Negotiation & Translation in First Year Composition WPA Work: Transformative Professional Knowledge to Composition Practice

Abstract

This dissertation considers the roles that Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) play (and the strategies that they use) in First Year Composition (FYC) programs to promote transformative professional knowledge. This study demonstrates how WPAs not only do the work of translating professional knowledge in Composition’s largest and most visible theater (FYC), but also how they are on the front lines of promoting transformative knowledge (challenging dominant conceptions of writing and education) and negotiating how that knowledge is taken up in program practices. Looking broadly at transformative knowledge—including feminist, critical, anti-racist, de-colonial, translingual, and other “emancipatory politics and pedagog[ies]” (Greenbaum, 2002, p.xii)—the analysis in this study seeks to articulate how strategies and ideals, theories and practices come together in the work of WPAs as they negotiate their positions and institutional realities. Nine FYC WPAs who identified as doing activist work of negotiation and translation were interviewed about the strategies they employed to port transformative knowledge from the profession into practices in their FYC program and/or the university at large; of these nine WPAs, some additionally shared key program documents whose production and/or use (by the WPA or by others associated with the program) supported transformative work. These findings—of strategies and textual practices—were then analyzed to gain a better sense of the diverse tactics employed by WPAs in different contexts and from different positionalities to reach “emancipatory objectives” (Greenbaum, 2002, p. xiii).