Writing Program Management Structure
New Mexico State University’s Writing Program Administrator is Dr. Lauren Rosenburg. The Writing Program is positioned within the English Department and includes ENG 111 (Honors, Multilingual Writers) and Writing in the Disciplines (as encouraged in Erika Lendemann’s “Freshman Composition: No Place for Literature”). Lauren reports directly to the English Department Head. Lauren stated that NMSU’s WPA (herself) “is also the Associate Department Head… Decisions about the WP are made by the WPA. Decisions about hiring of adjuncts and scheduling courses are made by the ADH/WPA. The WPA/ADH trains and evaluates all GAs and evaluates adjuncts…As WPA, I make all curricular decisions about gen ed writing. I also chair the English departments Gen Ed committee, which assesses the writing program.” Operating as WPA and ADH, Lauren holds more administrative responsibility than is accustomed of WPAs.
To assist Lauren are four Writing Program Coordinators who are all graduate students in Rhetoric and Professional Communication: Patrick DeSimio (last semester of MA); Natalie Taylor (last semester of PhD); Robyn Tierney (“in the prospectus-writing phase of [her] dissertations”); Karen Tellez-Trujillo (“in the prospectus-writing phase of [her] dissertations”). Except for Karen, who is a second year WPC, all WP Coordinators began their term in August. Lauren shared that when she began the WPA position in summer of 2016, she “changed the coordinators’ responsibilities from those expected of the previous WPA. These changes reflect my vision and approach to the writing program. For example, coordinators are now expected to primarily act as mentors to new graduate teaching assistants (GAs), continue to mentor and support continuing GAs, and assist me in directing the program. Previously, their responsibilities were less hands on; but I believe in a very interactive writing program with lots of support for all teachers, especially those who are new.
Our academic year begins in early August with a weeklong orientation for new GAs. The coordinators help to design and lead the orientation program. Once the week is over, they are assigned a group of mentees (new GAs) for the fall semester. They are responsible for meeting regularly with their mentees and reviewing their curriculum design for each unit of the first-year writing course, observing them teaching and providing verbal feedback, and acting as their support person when needed. Those responsibilities lessen during the second semester; the groups of mentees are reshuffled, and coordinators observe again. During the semester, I meet with coordinators as a group about once every 3 weeks to discuss GA concerns and business of the writing program.” According to Chris Anson and Carol Rutz in “Graduate Students, Writing Programs, and Consensus-Based Management: Collaboration in the Face of Disciplinary Ideology,” “Collaboratively participating in the governance and oversight of a curricular unit not only offers students experience in the more mundane “skills” of administration, but gives them a unique vantage point for making the connections between the work of their fields and the work of teaching, at the very nexus of these two activities: the organizational entity of the department” (119). Lauren supports this idea and actively involves graduate student in administrative affairs, preparing them for the future job marking and thickening the “Service” section of their CV.
In Catherine Latterell’s “Defining Roles for Graduate Students in Writing Program Administration: Balancing Pragmatic Needs with a Postmodern Ethics of Action,” Latterell describes various WPA positions that graduate students can fill that would benefit both graduate students for the job experience and WPs for the diverse, low-cost labor (25-26). As suggested in Latterell’s article, Lauren shares her workload with WPCs, each of whom hold a different job that compliments their strengths and assists her in her large workload. Lauren shared that “Another thing the coordinators do is run our professional development program, which is scheduled four times a semester on Friday afternoons. Pat is currently organizing PD. This means that he is recruiting proposals for spring sessions, which we will review at our next meeting. Karen is the online coordinator. She is responsible for keeping the instructors page up to date on Canvas (our course management system). Natalie is the library liaison. She works with the librarians on setting up sessions with teachers to bring their students in to learn about library services. Since our curriculum changed this past fall, Natalie had a lot to do to help the librarians learn about changes in our approach to teaching research.”
Writing Program Philosophy
NMSU’s Writing Program Philosophy:
The Writing Program at NMSU is built on the premise that all students are writers. We believe that students can become stronger, more capable writers with varied opportunities for composing and revising their work. We view writing as a practice that is ongoing during a student’s academic career and life. Writing in the university provides students with occasions to write in response to many situations and contexts, from learning to understand the purposes and audiences for the texts one produces in a first year class (English 111), to developing particular approaches and responses to disciplinary conventions and genres (200-level general education courses), to writing within various majors for academic or research purposes, and beyond. Thus, our Writing Program aims to support all students as writers developing their craft.
Our teachers are writers themselves. We believe that the best teachers—in any discipline—are reflexive: They continuously reflect on their beliefs and practices and revise them with new ideas and theories. In the Writing Program, we are invested in sharing our ideas and theories—about teaching and learning, reading and writing, students and teachers—to help promote reflexive teaching. We model this, in part, to encourage reflexive writing from students as well as teachers. We expect that students will reflect and analyze their own writing as they work toward increasingly complex rhetorical challenges.
When commenting on the WP’s philosophy, Lauren stated that “As WPA, I have autonomy in terms of determining the WP philosophy and how that philosophy is implemented pedagogically. Historically, our program takes a process writing approach and promotes critical self-reflection. But each WPA brings their own vision to the program. The previous WPA brought a rhetorical theory approach to the entire program. I am much more interested in teaching writing as a process of inquiry, which is the approach we are now using program-wide, that is, in FYC and in the 200-level courses.”