Eds. Rebecca Jackson and Jackie Grutsch McKinney<\/p>\n
Outside the field, particularly in the social sciences and education, autoethnography method\/methodology texts abound (e.g. Reed-Danahay 1997; Ellis 2003; Ellis 2008; Chang 2009; Nash 2011; Denzin 2013; Adams et al. 2014; Jones et al. 2016). These texts provide philosophical and methodological grounding in autoethnography, yet their applicability to Writing Studies is limited. Simply put, they leave unanswered the major questions Writing Studies scholars and researchers are interested in: what are the lines between autoethnography, personal narrative, memoir, and what Nash calls \u201cscholarly personal narrative\u201d? When is experience data? What are the (irrefutable) features of an autoethnography? What forms of autoethnography\u2014evocative, interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative\u2014should Writing Studies embrace? Is autoethnography simply the latest iteration of using personal story in scholarship, which has a long history in the field under various names (e.g. Gilyard 1991, Britton 1993, Villanueva 1993)?
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\nThis edited collection will address these and related questions, foregrounding the possibility of autoethnography as a viable research method and methodological approach, and providing researchers and instructors with ways of understanding, crafting, and teaching autoethnography within Writing Studies. The collection will be organized into three parts: a section on how and why to do autoethnographic research in Writing Studies, a section on how to teach autoethnography, and a section of Writing Studies autoethnographies.<\/p>\n
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by Nikki Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, & Becky Jackson<\/p>\n
The first book-length empirical investigation of writing center directors\u2019 labor,\u00a0The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors\u00a0presents a longitudinal qualitative study of the individual professional lives of nine new directors. Inspired by Kinkead and Harris\u2019s\u00a0Writing Centers in Context\u00a0(1993), the authors adopt a case study approach to examine the labor these directors performed and the varied motivations for their labor, as well as the labor they ignored, deferred, or sidelined temporarily, whether or not they wanted to.
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\nThe study shows directors engaged in various types of labor\u2014everyday, disciplinary, and emotional\u2014and reveals that labor is never restricted to a list of job responsibilities, although those play a role. Instead, labor is motivated and shaped by complex and unique combinations of requirements, expectations, values, perceived strengths, interests and desires, identities, and knowledge. The cases collectively distill how different institutions define writing and appropriate resources to writing instruction and support, informing the ongoing wider cultural debates about skills (writing and otherwise), the preparation of educators, the renewal\/tenuring of educators, and administrative \u201cbloat\u201d in academe.\u00a0The nine new directors discuss more than just their labor; they address their motivations, their sense of self, and their own thoughts about the work they do, facets of writing center director labor that other types of research or scholarship have up to now left invisible.\u00a0The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors\u00a0strikes a new path in scholarship on writing center administration and is essential reading for present and future writing center administrators and those who mentor them.<\/p>\n
Available on the University Press of Colorado\/Utah State University Press<\/a>\u00a0website and other online booksellers.<\/p>\n Strategies for Writing Center Research is a guide to empirical research on writing center work. Though there are many other places where formal writing instruction, conversations about writing, conversations about teaching writing, writing, and revision happen, these activities are all always occurring in writing centers. All of the political, theoretical, social, spatial, technological, and practical debates about how someone becomes a better writer play out hour after hour in the writing center; thus, the possibility of the writing center as a site for serious, interesting, groundbreaking writing research cannot be overstated.<\/p>\n \u200bStrategies for Writing Center Research\u00a0is divided into three parts that correspond, more or less, to the stages of a research project. Part 1 includes an overview of writing center research, an introduction to key terms for research, a discussion of how to conduct bibliographic research in writing center studies, and advice on shaping a research proposal. Part 2 helps readers select appropriate research methods for their research questions. Chapters are devoted to discourse analysis, interviewing, surveying, fieldwork, and action research, including a discussion of the limitations, ethical challenges, and pitfalls to expect, as well as a description of the sort of data collected. Part 3 includes a discussion of approaches for analyzing and reporting research.<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n
\u200bStrategies for Writing Center Research<\/h2>\n
Winner of\u00a02017 IWCA Best Book Award<\/span><\/h4>\n