Historicizing Infrastructural Contexts for Teaching and Learning: A Heuristic for Institutional Engagement

Foreword. Keep Playing, Friends

“…Skeffington et al (2008) continue describing how WPAs must also fight battles in the unit and department and across the camps: fighting to protect the budget for the composition program, fighting to maintain or improve working conditions for composition instructors, fighting the fights that must be fought-and making enemies (at least some of whom are virtually guaranteed to serve on either reappointment committees, tenure and promotion committees, or both). (p. 5) OWPAs usually have similar fights, or rhetorical work, in relation to slowing down, historicizing, theorizing, and pedagogically framing technology adoption and use (Day, 2006;DePew et al, 2006;Selber, 2020). Developing the ability to successfully navigate and negotiate institutional politics prepares many WPAs for administrative positions at the dean level or above, or, as Carmen Kynard (2019) calls some of them, "Super-WPAs. "…”

“…But writing programs must still institutionalize online writing instruction (OWI) if they're to realize the purposes of having a program in the first place and achieve the desired outcomes. By institutionalize, we mean stabilizing the practices of OWI in ways that are productive for both teachers and universities as organized sites of higher education (Selber, 2020).…”

Agile Writing Programs

“…I had to understand the pedagogy, the technology, and the context in which I worked and how the context may have been different than the ones many scholars wrote about. Other (un)official OWPA positions include website or lab managers, department technological liaisons , and managers of makerspaces (Selber, 2020). Stuart Selber (2020) describes how these types of positions can "run the spectrum from modest university engagements .…”

“…Other (un)official OWPA positions include website or lab managers, department technological liaisons , and managers of makerspaces (Selber, 2020). Stuart Selber (2020) describes how these types of positions can "run the spectrum from modest university engagements . .…”

Book Review: Institutional Literacies: Engaging Academic IT Contexts for Writing and Communication by Stuart A. Selber

“…Using these elements will likely yield many eureka moments, like long-ago made decisions about standards or documentation conventions on a campus that still linger and affect current practice and possibilities. As indicated by the stand-alone publication of this chapter (with only minor changes) in Computers and Composition (Selber, 2020), each heuristic dimension can also be applied independently of the others, and historical analysis seems a particularly fruitful way to understand a local academic IT unit.…”