How Can You Teach Composition Without Adjuncts or Tenure Lines?

In an English composition program that depends primarily on per-course teaching, moving toward full-time positions comes first, even if they aren’t tenure track.

By Georgia Rhoades and David P. Haney

In the 1990s at Appalachian State University, as at many other colleges and universities, the balance shifted in the writing program. Before then, English composition courses had been taught by tenure-track faculty members, but now most composition courses are taught by non-tenure-track faculty members. When Georgia Rhoades took over the Appalachian program in 1998, non-tenure-track faculty members were held to a maximum course load of three-two or two-three for the year, because the university policy was to supply benefits to anyone with a three-three load. (North Carolina state law requires that state employees must work a minimum of thirty hours a week for at least nine months in order to receive benefits.)

As a writing program administrator, the first thing Rhoades wanted to do was to improve the working conditions of the teaching staff, including getting them benefits and yearlong contracts, faculty development funding, and other opportunities to grow professionally. During her first year as composition program director, she proposed the creation of full-time non-tenure-track positions in composition with four-four loads and benefits. Some tenure-track faculty, however, objected to the creation of a “two-tiered” system. Rhoades and members of a department committee were able fairly quickly to convince them that our system already consisted of several tiers, including contingent faculty members in part-time positions and non-tenure-track faculty members in fulltime temporary positions. Some faculty members were concerned that the workload for the new positions was unreasonable (at that time, all faculty members were responsible for a four-four load, but no tenure-track faculty members taught four composition classes per semester). Non-tenure-track faculty members explained that many of them also taught writing at community colleges or held other jobs. Benefits and a four-four load, even if all the classes were the same, would definitely be an improvement.

Conversion of Tenure-Track Lines

Two developments transformed these conversations into action. In 2001, the new English department chair, Dave Haney, resolved to help improve the working conditions of non-tenure-track faculty members, and in 2002 a University of North Carolina board of governors task force called for reform of conditions for non-tenure-track faculty in the state. In 2003, the English department voted to create full-time composition jobs in response, and we agreed to convert a tenure-track line into our first full-time non-tenure-track appointment.

We took this step as our good-faith investment in improving the non-tenure-track situation and strengthening the composition program, asking the university to meet our willingness by finding ways to offer benefits for non-tenure-track faculty members and to staff the composition program more responsibly. In spring 2006, a university senate committee on non-tenure-track concerns also petitioned the administration for improvement in working conditions. And this year, the positions of thirty-nine non-tenure-track faculty members who had been working on a pay-by-course basis were converted to three-quarter-time appointments with benefits and salaries. The positions of eleven non-tenure-track faculty members in the composition program were included in this conversion, and we hope to continue the trend.

The English department made its first plan, to offer full-time composition positions with four-four loads, at a time when all faculty in our department taught four-four, and part of Rhoades’s proposal was to allow for some reductions to that load through options including professional development. For example, some of our non-tenure-track teachers work in the writing center as part of their assignments; others are assigned to support university functions such as the visiting writers series. We want to create career positions for non-tenure-track faculty members that combine teaching with other work. (Some such positions have been created by chance when university employees in other areas happen to have teaching credentials in English.)

The Importance of a Well-Trained Staff

This process has, of course, not been without tension. We remain concerned about the development of a two-tiered faculty, particularly when the “lower” tier carries a good deal of the responsibility for delivering essential general education courses. However, we have decided that it makes more sense to have a well-supported, well-trained staff of largely non-tenure-track composition teachers than to insist as a matter of principle that tenure-track faculty members teach first-year composition. Rhoades would prefer that all who teach composition do so by choice. Some tenure-track faculty members—including some well-published literary scholars and the current and former department chairs—do teach first-year composition, but most composition classes are now taught by non-tenure-track faculty members.

In an extensive report issued in 2006, our Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Committee endorsed AAUP recommendations on limiting the use of contingent faculty, but the committee also understood that the conscious coordination of groups of non-tenure-track faculty members can have both immediate and long-term benefits, and it called for “dedicating whole blocks of the curriculum to instruction by non-tenure-track faculty” in such areas as first-year composition or activity courses in leisure and exercise science. In those areas, largely staffed by non-tenure-track faculty members, part-time positions could be consolidated into full-time positions, and the university could then focus on reducing reliance on non-tenure-track faculty in other areas.

A Culture Shift in the Department

Too many composition programs in English departments in the United States rely on a large group of non-tenure-track teachers who do not have benefits or salaries. In the past twenty years, as faculty members with degrees in rhetoric and composition (and business and technical writing) have established writing programs in traditional English departments, departmental culture has had difficulty shifting from traditional literature programs, and the status of those who teach composition reflects those growing pains.

For those who teach primarily first-year composition, the key to both job satisfaction and quality teaching has been faculty development. For any director of a composition program that relies on contingent labor, one of the toughest questions is how to create a community out of a large group of people who were assumed to have little stake in the improvement of the program. Rhoades wanted to create a place for overworked and underpaid teachers to make a better professional home, to become involved in the changes in the field of rhetoric and composition, and to grow professionally, both for their own good and for the strength of the program.

Rhoades set out to create a community whose practice was based on current pedagogical theories. During the first semester of each year, she held “composition conversations,” then began a program of workshops presented by recognized leaders in rhetoric and composition. Without a budget, she wrote grants to the faculty development office and asked publishers to sponsor speakers. As a result, Appalachian has hosted workshops with Peter Elbow, Pat Belanoff, Tony Petrosky, Andrea Lunsford, Toby Fulwiler, Hepsie Roskelly, and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater. This year we expect to work with Chris Anson, Tim Miller, and again with Chiseri-Strater. As an inspiration to faculty members who can’t often go to conferences or find time to conduct their own research, these workshops have changed the tone of composition conversations: at a fall 2006 pre-semester meeting, for example, fifteen non-tenure-track teachers presented their own work to colleagues.

Until a few years ago, the English department practice of evaluating non-tenure-track faculty members required a non-tenure-track faculty member to designate two tenure-track faculty members to visit a class and write an evaluation. The program has now moved to a model in which groups of non-tenure-track faculty members visit each other and write evaluations based on the entire course plan, multiple visits, and many conversations. These groups are in their third year, and most non-tenure-track faculty members are part of groups that have continuing membership. We allow those who prefer the old method to make use of it, but this year only one teacher has chosen to do so.

Under Haney, non-tenure-track faculty members gained travel allowances, and the department was able to hire Beth Carroll to create a strong writing center, in which a few trained non-tenure-track faculty members have teaching responsibilities. The composition program has also embarked on a series of trial courses in which non-tenure-track faculty members experiment with new approaches to teaching writing. The program has established relationships with the authors of some of the textbooks it uses by inviting those authors to campus. Some of the first-year writing instructors have built on those relationships, working directly with the authors of the texts they pilot. Although many of these authors are nationally known, they turn out to be interested in finding out how their work is being used in the field.

Instructors also link their courses with teachers from several departments and programs on campus, for example by sharing a cohort of students with a first-year history class and coordinating assignments with the instructor of that course. Although we have common objectives for our multisection first-year composition courses, and we normally require a common textbook, teachers design their own syllabi and are encouraged to find different paths to achieving the objectives. We are formalizing some opportunities for innovation by enabling groups of instructors to pilot new course models.

For example, next year, some sections will work with our service learning director to incorporate service learning into their courses, and some will use an alternative textbook and focus on primary research influenced by ethnographic theory and practice. The university has made several grants for both teaching and research available to non-tenure-track faculty members, and we encourage non-tenure-track faculty members to apply for them. All of these efforts have helped to turn the mostly contingent first-year composition faculty into a community of teachers who are developing professionally while finding new ways to help our students learn to write.

We are still a long way from meeting the AAUP recommendation, first made in 1915 and reinforced in the 2003 statement Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession , that “the regular academic instruction of students should be the responsibility of faculty members . . . to whom the institution is willing to make the commitment of tenure.” But we are moving toward a situation in which non-tenure-track faculty members in English “are responsible for the curriculum and participate in the governance of the institution.” In the English department, they are actively involved in the curriculum that most of them teach, and the full-time and three-quarter-time faculty members whose ranks have increased are eligible to serve on most university committees.

Committee Service

Non-tenure-track faculty members are the backbone of the writing committee in the English department, and they serve on other important university committees such as the General Education Task Force. We have moved from a culture that considered it bad form to make more demands on non-tenure-track faculty members (through, for example, committee work and staff meetings) because we paid them so little to a culture that values their contributions and is attempting to recompense them. We also have evidence that non-tenure-track faculty members take pride in the work they do in this program and want to belong to a strong community whose members are encouraged to grow professionally.

Many English departments devalue the teaching of writing, but we hope that the changes we have recently made at Appalachian—investments in the teaching of writing—will be refined and extended. For example, the university writing center was recently moved from the English department to the newly constructed Library and Information Commons, producing a marked increase in the center’s visibility and effectiveness. It is now funded directly by the Office of Academic Affairs, reporting to former English chair Dave Haney in his new role as associate vice chancellor for academic affairs.

Recent studies of faculty work, including Faculty Priorities Reconsidered, edited by Kerry Ann O’Meara and R. Eugene Rice, and Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein’s The American Faculty, document the changing nature of faculty work as higher education undergoes what Schuster and Finkelstein call an “unprecedented transformation” that is “inextricably and profoundly linked with the volatile present circumstances and uncertain outlook for the academy’s core resource: the faculty.” Although North Carolina has a long tradition of supporting public higher education, it shares with most other states an inadequate recognition of what it costs to deliver that education. For example, faculty positions are allocated to universities according to a formula based on the student credit hours expected to be generated by each full-time equivalent position. English departments are classified in a category that would require, with a standard tenure-track nine-credit-hours-per-semester workload, an average class size of over thirty-nine students. Fortunately, positions are not allocated to English within the university according to the same formula.

Non-tenure-track faculty members are both key players and potential victims in this volatile situation. As we work to improve their working conditions, we also try to show that they are working in a university that is willing to challenge itself and embrace change at the institutional level. We are amid a substantial revision of our general education program (see http://www1.appstate. edu/orgs/gen_ed), and this year we are undertaking a major review of our systems of faculty rewards (information will be available at http://faceval.appstate.edu). The progress begun (and only begun) by initiatives such as the English composition program’s faculty development program and the increase in salaried lines and benefits for non-tenure-track faculty members can continue only if we also maintain and nurture a culture of institutional self-reflection.

Georgia Rhoades is professor of English and director of composition at Appalachian State University. David Haney is associate vice chancellor for academic affairs at the university. Their e-mail addresses are rhoadesgd@appstate.edu and haneydp@appstate.edu.

 Printer-Friendly Page