New Beginnings

Today was the first day of the Invitational Summer Institute--a day of reconnecting, thinking, exploring, wondering, beginning.  What wonderful teachers/writers/thinkers in the room.  The energy was awesome.  I was writing today about the question of "expertise" in the teaching of writing, about how the field of rhetoric and composition has emerged within the politics of English Departments which have historically neglected writing in favor of reading.  Now it is true that writing and reading go hand in glove; they are both important in our lives; they are recursive processes.  But in college English departments, the "default"--what people believe you do if you say "I'm an English professor,"  is teach literature. Those of us in professorial ranks who teach writing are smaller in number than those who teach literature.  Those of us who teach rhetoric and composition even smaller.  Yet the numbers of faculty--part-time and Lecturer ranks (read lower paid with many more students--who teach composition) are much greater.  Most part-time and Lecturer faculty who teach writing teach first-year writing.  Most of them were educated as literary critics or creative writers (not in rhetoric and composition) and so had to educate themselves about composition pedagogy. Most of them are women.  So even though there are people like me who have their doctoral degrees in rhetoric and composition, there are very few of us (only 2) who are in rhetoric and composition in my English Department; 3 have their doctoral degrees in professional and technical communication; 6 is linguistics, 3 in creative writing, and 24 in the study of literature.  There are 28 full-time contract Lecturers (non-tenure track) and 30 part-time faculty who work in the first-year writing program.  So it gets complicated because who gets to teach writing is not in the hands of those who traditionally are responsible for a discipline.  In biology, for instance, biologist decide who teaches biology.  In writing, the English department or the Dean make that that determination.  And rhetoric and composition tenure-line faculty rarely, if ever, get assigned to teach writing.

I didn't write about it this way, though.  I tried writing about it as a narrative.    Here is the opening:

I got fired, fired almost one year to the day that Tony packed up and left for Syracuse and two years since Mark took off--fired from my job in the First-Year Writing Program and sent back to my old job in the English Department.