Summer 2022 Dissertation Camp Blog

Welcome to 2022 Dissertation Camp.  I'm Carol, a Rhetoric professor and director of the Writing Center for many years. I love this camp not only because I get a chance to learn about scholars and writers like you, but because I also can get some work done on my own writing projects!  

About me: One of my favorite activities is keeping up and hanging out with my two bilingual grandaughters, 11 and 4. When I get a chance, I learn languages or at least try to revive my skills in my lapsing ones, Spanish and Italian. I play the drums regularly in church and for Yahoo Drummers events. Swimming is my usual workout.  I swam 100 miles last year to earn an Aquatic Center T-shirt; this year I'm 33 miles on my way to 113 (the equivalent of North Liberty to Des Moines) to earn another one.  I'm working on my endurance so I can one day swim with an open water swimming club called the  I-Cows at Lake McBride, whose swims, guided by kayakers, are 2.1 miles long. You get acclimated to the swims and the club by kayaking, so I'll also have to practice with my own kayak in Coralville Lake, which is just beyond my backyard. 

To launch my summer writing, I'm planning an academic project and a creative one for the camp. I'm prioritizing the first--a history of two periods, the 1980s and the 2020s, when Iowa faculty and administrators almost established a Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) program, but ultimately decided not to. I will use books, articles, and archival material to narrate and compare what happened both times. In the 80s, there was a series of NEH seminars on writing in first-year composition and in the disciplines (like WAC) established by Iowa English faculty for faculty at universities across the US.  Although the English faculty conducted writing across the curriculum workshops at universites and colleges across the US, ironically, they never conducted them here at Iowa. Instead they worked on the literature program and established the Non-Fiction MFA program. Also, the General Education Committee, led by Marleigh Ryan, Professor of Japanese, seriously discussed writing across the curriculum, and wrote up a report, but apparently there was no follow up implementation.  I made an appointment in Special Collections for this week to find and read that report from 1979.  

The second period, the 2020s, there was a series of meetings of two groups, the Writing and Communication Committee composed of Rhetoric, Writing Certificate, and English faculty, and the overlapping Writing University Working Group composed of proposers of selected writing-oriented pre-propoals, to assemble proposals for two sources of funding, one from the Provost and another from what are called "P3" funds from the university's utility agreement with a French company.  After a semester of meetings, the first source of funding was found to be non-existent, obviously a huge communication error between CLAS and the Provost's office. Then our contentiously produced proposal for P3 funds was rejected for reasons I will have to research. I plan to talk to administrators, although their responses so far have been vague and guarded, and print out all the dozens of  emails from those committee deliberations. 

When I mentioned my project and its theme of resistance to Writing across the Curriculum  in my Teaching in a Writing Center class for new tutors, a colleague told me to read a Wall Street Journal best seller called The Human Element that posits friction theory can explain resistance to beneficial ideas for change. The authors are two Northwestern U business professors whose examples and case studies reveal why we act as we do to change.  I've just finished it and will use the four components of Friction Theory to help explain why Writing across the Curriculum was not adopted either time. They are Inertia (the main reason change is so slow in academia); effort (if a change requires more work, academics are likely to reject it because they believe they are already working too hard); emotion (if the change feels imposed upon them and they are not given input or alternatives, they are likely to reject it); and Reactance (push back against pressure to change as a threat to autonomy). This theory also explains why other recent changes made by CLAS for the Rhetoric Dept (that also involve writing instruction), for example, one year instead of three year contracts, restrictions on team teaching and graduate teaching, and increased class sizes, and suggestions that Centers be relocated) are receiving push back as well.  In other words I relate to this book as someone who wants change from faculty and administration and also as part of the audience of faculty that higher administrators want to change.  

If I make progress on this project, reading, taking notes and articulating my ideas, working towards a draft of a paper to present at an October Writing Center conference if my proposal is accepted--I may switch to the creative one, which is for a virtual course I am taking on Thursday afternoons for five weeks, Writing about Place. I may want to write about the Coralville Lake Shore that is part of my "neighborhood" rather than a place I've traveled to by plane or car. This will be my third week and we have to produce 1000 words per week. I've done most of my HW for this week, but I imagine I'll want to use some of the camp for that HW.