WPAs in Transition
Navigating Educational Leadership Positions
WPAs in Transition shares a wide variety of professional and personal perspectives about the costs, benefits, struggles, and triumphs experienced by writing program administrators making transitions into and out of leadership positions. Contributors to the volume come from various positions, as writing center directors, assistant writing program administrators, and WPAs; mixed settings, including community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, and research institutions; and a range of career stages, from early to retiring. They recount insightful anecdotes and provide a scholarly context in which WPAs can share experiences related to this long-ignored aspect of their work.
During such transitions, WPAs and other leaders who function as both administrators and faculty face the professional and personal challenges of redefining who they are, the work they do, and with whom they collaborate. WPAs in Transition creates a grounded and nuanced experiential understanding of what it means to navigate changing roles, advancing the dialogue around WPAs’ and other administrators’ identities, career paths, work-life balance, and location, and is a meaningful addition to the broader literature on administration and leadership.
Contributors: Mark Blaauw-Hara, Christopher Blankenship, Jennifer Riley Campbell, Nicole I. Caswell, Richard Colby, Steven J. Corbett, Beth Daniell, Laura J. Davies, Jaquelyn Davis, Holland Enke, Letizia Guglielmo, Beth Huber, Karen Keaton Jackson, Rebecca Jackson, Tereza Joy Kramer, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, Kerri K. Morris, Liliana M. Naydan, Reyna Olegario, Kate Pantelides, Talinn Phillips, Andrea Scott, Paul Shovlin, Bradley Smith, Cheri Lemieux Spiegel, Sarah Stanley, Amy Rupiper Taggart, Molly Tetreault, Megan L. Titus, Chris Warnick
‘Faculty teaching these seminars [on writing program administration in rhetoric and composition programs] will find many of the chapters useful in raising issues that face both new and experienced WPAs, and the students enrolled in the seminars will find discussions of the chapters useful in thinking about what it means to be a WPA. It’s a strength of the collection that the authors represent a variety of writing programs and institutions, and that will be useful in the graduate seminar environment.’
—Irwin Weiser, Purdue University
Courtney Adams Wooten is assistant professor and director of Composition at George Mason University. She currently serves as a member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators' Executive Board and she is the book review editor for the journal WPA: Writing Program Administration. She studies feminist rhetorics, writing program administration, and first-year composition. Her work has been published in Composition Studies, Harlot, WPA, and Peitho as well as several edited collections. .
Jacob Babb is assistant professor of English at Indiana University Southeast and the associate editor of WPA. His research focuses on composition theory and pedagogy, writing program administration, and rhetoric. He has published articles in Harlot, WPA, and Composition Forum and chapters in several edited collections.
Brian Ray is assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he also directs the composition program. He is the author of Style: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. His articles have appeared in Written Communication, Rhetoric Review, Computers and Composition, and Composition Studies.
