College Composition & Communication - Volume 65, Issue 1, 2013

This essay revisits and expands on Gary A. Olson and Joseph M. Moxley’s 1989 article “Directing Freshman Composition: The Limits of Authority” by looking at revised notions of writing program administrators’ work and authority in 2012. Whereas the original essay surveyed only department chairs, our study includes data from both department chairs and directors of first-year writing to explore issues of authority. The essay complicates Olson and Moxley’s notion of authority, distinguishing among power, authority, and influence, and examining how they inflect the work of directors of first-year writing. In addition, common assumptions about the connections between WPAs’ tenure status and authority are re-examined in light of survey results.

Based on interviews with fifty-seven scholars in rhetoric and composition, this article addresses multiple topics in relation to the job search process. I emphasize the need for a more critical examination of job market procedures field-wide, taking into consideration the ways in which hiring committees might be unknowingly enacting exclusionary practices.

Drawing on findings from three qualitative studies, this article explores the distinct professional identities of two-year college English faculty. We examine full-time faculty patterns of engagement with professional organizations, their assertion of professional authority in institutional decision making, and the role of organizational socialization in the shaping of part-time faculty professional identities.

By challenging misconceptions about students and instructors at two-year campuses, this article critically examines practices of knowledge making in writing studies, arguing for the repositioning of writing instruction at two-year and open-admissions colleges from the margins to the center of the profession.

This essay examines the current state of online writing instruction in light of changing technologies and everyday literacies in order to understand their impact on access to higher education and on the material conditions of teaching writing.

This article considers connections between the work of composition and rhetoric and the growing field of faculty development. It defines faculty development, explores reasons composition and rhetoric scholars might be drawn to and successful in faculty development positions, and examines existing and potential intellectual connections between these two fields of inquiry.

This article argues that tenure and promotion decisions should reflect the fundamental ways in which the academy and our positions within it have changed. Calling attention to the role senior scholars can play, the article considers the challenges offered by activity in four areas: digital and new-media scholarship, editorial and curatorial work, administration and leadership, and mentoring.

Reviewed are:

Postcomposition Sidney I. Dobrin

The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies Donna Strickland

What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors