DePaul University's Major in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse

DARSIE BOWDEN

Introduction

The Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse (WRD) separated from DePaul's English department on July 1, 2007. WRD assumed immediate oversight of the first-year writing program and the minor in professional writing, which, at the time, had twenty-six declared students. In the course of the next year, we established a master's in WRD, annexed an existing master's in new media studies (an interdisciplinary degree already directed by a WRD faculty member and staffed primarily by WRD faculty), and created a TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate program. Finally, in March of 2010, we submitted a proposal for a BA in WRD, which was approved in the summer of 2010.

Department Name: Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse

Institution Type: Private, Catholic, Doctoral/Research University (DRU)

Institution Size: 25,000 students

Residential or 87% commuter
Commuter:

Student Body Diverse student body; high percentage
Description: first in their family to go to college;
high school GPA average 3.55; 33%
come from out of state

Year Major Began: 2010

Official Name of Bachelor of Arts in Writing, Rhetoric,
Degree: and Discourse

Number of Majors: In year one: 8 In In year three: 40
year five: N/A Current: 40

Number of Full-Time 13
R/C Faculty:

The journey to a free-standing department with its own major was predictably tumultuous. Change is difficult in the conservative culture of education, and DePaul — the largest Catholic university in the US, with an enrollment of 25,398, including 7,983 graduate students (mostly master's students) — is not immune to the power of the status quo. The scarcity of resources due to the economic downturn of the past three years has served to exacerbate tensions and competitiveness between departments and programs. In addition to struggles for resources, some of the drama in our separation stemmed from local conditions, including existing institutional structures, areas of expertise, alliances, and personalities. The split also put into stark relief assumptions about writing — how it is defined, how it is perceived, and who owns it in terms of disciplinary jurisdiction.

Overview and Program Rationale

In the negotiations surrounding the physical and curricular separation from English, one of the most heated conversations concerned the naming of the new department. English department representatives, a majority of whom were creative writing faculty (poetry, fiction, and "creative nonfiction"), were insistent that the new unit NOT include writing in its name, unless it was "writing studies." While at first only a problem as we worked to divvy up the courses from an existing (and successful) master's degree in writing (both units wanted to retain "writing"), the naming issue would later fuel debates about the undergraduate major as well. The creative writers who identified strongly with literature — both professionally and personally — not only wanted to remain with English, but also wanted to retain primary status as the "writers" of the DePaul community. As such, they also felt they should be entitled to keep first-year writing in the English department. Thus, the question of who could control writing became both disciplinary and symbolic — should it be English with its long, illustrious history and investment in literature and "creative" writing or the new department, nested in the field of composition and rhetoric, with its even longer history and intellectual and practical investments in language and rhetoric? There is no convenient (or perfect) answer.

To add to the jurisdictional confusion, the university writing center, which had been supervised and managed by English department faculty since the mid 1970s, had become a unit of Academic Affairs in the previous year. Shortly afterward, Academic Affairs hired a staff director rather a faculty director, who, as it happened, had a graduate degree in literature, exacerbating jurisdictional issues and distancing writing even further from the control of those with disciplinary expertise in writing center theory and pedagogy.

Ultimately, compromises were made and departmental naming and course jurisdictions were sorted out, resulting in gains and losses for all parties. Because the development of the major came on the heels of the creation of a new department, we had already begun to tackle the kinds of issues that would shape our major proposal. The following section deals with the development of the major, describing our goals and the subsequent choices and their motivations.

Developing and Implementing a Major

Developing a new major (and department) from scratch was, at first, a heady experience. This was a department we could build from the ground up, and we all felt we wanted to create something that would make a significant contribution to both the university and our field. That giddy idealism faded as we began to recognize and then engage in the hard work of setting up a major that would satisfy numerous constituencies — faculty, students, and other units in the institution as a whole — each who had a variety of assumptions about the role of writing in the university and how to teach and study it.

First, we wanted to try to make use of the expertise each faculty member brought to the major. Initially, we considered the disciplinary interests and specializations of each of the tenure-track faculty. The most senior faculty had expertise in rhetoric, composition theory, and pedagogy, including writing centers, writing program administration, and new media. One advanced assistant professor was a linguist with interests in global Englishes and writing for non-native speakers; another specialized in civic and political rhetoric (both were later tenured). These were rounded out by faculty whose interests and expertise included professional and technical writing, new media studies, and Mexican and Latin American rhetoric. All nine tenure-track faculty had strong backgrounds in composition and rhetoric. We soon moved to invite adjunct faculty into the deliberations as well. We had an extraordinary (in both size and quality) group of adjunct faculty, most of whom had considerable training in the teaching of writing and/or experience in the workplace.

The name Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse emerged out of the discussions to capitalize on our expertise, as did the structure of the major. We developed writing courses that would offer practical experience and instruction (professional and technical writing, style, editing, revision, internships, and special topics such as grant writing and legal writing), as well as rhetoric and discourse courses that would blend practice, theory, and history (rhetorical analysis, genre analysis, digital rhetoric and culture, alternative rhetorics, and intellectual property). Our professional interests in service learning — work we were already doing with our classes (literacy, ESL, professional and technical writing, and social justice) — would be highlighted as a prominent feature of the major, particularly important at DePaul, where institutional connection with the local Chicago community has been fundamental to the university's mission since its founding in 1898.

The process of approval required that we work to define ourselves in opposition to other units, especially English, which retained the creative writing courses. Drawing from prominent discussions in composition and rhetoric, we articulated key differences in various approaches to studying texts. While literary studies focuses primarily on the interpretation of literary text, writing studies is inextricably grounded in production of non-literary text, such as writing in professional, legal, non-profit, corporate, civic, academic, digital, religious, and personal contexts. In addition to these basic differences (which can, of course, be seen as complementary), literature scholars and writing studies scholars work within separate disciplinary domains, drawing on distinct epistemological paradigms and modes of inquiry and participating in distinct professional and scholarly communities. As writing studies has matured and professionalized as a discipline, these differences have increased and become a source of tension in many English departments (Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse 2010).

Further, our developing major was unlike other majors at the university who had interests in writing, rhetoric, and media (communication, education, and computer science). Using the following language, we explained how we situated our major within and among other fields of study, taking care to define what we meant by writing.

WRD is grounded in the theory and practice of symbolic expression, from its broadest cultural manifestations to its most particular instances of production. We understand that the 2,500-year-old discipline of rhetoric functions as a productive and analytic art — a system for creating and interpreting the social and cultural knowledge that sustains, shapes, and alters the way people interact personally, professionally, and publically. We define writing as a particular mode and instance of rhetorical production, or language-in-use, a concrete manifestation of social and cultural orientation (Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse 2010).

During the process of developing our major, the university was in the midst of a five-year strategic plan, called Vision Twenty12 (DePaul University 2012). One of the key goals of the plan was the enhancement of academic quality in the following areas: educating students for a globalized world, extending the classroom to include the city of Chicago, providing opportunities for students to learn ethical practice, and becoming the dominant provider within certain markets. We took advantage of these goals, foregrounding them in both our proposal and our proposed (and eventual) curricula. Additionally, with no other independent writing departments in the Chicago area, we could make the case for becoming the dominant local provider of undergraduate education in writing studies.

In a time of scarce resources, we took care to attend to the university's budgetary concerns. The health of our minor in professional and technical writing enabled us to use existing courses in the minor as an initial foundation or jumping-off point for the major. These courses included professional writing, grammar and style for writers, technical writing, introduction to reasoned discourse, composition and style, rhetoric, and writing and social engagement. Taking advantage of what was already on the books enabled us to start signing on majors immediately without creating new courses. In addition, we could adapt many of our graduate offerings to be appropriate for undergraduate students. We had sufficient faculty to cover courses, and we would not have to add courses until our major began to grow.

Finally, we wanted to nest the vocational within the context of the humanities in order to situate ourselves squarely in the liberal arts and sciences. We made the case that a WRD major could serve students in the workplace by teaching them how to be professional and technical writers, while at the same time providing students with a well-established cornerstone in liberal arts education through the advanced study of rhetorical theory and history, literary practices in contemporary culture, language and style, and writing pedagogy. In other words, we could provide majors with a rhetorical education that would enable students "to engage the ethical implications of language use, an engagement that [would] allow them to act as ethically and socially committed people both in their local communities and in society more broadly" (Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse 2010).

We established a set of five core courses that all tenure-track (and many adjunct) faculty would be expected to teach, and which every student in our major would take:

• WRD 203: Style for Writers

• WRD 205: History of Literacies and Writing

• WRD 209: Genre and Discourse

• WRD 301: Writing in Workplace Contexts

• WRD 306: Rhetorical Traditions

Students would then be required to take at least one course from the writing category, at least one course from the rhetoric and discourse category, and a service learning course (already a liberal studies requirement), up to a total of fourteen courses. Electives were open. We were careful to avoid front-loading the program with requirements and instead worked on creating a major with considerable flexibility. Consequently, students could shape a writing major according to their goals and interests and could easily double major (with, for example, commerce, political science, education, computing, and digital cinema).

Challenges

One of the most difficult challenges was in marketing. How could we attract incoming students whose high school background situates writing almost exclusively within English or language arts — with a primary focus on literature — and where even "writing" courses are often conflated with literary study? The name we selected did not help much in this area. In addition to the confusion about who teaches writing ("What? This is not an English class?"), the mention of rhetoric often drew blank stares from students and other university faculty, and the term discourse seemed even more mystifying.

To meet these challenges, and in a concerted effort to compete with more established majors at the university, we worked quickly to form recognizable programs that would appeal to writing demands in the new century. We created an internship program to make use of the rich opportunities in the Chicago area — in business, publishing, and workplace writing. We embarked on a vigorous internal marketing campaign, developing innovative program structures like the combined BA/MA. We collaborated with the English department and the School of Education on a five-year secondary education degree, in which we were responsible for designing the parts of the curricula that had to do with writing and rhetoric. Building on our MA in new media studies, we worked to emphasize digital literacies in many of our course offerings. We partnered with the writing centers to promote national efforts to increase the visibility of writing through the National Day on Writing (now an annual celebration). And we secured a multi-year grant from the Department of Education and Chicago Public Schools to help low-income high schools develop successful AP English language and composition programs.