[CBW_Exec] Kells @CCCC

[Shannon Carter]

Diversity, Social Justice, and the New WPA: Responsible Relations in Knowledge-Making, Community Activism, and Writing Program Administration	
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Session: J.24 on Apr 8, 2011 from 2:00 PM to 3:15 PM	 Cluster: 112) Community, Civic & Public	
Type: Concurrent Session (3 or more presenters)	 Interest Emphasis: race/ethnicity	
Level Emphasis: 4-year	 Focus: WAC/WID	
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This panel will examine ways to help new Writing Program Administrators negotiate the intersections of the field as they work to become productive and effective scholars, researchers, administrators, and advocates. We engage the perspectives of two established scholars and two emerging leaders to address the implications of leading writing programs within conditions of growing economic scarcity and socio-cultural diversity.Members of this panel foreground leadership strategies that: promote productive action; enact the generative possibilities of discursive democracy; respond to reactive rhetorics resistant to change.We argue that undergraduate students as well as junior WPAs must respond to rapidly emerging exigencies of diversity and scarcity by creating new strategies to communicate with each other, essentially co-constructing knowledge, by: employing technology and new media; building relationships across disciplinary boundaries; cultivating and circulating new knowledge; creating and critiquing multi-media/multi-genre texts; and attending to our ethical responsibilities in complex social environments. Presenter 1 The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Public Spheres and the Contestation of Discourses.Over the last several years, members of this panel have been working together to promote the concept of Writing Across Communities, a theoretical framework that we have developed to extend Writing Across the Curriculum beyond the academy to include a range of other communities, among them the home communities from which our students come, as well as the civic and professional communities within which they enact a public self and to which they aspire.In the process, we have described the tools we encourage students to use (transcultural repositioning, transcultural literacies), the relationship we want them to establish with the larger society in which they live (transcultural citizenship), and the process by which we hope they will establish it (discursive democracy). I argue that discursive democracy provides a powerful frame of reference for students who are learning how to enact the critical practices of transcultural repositioning and transcultural citizenship in our classrooms.I examine the differences between liberal and critical forms of deliberative democracy and discursive democracy, with particular focus on the theories that have historically played a central role in the work of researchers, theorists and educators in the fields of composition and literacy. Finally, I contrast deliberative democracy and discursive democracy to highlight the reasons why I believe that the latter concept tells a better story about the role that writing program administrators and writing teachers must play in the work we all profess to do on citizenship in the writing classroom.For it is only by enacting the generative possibilities of discursive democracy as both a way of knowing and governing, and by attending to our ethical responsibilities in complex social environments, that we will help our students participate productively in the world-at-large. Presenter 2 Welcome to Babylon: The New WPA Transgressing the Intersections of Composition and Critical Studies. The new WPA will operate at the intersection of research, policy-making, and pedagogy. Preparing future writing program administrators to meet the needs of 21st century students and institutions demands reconfiguration of the intellectual operating spaces of Composition Studies. Graduate education programs need to promote approaches to knowledge-making, strategies for community activism, and opportunities for writing program administration at the intersections of both rhetorical studies and cultural studies. In order to respond productively, ethically, and appropriately to the increasingly diverse language and literacy practices of 21st century college writer, junior writing program administrators need training in how to promote rhetorical action alongside the study of composition pedagogy and praxis. Economic scarcity and global geo-political trends will demand that emerging leaders in the field become active agents in knowledge-making and resource allocations within their institutions, and learn to respond to the ways that the struggle for power happens through legitimate social institutions as well as outside sanctioned social institutions. Presenter 3 Knowledge-Making and Cultural Screens: The Transcultural WPA. New WPA's need to be prepared for teaching critical thinking and writing to an increasingly culturally-diverse student body with a broad spectrum of entry-level writing skills, larger class sizes and fewer resources. In the increasingly pluralistic, globalized, service and technology oriented society of the 21st century, students must become engaged citizens of their own educational process, and pedagogies must begin to embrace, rather than overcome, the cultural differences of academic students.Engaging these cultural differences in a setting that encourages student involvement and transcultural communication will better prepare students for success in a global society.This paper examines post-process, hermeneutic pedagogies rooted in the progressive educational philosophies of Dewey, Vygotsky, Arendt, and Kent that seek to overcome cross-cultural screens in a modern, pluralistic, academic setting. Presenter 4 Narrative and the Social Turn: INVENTION and Teaching the Stories of Genres. At the Research-1, Hispanic-serving institution we teach, half of high school graduates require remedial education and live in communities that rank among the poorest in the nation. Issues of scarcity and social justice are central.Current nationwide economic conditions and increasingly diverse student populations foreground these issues within US colleges.This paper argues that a genre-based curriculum, such as the one we've established at our institution, that teaches genre as social action rather than a form is the most responsible way to prepare students to position themselves simultaneously within the communities they've come from, those they are currently negotiating, and those in which they see themselves in the future. Following Miller, Bawarshi and Devitt, this paper establishes the benefits of moving away from a formal view of genre toward a more comprehensive view that sees the writer occupying a nexus of social forces including exigency, genre itself, and the actions the genre seeks to call forth. While sociologists Giddens and Fishelov are often invoked as a way of exploring the social nature of genre, I argue that narrative studies provides a better model than sociology for communicating to students the contexts in which their writing exists.I advance pedagogical perspectives that value the communities from which students have come and the diverse language skills they bring with them, while challenging students to realistically imagine how their current practices might make them better professionals and citizens.	
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Participant	 Affiliation	 Speech Title (if known)	
Michelle Kells
(Chair)	 University of New Mexico	 Diversity, Social Justice, and the New WPA: Responsible Relations in Knowledge-Making, Community Activism, and Writing Program Administration 	
Juan Guerra
(Speaker 1)	 University of Washington	 The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Public Spheres and the Contestation of Discourses	
Michelle Kells
(Speaker 2)	 University of New Mexico	 Welcome to Babylon: The New WPA Transgressing the Intersections of Composition and Cultural Studies	
Greg Evans
(Speaker 3)	 University of New Mexico	 Knowledge-Making and Cultural Screens: The Transcultural WPA	
Dan Cryer
(Speaker 4)	 University of New Mexico	 Narrative and the Social Turn: Invention and Teaching the Stories of Genres	
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Kells has a strong background in BW and is located in hte midwest

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