My title is assistant professor of computers and writing. When I arrived on campus, my startup package included a computer and an iPod to continue my multimodal composition research. But the teaching part of my research quickly became problematic. My colleagues weren’t sure of my research and so they couldn’t understand my teaching. For example, I was asked to teach a video-editing class, but there were no video cameras. And no access to a computer lab. Later in the semester, I wondered why students in the class couldn’t save Photoshop files to the server. The system administrator explained that students only have 8 megs of space, “Large enough for the Word docs they write in English classes,” he said.
What I had been hired to do versus what I could do reversed the chronology of English scholarship that Kelli Cargile Cook presented earlier and made me wonder whether I would get tenure. A story, no doubt, that many of us face as we struggle to figure out how to make our nontraditional teaching and research do-able amidst the poor political economies of our departments as played out in the lack of funding in traditional English Departments for new technologies.
Ryan Moeller and I (with the indispensable help of Kelli and Mark Zachry) realized we had to educate our administrators about the research roles of professional writing faculty. With one week’s planning, we walked into a meeting with the VP of Research to ask for more start-up funds, funds inline with but not nearly the amount a science faculty member would expect. We explained our research collectively as studies on the impact of technology on culture. We were a united front, demonstrating a new wave of research, and we could point to our new PhD program as evidence of that morphing scholarship.
We received $50,000 from our department head, dean, and the vice president for research and enough hardware, software, and video cameras to do our research until we could write enough grants to maintain a sustainable budget for a small multimedia lab. This means writing more grants than we’d expected to, which changes our research topics in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways, but isn’t that part of our changing research roles? (And should it be?)
We convinced the administration, but we still have to educate our English department colleagues as to what our research is. Some of those outreach possibilities include informal faculty colloquia to share research ideas, volunteer technology workshops, and a more open lab environment. I am also working on explaining my research agenda in small, fun ways – ways that don’t involve too much technological jargon and that help colleagues see that some of my research looks like theirs, such as the articles I write for scholarly journals. One of these projects I call “Explore the Door,” in which I post my current research and teaching projects on the door of my office, with short narratives that describe how my work coheres to my research agenda. As part of the experience, I have open areas for comment and have invited my colleagues to stop by, explore my door, and provide feedback, comments, or critiques.
I would love to hear other suggestions for education and visibility, as well as how you are morphing or have morphed into tenurable faculty members without sacrificing nontraditional research agendas.