CFP: WPA Journal, Spring 2022 Special Issue: A Tribute to Mike Rose

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WPA Journal Spring 2022 Special Issue: A Tribute to Mike Rose

As a scholar with over four decades of contributions to the field, Mike Rose set the stage for how the field of Composition and Rhetoric would grapple with basic writing and open access education. While it is impossible to quantify his impact, his broad reach is certainly evidenced by the 12 books he has authored and edited, over 60 articles in print, numerous book chapters, and his uncountable speaking engagements. Throughout his life, Rose wrote prolifically on public education policies and reform, often troubling the easy answers academics give themselves regarding how to foster intrinsically motivated learning.

From Lives on the Boundary to The Mind at Work to Back to School, Rose’s work focuses extensively on socioeconomics and the impacts, challenges, and opportunities present in higher education for the working class in the United States. Rose brought attention to adult learners and reminded us all that class-based decisions regarding readiness to learn are nothing but a lack of imagination on the part of those in power. In the introduction to The Mind at Work, Rose argues, “Measures of intellectual ability and assumptions about it are woven throughout [my] history. So I've been thinking about this business of intelligence for a long time: the way we decide who's smart and who isn't, the way the work someone does feeds into that judgment, and the effect such judgment has on our sense of who we are and what we can do.”  The questions of who we are and what we can do rest at the focal point of much, if not all of the scholarship in writing program administration. And it is with this knowledge, and respect to Mike Rose’s leadership and contributions, that we seek contributions to this special issue dedicated to the impact of his work. 

In her podcast “On Being,” Kristen Tippet reminds us that Mike Rose’s “expansive wisdom” makes it possible to disrupt our tendency to view learning too narrowly, encouraging us to illuminate the blending, the hybridity of the process, the coalescence of the physical, human, and cognitive. Throughout his career in teaching, writing, and research, he exposed the dualistic thinking so pervasive in our public, legislative, and academic settings by using the lived experiences of the working class, students, and teachers to challenge “the single story” of learning.

Working from this challenge, we invite contributors to share how Mike Rose has influenced their “civic imagination on big subjects at the heart of who we are — schooling, social class, and the deepest meaning of vocation” (Tippet, 2010). The purpose of this special issue is to honor the legacy of Mike Rose by providing the field with a rich, polyvocal resource for informing our vision for the future of writing program administration. In particular, we invite submissions from those who identify as working class, first gen, and/or as from minoritized backgrounds who worked with Rose and/or his contributions to the field in some of the following ways:

1. What challenges Rose’s work in light of new developments and perspectives within the field? 
2. How might Rose’s work be blended with emerging ideas across generational and/or institutional lines? 
3. How does it demonstrate an understanding of the difficulties writers face based on class, race, economics, region? 
4. How might we celebrate the impact of Rose’s work in the areas of access, accessibility, community partnership, socio-economic equity/justice/assistance, and/or other of Rose’s foci?

By centering narratives, dialogues, observations, and conversations, Rose illuminated multiple and diverse perspectives and experiences about teaching, learning, and working. To understand how his work, then, compels us to imagine the future of writing program administration, we invite collaborative and polyvocal works that illustrate textured and nuanced understanding of the constraints and tensions that emerge in educational research and education policy about what counts as learning and whose learning counts.

Submit 500-750 word vignettes, polyvocal narratives, and/or thought pieces that illuminate how threads of Rose’s work are part of your tapestry of teaching, learning, and research. In your email, identify which question you addressed from the list above. In the words of Mike Rose, “it is hope that drives the writing, hope that careful analysis and the right phrasing might in some small, small way open a space to think anew” (An Open Language, Introduction). We invite a symphony of writers to “think anew” on how Rose’s work served to shape the past, present, and future of writing program administration.

For queries or to submit a proposed draft, contact Angela Clark Oates, Aurora Matzke, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson at: WPAMi...@gmail.com

Timeline

Rough Drafts: December 6, 2021 

Notifications: December 20, 2021

Revisions: January - February 2022

Final Drafts Due: March 1, 2022

Forthcoming Issue: June 2022