Working with Faculty Writers

Introduction

I n t r o d u c t i o n Anne Ellen Geller Here’s one image of the faculty writer: She’s in an office where bookshelves line the walls. She’s hunched over a desk. Perhaps she wears glasses. She is typing, and her eyes move back and forth from her text to the books and data scattered around her. Occasionally, she furrows her brow. Or she stretches her shoulders and rubs her neck. She is alone. The scene is quiet. The only aspect of this dominant image that has changed in the nearly twenty years since I began my own doctoral program is that the purring electric typewriter with a waving sheet of paper and clicking keys is now a silent, shiny, silver Apple laptop. But there are other images of the faculty writer available to us. She is reading aloud from her draft to a small group of cross-disciplinary colleagues who are nodding and taking notes. She is describing her goals to a writing or editorial coach. Perhaps she has carried her laptop out of her office to a common space on campus, like a writing center or coffee shop, and she is working to the rhythm of the typing of colleagues around her. Or maybe she is at a lunch event sponsored by her campus’s center for teaching and learning. There, she and other faculty discuss the process of publishing scholarly articles, and she feels less discouraged by the revise and resubmit response she received by e-mail that morning. One image, the first static one, signifies the idealized individual faculty writer, who struggles alone, is brilliant alone, and succeeds alone. The other images represent the more realistic social aspects of writing, the individual writer working alone and within communities. These images celebrate the value of supportive and challenging colleagues, and point to the desire faculty have to learn from one another and from those with more experience and expertise about what it takes to successfully develop and sustain a scholarly agenda and a publishing career. The solitary and social acts depicted in these images are all necessary and integral to the life of the successful scholarly writer, but the truth is that within the academy we still tend to valorize the first image. 2   Anne E l len Geller One of our hopes in putting together this collection is to make certain readers know that many in higher education have developed productive writing programs for all faculty (and future faculty). Often these programs allow faculty—and graduate students—to meet and support one another across disciplinary and departmental boundaries, to come to new insights about their own disciplinary writing and their own writing processes, and, sometimes, to develop new insights about their students ’ writing. We have also had other reasons to bring together this collection. For example, we want to share what we have come to know from our own work with faculty writers, and we wish to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about how writers work and what supports their work. We want to offer a timely, early twenty-first century response to historical and contemporary issues related to the production of writing in the academy during the “late age of print” (Striphas 2009; Bolter 2001); and, in that context, we want to highlight what can be done to promote and sustain all writing in the academy, whether that means student writing (undergraduate and graduate) or faculty writing. With the ever-increasing pressure on faculty to be productive researchers and writers, we thought it was time to share best practices with all who hope to effectively support faculty writers, and this is a book for anyone who wants to learn more about developing and assessing such support. We hope those who use these chapters to develop faculty writing programs strive to keep those initiatives closely linked to initiatives for student writing, for we believe it is this connection that leads to a true culture of writing across a campus. Our best practices of supporting faculty writing are more important now than they have ever been. For decades universities have struggled to develop and sustain a culture of writing, and now, in a time when the very definition and concept of text production is changing, there are both more possibilities for this support and more challenges. One of the challenges is the pressure of accountability. A culture of assessment has taken hold in higher education, and as intellectual...