Writing Program Administration

Writing center scholars have long been interested in the configuration of administrative leadership, often focusing on the roles and designations of writing center administrators (WCAs), whether faculty or staff. This article builds on existing scholarship by examining the affordances—capabilities and limitations—of a mixed-designation administrative team composed of both faculty and staff. Using our writing center as a case study, we highlight the benefits and limitations of a leadership team composed of both faculty and staff. We outline our center’s transition to a mixed-designation leadership model and use affordance theory to delineate the potentials and constraints of such teams, exploring how this configuration impacts functionality, effectiveness, and reach. Capabilities of this model include institutional visibility and legitimacy, access to information and resources, institutional reach, tutor education and training, and mentorship. Limitations include time constraints and a split focus, communication challenges, role ambiguity, and potential reinforcement of hierarchical structures. We conclude with practical recommendations for WCAs seeking to enhance their team structure or add faculty or staff administrative roles. By exploring the unique potentials and limitations of mixed-designation teams, we aim to contribute to ongoing conversations about equity, inclusion, and effective leadership structures in writing center administration.

This article reimagines writing center anniversary celebrations as powerful acts of epideictic rhetoric. Applying Sheard’s six characteristics—educative, ritualistic, elicits judgment, initiates, supports, and influences discourse, participates in reality at critical moments, and inspires new realities—we analyze celebrations at three institutions: a private R1 university, a small liberal arts college, and a public institution. Our analysis reveals that these events function as strategic rhetorical acts rather than mere commemorations. Writing center anniversary celebrations affirm institutional value, strengthen community identity, and advocate for continued support. Moreover, through commemorating past achievements, reflecting on present work, and envisioning future directions, these events reinforce the writing center’s institutional identity and showcase contributions to student success–all of which can help to secure ongoing support. Ultimately, we argue that approaching anniversary events as rhetorical opportunities rather than neutral commemorations enables writing center administrators to create celebrations that honor tradition, affirm communal values, and advance strategic aims.

T his article explores retention at a SLAC, specifically breaking down the factors that affected our students’ success in the writing classroom. Noting that students of color and first-generation students struggled more than their peers, we explore the current literature surrounding these issues and the writing classroom, particularly in terms of the ways that it affects a SLAC that is also a primarily white institution (PWI). In addition, we explore the use of resources that are available to all students on campus, and the fact that most students who did not successfully complete the course also did not take advantage of those resources in a meaningful way. Throughout, we brainstorm ways that we might further assist students in succeeding in the writing classroom and ways that writing directors might continue to implement antiracist pedagogies.

This study examines the experiences of African American students who have experienced implicit bias in educational settings, addressing the research question: "What are the narratives of African American students who have experienced instances of implicit bias in the classroom?" Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and Critical Race Theory as frameworks for inquiry, six randomly selected African American high school seniors were interviewed about their experiences regarding implicit bias during their time through grades K-12. Key findings revealed students' sophisticated pattern recognition of discriminatory treatment, limited positive media representation impacting self-perception, severe lack of African American teachers, curriculum gaps reducing Black history to trauma narratives, disciplinary disparities, and accumulating microaggressions creating hostile learning environments. Despite challenges, students demonstrated remarkable resilience and provided thoughtful recommendations for educational improvement. Results validate existing research on microaggressions while offering new insights into student awareness of bias. The study aims to develop professional development curricula helping educators recognize and address implicit bias effects without blame or shame, ultimately transforming educational environments to better serve African American students and honor their experiences.

There is very little research on writing teachers' perceptions of multilingual writers' needs and the teachers' preparation in working with L2 writers in first year composition courses. This present study was conducted to identify the extent to which first year writing teachers recognize the presence and needs of multilingual writers and the preparation those teachers need to have to better work with multilingual writers. A total of 22 writing teachers completed a 21-item survey. The 22 participants were teaching English writing courses at the university. The participants include graduate teaching assistants with different educational backgrounds, currently pursuing their master degree in English and full-time and part-time adjunct teachers with master's or Ph.D. degrees. The participants completed a survey to identify: 1) to what extent do teachers recognize the needs of multilingual writers and 2) what preparation (professional development needs) that those teachers need to better work with multilingual writers. The research reveals that teachers recognize multilingual writers' presence and needs, and suggest external professional preparation opportunities to address the unique needs of L2 writers. The findings of the study serve as an informative source for college writing programs to identify the existing shortcomings and devise administrative and training plans to address them.

This bibliography presents annotations of 38 journal articles, books, encyclopedia and handbook entries, and scholarly papers that discuss the role of grammar in the writing curriculum. Entries are organized under the following headings: selected overviews and position papers; research reviews; selected experimental research; grammar instruction in English as a Second Language; and historical perspectives. Materials in the annotated bibliography were published between 1927 and 1995. (RS)

The purpose of the present study is to examine concurrent and predictive evidence used in the validation of ACCUPLACER, a purchased test designed to place first-year students into writing courses at an urban, public research university devoted to science and technology education. Concurrent evidence was determined by correlations between ACCUPLACER scores and scores on two other tests designed to measure writing ability: the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement Test and the SAT Writing Section. Predictive evidence was determined by coefficients of determination between ACCUPLACER scores and end-of-semester performance measures. A longitudinal study was also conducted to investigate the grade history of students placed into first-year writing by established and new methods. When analyzed in terms of gender and ethnicity impact, ACCUPLACER failed to achieve statistically significant prediction rates for student performance. The study reveals some limits of placement testing and the problems related to it. Placement of Students into First-Year Writing Courses Disjuncture between secondary and postsecondary writing proficiency expectations results in remediation for many first-year students admitted to community colleges, colleges, and universities Sullivan & Tinberg, 2006). The cost associated with this remediation is staggering. Michigan researchers estimate a cost of $601 million for that state , and the College Board has recently estimated that $17 billion is spent annually on remediation each year (Lee & Rawls, 2010). Strategies to align high school and college writing expectations-attention to coordinating constructs of writing (Applebee & Langer, 2006) and to aligning the content of college placement tests with K-12 exit level standards (Venezia, Bracco, & Nodine, 2010)-are known yet largely unrealized. As a result, information that would yield extrapolation about interpretations of placement test performance to claims about course performance is largely fuzzy. Failure to communicate extrapolation inferences-to explain what truly occurs in student learning assessment-has led to recent federal demands for accountability resulting from the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (H. R. 4137), including the requirement that graduation rates be posted prominently on all web sites and promotional materials, call attention to remedial placement patterns that delay graduation (Code of Federal Regulations, 2005; Federal Register, 2010). It is increasingly clear that the 2006 report of former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, with its identification of "shortcomings of postsecondary institutions in graduation rates and time to degree to learning outcomes and even core literacy skills," was an early signal that accountability have now become an enduring part of American higher education (U.S. Education, 2006, p.3). In an environment of transparency and accountability, validation of placement test use-the accumulation of evidence to provide a sound scientific Placement of Students 4 basis for proposed score interpretations-is increasingly important (AERA, APA, & NCME, 1999). When a test is purchased from a vendor, the challenges are especially unique if the developer has not fully disclosed information on test construction, evaluation, documentation, fairness, and applications recommended by the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, & NCME, 1999). As a report on one institution's efforts to validate the use of purchased writing tests to place students into composition courses that would be challenging but not daunting for them, the present study is a case documenting procedures used, evidence accumulated, interpretations proposed, conclusions drawn, and questions raised that are indicative of complexities encountered in writing placement testing. Our study is set within a context of student placement from 1998 to 2010 at an urban, public research university devoted to science and technology education. The most common type of research conducted by institutions participating in Trends in College Admission 2000: A Report of a National Survey of Undergraduate Admission Policies, Practices, and Procedures was the development of characteristics of incoming first-time, firstyear students. Because four-year institutions are committed to developing profiles of incoming first-year students, validity studies designed to correlate placement test scores and high school grades with college achievement are common in public four-year institutions (Breland, Maxey, Gernand, Cumming, & Trapani, 2002). Of the 1,664 institutions participating in this national study, 42% reported that they had developed placement studies for particular courses or academic majors.

Hallie Quinn Brown was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1845, the daughter of two former slaves. Her father, Thomas Arthur Brown, became known as "Mr. Brown, the walking encyclopedia." Brown's mother, Frances Jane Scroggins, was also well educated; she was an unofficial advisor and counselor to the students of Wilberforce school, a private, coed, liberal arts college. Both Thomas and Frances were actively involved with the Underground Railroad. Her parents' commitment to the cause would later influence the organizations Brown founded and participated in. Brown's family moved from Pittsburgh to Canada in 1864 and then to Wilberforce, Ohio, in 1870. In Ohio, the author experienced her first all black school at Wilberforce University. Brown graduated in 1873 with a Bachelor of Science degree. After graduation, she began teaching on the Senora Plantation in Mississippi and went on to teach on several plantations during her life. Her efforts focused on improving the literacy levels of black children who had been denied the chance during slavery. Several years later she moved onto Columbia City Schools and then to Allen University in Columbia. Brown served as the Dean at Allen University and was appointed principal of Tuskegee Institutes in Alabama from 1892-1893, where she worked with Booker T. Washington. Brown began traveling in 1894 as a lecturer and public speaker for African American culture and temperance. Her travels stopped in 1899, but not before she lectured before Queen Victoria.

International studies have concluded that the teaching of formal grammar does not improve pupils’ writing skills. The most recent and extensive reports are possibly those from a review carried out by the British EPPI-Centre. These reports provide a systematic examination of studies carried out from the 1960s onwards. In this article, we take a critical look at key definitions of concepts used in the EPPI review, such as “grammar” and “sentence combining”, and at the relationship between these concepts. Through this, we wish to discuss the main differences between teaching grammar and teaching “sentence combining” when it comes to the effect on pupils’ writing skills. We also take a brief look at the history of the Norwegian debate on grammar teaching, giving a pointer to the relevance of the international debate to our own.

In this article, we describe writing center clients’ “idea” of the writing center based on interviews with 26 writing center users and qualitative coding of interview transcripts. Participants’ constructs of the writing center provide a lens to better understand how they perceive writing as an activity, the “writing culture” of the institution, the role of the writing center in their writing processes, and, ultimately, if they see writing centers in the way we would expect them to. The tensions we derived from our data are (1) between who and what tutors are and offer: discipline-­ specific expertise (including the disciplines of writing) versus generalist expertise, and (2) between how tutoring should occur: tutors as collaborative partners in students’ writing processes versus tutors as “another set of eyes” to give relatively quick feedback. Additionally, we offer our findings in a 2 x 2 matrix, a common visualization tool to productively illuminate the nuances, tensions, perspectives, and points of view in ways that can further writing center theory and practice. Our findings suggest that writing centers might respond to these tensions by expanding their “ideas” about who they are and what they do within their institutions.

This article looks back to the 1998 special issue of WPA themed on collaborative administration and contrasts patterns in the articles in that issue—written almost entirely by four-year-college and university WPAs—with the particular conditions of one TYC writing program to argue that collaboration is equally valuable and vital in TYC programs but for different reasons than at other types of institutions. The specific material conditions of TYC writing programs—including diversity of disciplinary expertise among the faculty, and complex power dynamics—create a setting in which WPAs must build deep and wide collaborative structures that are both strong and radically inclusive. This article concludes with a list of design principles to guide the ongoing work of creating sustainable collaborative TYC writing programs.

Our Story Our motivations for developing this special issue of Across the Disciplines began in 2011. At that point all of the editors were working at the Michigan State University (MSU) Writing Center, Trixie Smith as the director and the rest of us as graduate students. We began focusing on the issues of graduate writing support through our involvement with the graduate writing groups hosted through the MSU Writing Center, conducting research on the benefits of such groups. When the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department began an initiative to create research clusters that bring faculty, staff, and students together to engage in conducting professional academic research and developing professional publications, we decided that a research cluster focusing on graduate writing would be ideal. We participated in this Graduate Writing Research Cluster for the two years that we were all still at MSU, and this special issue is a product of that participation. Working with man...

This study investigates the impact of metalinguistic reflection as a strategy to improve the learning of relative clauses in English. The research was conducted with 11 Mexican high school students (B2 level), comparing an experimental group that used metalinguistic reflection with a control group.

The results of the pre- and post-intervention tests showed that the experimental group made significantly greater improvements in the identification, comprehension, and production of relative clauses. While the control group also improved, the difference was not statistically significant. These findings suggest that metalinguistic reflection is a key pedagogical tool for strengthening grammatical competence in a second language, enabling students not only to recognize but also to use complex structures more precisely and autonomously.

Black Studies programs across the nation have been in a fight for their survival for years. As colleges and universities choose the proverbial “ax over the scalpel” to cut budgets in the wake of decreased state and federal funding, Black Studies and other area study programs are often the first on the chopping block. Lack of interest and low enrollment are commonly cited as justifications for slashing or underfunding Black Studies programs, many of which are still in their infancy relative to other academic fields. #BlackLivesMatter is (re)igniting a resurgence of public displays of resilience and resistance, especially among Millennial college students. Moreover, there appears to be a much less understood phenomenon of the resurrection of Black Studies Programs across the country, as this generation seeks informed ways to access critically and analyze the value, or often lack thereof, of Black lives in America. Drawing from hegemonic theory, theory of consent, Afro-pessimism, and s...

As institutions that include Writing Studies (Rhetoric and Composition, Business, Technical and Professional Writing) in their curriculum at various levels increasingly move to include more digital technology infrastructural support for classes, faculty who have scholarly expertise in various technologies are often being called upon, through either necessity to complete their own agendas or because of additional departmental and college needs, to do service work beyond required committee work. Oftentimes, this work is invisible. This article reports the results on interviews collected from 23 faculty members regarding types of technologically-related service being done. It discusses the changing nature of the types of service done by faculty we term Writing Program Technologists (WPTs). It also discusses the connections between shifts in technology and infrastructure at various institutions and the varying ways that compensation of the WPT occurs depending upon personal as well as institutional needs, desires, and constraints. Making visible this often invisible labor can provide information for faculty who are trying to develop arguments for more equitable compensation for this work that in terms of time expended and intellectual labor involved goes beyond other forms of service expectations.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have long been at the forefront of promoting educational equity and social justice. This study explores the role of critical pedagogy at HBCUs in shaping global leaders who graduated between 1900 and 1980. Using a qualitative case study approach, the research examines how an education grounded in social justice principles influenced the careers of seven global leaders. Through archival research and document analysis, the study investigates how these leaders challenged systemic oppression and contributed to global change. The findings highlight key implications for higher education and global leadership, underscoring the potential of HBCUs to foster more inclusive approaches to diplomacy.

This profile articulates the authors' response to a statewide mandate to eliminate "remedial" writing instruction at four-year public universities, including their own. The profile describes the difficulties the authors faced in responding to this initiative, given the context of their regional comprehensive university and its specific challenges with retention and student success, and discusses their revision of the university's writing program. The changes the authors madeeliminating a non-credit basic writing course and creating a credit-bearing basic writing course; instituting guided self-placement; and developing a flexible, WPA-outcomes based writing curriculum-have led to improved satisfaction, success, and retention rates among basic writers at their institution.

This article uses a disparate impact analysis framework to assess the impact of a policy change in writing assessment that roughly doubled the proportion of students placing into college English at Butte College, a two-year college in California. After establishing the disparate impact of placement, we tracked how students performed in college English, subsequent college courses, and overall college completion under the new policy. We found that substantially more students completed college English compared to previous cohorts, with Asian, African American, Latinx, and Native American students' completion of college English doubling or tripling. Upon taking subsequent college courses, students placing into college English under the new policy performed as well as those who had qualified for college English under the more restrictive policy. Overall college completion outcomes, including degree completion and meeting the criteria for transferring to 4-year universities, have generally improved and become more equitable since the 2011 policy change. These findings suggest that broadening access to college English can be a powerful lever for reducing racial and ethnic gaps in the completion of college English and may help to reduce gaps in the attainment of other, longer-term college completion outcomes.

Writing involves a complex web of deliberations as writers make specific choices from their repertoire of grammatical resources. However, curriculum and assessment criteria that favour top-down prescriptions of writing marginalise the agency of the writer (Gardner, 2012). Conversely, we posit a bottom-up process that integrates grammar teaching with the agentic role of the writer as they make ongoing writerly choices. This study draws on Myhill's work (2012, 2022) on the teaching of 'grammar as choice' by exploring the impact of explicitly teaching six embodied grammatical concepts: generating energy; tracking motion; scanning the scene; creating perspective; focusing; and zooming in. The study demonstrates how explicitly teaching these concepts to 11 Year Five students during short, personalised writing conferences improved the range and application of their linguistic choices, their writerly agency and the quality and quantity of their writing. The study contributes to the growing body of research that emphasises students' agency as writers.

https://compositionforum.com/issue/39/cynthia-lewiecki-wilson-interview.php
This interview tracks the early days of the field, the importance of mentorship, and the work we have left to do. We opted for an informal conversation, conducted over Skype in late 2017. The interview is a testament to Cynthia's brilliance and humility.

This essay examines what thinking with disability brings to sitespecific rhetorical work, which is work where rhetoricians gather to study location-related texts. Adapting the rhetorical triangle, I suggest that this work is fundamentally about the relationships between communicators, texts, and audiences, and my focus on the importance of including the perspectives of disabled and/or disability activists adds the "angle" of access. This "angle" requires reconsideration of how texts, speakers, and audiences connect and interact, as inaccessibility hinders and/or excludes some communicators, disregards some audiences, and renders some texts illegible. At the same time, thinking with disability in sitespecific rhetorical work provides opportunities to support communities of disability scholars and scholarship, to create and implement accessible rhetorical methods, and to imagine inclusion as an iterative and fluid process. To examine these ideas, the essay shifts between articulating general principles and methodologies and offering specific examples from the Disability and Accessibility working group at the 2019 Rhetoric Society of

English 299 is a two-unit credit/no credit elective, capped at fifteen students per section, intended to help first year composition students become more effective editors of their own writing. The class provides a hands-on environment to help students with sentence-level editing since the writing center on campus traditionally focuses on more global concerns. Incoming California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI) students who are deemed by the California State University system as needing additional support to satisfy their first year writing requirement (so-called "Early Start" students, explained further below) are placed in English 299 and given priority enrollment in the first year composition (FYC) course of their choice. The class follows a coaching model that helps students develop confidence as editors of their own work and demystifies the writing process.

This essay seeks to explain the history that led to the establishment of FirstYear Writing at Binghamton University, a program which offers a set of electives that complement disciplinespecific and writingacrossthecurriculum courses while providing firstyear students a common experience in and comprehensive introduction to college writing.

Recently, I participated in a conference workshop on issues in teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. One of the attendees remarked that, because she taught Advanced Writing, she had no need to think about second-language writers. This notion, that second-language writers are easy to identify and do not exist outside of segregated sections of ESOL courses, stems from what the authors of this collection refer to as composition's tacit policy of English Only (1). The policy, which champions standard, academic English above all others, keeps instructors from following the best pedagogical practices for second-language writers. The lack of scholarship and teacher training in language diversity doesn't help, with scholars having a tendency to align themselves on one side of the conversation-either TESOL instructors focusing on ESOL issues or composition instructors focusing on dialects. Given these concerns, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda's collection is an important contribution to the field. Issues in language diversity are rarely given attention in the first-year composition classroom, but these essays reveal the benefits of this topic to all composition classes. The collection features eighteen essays, divided equally between two sections. The first, "Struggling with 'English Only' in Composition," discusses the evolution of language and provides background on how English Only policies have manifested in the college composition classroom. Part 1 has essays from scholars such as John Trimbur, Gail E. Hawisher, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Paul Kei Matsuda. The second section, "Responses to Struggling with 'English Only' in Composition" offers calls to action for increasing linguistic diversity and a discussion of the real challenges presented by attending to these issues. This section begins with Shirley Wilson Logan's discussion of language and ownership and ends with a reflection by Victor Villanueva. Throughout the collection, the authors continually prove the need for language awareness in the classroom. The problem, Horner asserts in the book's introduction, is that instructors falsely assume that their students are native speakers of English (1). By exposing attitudes promoting monolingualism, the book makes clear the need to study, teach, and assess language in all of its variations. In the first essay of the collection, "Linguistic Memory and the Uneasy Settlement of U.S. English," Trimbur notes the United States' tendency to forget its heritage as a linguistically diverse nation. He provides a historical overview of the evolution of language in the US, including dialects, pidgins, and creoles born out of the travel and expansion of settlers. For example, African American slaves used a type of plantation creole as a form of secrecy,

What students need most from instructors' written response on their texts is commentary that evokes a sense of exchange. Teachers often believe that their job is to point out the deficits in a student's paper and help eliminate those deficits. While this is a part of the function of response, it should not be the primary goal of feedback; rather, students need comments that will help them gain a sense of themselves as writers who are accepted into the college writing community. Grounding the argument in the scholarship of response, this thesis develops an approach to teacher response that narrows the topic into three problem areas: the tension between responding to content issues versus responding to the distraction of surface error; the tension between promoting mastery of academic language versus encouraging development of student voice; and the tension between the reality of teacher authority and the teacher's desire to empower students to take charge of their own learning. The author's purpose is to clarify the goals of response as well as the act itself in order to help eliminate the confusion and frustration inexperienced instructors may feel when they respond to student writing. New teachers and experienced teachers who are new to writing intensive courses should find this thesis to be a useful guide to responding to student writing.

What students need most from instructors' written response on their texts is commentary that evokes a sense of exchange. Teachers often believe that their job is to point out the deficits in a student's paper and help eliminate those deficits. While this is a part of the function of response, it should not be the primary goal of feedback; rather, students need comments that will help them gain a sense of themselves as writers who are accepted into the college writing community. Grounding the argument in the scholarship of response, this thesis develops an approach to teacher response that narrows the topic into three problem areas: the tension between responding to content issues versus responding to the distraction of surface error; the tension between promoting mastery of academic language versus encouraging development of student voice; and the tension between the reality of teacher authority and the teacher's desire to empower students to take charge of their own learning. The author's purpose is to clarify the goals of response as well as the act itself in order to help eliminate the confusion and frustration inexperienced instructors may feel when they respond to student writing. New teachers and experienced teachers who are new to writing intensive courses should find this thesis to be a useful guide to responding to student writing.

7his article describes the educational reform efforts surrounding writing placement in one state context. We propose that placement offers a particularly useful engagement point because it is often controlled by state-level policies and it directly impacts the lived experience of first-year college students. To document how we worked across institutions in our state, we describe a series of events that occurred over several years and that fostered collaborative exchanges. 1hen, we explore the challenges and opportunities afforded by our long-term engagement with policymakers. Ultimately, we propose strategies that writing program administrators might consider as they become engaged with state-level higher education policy.

As enrollment of students in online courses has steadily increased over the last few decades, very little attention has been given to online instructor evaluation. This is an area of online education that needs additional research to better ascertain the current state of online instructor evaluation as well as discover ways to improve its effectiveness. The purpose of this study is to identify how institutions evaluate online instructors and why. Findings indicated that the post-secondary institutions studied utilized many types of evaluation including student evaluations, administrative evaluations, peer evaluations, self-evaluations, and metrics in their evaluations. Recommendations for the use of triangulation, course observation rubrics, formative evaluations, and metrics as part of an online instructor evaluation system are provided.

A study was conducted to determine whether a significant correlation existed between an essay's letter grade and five important factors of syntactic maturity (clause length, t-un3,t length, sentence length, clauses per t-unit, and t-units per sentence). A total of 45 essays-15 A, 15 B, and 15 C papers as graded b five junior college English teachers-were assigned a point value and analyzed for a correlation between the grade and each of the five syntactic maturity factors. The results indicated a slight correlation between the grades and the number of clauses per t-unit and the number of t-units per sentence, suggesting that the teachers were influenced somewhat in their grading by the writer's ability to build compound sentences. The second portion of the study was an analysis of the difference between each of the three grade groups. Here, the number of words per sentence was found to be the most significant factor. The significant difference between the A and the C papers was possibly due to the fac: that the A students connected independent clauses with semicolons more frequently than did the other students ana thus produced much longer sentences and more t-units per sentence. While the results infer that sentence combining exercises may help increase the quality of a student's writing, factors of syntactic maturity overall }tad only a low correlation with the quality of writing. (HTH)

This dissertation will broaden the purview of recent scholarship pertaining to socially just writing assessments by making connections among assemblage theory and materialism, studies of ecological and anti-racist assessments, and studies of writing center work, to ground theoretical conversations in everyday practices. Focusing on systemic oppression in the neoliberal university and consciously using assemblage theory as a mechanism for confronting multiliteracies allows writing center directors to see the constant movement and reshaping of students' knowledges as they approach different environments, different courses, and different genres. Notions of intra-relatedness and intertwinings evident in assemblage theory are essential to this dissertation's consideration of pedagogy and administration. Expanding upon research on ecological and anti-racist assessment practices, I argue that it is vitally important for writing program administrators and writing center directors to bring complex views of literacies and identities to their assessment protocols. I further argue that this practice can be aided by frameworks based in assemblage theory. Using archival research and critical discourse analysis, this project explores one WC's history and current practices in a large public, urban university system as a case study. Acknowledging the burden of negotiating hurdles set up by corporatized university structures, this dissertation examines the ways institutional pressures can shape v assessments, and makes suggestions for new, socially just approaches relying on assemblage theory that follow current trends in writing assessment. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, my gratitude goes out to Livia Katz, who generously allowed me to analyze and poke around her writing center for this study. Livia is a dynamo, and her tutors and students are very lucky to have her fighting for them. I hope to be half the writing center director she is throughout my career. I am also grateful to Pat Licklider and Bob Crozier for taking the time to record oral history interviews with me. Pat sat through the interview twice due to a technical glitch, and also allowed me to reference her personal files from her time at John Jay for this project, which makes her an absolute saint. Thank you also to the librarians and archivists at the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay, and to the interlibrary loan librarians at both Taylor Memorial Library at Centenary University and the Mina Rees Library at the Graduate Center. I am also unendingly grateful to Mark McBeth, my committee chair, without whom I would never have completed this journey. His unflagging support, generosity, and brilliance (and knack of finding archives where none are supposed to exist) continues to inspire me. Mark, I have been incredibly fortunate to have had you as an advisor, and I hope I can live up to the care, encouragement, and critiques with which you guided me during my graduate studies as a mentor to my own students. Sondra Perl and Jessica Yood, two of my committee members, have also been instrumental in helping me achieve this goal, and I thank them for their advice and presence during my time at the Graduate Center. Sondra and Jessica, both of your classes shaped so much of my thinking for this project. I'm so grateful to both of you, and to you, Sondra, for taking on this project with me despite its late hour in your time at CUNY. Happy retirement! Carmen Kynard, my fourth reader on the committee, has been inspiring me to experiment in the classroom and remain critical of writing studies since she sat in on the John Jay Teaching Practicum with me in 2013. Carmen, Mark, and Tim McCormack, the former Deputy Writing vii Program Director at John Jay, taught me to teach, and to love teaching. Thanks to all of you for giving me that wonderful gift, and for showing me the importance of having fun with my pedagogy. I also thank the past and current members of CompComm, the student composition and rhetoric group at the CUNY Graduate Center, for their emotional, professional, and scholarly support. You are truly a family for me, and I hope future students realize what a special group we have at the GC. I particularly recognize Seth Graves, Andrew Lucchesi, and Sean Molloy for their friendship and thoughtful collaborations, as well as Robert Greco, Lindsey Albracht, and Rohit Lanez-Sharma for their sharp peer reviews of my chapter drafts. I could not have done this without you folks next to me. Robert, your friendship and input has influenced my approach to so much of my work. Thank you for geeking out with me about politics, Doctor Who, and the latest CCC issue in the cafeteria for so many years. Thanks also to Emilia Phillips of UNC Greensboro and Emily Anderson of Centenary University for their companionship during long days of writing this summer and for being such strong, engaging, supportive presences in my life. I also thank Alicia Clark-Barnes for her friendship and input as I began developing the ideas for this project at the NEWCA conference in 2015. My professional gratitude extends to my colleagues in the English department at Centenary University, especially my chair, Sharon Decker, and my long-time mentor, Lisa Mastrangelo, who have supported me personally and professionally this year. I'm lucky to be part of such a wonderful department. Lisa, thank you for your teaching, scholarship, mentorship, and friendship that has been with me professionally since I can remember. Thank you, as well, to my staff of peer tutors in the Writing Collaboratory at Centenary University, who continue to inspire me and challenge me with new ideas. I'm grateful to be part of such a remarkable group in our writing center! viii On a personal note, thanks to Laura for being a sounding board for my frustrations and for checking in on me periodically to make sure I didn't perish in a dark library corner, laptop open and coffee mug in-hand. Thanks to my family and in-laws for their confidence and cheerleading. In particular, thanks to my parents, Tom and Jeanne, and my brothers, Michael and Glen, for inspiring my love of learning and writing, and for collectively being my "last homely house" when I needed a break. Thanks to my cats, Rocky and Blues, for always knowing when I needed a couple of fuzzy muses to keep going. But mostly, thanks to my husband, Dave, a person who took on more than his share of house chores and who never complained when asked to turn down the TV volume so that I could concentrate-even during the playoffs. I'll never be able to fully express my gratitude for his love, his support, and for taking care of me on the most difficult writing days. I love you, Dave. … Lastly, thanks to NJ Transit: Some days you tried your best to foil my attempts at traveling to my research site. Some days you provided me with three hours of solid writing time. We've had a love-hate relationship for seven years and over 5,000 hours together (yes, I did the math). I'm not sure if this expression of gratitude is sincere or sarcastic-probably both-but anyway… thanks a lot.

This dissertation will broaden the purview of recent scholarship pertaining to socially just writing assessments by making connections among assemblage theory and materialism, studies of ecological and anti-racist assessments, and studies of writing center work, to ground theoretical conversations in everyday practices. Focusing on systemic oppression in the neoliberal university and consciously using assemblage theory as a mechanism for confronting multiliteracies allows writing center directors to see the constant movement and reshaping of students' knowledges as they approach different environments, different courses, and different genres. Notions of intra-relatedness and intertwinings evident in assemblage theory are essential to this dissertation's consideration of pedagogy and administration. Expanding upon research on ecological and anti-racist assessment practices, I argue that it is vitally important for writing program administrators and writing center directors to bring complex views of literacies and identities to their assessment protocols. I further argue that this practice can be aided by frameworks based in assemblage theory. Using archival research and critical discourse analysis, this project explores one WC's history and current practices in a large public, urban university system as a case study. Acknowledging the burden of negotiating hurdles set up by corporatized university structures, this dissertation examines the ways institutional pressures can shape v assessments, and makes suggestions for new, socially just approaches relying on assemblage theory that follow current trends in writing assessment. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, my gratitude goes out to Livia Katz, who generously allowed me to analyze and poke around her writing center for this study. Livia is a dynamo, and her tutors and students are very lucky to have her fighting for them. I hope to be half the writing center director she is throughout my career. I am also grateful to Pat Licklider and Bob Crozier for taking the time to record oral history interviews with me. Pat sat through the interview twice due to a technical glitch, and also allowed me to reference her personal files from her time at John Jay for this project, which makes her an absolute saint. Thank you also to the librarians and archivists at the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay, and to the interlibrary loan librarians at both Taylor Memorial Library at Centenary University and the Mina Rees Library at the Graduate Center. I am also unendingly grateful to Mark McBeth, my committee chair, without whom I would never have completed this journey. His unflagging support, generosity, and brilliance (and knack of finding archives where none are supposed to exist) continues to inspire me. Mark, I have been incredibly fortunate to have had you as an advisor, and I hope I can live up to the care, encouragement, and critiques with which you guided me during my graduate studies as a mentor to my own students. Sondra Perl and Jessica Yood, two of my committee members, have also been instrumental in helping me achieve this goal, and I thank them for their advice and presence during my time at the Graduate Center. Sondra and Jessica, both of your classes shaped so much of my thinking for this project. I'm so grateful to both of you, and to you, Sondra, for taking on this project with me despite its late hour in your time at CUNY. Happy retirement! Carmen Kynard, my fourth reader on the committee, has been inspiring me to experiment in the classroom and remain critical of writing studies since she sat in on the John Jay Teaching Practicum with me in 2013. Carmen, Mark, and Tim McCormack, the former Deputy Writing vii Program Director at John Jay, taught me to teach, and to love teaching. Thanks to all of you for giving me that wonderful gift, and for showing me the importance of having fun with my pedagogy. I also thank the past and current members of CompComm, the student composition and rhetoric group at the CUNY Graduate Center, for their emotional, professional, and scholarly support. You are truly a family for me, and I hope future students realize what a special group we have at the GC. I particularly recognize Seth Graves, Andrew Lucchesi, and Sean Molloy for their friendship and thoughtful collaborations, as well as Robert Greco, Lindsey Albracht, and Rohit Lanez-Sharma for their sharp peer reviews of my chapter drafts. I could not have done this without you folks next to me. Robert, your friendship and input has influenced my approach to so much of my work. Thank you for geeking out with me about politics, Doctor Who, and the latest CCC issue in the cafeteria for so many years. Thanks also to Emilia Phillips of UNC Greensboro and Emily Anderson of Centenary University for their companionship during long days of writing this summer and for being such strong, engaging, supportive presences in my life. I also thank Alicia Clark-Barnes for her friendship and input as I began developing the ideas for this project at the NEWCA conference in 2015. My professional gratitude extends to my colleagues in the English department at Centenary University, especially my chair, Sharon Decker, and my long-time mentor, Lisa Mastrangelo, who have supported me personally and professionally this year. I'm lucky to be part of such a wonderful department. Lisa, thank you for your teaching, scholarship, mentorship, and friendship that has been with me professionally since I can remember. Thank you, as well, to my staff of peer tutors in the Writing Collaboratory at Centenary University, who continue to inspire me and challenge me with new ideas. I'm grateful to be part of such a remarkable group in our writing center! viii On a personal note, thanks to Laura for being a sounding board for my frustrations and for checking in on me periodically to make sure I didn't perish in a dark library corner, laptop open and coffee mug in-hand. Thanks to my family and in-laws for their confidence and cheerleading. In particular, thanks to my parents, Tom and Jeanne, and my brothers, Michael and Glen, for inspiring my love of learning and writing, and for collectively being my "last homely house" when I needed a break. Thanks to my cats, Rocky and Blues, for always knowing when I needed a couple of fuzzy muses to keep going. But mostly, thanks to my husband, Dave, a person who took on more than his share of house chores and who never complained when asked to turn down the TV volume so that I could concentrate-even during the playoffs. I'll never be able to fully express my gratitude for his love, his support, and for taking care of me on the most difficult writing days. I love you, Dave. … Lastly, thanks to NJ Transit: Some days you tried your best to foil my attempts at traveling to my research site. Some days you provided me with three hours of solid writing time. We've had a love-hate relationship for seven years and over 5,000 hours together (yes, I did the math). I'm not sure if this expression of gratitude is sincere or sarcastic-probably both-but anyway… thanks a lot.

espanolEl creciente interes en el desarrollo de la escritura en la educacion superior ha dado lugar al surgimiento de diversos programas que buscan apoyar a los estudiantes en la dificil tarea de aprender a comunicarse academicamente en el contexto de sus disciplinas. En este marco, el presente articulo da cuenta de las opciones teoricas y de algunas acciones estrategicas consideradas en el diseno de un programa de escritura en el contexto universitario chileno. Se discute la integracion de modelos teoricos de diversa naturaleza, senalando el aporte de cada una de estas lineas para alcanzar el objetivo del programa. Asimismo, se detallan las decisiones estrategicas vinculadas a su creacion y se argumenta su importancia para disenar un programa organico y coherente con las necesidades y los principios de la institucion. El articulo pretende contribuir al ambito del diseno de programas de escritura que puedan responder a las crecientes necesidades de formacion en escritura que enfrent...

Divided into two broad sections, "Instituting Change" and "Instituting Practice," this handbook is a collection of essays from established authorities in the field addressing problems and issues both local and global. The first section, "Instituting Change," discusses WPA work as it is situated within the college or university and within the wider landscape of academia; chapters address, for example, "Politics and the WPA" (Douglas D. Hesse), "Certifying the Knowledge of WPAs" (Gail Stygall), "Teaching a Graduate Course in Writing Program Administration" (Edward M. White), "Moving Up the Administrative Ladder" (Susan H. McLeod), and "Part-Time/Adjunct Issues: Working Toward Change" (Eileen E. Schell). The second section, "Instituting Practice," addresses the myriad practical problems WPAs experience, offering suggestions for action but also reflections on and thoughtful rationales for recommended practices. Topics include, for example, "Figuring it Out: Writing Programs in the Context of University Budgets" (Chris M. Anson), "Hard Work and Hard Data: Using Statistics to Help Your Program" (Gregory R. Glau), "Writing Program Administration and Instructional Computing" (Ken S. McAllister and Cynthia L. Selfe). The volume also includes an excellent annotated bibliography.

Drawn from a conference that addressed the role of sentence combining in the teaching of writing, the papers in this collection are divided into three sections: the theory of sentence combining, research in sentence combining, and sentence combining in the classroom. The 22 papers discuss a variety of topics, including the following: (1) sentence combining, style, and the psychology of composition; (2) the effect of sentence combining instruction on reading comprehension; (3) syntactic manipulation and scores in reading comprehension; (4) sentence combining in a comprehensive language framework; (5) developing paragraph power thror. sentence combining; 16) parallel sentence combining studies in grades nine and eleven; (7) multivariate analysis in sentence combining research; (8) problems in analyzing maturity in college and adult writing; (9) sentence analysis and combining as a means of improving the expository style of advanced college students; (10) sentence combining in training programs for business, industry, and government; (11) teaching the logic of sentence connection; and (12) sentence combining and composing in the classroom. The collection concludes with a bibliography of materials concerning sentence combining and writing instruction. (HOD)

The efficacy of traditional letter or numerical grading for composition classes has been questioned for decades, but still, most instructors use conventional grading systems in their writing classes. This article outlines a century-long history of research and experimentation, focusing on the use of grading contracts in composition courses to increase grading consistency, incentivize more effective writing approaches, break down problematic classroom power dynamics, reward improvement, reduce race or gender bias, and encourage self-directed learning. Most scholarship on grading contracts in composition focuses on individual case studies of particular contract implementations, but recent turns toward more comparative, large-scale studies indicate the potential of the field to better understand the usefulness of grading contracts. Existing research demonstrates the promise of grading contracts to create more egalitarian classrooms in which students assume more ownership of their work, provided instructors embrace the opportunities for class discussion and negotiation that contracts afford. No contract is one-size-fits-all, so instructors can use the examples outlined in this history to craft grading contracts that make the most sense for their goals and instructional pedagogy.