“Mentorship, Affordability, and Equity: Ways Forward in Writing Program Administration”

by Amanda Presswood and Virginia M. Schwarz, Writing Program Administrators Graduate Organization (WPA-GO) | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020

Equity-Centered Approaches to Assessment

Another continuing possibility for not only challenging structures but making structures more challengeable to begin with is related to organizational elections, the process of voting in leaders who serve as chairs or graduate council members. This elected group is responsible for setting WPA-GO’s priorities and agenda for the academic year and organizing committee labor. In the past, WPA-GO elections have disproportionately benefited members from well-resourced or well-funded programs who already have the most on their CVs (and the time, financial means, energy, and resources to add more). These processes reveal graduate students’ problematic assessments of one another, reflecting biases in what/who we value (and in turn, devalue). For example, as discussed, graduate students have unequal access to opportunities at their home institutions (e.g., not all departments offer graduate WPA [gWPA] positions and not all gWPA positions are themselves distributed equitably). WPA-GO’s membership, representing a diversity of identities, scholarship, programs, and institutional types, should all feel they have a clear path to leadership and access to multiple means of challenging and changing organizational structures that are unjust. Otherwise, WPA-GO is reproducing existing inequalities in the field.

In 2012, WPA-GO implemented the first Diversity Task force, and members made recommendations explicitly addressing elections, including language to address diversity of intellectual labor. In 2017, the organization built on this previous work by collaborating with Asao Inoue to create an antiracist assessment workshop specifically for WPA-GO. Held at the CWPA Conference, this event was open to all graduate students and conference attendees, whether or not they were affiliated with WPA-GO. Together, this room of 40 members and outside readers engaged with organizational documents, offered thoughtful responses, and suggested possible revisions for future practices.