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The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors

by Nicole I. Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson

Paperback Price $28.95
Ebook Price $23.95

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IWCA 2017 Outstanding Book Award

"The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors is poised to make a unique and valuable contribution to the field of writing center studies, as well as to writing program administration. . . . [I]t gives us a window into the professional lives of writing center directors at institutions that we rarely see in published scholarship."

—Jonikka Charlton, The University of Texas–Pan American

"These case studies allow us to learn quite a bit about the prevailing views of writing centers within institutions and also within the disciplines in which writing center directors’ professional lives nest—rhetoric and composition, education, TESOL, English. This is a study to be admired."

—Anne Ellen Geller, St. John’s University

 

The first book-length empirical investigation of writing center directors’ labor, The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors presents a longitudinal qualitative study of the individual professional lives of nine new directors. Inspired by Kinkead and Harris’s Writing Centers in Context (1993), the authors adopt a case study approach to examine the labor these directors performed and the varied motivations for their labor, as well as the labor they ignored, deferred, or sidelined temporarily, whether or not they wanted to.

The study shows directors engaged in various types of labor—everyday, disciplinary, and emotional—and reveals that labor is never restricted to a list of job responsibilities, although those play a role. Instead, labor is motivated and shaped by complex and unique combinations of requirements, expectations, values, perceived strengths, interests and desires, identities, and knowledge. The cases collectively distill how different institutions define writing and appropriate resources to writing instruction and support, informing the ongoing wider cultural debates about skills (writing and otherwise), the preparation of educators, the renewal/tenuring of educators, and administrative “bloat” in academe.

The nine new directors discuss more than just their labor; they address their motivations, their sense of self, and their own thoughts about the work they do, facets of writing center director labor that other types of research or scholarship have up to now left invisible. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors strikes a new path in scholarship on writing center administration and is essential reading for present and future writing center administrators and those who mentor them.

 

Nicole I. Caswell is associate professor of English and director of the University Writing Center at East Carolina University. She is a coauthor of the 2017 International Writing Center Association Book of the Year, The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors.

Jackie Grutsch McKinney is the director of the Writing Center and professor of rhetoric and composition at Ball State University. She is author or coauthor of three books: Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, Strategies for Writing Center Research, and The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, each of which has won an IWCA Outstanding Book Award.

Rebecca Jackson is professor of rhetoric and composition and former director (2006-2020) of the MA major in rhetoric and composition at Texas State University. She is coauthor of The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, winner of the 2017 IWCA Outstanding Book award, and coeditor of Self+Culture+Writing.

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Details

  • Paperback Price: $28.95
  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60732-536-9
  • Ebook Price: $23.95
  • EISBN: 978-1-60732-537-6
  • Publication Month: October
  • Publication Year: 2016
  • Pages: 226
  • Discount Type: Short
  • Author: by Nicole I. Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson
  • ECommerce Code: 978-1-60732-536-9
  • Get Permissions: Get Permission

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