The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors

The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors

Role

Editors: Nicole I. Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson

Contributing author: Elizabeth H. Boquet

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Document Type

Book Contribution

Description/Summary

Elizabeth Boquet is a contributing author, "Foreward."

Book description:

The first book-length empirical investigation of writing center directors’ labor, The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors presents a longitudinal qualitative study of the individual professional lives of nine new directors. Inspired by Kinkead and Harris’s Writing Centers in Context (1993), the authors adopt a case study approach to examine the labor these directors performed and the varied motivations for their labor, as well as the labor they ignored, deferred, or sidelined temporarily, whether or not they wanted to. The study shows directors engaged in various types of labor—everyday, disciplinary, and emotional—and reveals that labor is never restricted to a list of job responsibilities, although those play a role. Instead, labor is motivated and shaped by complex and unique combinations of requirements, expectations, values, perceived strengths, interests and desires, identities, and knowledge. The cases collectively distill how different institutions define writing and appropriate resources to writing instruction and support, informing the ongoing wider cultural debates about skills (writing and otherwise), the preparation of educators, the renewal/tenuring of educators, and administrative “bloat” in academe. The nine new directors discuss more than just their labor; they address their motivations, their sense of self, and their own thoughts about the work they do, facets of writing center director labor that other types of research or scholarship have up to now left invisible. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors strikes a new path in scholarship on writing center administration and is essential reading for present and future writing center administrators and those who mentor them.

ISBN

9781607325369

Publication Date

2016

Publication Information

Boquet, Elizabeth H. “Foreword.” The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, edited by Caswell, Nicole, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2016.

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Copyright 2016 Utah State University Press

The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors

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