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Alex’s Narrative
Unlike my coauthors, my introduction to TPC came not through a teaching assignment or graduate course but instead via an academic journal. When I first enrolled as a PhD student in RC, a faculty member in the program shared a job listing with me. Programmatic Perspectives, a journal focused on WPA for TPC programs, was looking for a copy and production editor to join their editorial team. Having worked for literary journals in the past, I had some experience line-editing and typesetting, and after a short interview, I was offered the position, despite my lack of knowledge about TPC or WPA work. Closely reading accepted manuscripts for Programmatic Perspectives offered me a birds-eye view of many different writing programs and key insights into some of the prevailing arguments in the field. When I was first offered the chance to teach courses in TPC, however, I struggled to transfer this theoretical knowledge, mostly circulated between tenured faculty and WPAs, to my own courses.
WPAs in both RC and TPC are tasked with bridging the gap between broader programmatic goals and individual instructors’ classroom realities. There are many approaches to achieving this goal, including using a shared curriculum, course shell, or textbook, encouraging/mandating instructors to engage in programmatic professional development and/or mentorship, and carrying out regular assessment and observation efforts to ensure consistency across sections and between instructors. The challenge, particularly for programs that rely on adjuncts and GSIs to teach their most popular courses, is that most of these approaches require labor from these part-time instructors beyond their contracted duties. To respond to this and ensure consistency, our professional writing program provides new instructors with a course shell and textbook, but thus far it has not included GSIs in any of the other approaches above.
While effective in ensuring that all courses follow the same assignment sequence and use the same readings, this approach has significant limitations. As my co-authors have noted, the lack of specialized training leaves many new instructors feeling as though they lack the content knowledge to adequately guide their students through the course. As information in the program flows only one way (from the WPA and full-time instructors to GSIs and adjunct instructors), there is no clear feedback mechanism for instructors to ask for additional support or suggest revisions to the course shells. TPC scholarship offers many solutions to this. For example, recent scholarship outlines the process of developing a graduate orientation for new TPC instructors (Blackmon), describes the value of an advisory board in making programmatic changes (Carrington and Wingerter), and considers how new TPC WPAs transfer knowledge from past roles and contexts into a new programmatic environment (Speicher Sarraf). Yet for instructors like me, who are neither WPAs nor compensated for or expected to engage in programmatic work, these features must be developed and supported by WPAs or full-time faculty to be sustainable.