Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607328151 ISBN 13: 9781607328155

Verlag: Utah State University Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace is the first volume to take up the issue of bullying in writing programs. Contributors to this collection share their personal stories and analyze varieties of collegial malevolence they have experienced as WPAs with consequences in emotional, mental, and physical health and in personal and institutional economies.
 
Contributors of varying status in different types of programs across many kinds of institutions describe various forms of bullying, including microaggressions, incivility, mobbing, and emotional abuse. They define bullying as institutional racism, “academic systemic incivility,” a crisis of insularity, and faculty fundamentalism. They locate bullying in institutional contexts, including research institutions, small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and writing programs and writing centers. These locations are used as points of departure to further theorize bullying and to provide clear advice about agentive responses.
 
A culture of silence discourages discussions of this behavior, making it difficult to address abuse. This silence also normalizes patterns and cultivates the perception that bullying arises naturally. Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace helps the field to name these patterns of behaviors as bullying and resist ideologies of normalcy, encouraging and empowering readers to take an active role in defining, locating, and addressing bullying in their own workplaces.
 
Contributors: Sarah Allen, Andrea Dardello, Harry Denny, Dawn Fels, Bre Garrett, W. Gary Griswold, Amy C. Heckathorn, Aurora Matzke, Staci Perryman-Clark, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, Erec Smith
 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cristyn L. Elder is associate professor of rhetoric and writing and cofounder of the Stretch and Studio Composition program at the University of New Mexico, for which she was cowinner of the 2016 Award for Innovation from the Council on Basic Writing. She received the 2015–2016 award for Outstanding New Teacher of the Year and the 2015 Golden Louie Award for Outstanding Faculty Student Service Provider, both at the University of New Mexico.
 
Bethany Davila is associate professor of rhetoric and writing and cofounder of the Stretch and Studio Composition program at the University of New Mexico, for which she was cowinner of the 2016 Award for Innovation from the Council on Basic Writing. She received the 2013–2014 award for Outstanding New Teacher of the Year at the University of New Mexico, the Best New Scholar Award in 2012 from Written Communication, and the Dimond Best Dissertation Award in 2011 from the University of Michigan School of Education.

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Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace

By Cristyn L. Elder, Bethany Davila

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2019 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-815-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Foreword Shirley K Rose, 
Introduction: Bullying: Not Just Politics as Usual Cristyn L. Elder and Bethany Davila, 
1. "Shocked by the Incivility": A Survey of Bullying in the WPA Workplace Bethany Davila and Cristyn L. Elder, 
2. Of Sticks and Stones, Words That Wound, and Actions Speaking Louder: When Academic Bullying Becomes Everyday Oppression Harry Denny, 
3. "Nevertheless, She Persisted": Strategies to Counteract the Time, Place, and Structure for Academic Bullying of WPAs Aurora Matzke, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Bre Garrett, 
4. The Making of a Bully Culture (and How One Might Transform It) Sarah Allen, 
5. Quiet as It's Kept: Bullying and the Contingent Writing Center Director Dawn Fels, 
6. Breaking the Silence of Racism and Bullying in Academia: Leaning in to a Hard Truth Andrea Dardello, 
7. Race, Teaching Assistants, and Workplace Bullying: Confessions from an African American Pre-Tenured WPA Staci Perryman-Clark, 
8. A Barbarian within the Gate: The Detriments of Insularity at a Small Liberal Arts College Erec Smith, 
9. The Professional Is Personal: Institutional Bullying and the WPA Amy Heckathorn, 
10. Remediation via Mandate: The California State University's Early Start Initiative as Manifestation of Systematized Bullying W. Gary Griswold, 
11. "I Can't Afford to Lose My Job" Anonymous, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"Shocked by the Incivility"

A Survey of Bullying in the WPA Workplace

Bethany Davila and Cristyn L. Elder

In their opening chapter to The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration, Jillian Skeffington, Shane Borrowman, and Theresa Enos (2008) identify ways writing program administrators (WPAs) (most of whom are women and many of whom, whether male or female, are junior faculty) fight to do their jobs. They provide examples of both the professional and personal challenges WPAs can face and share the results of their "Web survey of WPAs," designed "to profile the work of writing program administrators in broad strokes" (Skeffington, Borrowman, and Enos 2008, 8). The authors begin their discussion by listing the questions they did not ask, including, as they note, the most important yet implicit question "are you okay," a question to which "many junior faculty with administrative duties cannot respond positively on either a personal or professional level" (Skeffington, Borrowman, and Enos 2008, 9). In many ways, we designed our survey — the focus of this chapter — to address an aspect of that unstated question ("are you okay?") by asking WPAs and those who work in the WPA workplace whether they have experienced bullying and, if so, to describe the details of those experiences. Through the results of our survey, we identified bullying as a common peril in the WPA workplace. In addition to contributing to WPA scholarship on what has heretofore been termed working conditions or politics (phrases we take issue with in the introduction to this collection), this chapter also contributes to scholarship on bullying in higher education by defining the categories of the Negative Acts Questionnaire–Revised (NAQ-R) — a research instrument used to collect data on workplace bullying in primarily Anglophone settings — and by identifying an additional category that is relevant to and perhaps beyond the WPA workplace.

Ultimately, this chapter describes the scope of bullying in the WPA workplace as well as the prevalent patterns within the broad term workplace bullying. Through this work, we aim to draw attention to unacceptable behaviors that have been largely normalized and often go unaddressed. By showing the unacceptable prevalence of bullying in the WPA workplace, we will not only send the message to targets of bullying that they are not alone, but we also hope to inspire others to work against the behaviors and patterns described below. In other words, we intend for this chapter to serve as a call to action for our field.

The Survey

To investigate the extent of bullying in the WPA workplace, we surveyed and interviewed self-identified stakeholders in writing programs at colleges and universities across the United States. In this chapter we will share the results of this survey, which sought to answer these questions: what does bullying in the WPA workplace look like, and how often does it occur?

We began the anonymous online survey by asking participants (recruited through professional academic listservs, namely, WPA-L, BW-L, WAC-L, and SLW-L) if, based on the one definition of bullying we provided, they had been bullied in relation to their work in the WPA workplace. For participants who answered "yes," we asked them to describe their experiences. In addition and alternatively, participants were given the option to provide their contact information so we could interview them about these experiences. Our goals with these first two questions were to identify the scope of bullying in the WPA workplace and to collect information about the kinds of bullying people have experienced.

The next section of our survey followed an established method of measuring workplace bullying: asking participants to read a list of acts or behaviors and to indicate how frequently, if at all, they had experienced each of those acts in the previous twelve months. The list we used was a slightly adapted version of the NAQ-R, which is "a reliable, valid, comprehensive, yet relatively short scale, tailor-made for use in a variety of occupational settings" (Einarsen, Hoel, and Notelaers 2009, 27). The full list of the acts and behaviors is included with our findings in this chapter. We followed the protocol tested in association with the NAQ-R and asked participants to limit their responses to a specific time frame (the previous twelve months). This time frame helps distinguish between bullying, which involves "repetition (frequency), duration (over a period of time) and patterning (of a variety of behaviors involved)," and other negative but isolated workplace experiences (Einarsen, Hoel, and Notelaers 2009, 25). However, a few respondents specifically stated either that they did not follow those directions or that if they hadn't done so, their answers would have been considerably different, as their experiences with bullying happened at prior institutions and didn't fit within the twelve-month time frame. Participants' answers to this section of the survey help us better understand the kinds of bullying WPAs might face and the frequency of specific acts of bullying.

Finally, the survey collected demographic information and (again) asked participants to provide contact information if they were willing to participate in a follow-up interview.

Participants

A total of 124 people answered at least one question in the survey. However, only 114 participants provided demographic information by answering one or more of the questions at the end of the survey, and 104 of those respondents also reported having experienced bullying. Because the rest of the chapter focuses on the responses of those who both completed the survey and experienced bullying and because 50 percent of those who did not report bullying also did not provide demographic information, we report only on...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Utah State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1607328151
• ISBN 13: 9781607328155
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 199
• Herausgeber: Elder Cristyn L., Davila Bethany
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland