Efforts on the part of specific individuals, particular programs, and professional organizations to be change agents within various spheres of influence (i.e., within particular programs, departments, institutions, or national and international contexts) is understandably difficult given the dual challenge of bringing change to both the practices as well as the infrastructures that can support (but can also thwart) the activities of writing instruction.
While there are strong forces at work in maintaining the ideological commitments to specific configurations of infrastructure that will make it even more difficult to enact changes to current models of teaching, learning, and writing, the globalization of higher education does offer opportunities to rethink and therefore restructure the delivery of higher education. Without such a rethinking, the business model dominates the discussion, while concerns of educational models are either muted or remain secondary.
Throughout this webtext I have told a story about how I have come to learn about transnational writing programs. Through the course of my learning, I have developed strategies to change the writing program-related activities on RIT's campuses. Specifically, as a WPA working in a transnational setting, I have attempted to reckon with the specific institutional histories of where I work, and make deliberate attempts to foster robust, structured, direct communication with faculty and administrators. I have found the following strategies useful:
Strategies like these use existing infrastructure for the development of new activities that challenge the predominance of business models that can be more opportunistic than deliberately educational, despite the intention to deliver strong educational programs. The development and implantation of international programs can be deliberately opportunistic in that they aim to establish alternative revenue streams, expand the reach of an institution's educational, research, and scholarly mission, and establish or further individuate the uniqueness of an institutional brand. WPAs, as part of the infrastructure of higher education, are positioned to balance the pressure exerted by the economic models of education with meaningful and effective pedagogies for education.
Yet in order to influence the conversations about international education on our campuses, WPAs have more work to do in order to rectify our own historical and disciplinary limitations with regard to prevalent linguistic ideologies and disciplinary knowledge gaps. The questions we can't answer easily are not going away. We can ignore them, and continue to do our jobs on U.S.-based campuses, but in doing so we would miss out on some of the most pressing and invigorating discussions in higher education today.
Here, as in my edited collection, Transnational Writing Program Administration (2015), I use the term "transnational" to describe the growing phenomenon that Grant McBurnie and Christopher Ziguras address in their book Transnational Education: Issues and trends in offshore higher education as "any education delivered by an institution based in one country to students located in another" (p. 1). But unlike "global" or "international," I use the term "transnational" because it also invokes a more critical, analytical orientation like that described by Rebeca Dingo in her book, Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, transnational feminism, and public policy. Dingo (2012) argued:
The term transnational, while defined in a number of ways, generally refers to how globalization has influenced the movement of people and the production of texts, culture, and knowledge across borders so that the strict distinctions among nations and national practices can become blurred. In the last ten years, disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences have recognized that increasing globalization and enduring neoliberal economics have changed our understandings of citizenship, place, and texts. Drawing heavily from the fields of political science, sociology, geography, and women's studies, the emergent interdisciplinary field of transnational studies has sought to uncover, analyze, and conceptualize similarities, differences and interactions among trans-societal and trans-organizational realities and dynamics across time and space (Levitt and Khagram, p. 10–11). (p. 8–9)
By considering the infrastructure of transnational writing programs, my aim is to continue a critical conversation about the opportunities and implications for the learning, teaching and administration of writing across borders.
The bitter battle in the state of Wisconsin over the right of public employees to unionize and bargain collectively is now shifted to the courts and yet, the massive efforts to recall elected officials failed. The argument made by the Republican Governor, based upon a kind of market logic, is that after years of recession and continued economic downturns, the salaries and benefits of public employees, which were the result of collective bargaining, were too costly for the state to continue paying. Still, while the public employee unions agreed to reductions of pay and benefits, the governor insisting on his legislation in the Republican controlled legislature, despite the efforts of the minority Democrats to thwart the passage of the law, as well as widespread public support. An example of market logic gone awry: even when the unions agreed to reductions of pay and benefits to help close the budget deficit, the governor signed the law to restrict collective bargaining.