Working with Faculty Writers

Afterword

Af t e r w o r d Michele Eodice In the act of “making a book”—in this case, Working with Faculty Writers—we have enacted our own call to “work with faculty writers.” Anne and I worked closely with each writer or writing team (forty-four in all) to develop chapters. The process reinforced our beliefs about supporting the faculty writer: writers need and want truly helpful feedback that provokes revision; writers want to sense movement, progress, which regular communication can foster; and even solo authors want to feel they are among other writers in community. Reviewing each chapter draft several times and composing notes for authors sharpened our mindfulness and improved our own thinking and talking about writing. E-mail back from authors confirmed their excitement about the project, and they readily acknowledged the value of the exchange. This work has been a real pleasure to engage in. As the collection emerged, we pledged that the finished product would offer two things, at the very least: first, a sense of the scope and depth of programs already working with faculty writers, with the inclusion of all types of institutions and writers in mind; and second, bringing together, for the first time, a collection of persuasive stories of these representative and successful programs so that readers might find in them new or renewed support and guidance for their own efforts. This collection should also put the kibosh on any doubts that our institutions should offer support to all of our writers, including faculty . No school should feel support is unnecessary. Like the motive for creating a writing center for all students, the motive for building such programs is not remediation; this support demonstrates a commitment to what many of our mission statements promise and value: lifelong learning. This is about development, growth, and improvement. We imagine our readers will be those who already cross institutional boundaries—teaching center directors, writing program directors , deans, chairs—and they will span the disciplines as well. A real 294   Michel e Eodice strength of this collection is that it does not plant this work with faculty writers in one location. And while most support programs originated from teaching centers or writing programs or from a collaboration between the two, we can only guess at how these programs will be offered (or outsourced) in the future. No matter who sponsors the support, it will likely be “mutually beneficial” (Schick et al. 2012, 45) because all the participants and facilitators learn from the experience. What is learned can be surprising. For one thing, empowering faculty to place themselves in contexts that will activate their own professional development can become a pathway to improving the teaching of writing across the disciplines. Hearing from and talking with colleagues from a department far, far away from your own opens such possibilities ; the more we interact, the better we can “decode disciplinary conventions ” (Schick et al. 2012, 60), thus clearing the way for a more comprehensive understanding of the demands on students and the need to craft our learning outcomes and assignments to make sense of those demands. Future F ile The programs described in this collection privilege proximal ways of working with writers—around tables, through consultations, at retreats, up in tree houses. Any number of these admirably high touch/low tech efforts can likely work on your campus. At the same time, higher education priorities are shifting, writing itself is changing shape in modality, and scholarly contributions are due for an exciting transformation as we exploit the powers of the digital world. But the future of scholarly writing and writers can be enhanced by retaining the values of high touch/ low tech in new environments with new demands. For example, what happens best to faculty writers (according to them) happens in person: building community, sharing drafts, engaging in peer review, celebrating . But several technologies will make it more possible to apply high touch to digital collaboration and online community-generated peer review, and to make way for the mega accessible through “the inevitability of open access” (Lewis 2012). One of Anne’s graduate students, Laura Lisabeth, was introduced to these ideas by one of the pioneers, Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Following a visit by Fitzpatrick to her campus, Lisabeth (2012) wrote this in her blog: “One of Dr. Fitzpatrick’s most thought provoking ideas was the need to move out of the ‘filter then publish’ process of academic publishing and into a ‘publish then filter’ one, which certainly...