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) *
In my own teaching practices, I have been working towards anti-racist assessment by working with labor-based grading contracts and attending to dominant language ideologies in the first-year writing classroom. I have given presentations and workshops on both, and would love to work towards larger models of professional development around these practices. I also currently serve as Assistant Director of Composition, so I have gWPA experience that may be useful in mentoring other grad students, and I am working towards a dissertation exploring alternative models of writing program administration.
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) *
I think two key needed areas of support for grad students are 1) teacher development and 2) publishing. While our field espouses a commitment to teaching, I think many grad students, especially new TAs, are not provided adequate support to develop as effective teachers and are expected to mostly figure things out on their own. As a mentor to new TAs at my institution, I attempt to fill this gap by working with new TAs to develop shared resources, offering workshops, having frequent discussions where we reflect on particular assignments, and having reciprocal peer observations of classes. Not all of these may be possible in a WPA-GO position, but I would like to continue to develop these kind of supports. I included publishing because I feel like I have not had enough support with this, so I am not sure what I would offer–though I did value the webinar WPA-GO hosted on publishing a year or two ago and think grad students will continue to find those kind of experiences valuable.
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) *
I am a trans woman and have not found academia very welcoming or understanding, as I have faced explicit discrimination from colleagues and continued microaggressions from members of my department. So, while I admit this is heavily informed by my own experiences, I think a key issue is making our field, our departments, and our classrooms more welcoming to trans and gender nonconforming people, which I think would require a sustained focus on gender literacy. I think a major barrier is simply a lack of education around trans issues, as recently I have dealt with colleagues attempting to be supportive of openly trans students while saying and doing extremely alienating. I think our field needs to work more to consider the ways in which we structure writing classrooms and writing programs implicitly operate with an assumption of a cisgender student population and work to encourage different types of embodied literacies. I do not yet have a specific answer on how to approach this, but it is something I am committed towards.
