credit for it” (p. 201, emphasis added).
Committee members reasoned that another way to mitigate concerns about ENG 703 might be to show some written record of classroom observations that the Director had performed as a part of the practicum. Unfortunately, this request could not be met. The Director explained that no classroom observations had been conducted in GTA classes over the last several years because such observations were “not really productive.” Committee members were surprised, especially because the assumption had been that this was part of the Director’s workload (yet one more example of how embedded our institution was in the WPA=writing program model). The committee members realized just how little they knew about what was actually happening within the composition practicum. This was a concern, especially given that the makeup of the Composition Committee included all full-time composition faculty, the dual-credit coordinator, and one faculty member elected from the faculty. Members of the committee realized that they were insufficiently prepared to lobby for the necessity of the composition practicum, aside from resorting to hypothetical platitudes about the value of composition practicums in general. This became readily apparent at the next departmental retreat when ENG 703 became an unexpected topic of discussion, and the Director of Composition was not present.
Several of the English faculty members openly expressed concern about the composition practicum and no longer felt that their graduate program areas could support ENG 703 as a required course for degree completion. These program areas preferred to have graduate students take an additional 3-hour course in their respective programs. The implications of this decision were not lost on faculty. If ENG 703 remained a requirement for a graduate teaching assistantship, GTAs in those programs would be forced to pay for the course because it would not be covered by their tuition waiver. The Graduate College has clear guidelines regarding the tuition waiver offered as part of a graduate assistantship: “The fee waiver will pay for graduate level courses that are part of your primary graduate program being pursued (i.e., on the program of study).” Given the unique nature of the graduate assistantships in the English Department, the Graduate College has always granted the waiver at 110% of tuition. This translates to covering one graduate course beyond those graduate courses required for the student’s particular program of study. Historically, the required 3-hour composition theory course (ENG 720) was this additional course. The composition practicum (ENG 703) had simply been absorbed by each program into the program of study requirements.
The shift made by two of the six program areas to not include ENG 703 in their program requirements moved the financial burden onto the GTAs. Furthermore, the shift created inequity among the GTAs because some could count ENG 703 toward their program requirements and some could not. Heated discussion ensued about the ethical quandary of requiring GTAs to pay for a composition practicum, especially given that many GTAs are in programs other than composition theory/rhetoric. GTAs had never been given the option to attend ENG 703 but not enroll as happens in the Kansas State University’s program described by Deborah Murray (2005). Our department’s discussion surrounding the composition practicum defaulted to an issue of economics similar to the discussions described by Dobrin (2005) in which faculty disagreed about “the economics of moving graduate students through their degree programs efficiently (in terms of both their funding and the efficiency of granting regular degrees)” (p. 23). Our conversation about economics then led to a litany of other faculty complaints, everything from the number of assistantships allocated to graduate students in particular programs to why all assistantships needed to be teaching assistantships. (Note: This is a requirement established by the Provost Office, not our department.)
Institutional politics have surrounded the composition practicum almost since its inception, not just at our university, but at many other universities as well (Thomas, 1916; Hunting, 1951; Allen, 1952; Roberts, 1955; Kitzhaber, 1955; Hesse, 1993). Thus, climate change is certainly not a concern unique to our university. However, mantras such as “think globally, act locally” served as powerful reminders to us that the way to combat climate change is first through local action. As the United Nations Climate Change (2022) portal emphasizes, “Thinking and acting at a local level helps communities fight climate change and build resilience to climate impacts.” In an attempt to address the changing climate within the department, the Composition Committee acted at an extreme local level.
Fortuitously, at the same time that the composition practicum was coming under scrutiny by faculty, our department was in the midst of a major revision of our departmental bylaws. The bylaws had not been updated in any substantial way since 2004, and it was discovered that even those proposed changes had not been officially approved by the department. The actual bylaws governing our department were from 1997. Obviously, much had changed in our department since 1997, so each standing committee was asked to revisit the committee description in the bylaws and propose changes for the departmental faculty to consider. The Composition Committee took this opportunity to propose several changes to the committee’s description. The most substantial change was replacing the word “advise” with “oversee matters concerning the undergraduate and graduate composition program."
Another substantial change was recommended by the Department Head for all standing committees: the addition of a section labeled “Meetings” that specified when and how often the committee shall meet. The members of the Composition Committee proposed the following addition: “The Composition Committee shall meet at least twice in the Fall and Spring semesters and as needed. The committee will report to faculty as necessary and by making meeting notes available.” The Composition Committee hoped that this addition would improve transparency within the department. The committee also recommended a clear description of the purpose for the Composition Committee: “…to help the department keep abreast of issues related to the field of composition studies, review the needs of the composition program, and ensure that they are being met.” Again, it was hoped that this change to the bylaws would indirectly highlight the interconnectedness of the composition practicum to the department as a whole.
The Composition Committee’s proposed changes to the bylaws passed without much discussion in the departmental meeting, so the assumption was that the storm had somewhat subsided. This was not an accurate assumption. Early the next semester, our Department Head informed the Composition Committee that the credit-bearing ENG 703 would be taken off the course schedule and replaced next academic year by required “staff meetings” each week for the GTAs, much to the chagrin of the Director of Composition. From our Department Head’s perspective, the composition practicum was not sustainable.
Guerra and Bawarshi (2005) point out that change is almost inevitable during transition periods from one WPA to another. At our institution, though, the climate change precipitated the handing off of the composition program to a new WPA. Less than a month after the elimination of ENG 703, our Department Head approached the most senior composition faculty member (Margaret) and requested that she assume the role of Director of Composition beginning in June. Our Department Head was sensitive to the fragile cultural climate within the department and was astute at “recognizing these periods of transition as opportunity spaces, not for the enactment of another personality, but for thinking about the institutional and intellectual place of a writing program” (Guerra & Bawarshi, 2005, p. 54). Therefore, she simultaneously created a new position, an Assistant Director of Composition. What made this particularly noteworthy was that the Assistant Director position was offered to a faculty member within the Professional and Technical Writing program (Leslie), not the Composition/Rhetoric program. Faculty from two different program areas would coordinate the composition program.
We both agreed to accept our new positions knowing well that we were stepping into a political storm that had all but demolished the composition practicum. Semi-private hallway discussions, power struggles, and the single WPA model had taken their toil on our department. What we did not anticipate was the larger storm in our community. Within one week of agreeing to our new positions, the pandemic struck and we were faced with a different kind of threat—one that had deadly consequences. Our university, like most other universities, was forced to move totally online in March 2020. Faculty and GTAs were given an extra week of Spring Break to make the transition to an online modality. Although we were not scheduled to step into our new positions until June, the collapse of the ecosystem required our immediate attention. The GTAs had received no training to prepare them for this sudden modality shift. Word spread quickly (despite no official announcement) that there was going to be a change in WPAs beginning in June, so a handful of first year GTAs reached out for assistance. A limited number of professional ZOOM licenses were available from the university on a first come, first serve basis. After procuring one of the licenses that would allow for sessions longer than 40 minutes, Margaret provided several informal training sessions in online teaching and course design for these GTAs who reached out. Other pressing tasks included designing an online Directed Self Placement for students without ACT scores and developing a hybrid model for Writing I for the next academic year— tasks that were not anticipated when we agreed to step into our new positions in June.
In any semester prior to COVID, we would have begun our new roles by having face-to-face listening sessions with the various program areas. Therefore, this is what we did, albeit on ZOOM—back when ZOOM was an awkward new tool for those of us in academia. After two years of living in a ZOOM world, faculty have become intimately acquainted with this technology. However, in Spring 2020, this was not the case. Faculty struggled to log in, turn on microphones, post messages in the chat function, and toggle between gallery view and speaker view. The few meetings that remained on the Spring schedule were filled with continual reminders of how to use the technology. Nevertheless, ZOOM provided a way for faculty to interact with each in the same space and the same time. Faculty craved this interaction because it provided a respite from the silent online classes we were engaged in. It is not an understatement to say that ZOOM provided a way to begin to reestablish the equilibrium that had been disrupted by the composition practicum and the pandemic.
Before faculty dispersed for the summer, we scheduled listening sessions with faculty in each program area. We reasoned that smaller ZOOM sessions would create a more intimate albeit public forum for discussion, unhampered by the presence of the Department Head or faculty in other program areas. The sessions ranged in attendance from 3 to 7 faculty per session, and 20 of 27 colleagues voluntarily participated in the listening sessions. The email invite simply said that we wanted to have a “casual conversation about GTA training and the GTA program in general.” The robust attendance indicated that the composition practicum was not defunct. Faculty understood the symbiotic relationship between the practicum and the department, and they had a vested interest in its success.
The listening sessions were guided by three questions: What would you like for your graduate students to gain from the GTA program? What would you like to see? What are your concerns? As might be expected, much of the discussion was program-centric. Without exception, faculty expressed a desire for more assistantships to be awarded to students in their particular areas. TESOL faculty also wanted more international graduate students to be awarded assistantships. Faculty wanted all graduate students to “feel more empowered” and to “develop into young professionals” as a result of being part of our department’s GTA program. Faculty wanted to see training include such things as responding to student writing, grading student papers, building research and citation skills, and working with ESL students.
Our colleagues offered insightful suggestions, many of which we had not considered. For example, literature faculty expressed the need for a bootcamp for faculty who find themselves teaching Writing I at the last minute when one of their upper-division courses does not fill. Unbeknownst to us, the TESOL faculty were concerned about the “non-native” label used on particular sections of Writing I and suggested the use of “emerging bilingual.” Professional and Technical Writing faculty encouraged us to have GTAs complete the Blackboard training modules that are available online for faculty development. Creative Writing faculty suggested ways to incorporate more creative writing into Writing I by teaching techniques such as braiding, and one of the faculty members offered to share her teaching unit on braiding. English Education faculty emphasized the importance of modeling and building in feedback mechanisms during GTA training. What was perhaps the most profound observation we made through these faculty listening sessions was the desire of faculty to have public discussions about teaching. Several colleagues commented on how much they appreciated us asking them to share their insights.
In addition to faculty listening sessions, we also asked the GTAs who were returning for a second year to complete a written questionnaire. The questionnaire asked them to articulate the biggest challenges they had faced (in addition to moving their courses online), what they now wished they had known before they started teaching, pressing questions they had before they started teaching, resources they needed, readings that had been particularly helpful in their GTA preparation, concerns they had, what worked/did not work in the current Writing I curriculum, and what aspects of their teaching they excel at. Because our focus in this webtext is on faculty buy-in, we will not devote time to elaborating on the responses of the GTAs, except to say that their responses and the accompanying online listening session closely informed the design and content of the new hybrid Writing I curriculum, as well as the two-week GTA orientation before the start of the Fall semester and the weekly “staff meetings” the next academic year. The ZOOM listening session with the GTAs allowed us to transition away from the semi-private face-to-face interactions that had plagued our department.
As mentioned earlier, the membership of the Composition Committee includes all of the composition faculty in our department. Composition faculty recognized that one of the difficulties with the practicum was that the Director had treated it as an isolated space, not a complex ecosystem that influences and is influenced by other courses and faculty in the department. To push back on this perception, a subset of the committee, which included both of us, committed to participating in a campus-wide 2-day assessment workshop in May 2020.
Our initial goal was to create a formalized assessment of the learning that occurs as a result of being an English GTA. While course assessments can capture whether course objectives are met in ENG 720 (the required composition theory course), these assessments cannot adequately capture the learning that occurs as a result of the experience of teaching and participating in the composition practicum concurrently. Even if the Director had provided a syllabus for the composition practicum (ENG 703), course syllabi and assessments are designed to function as isolated artifacts. They are unable to provide an accurate glimpse into how the course functions as an ecosystem, interacting with other aspects of a program. Faculty are accustomed to developing learning outcomes for their respective programs within the department, but no prior WPA had articulated learning outcomes for the GTA program.
Informal data collection for our departmental self-study a few years ago revealed that from Fall 2009 to Fall 2018, 165 GTAs had completed graduate programs within our department. Of this number, 48 were currently employed as composition teachers, even though 24 of these students received degrees in program areas other than Composition/Rhetoric. Despite this data, no one had attempted to articulate the short-term and long-term benefits gained by requiring GTAs to participate in the composition practicum, in conjunction with the composition theory course and other courses within our department. Our overarching question at the assessment workshop was, what do graduate students learn by serving as GTAs in the English Department? During the workshop, we articulated specific learning outcomes for the GTA program and clearly identified how the composition practicum contributes to accomplishing and assessing these learning outcomes.
When June arrived and we “officially” stepped into our WPA roles, we returned to the question of what to do about the composition practicum (or what our Department Head was now labeling “staff meetings”). We began by making a conscious decision to prioritize faculty buy-in and to be more inclusive and transparent with the practicum. Our philosophy was to “open it up” and let faculty see what happens during the practicum.