A Community of Teachers and Scholars

All distinguished writing programs share at least one major characteristic: they develop, sometimes slowly but also surely, from an aggregate of disparate instructors and courses into a rich and robust community of scholar/teachers. Our program aims to achieve such a community and invites all those reading and working with this Guide to join in its development and nurture.

In most fields, but most particularly in the field of rhetoric and writing, scholarship and pedagogy as well as theory and practice interanimate one another, inviting a multi-faceted collaborative approach that is interdisciplinary, focused on ethos rather than authority, and exploratory in the very best sense of that word. Such a stance asks teacher/scholars to recognize the value of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s insight that “For excellence, the presence of others is always required,” and to view our own research on and teaching of writing as the kind of work poet Marge Piercy has in mind when she writes, “The pitcher cries out for water to carry / And a person for work that is real.” That is to say, the community we hope to build here sees writing and the arts of rhetoric as instruments for personal as well as social change, as an opportunity for service, and as a commitment to expand the boundaries of our knowledge.

How can we achieve such a community, one that rejects homogenization and values individual diversity as well as the power of what legal scholar Patricia Williams calls ever-shifting coalitions for change? The answers to this question will emerge in the work we do together in PWR, as well as in wider local and national settings.