How would your studies and / or your professional experiences advance the goals of WPA-GO? These goals may be found in the About Me section of WPA-GO’s website: http://wpacouncil.org/wpa-go (no more than 150 words) *
First, my past experience as a Master’s Student Representative means that I would bring with me institutional memory. I think it is important for organizations like WPA-GO, that are driven by the labor of graduate students, to avoid spending time “reinventing the wheel” when graduate committee seats inevitably turn over. I am happy to offer my past experiences about WPA-GO logistics to the incoming graduate committee. To support WPA-GO’s commitments to inclusivity, social justice, and equity, I would bring my experiences as a practitioner and researcher of antiracist pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. Additionally, I have lots of experience working collaboratively in a team to plan events and initiatives. In the fall, I will be starting a two year position as the Assistant Director of the English 100 Program at UW–Madison, I currently serve on my institution’s Graduate Welcome Committee, and in the past I have led several conference planning committees.
What kinds of support do you value as a graduate student and how would you further those forms of support for others through WPA-GO? (no more than 250 words) *
As a first generation college student, I value support from the ground up. I have taught composition and humanities courses in a variety of institutional contexts throughout the past five years, and I have always framed my role as an instructor as someone who provides students with the support necessary to succeed as writers, students, and humans. Similarly, I value when my writing program administrators and professors position their role around supporting instructors and students like me. I think this sort of inverted pyramid model of support works well in writing programs and academic hierarchies because it centers service of others. WPA-GO’s current initiatives around mentoring circles at CCCC and CWPA are a great example of how this model is currently underway in the organization, and I would love to help facilitate and further these events, as well as develop new opportunities and occasions for formal and informal mentoring. Within the graduate committee itself, I think there are great opportunities for inter-institutional peer-to-peer mentoring; getting to know graduate students across diverse institutions in the context of WPA-GO was invaluable to me in my first foray as an ex-officio member. I would love to develop a program that mirrors the mentoring relationships developed on the GC for a wider range of interested parties by matching up graduate students with peers at different institutions.
CWPA pledges to “foster inclusion more generally; promote research into student diversities; promote policies that increase diversity in our membership and in the population of people who administer writing programs; and explicitly act against the structures that cause injustice today,” and WPA-GO is dedicated to supporting this mission. How will your selection to the WPA-GO Graduate Committee advance these goals? Please answer this question by choosing one barrier you identify to meeting these goals in writing studies. How would your work within WPA-GO specifically address this barrier? (no more than 500 words) *
One barrier that stands in the way of CWPA’s mission of inclusivity is the fact that racist logics about writing and language transcend individual classroom practices and assessments. It is fairly straightforward to conceptualize how one might critically reflect on teaching practices in order to make one’s classroom a more inclusive, antiracist space. It is more difficult to conceptualize how to sustain this antiracist critical reflexivity when considering how the individual writing classroom functions as a part of, and in service to, a larger writing program (and the still larger general education sequence of a university). For sure, the programmatic, and university-level assessment practices need to, at the very least, find ways to value the antiracist work being done in classrooms. According to the results of Genevieve García de Müeller and Iris Ruiz’s spring 2016 qualitative study of US College Writing Programs, “when writing instructors and institutions put resources and time towards researching and implementing race-based writing program strategies, POC students benefit, POC academics feel supported, and white/Caucasian instructors are more able to address race in articulate and concrete ways” (2017, 36). Similarly, in order to “resist the normalization of whiteness and better serve the changing demographic of college students”, James Chase Sanchez and Tyler S. Branson call for writing programs to deal with race at the level of programmatic assessment in addition to curriculum and pedagogy (2016, 48-9). As a member of WPA-GO’s graduate committee, I would work with the Task Force for Antiracist Assessment to consider the question of how to scale up antiracist writing assessment ecologies to programmatic assessment practices. To work towards this goal, I would first develop and administer a national survey about extant programmatic assessment practices, and then lead the task force to consider how identified data trends intersect with questions of race and equity. I would then work to establish a best practices statement for antiracist programmatic assessment.
