Research Statement
I believe that all types of research are important, from the speculative to the concrete, the esoteric to the practical. But if I am honest, I want my scholarship to yield applications I can see or recommended changes I can work toward. I grow restless when a project loses focus and stops suggesting concrete uses. I need the work I do to explicitly address contemporary crises in my field and to look toward answers. As an historian, many well-meaning people assume that I look only backwards. However, one of my deeply held beliefs about historical scholarship is that it can enrich, complicate, and drive contemporary responses to ongoing problems. And as someone aligned with and invested in Writing Program Administration (WPA), I believe the intellectual work I do on curricular, programmatic, and labor issues not only enacts but inspires research. In these two strands of my scholarly interests one finds the same underlying philosophy: my work in Composition and Rhetoric must lead to action that improves writing instruction, for both teachers and students.
My current project demonstrates my philosophy of research by linking historical close readings of pivotal figures in the creation of first-year composition (FYC) labor practices to contemporary debates about how to best advocate for and reform contemporary labor conditions, specifically the increasing over-reliance on exploitative adjunct labor and the unique challenges of tiered employment systems. My dissertation investigates Barrett Wendell (1800-1900), Edwin Hopkins (1900-1920), George Wykoff (1940-60), Mina Shaughnessy (1970-1980) and my own teaching experiences (2010-present) through the lens of labor. While my dissertation jump-starts this project, in order to complete a book-length monograph, I plan on adding an additional chapter on a pivotal figure from the years (1980-2000). I am writing my book proposal with Southern Illinois Press in mind and anticipate having a draft of the entire project completed by the end of the 2017-2108 school year.
As I am completing this project, I expect that my next research endeavor will grow out of my teaching or administrative work, again responding to my strong desire to use scholarship to improve writing instruction. In some sense that means I will have to wait until I learn more about the program I join and my place within it before fully defining my research agenda, but I can give you a sense of kind of projects I imagine working on. As a writing teacher, the problem that originally led me to investigate the labor conditions in my book-length project was responding to student writing. How could I respond as I wanted to—fully, carefully, and with deep engagement—within my labor conditions? Were labor conditions for writing teachers better in the past? How did my current labor conditions become naturalized? Thus, I see my dissertation as an example of a project that takes up practical pedagogies (of which our field has many) and positions them explicitly within a situated labor environment in order articulate strategies that improve writing instruction. As an administrator, the curricular and labor work of the job are ripe for research. For example, at the University of Oklahoma (OU) as Senior Assistant Director of FYC I helped to draft and implement an innovative two-semester course sequence enacting scholarship on rhetorical education, public speaking, and rhetorical listening. While crafting this curriculum was an act of scholarship, continuing that scholarship by writing about and publishing on it both demonstrates the scholarly value of administrative work and provides useful theory and practice for other interested writing teachers and WPAs. I share these experiences of the kind of projects I have been drawn to in the past—projects directly related to the teaching and administrative areas of my job—in order to demonstrate the kind of scholarship you might realistically expect to come out of my engagement with your program. I see my teaching, administrative work, service, and research as deeply interwoven and I am invested in finding and developing projects that build on and extend these threads.
Compiling data, reviewing archival documents, and remaining connected to relevant scholarly conversations can be slow, difficult, and exhausting work. But because I believe deeply that my research supports creating successful writing environments—specifically by improving writing instruction for teachers and for students—I am motivated and excited by my work. I see opportunities for scholarship in every class I teach and every project I undertake. My passion for accomplishing improved writing instruction necessarily embraces research as a tool for putting these ideas into practice and contributing to important scholarly conversations.
See my Dissertation Abstract for more information about my book project
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