Respondents
The survey was designed to gather information about WPAs’ programmatic commitments to digital literacy
(the focus of this webtext) as well as to gather background information to contextualize an analysis of writing program websites (a discussion beyond the scope of the present text). Respondents were informed that the survey was concerned with the relationship between digital technology integration and writing program administration, and they were asked to consider their overall program goals, Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs), and the trajectory of their curriculum in their responses—all to ensure the study was focused on program-wide implementations rather than the efforts of individual teachers. To determine the total population to which I would send the survey, I first established criteria that defined a writing program for this study. First, I chose to make First-Year Composition (FYC) central to my definition of a writing program. FYC can be seen as a cornerstone of higher education in the US, and in most schools, the majority of students take FYC, which means this is where the bulk of a school’s students are provided support for their writing. Additionally, the administration of first-year writing programs is “the most common kind of WPA work,” according to Susan McLeod (2007, pp. 3-4). For these reasons, I selected FYC as an important site of study since the focus of the study was on program administration. Because of this focus on administration, I also decided to select programs that self-identified as a rhetoric, writing, and/or composition program or department. By self-identifying as a “program” or “department,” a writing program is an entity that may be part of, but is not subsumed by, an English Department. This enabled me to remove English Departments that offer writing courses but do not have an actual composition program. Additionally, the program needed an administrator—a WPA, Coordinator, or Director of writing courses. While my goal was to include as many writing programs as possible in this study, delineating these criteria (summarized to the right) enabled me to find some consistency across the participants for the purpose of comparison. I consulted two national lists (the then-current (February 2014) list of individual Council of Writing Program Administrators members and a list of class sizes for writing courses collected by Richard Haswell from the WPA listserv) in an effort to discover writing programs at as many schools as possible that had WPAs. I then applied the criteria to the members of these lists. I searched each school's website as thoroughly as possible, looking for any mention of a WPA or coordinator not only on the writing program's website but on department faculty lists; searching through course catalogs for first-year writing courses, and so forth. One potential limitation to the process is that a more robust program website might equate with a WPA more invested in digital literacies; however, my search of course catalogs and faculty listings was intended to broaden the search beyond the writing program webpage itself. In the event any of my criteria were not clear by looking at a website, I contacted the English department to determine if the program met the criteria. The process yielded 152 writing programs. I sent an individual email to the WPA of each of the programs, asking him or her to respond to the survey. The emails were sent between March 10th and March 26th of 2014, in the middle of the flow of the academic year for most schools, and I asked for completion of the survey by April 11, 2014. Seventy WPAs fully completed the survey, for a 46% response rate. |
Digital Literacy: the practices involved in exchanging, reading, and writing in electronic environments, along with the values that are associated with these practices—cultural, political, educational, and social (Hawisher and Selfe, 2004, p. 2). *Note: I used "digital literacy" rather than multimodal composing because I felt digital literacy would be more relatable for all respondents and would allow me to examine not only composing but also analysis practices. Also, some scholars have argued that multimodal composing does not have to be digital, so choosing digital literacy allowed me to retain a focus on digital technologies. Writing Program: A program dedicated to the teaching of writing, rhetoric, and/or composition that
Survey: Please view the survey at this link.
|
Of the larger population—the 152 programs that met all criteria—there was a bias toward research-oriented institutions and 4-year public schools. The distribution was fairly even across geographic regions, and the majority of the schools’ population sizes were between 5,000 and 25,000. As I had hoped, the 70 respondents represented a vast range of programs—varying in size, research focus, and geographic location (see Table 2). Again, there was a bias toward research-focused institutions, with 69% being doctorate-granting institutions according to Carnegie classifications. Institution type and geographic location were fairly representative of the larger population, and institution size varied significantly, providing a broad range of programs to examine.
Table 2: Respondent Population
|
*Definitions of Carnegie Classifications can be found here. I classified the programs based on how they were categorized during the time of the survey. With the 2015 classification update, a few titles have now changed, such as RU/VH, which is now R1.
|
The majority of the WPAs surveyed (over 50%) hold degrees in rhetoric and composition. The second most common educational background was a degree in English literature (at 24%).
Thirty-two (45.7%) of the programs represented by WPAs in the survey are solely first-year composition programs. Twenty-seven (38.6%) are undergraduate writing, rhetoric, and/or composition programs that host first-year writing along with other courses. Seven of the respondents (10%) are administrators of entire Departments or Schools of Writing and/or Rhetoric, and two of the respondents are administrators of Rhetoric and Composition graduate programs that also host first-year writing.
Thirty-two (45.7%) of the programs represented by WPAs in the survey are solely first-year composition programs. Twenty-seven (38.6%) are undergraduate writing, rhetoric, and/or composition programs that host first-year writing along with other courses. Seven of the respondents (10%) are administrators of entire Departments or Schools of Writing and/or Rhetoric, and two of the respondents are administrators of Rhetoric and Composition graduate programs that also host first-year writing.