Understanding WPA Readiness and Renewal

Acknowledgments

We begin by thanking Alice Horning, who reached out to us early in the process of conceiving of this book with encouragement and the suggestion that we work together. Throughout the book’s journey, Alice provided clear and direct feedback to both us and our chapter authors with the goal of helping the book reach its potential. Along with Alice, we extend our thanks to the rest of Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, especially Anthony Mason, who also provided support and feedback. We thank Charmitha Ashok and the production team for their careful editing, Jaganathan Rajapandi for indexing, and Thiyagu Kumaraselvam for help designing our book’s cover. We also thank the two manuscript reviewers for their careful reading and generative advice.

Our chapter authors were consummate professionals and scholars. Thank you for lending your expertise and experience to this project. We know that future and current WPAs will be educated and inspired by your words.

Joe thanks Mark for generously sharing his intellect and enthusiasm with him and the authors. You will always be Emperor Mark Blaauw-Hara, HRH.

Mark thanks Joe for inviting him to be a part of this project, and for showing him the ropes of putting together an edited collection. One could not ask for a wiser or more patient co-editor.

Understanding WPA Readiness and Renewal: Of Preparation, Pipe Dreams, and Possibilities

Joseph Janangelo, Loyola University Chicago

We begin by thanking you for reading our book and sharing two questions that inspire our work:

• • How do people develop readiness to serve as WPAs?
• • How do experienced WPAs find or create renewal opportunities that help them move forward throughout their lives and careers?

“Throughout” is an important concept to us because Understanding WPA Readiness and Renewal examines WPA journeys and journeying. In our book, we seek to offer readers nuanced understandings of how aspiring, early career and seasoned WPAs plan, lead, build, and re-build their careers and working lives. We also hope to help graduate students and early career WPAs better understand the enticements and entanglements of their intended career’s complex, daunting, rewarding, and important work. Moreover, we seek to offer mid- and later-career WPAs ideas for rekindling interest in work that has become stagnant, unchallenging, and even discouraging. We contend that understanding WPA “readiness” and “renewal” involves questioning inherited definitions of those patented, patinated terms. It also involves engaging in candid and self-aware scholarly conversations that reflect, and reflect on, WPAs’ plans, desires, trepidations and fears for and about their work.

We view renewal as a vital part of long-haul WPA work. As WPA work has evolved, more WPAs are mid-career at a wide range of institutions than in the past and need work that speaks to their experience and existence. More importantly, we see mid- and later-career WPAs are valuable and uniquely vulnerable members of the WPA community and are eager to pay attention to their ideas and needs. We say “vulnerable” because these individuals are underrepresented and understudied in WPA scholarship. Perhaps understandably, Writing Studies graduate programs and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) pay close attention to pre-service and early-career WPAs who are beginning their journeys, especially in terms of preparation and onboarding WPAs and mentoring them through “the early years.” Yet, there is so much more journeying to notice and to try to understand.

Our goal in including WPA readiness and renewal in the same volume is to bring those concepts and colleagues into conversation with one another. We experience and regard WPA workplaces and working lives as continuums. WPAs, aspiring and experienced, are there for a while at various moments in their lives and careers and strive to do good and rewarding work during that time. We hope our book contributes to intergenerational understandings among pre-service, early-career, and mid- and later-career WPAs.

In composing our book’s title, we don’t strive to be gratuitously alliterative. Moreover, while this book has two sections, we don’t think of readiness and renewal as discrete experiences, but as permeable, porous ones. In these pages, we and our authors portray WPA readiness and renewal as existing in complicated twinship with each other and engaged with animating and competing logics and priorities. For example, WPA readiness and renewal are in close communication with one’s personal life and career trajectories, one’s institutional mission and identity, colleagues, and students, world events (e.g., pandemics), and evolutions in higher education.

We choose “understanding” as our guiding verb, even though Merriam- Webster defines it primarily as a noun, as an understanding. Consider that dictionary’s top two definitions: 1: a mental grasp: COMPREHENSION 2: a. the power of comprehending especially: the capacity to apprehend general relations of particulars b: the power to make experience intelligible by applying concepts and categories. For readers’ further edification, Merriam-Webster offers three “Example Sentences” replete with sexist, gender-based characterizations:

He has a thorough understanding of the subject.

She has a basic understanding of the process.

I hope to get a clearer understanding of the issues involved. See More.

In search of complex understandings of WPA readiness and renewal, we do see more. We suspect more as well. Our suspicions are fourfold.