Theorizing Feminist Pragmatic Rhetoric as a Communicative Art for ...

y a n a n d g r a b a n / t h e o r i z i n g f e m i n i s t p r a g m a t i c r h e t o r i c 

Kathleen J. Ryan and Tarez Samra Graban 

Theorizing Feminist Pragmatic Rhetoric as a 

Communicative Art for the Composition Practicum 

This article uses the convergence of our positionings as feminists, pragmatists, and 

rhetoricians to theorize communicative gaps related to different beliefs about writing 

instruction as sites of generative dialogue. We offer a WPA/TA discourse model centered 

on productive resistance and on discursive power, to posit feminist pragmatic rhetoric 

as a communicative art of writing program change. 

Exigencies and Introduction 

Part of our role as writing program administrators (WPAs) working in large, 

vibrant programs with many stakeholders is finding ways to engage with teaching 

assistants (TAs) who resist the curriculum they are asked to teach. 1 And 

part of our role as writing program participants is finding ways to discourse 

more productively about the potential of our programs to alter broader institutional 

situations. We see these roles as one and the same. In “Administration 

as Emergence,” Rita Malenczyk contends that rhetoric “occupies much of a 

WPA’s daily work” because we “are engaged in an ongoing struggle to persuade, 

whether at the local level or the national” (79). She asks, “What . . . does WPA 

rhetoric reveal about how we both do persuade and can persuade?” (79). This 

CCC 61:1 / september 2009 

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article represents one response to Malenczyk’s question by theorizing our roles 

as WPAs who engage resistance in the composition practicum. 2 

Our belief that resistance is not antithetical to the learning goals of firstyear 

composition causes us to embrace resistance as disciplinary negotiation 

and pedagogical aim, since even well-run programs encounter resistance that, if 

not embraced as a site of possibility, can lead to a quiet but perpetual programmatic 

undervaluing on the level of communicative and rhetorical ideology. We 

focus particularly on the context of the TA practicum to inventively counter 

this undervaluing for three reasons. First, in our work with writing programs, 

especially with TA training, we think we owe it to our TAs, ourselves, and our 

discipline to resee what we do as training ourselves and them in a kind of civic 

discourse and disciplinary critique. Second, as Sidney Dobrin and his contributors 

indicate in Don’t Call It That, TA training is the primary site that conveys 

and creates writing program identity, and thus has far-reaching impact within 

and beyond individual writing programs. Third, our own experiences directing 

composition and coordinating courses have impelled us to theorize more 

deeply about what could constitute healthier TA and WPA relations because 

we kept encountering situations that we couldn’t resolve from our positioning 

as either untenured or graduate student WPAs, yet couldn’t discount as valid. 

Our own practices leading us to theorize this way have been informed by 

such WPA scholarship as Ebest’s Changing the Way We Teach and Pytlik and 

Liggett’s Preparing College Teachers of Writing. We align ourselves with these 

scholars in underwriting the importance of providing graduate students with 

conceptual resources they will need to bridge disparate intellectual paradigms 

(Ebest; Rose and Finders; Yancey) and proposing the TA preparation course as 

an essential site for theory building (Stancliff and Goggin 13). Our work differs 

in that we aim to articulate a feminist pragmatic rhetoric as a way to invite all 

stakeholders to participate more pragmatically in their appointments. To ensure 

that we don’t respond with resistance in turn, we must learn to “do critique” 

more pragmatically and communicate more productively. 

We direct our theorizing, then, toward responding productively to TA 

resistance to deal better with such familiar conflicts as the following 3 : 

• Our TAs go through periods of struggle as they negotiate their TAships, 

and we take these struggles seriously, just as we take their teaching 

responsibilities seriously. They might experience the paradox of wanting 

to be told what to do without being told what to do or express a 

cynicism about learning, including a skepticism that first-year students 

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want to be engaged in their classes and can learn to be better writers. 

While we recognize some of their doubts as problematic because of the 

assumptions they make about the intellectual work of teaching, we are 

uncomfortable simply discounting them as antithetical to practicum 

goals. 

• Our TAs sometimes view the practicum as forced pedagogical initiation 

because it’s uncomfortable to learn while teaching and to embrace an 

unfamiliar ideological stance. We want to encourage TAs to position 

themselves personally, academically, and professionally in the context 

of their practica and composition teaching, but we don’t wish to unintentionally 

flatter them into thinking they can teach without training, 

or cause them to feign mastery they don’t have. That is, we recognize 

how this important theoretical work can seem to interfere with the 

day-to-day running of our programs, and that an insider/outsider (or 

expert/neophyte) difference in status frames our interactions with TAs 

despite our best efforts to elide it. 

• Practica are one site where TA skepticism or resentment about teaching 

may clash with WPA assumptions and desires regarding TA responsibilities. 

For many institutions, the ungraded teaching practicum 

reflects myriad misperceptions and tensions: that TAships exist merely 

to fund graduate education, that teaching distracts TAs from their 

“real” work of graduate study, and that program curricula and pedagogical 

practices interfere with beliefs that teaching writing is intuitive 

or simplistic recipe following. 4 These practica may be marked by poor 

attendance, limited participation, or a casual dismissal of composition 

pedagogy. Or, TAs might refuse (or be unable) to believe that theoretical 

approaches can help them develop instructional pedagogies to survive, 

if not thrive, in their first year of teaching composition. TAs might also 

choose not to carry out one or more responsibilities associated with 

their teaching in our programs. 

• We want to encourage TAs to take ownership of their own classrooms 

and be responsible program members, but we don’t believe we ever can 

or should give up the responsibilities attendant to our WPA roles. 

• Even while our job descriptions often include language calling for the 

supervision of TAs, we—particularly those of us who are untenured, 

nontenure track, or graduate student WPAs—find traditional concep- 

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tualizations of “power” don’t work for us since our practica are frequently 

pass/fail courses where we cannot fail TAs as we cannot (nor 

do we necessarily wish to) dismiss them from their appointments. We 

also often lack audiences of experienced TAs who believe in our motivations 

and can persuade other TAs of our authority as program leaders. 

Yet, we don’t like implementing mechanisms of surveillance and don’t 

want to see such conflicts as disruptive to potential program building. 

• We understand that how we conduct our practica does not always align 

with our TAs’ assumptions and expectations, and that for some TAs the 

practicum is the only venue they have for expressing angst that comes 

from overturned expectations. The practicum may also be the site for 

repressed silences, outbursts, and otherwise surprising responses to 

our pedagogy that we don’t always recognize or respond to productively 

ourselves. 

We could take the path of least resistance by overlooking these tensions, 

capitulating to them, or asserting an autocratic authority. Yet, as feminists we 

are dissatisfied with enacting Foucauldian disciplinary measures because we 

value knowledge gained experientially and dialogically, and we recognize how 

subjectivity shapes acts of knowledge making to inform communication. As 

rhetoricians we find it counterproductive to capitulate because we value our 

discipline and recognize knowledge making as contextualized, goal-directed 

communication. And as pragmatists we think it irresponsible to not react 

because we want to use our disciplinary knowledge to create good programs— 

productive activity systems where all stakeholders, particularly TAs, are engaged 

as “insiders.” The convergence of these three positionings impels us to work 

towards a stronger understanding among WPAs and TAs of what it means to 

be an engaged member of a writing program and teach writing well to counter 

programmatic undervaluing, and to model useful institutional critique, the 

most compelling dimension of which is to “loo[k] for gaps or fissures, places 

where resistance and change are possible. Such gaps are often discursive (places 

where writing—e.g., policy writing—can be deployed to promote change)” 

(Porter et al. 631). 

The Feminist Pragmatic WPA: Toward Dialogic Negotiation 

We situate our pragmatism in the context of contemporary (re)readings of 

classical American pragmatism in composition and rhetoric studies that draw 

on the historical efforts of John Dewey, Charles Peirce, William James, and Jane 

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Addams, alongside the more contemporary thinking of neo-pragmatists such 

as Kenneth Burke, Paulo Freire, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps. In “Kenneth 

Burke’s Pragmatism—Old and New,” for example, David Blakesley discusses 

Burke’s dialectical rhetoric as an example of “new pragmatism” for its systematic 

way of identifying hermeneutic inquiry as part of pragmatic/rhetorical 

inquiry. Blakesley specifically identifies Burke’s dramatism and emphasis on 

multivocality as a pragmatic/rhetorical model for agency and inquiry (88). 

Sustaining such multivocality requires that we develop paradigmatic empathy, 

a term we use to describe the empathetic and intellectual awareness of 

one another’s disciplinary positioning, and here is where we turn more directly 

to other feminist pragmatists who have already articulated compelling reasons 

to do this based on hope. In Reason to Believe, Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate 

Ronald recover the American romantic tradition and classical American pragmatism 

as an interwoven philosophy they believe gives us “a reason to believe 

in the vocation of teaching and its uses in the world” (27). They claim Freire as 

a romantic pragmatist, particularly through his concepts of conscientization 

and praxis and his recognition that hope means struggling rather than wishful 

thinking (Ronald and Roskelly 24). And in “The WPA as Pragmatist,” Donald 

Bushman discusses the pragmatic interaction of experience, reflection, and 

action—through Phelps’s description of composition as a human science and 

through Roskelly and Ronald’s romantic/pragmatic rhetoric—to illustrate writing 

program work as intellectual. For Bushman, the “pragmatic concern for selfunderstanding 

through reflection and action is central to the role of the WPA,” 

and “seeing the work of WPAs as the embodiment of a pragmatist philosophy 

. . . provides another way to distance it from the label of mere service” (31). 5 

Like Blakesley’s appreciation of agency and dialectic, Roskelly and Ronald’s 

hope for teaching as a vocation, and Bushman’s reconstruction of WPAs as 

scholarly administrators—and the pragmatists these scholars invoke—we also 

find hope in pragmatism. And we do not see hope as mere wishful thinking, but 

rather embrace Dale Jacobs’s explication of Ronald and Roskelly’s conception of 

hope as something that “combines ‘a liberating utopia’—a vision of the future 

toward which we can work—with ‘the scientific analysis of reality’—reflection 

on action” (797) in order to motivate ourselves more effectively. 

The motivation we have in mind raises hope for the institution to “be 

[more] sensitized to its users” (Porter et al. 611). Our experiences as feminists, 

women, and writing program administrators lead us to embrace feminist 

pragmatism as a hopeful model of working with other people. Feminism and 

pragmatic philosophy mutually enrich one another. Feminism offers us, as 

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women, an experiential window into recognizing and resisting oppression. 

While pragmatist philosophy embraces experience, pluralism, and reform, feminism 

quite firmly directs these values because of our interest in subjectivity. We 

recognize the complex ways subjectivity shapes experience, creates knowledge, 

and informs our reflection on the world around us. Pragmatism’s valorization 

of human experience as a way of knowing and its orientation toward reform 

via reflection on experience augment our beliefs as feminist rhetors and offer 

us a compelling means for action. 

Quite simply, pragmatism offers us a method to enact our feminist beliefs 

since it allows us to involve TAs in pedagogical development while also 

maintaining our own program leadership. It proposes genuine interaction as a 

productive way of involving program participants in the very acts of teaching 

and learning that they may resist. The following tenets of pragmatism further 

direct our feminist pragmatism: it authorizes inquiry based on human experience 

that yields contingent truths; it privileges knowledge gained through 

an examination of truths tested by experience, rather than measured against 

foundational knowledge; it involves more members of a community in the 

inquiry to better the chance of developing useful beliefs; and it understands 

beliefs as something on which shareholders should be prepared to take action 

and as habits that can be broken through the introduction of doubt (Jones). 

Both feminism and pragmatism resist mainstream philosophy’s dictum 

that knowledge is a neutral, certain, objective pursuit in favor of the belief 

that knowledge is contextual, experiential, and activity oriented (Seigfried). 

Pragmatists focus on imagining alternative communities, on the prospect 

of creating “a possibly less painful, dimly seen, future” (Rorty 19), one that 

for many feminist scholars is the hope for equity. Richard Rorty’s merging of 

feminist and pragmatic aims articulates our understanding that “feminists who 

are also pragmatists” work to create “a better set of social constructs than the 

ones presently available . . . [to work toward] the creation of a new and better 

sort of human being” (35). To this end, we elaborate on how practicing feminist 

pragmatism in composition practica is less concerned that the outcome of a 

WPA/TA interaction will result in either of us changing our minds; more likely, 

such interaction will provide TAs and WPAs with alternative habits of mind. 

Those habits of mind, when modeled and taught, may cause TAs to believe (or 

believe again) in the intellectual work of teaching composition and to credit 

our disciplinary knowledge and our discipline with offering them ways to better 

engage in our practica and better teach in our programs. 

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Defining Dialogic Negotiation with Discursive Power and 

Feminist Subjectivity 

We have come to understand that feminist pragmatism offers a dynamic model 

for action through dialogic negotiation—one that principally takes into account 

positioning to enhance our response to resistance and uses that positioning to 

move toward more shared programmatic behaviors. Because we do not want 

to seek to diffuse TA resistance through threats of real or deferred force, we 

call for re-viewing program hierarchies as visible structures to rewrite rather 

than perpetuate. 6 Not only do we hope to make traditional power relations and 

structures in our programs visible (largely to productively critique them), but 

we also want to use power “to facilitate, to share power, and to enable both 

self and others to contribute” (Miller 82). This is not unlike Phelps’s call for a 

dynamic “matrix model for leadership education in which integrations among 

learning modes intersect productively with synchronous learning among 

professionals and leaders of different generations” (“Turtles” 29). We likewise 

seek to welcome emerging leaders within our programs, creating a group of 

TAs who take seriously the teaching of writing and making program development 

a shared endeavor among teachers with different kinds and degrees of 

experience rather than a solitary WPA endeavor. 

Thus, we embrace a WPA/TA discourse that builds on Stephen Yarbrough’s 

“discursive power” as a compelling, feminist way to teach our TAs to be good 

teachers and better members of our writing programs. We offer dialogic negotiation 

as a feminist pragmatic model of dialogue for TAs and WPAs to use in TA 

practica where resistance might otherwise stop productive conversation. We 

particularly value from Yarbrough the following points: that differences create 

gaps, that differences should impel ongoing conversation, that we must try to 

understand one another to live in this world, that we must believe others tell 

their truths when they speak, and that we speak out of different conditions. 

This model has several consequences for changing our resistance by 

changing our epistemic orientation as WPAs and TAs, first by allowing us to 

rewrite the power gap between TAs and WPAs as more than WPAs having 

access to the threat of actual or deferred force, which Yarbrough describes as 

the traditional conceptualization of power (22–23). Though we do not share 

Yarbrough’s discontent with rhetoric’s history of “persuasion to conclusions” or 

agree that the best alternative is to replace composition with discourse study 

as a way of avoiding “taking a position” (11), his discourse theory offers us a 

compelling definition of power as provisional and helps us note opportunities 

for program ownership and engagement, if not leadership, by TAs: 

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if we are to understand others’ opinions, we have to grant them power. That is, 

we have to give them credit, at least provisionally, for being sincere in what they 

say—credit for articulating real differences. We have to presume that what they 

claim . . . is motivated by conditions different from those affecting our own. (33) 

Here, Yarbrough’s definition of power “enable[s] and motivate[s] communication” 

by helping us re-see points of resistance as discursive indicators of different 

conditions, not as unbridgeable differences (46), and by turning our attention 

to beliefs that prevent us from sharing others’ beliefs (4). 7 

This willingness to believe others, not unlike Augustinian caritas, means 

we can enter into conversations with TAs without immediate rejection of their 

words because we assume they have an exigence and audience, which are not 

hypocritical. However, there is more to making this dialogue productive than 

just tolerating different viewpoints. Yarbrough’s dialogic model, suitable in 

one-on-one conversations as well as larger group contexts, draws on Donald 

Davidson’s concept of charity: “If we want to understand them [‘the people 

with whom we speak’] truly—that is, if we want to know what caused them to 

speak as they did—we have to take up the attitude [Davidson] calls ‘interpretive 

charity’” (Yarbrough 6). This attitude promotes listening and working toward 

understanding, not by claiming a Burkean identification but by recognizing 

difference as a window into pedagogical limitations and possibilities that 

helps us hear others even if we do not reach agreement. Like Krista Ratcliffe, 

we understand our own theories about curriculum and pedagogy as interpretive 

processes or identifications (41). We should be more willing to extend 

this understanding to our TAs by recognizing their disidentification with our 

curricula or program philosophies. 

In addition to enabling and motivating communication, Yarbrough’s 

discourse model makes other important moves toward reform. For Yarbrough, 

discourse is motivated by the perception of difference—wherever contradiction 

and conflict manifest, a mediate position is possible and desired (158). 

Yarbrough’s “common ground” is, like ours, located in a commitment to an 

achievable commonality where the goal is mediation rather than ideological 

compromise (178). It recognizes that “the end of communication [is]… one of 

rhythmic change that provides stability and sense but depends on openness 

and novelty rather than closure and unity” and “that another kind of power can 

be produced . . . to keep the conversation going, not to silence it, to proliferate 

differences, not erase them, to respond to challenges, not submit to them or 

vanquish them” (46–47). 

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This approach to discourse strikes us as an important teaching and learning 

strategy in that “we can alter the grounds of others’ discourse simply by 

speaking, introducing new vocabularies and discursive patterns with which 

our interpreters will have to contend” (Yarbrough 77). It also offers us a way to 

approach gaps with TAs that focuses on valuing our differing material conditions 

and looking on our multiple subject positionings as how we negotiate with 

others in the world. For us, a critical point of convergence between feminism 

and pragmatism is in pragmatism’s emphasis on instantiated human knowledge 

and feminism’s emphasis on subjectivity as a valid knowledge-making practice. 

This convergence isn’t necessarily so obvious in feminist theoretical discourse, 

however; in fact, it relies on an emended definition of feminist “subjectivity.” 8 

To orient Yarbrough’s discourse theory toward feminist pragmatic ends means 

using it to re-imagine Foss and Griffin’s concept of “offering and yielding” (8) as 

hermeneutic and rhetorical strategies that help us participate in “engagement 

in an issue rather than persuasion to a belief ” (Ryan and Natalle 70). Like Foss 

and Griffin, we long for discourse models where interlocutors offer by “sharing 

what they know, extending one another’s ideas, thinking critically about all 

the ideas offered, and coming to an understanding of the subject and of one 

another” (8). But unlike Foss and Griffin, we find it acceptable that this offering 

is a suasive act. We see it as a means of engaging all program participants in 

dialogue that credits their participation and collaborative potential. 

Thus, we appreciate Ryan and Natalle’s move to align Foss and Griffin’s 

feminist subjective epistemology—one that resists change and learning from 

others—to Lorraine Code’s dialogic model of knowing others, a social science 

model “that recognizes the role of subjectivity in its quest to understand how 

we know other people” and is critical to our theorizing (75). We see “knowing 

others” as a feminist philosophical framework that enhances Yarbrough’s 

interpretation of Donald Davidson’s work and defines subjectivity as critical 

to establishing and practicing this way of knowing. Code’s enumeration of 

dimensions of subjectivity outlines four relevant conditions for constructing 

knowledge that in other philosophical systems might otherwise go unnoticed: 

historical location, social and linguistic context, creativity, and affectivity and 

commitment (46). Where a person “stands”—always amid shifting, sometimes 

competing fac tors—describes that person’s subjectivity. Thus, urging our TAs 

toward a reciprocal understanding of these learning gaps—in relationship 

to teaching and students— requires acknowledging the complexity of their 

multiple positioning and of the gaps themselves even as it requires teaching 

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paradigmatic empathy. We acknowledge their subjectivity and our own as instantiated 

conditions that we both must learn to negotiate and through which 

knowledge can be made and exchanged among WPAs and TAs. 

Conjoining Feminist Pragmatism with Rhetorical Theory : 

Toward an Alternative Destination 

But feminist pragmatism isn’t enough to help us traverse those moments where 

we cannot credit one another’s beliefs, even when we try to do so but are hampered 

by divergent disciplinary affiliations. In other words, while we seek to 

respond productively to TA resistance, quite frankly, we find we cannot always 

credit our TAs’ claims to truth because of our disciplinary expertise. This stance 

is born out of our valorization of equality and our understanding that our discipline 

has much to offer TAs—the latter being our particular “claim to truth” 

in the pragmatic tradition (we believe TAs need to learn about our discipline 

to teach writing well). Like our feminist pragmatic sensibility, our rhetorical 

education has also taught us that analytic philosophy is an inadequate model 

of knowledge for the humanities because it neglects contingencies. The concept 

of rhetorical situation, historically defined by Bitzer and Kinneavy, easily 

demonstrates its insufficiency. Fahnestock and Secor also remind us that the 

paradigmatic “rhetorical situation” is situated in setting and time, cooperative 

between at least two parties, and reliant upon both physically present and verbally 

constructed means of persuasion (177). Feminist pragmatists recognize 

that rhetorical situation is an important factor in knowledge making without 

specifically discussing it as do rhetoric scholars. 

The concept of rhetorical situation enhances our discursive power via 

subjectivity more expansively to account for broader contextual conditions, 

positionings, and persuasive ends among interlocutors participating in dialogic 

negotiation. In general, we don’t consider knowing/using rhetorical knowledge 

to be incompatible with suasory approaches in feminist pragmatism. Shannon 

Sullivan’s discussion of John Dewey’s definition of truth claims helps us more 

comfortably locate our disciplinary commitment to rhetorical studies without 

giving up discursive power or our feminist efforts to use it to facilitate reform. 

Sullivan discusses how the pragmatic tradition redefines truth claims by producing 

the expected “transformation of experience”: 

truth refers to the future career of a judgment and, in particular, the ability of 

that judgment to effect an improved transaction between living beings and their 

environments. . . . When considering the truth of a claim, one is not asking whether 

it mirrors reality, but instead whether it satisfies desires and needs. (220) 

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Sullivan goes on to write that “with Dewey’s pragmatism, claims can be judged 

true or false based on the degree to which they promote flourishing in and 

through transactions with the world, not on the degree of their transparency 

to reality” (224). As feminist pragmatic rhetoricians, then, we situate our 

truth claims and our definition of discursive power within the aim of turning 

resistance in TA practica to “flourishing in” them to create better teaching 

and learning “transactions.” Claims to truth are necessarily linked to feminist 

pragmatism’s future orientation; these truth claims are valuable only inasmuch 

as they help us do the work. 

As rhetoricians, we also value this dialogic opportunity to practice argument 

as “emergence toward the other” (Corder 26) in the hopes of creating 

mutual communication rather than discord. For Corder, this communicative 

act is only possible when participants show a “readiness to testify to an identity 

that is always emerging” and a “willingness to dramatize one’s narrative in 

progress before the other” (26). Like invitational rhetoric, Corderian rhetoric 

emphasizes the need for mutuality in discourse to “free us from the apparent 

hopelessness of steadfast arguments contending with each other” (25). This 

active hope and effort to acknowledge where the other stands supports our 

feminist pragmatic stance to “abandon authoritative positions” without abandoning 

our suasive goals or ends (29). 

We do recognize in this discourse a kind of Burkean “willingness to listen”; 

however, we do not trade in pragmatic believing or interpretive charity 

for Burke’s symbolic skepticism. Rather, we augment it with Burke’s willingness 

to question long-held beliefs about writing and to interrogate new ones 

productively as well. This rhetorical practice provides a good starting point 

for turning our TAs and ourselves from critical pedagogues into program participants, 

where participation is not defined as conforming to a singular goal 

or ideal, but as moving toward Atwill’s “alternative destination” by tempering 

competitive tendencies in favor of emergent stances. We are thus promoting 

a feminist pragmatism that fully embraces rhetoric’s aims, rather than claims 

to operate outside of them. 

To further this end, we draw from Atwill’s notion of techne as productive 

knowledge to discuss how the feminist pragmatic WPA is also a rhetor and 

rhetorician who urges program participants into transformative engagement 

by practicing transformative engagement as an art. Atwill’s recovery of techne 

to classify rhetoric as productive knowledge shifts historical arguments that 

identify rhetoric as either theoretical or practical by identifying productive 

knowledge as a situated rhetorical-epistemic art. Techne disrupts typical defini- 

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tions of “subject” as static, making it possible for a rhetor to invent more fluid 

paths purposed toward transgressing epistemological boundaries and rectifying 

those transgressions (Rhetoric 48). Techne’s aim is “neither to formalize a 

rigorous method nor to secure and define an object of study but rather to reach 

an end by way of a path that can be retraced, modified, adapted, and ‘shared’”; 

to be “concerned with the indeterminate and the possible—and that which 

presents us . . . with alternative possibilities” (195). 

As feminist pragmatists we seek to bring together the valorization of 

practice and production in our writing program work, and we find Atwill’s argument 

compelling that “to refigure rhetorical studies as an art of intervention 

and invention is to create a very different classroom” (Rhetoric 210), one where 

students—in this case TAs—are situated participants in their worlds. Rhetoric 

as techne is particularly useful for us as we imagine fluid subjectivities because 

it is, as Atwill says, something of an “expert outsider’s” art. That is, it allows 

someone to observe, from the boundaries of a given field, the regularities of a 

practice towards “decoding” it (“Bodies” 169). 

In many ways, while TAs work “inside” our programs, their personal histories 

and assumptions about writing and writing pedagogy position them as 

“outsiders” who must learn to navigate new territory. We hope to elide such 

simplistic oppositions. Whereas an administrative strategy grounded (explicitly 

or not) in analytic philosophy would require us to assume that TAs simply implement 

our curricula and transfer its goals and aims to their class once they learn 

the theoretical information involved, a feminist pragmatic rhetoric recognizes 

that practical and productive knowledges are contingent and interpretive and 

gives its participants permission to temporarily dwell in our writing programs. 

As WPAs, we recognize ourselves as makers of programs designed for users, TAs 

unfamiliar with teaching. What TAs first think teaching writing means (and, in 

fact, what we as WPAs first think teaching writing teachers means) can evolve in 

the course of a single practicum. To ensure that it evolves pragmatically means 

repositioning both WPAs and TAs as emergent learners. Practically speaking, 

this might mean teaching TAs strategies for examining a program’s goals as a 

purposeful, interpretable system with a history and context, rather than as a 

static set of rules and guidelines. 

Feminist Pragmatic Rhetoric as a Communicative Art 

In so doing, we demonstrate how we have come to terms with dialogic negotiation 

as a legitimate feminist pragmatic rhetorical act and to offer our 

understanding of this activity as part of a heuristic that invites TAs and WPAs 

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to participate in the practicum differently. By situating our theorizing in 

practice, we hope to suggest how our heuristic eases the tensions we noted 

at the beginning of this article. This heuristic includes the following dynamic, 

interwoven aspects: practice charitable interpretation, shift the focus of the TA 

practicum from chronological to kairotic time, demonstrate rhetorical power 

as something we make and share, identify value conflicts as opportunities, and 

model dialogic negotiation. 

Practicing charitable interpretation orients us toward pragmatic collaboration 

and institutional critique for the sake of reform by differentiating 

between resistance and refusal. Here, charitable interpretation means crediting 

one another with the belief that we can (re)position and (re)learn, and that we 

are capable of choosing to do so. As WPAs, composition/rhetoric scholars and 

teachers, we’re committed emotionally and professionally to our discipline 

and our programs. Even TAs responsible toward their teaching may not, of 

course, share our commitment, our expertise, or our positions as program 

leaders. And we cannot expect them to. In other words, instead of getting 

angry when TAs choose not to complete assigned readings or insist that a 

mainstream rhetoric text is “inappropriate” for their students because it doesn’t 

reinforce their own experiences, we must try a new approach: crediting TAs for 

speaking and enacting what they understand to be true by assuming that the 

conditions informing what they say are unlike our own, and by understanding 

the disciplinary boundaries of our own conditions. This means setting ground 

rules early on that articulate how all participants can self-position in the 

practicum. We have a right to require TAs to participate, even though we have 

defined participation in a more flexible way. While resistance is acceptable, 

refusal is not. 

Shifting the focus from chronological to kairotic time can position us to 

consider temporal limits and possibilities of the TA practicum to deal with the 

different urgencies of their day-to-day work alongside our intellectual work. 

WPA goals and TA expectations can coexist when we recognize what we can 

and cannot achieve in a sixteen-week practicum and that the practicum is a 

temporary, contextualized requirement with indeterminate ends. As rhetoricians 

we persuade TAs that the program matters by teaching them strategies 

for understanding the curriculum as contextualized in outcomes, albeit ones 

that evolve kairotically. Just as readers rewrite the texts they read (Rosenblatt), 

so too do TAs remake the curriculum they are asked to teach, both in their ongoing 

response to it and their creation of pedagogical materials—a particular 

context that changes with each new semester and each new group of students. 

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The aim of our practicum, then, becomes not to “secure and define an object 

of study;” rather, our aim becomes “produc[ing]—an alternative destination” 

(Atwill, Rhetoric 69) and being willing to teach from it. 9 We can still see in our 

practica the robust goal of pedagogical training, but we should accept that this 

work will likely result in a different set of goals or outcomes than just those that 

we anticipate or establish. For example, rather than introducing a reading like 

Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed or Ramanathan and Atkinson’s “Individualism, 

Academic Writing, and ESL Writers” early in the practicum to establish a 

program philosophy through key theorists, we read them near the end of the 

practicum to help us and our TAs reflect on where we have come and where we 

may still not align on core ideologies. Resituating a reading that TAs might have 

thought too unrealistic or theoretical can better reflect their and our ongoing 

experiences and ideals when read later in the semester. Even in such programs 

where the ungraded practicum is three credits and yearlong, balancing the 

demands of reading and theory building with enacting what TAs often see as 

the more pressing needs of daily lesson plans necessitates that we invite TAs 

to enter the disciplinary conversation where they are and to take from it what 

they understand. In our programs we are working with up to twenty-five TAs 

from disciplines as diverse as creative writing, American studies, Victorian 

literature, and philosophy who are unlikely to become compositionists in a 

semester- or even year-long course; however, they can learn to connect relevant 

disciplinary questions to their daily teaching and scholarship (e.g., “What is 

my craft of composing?” “How much do I intervene in their writing process?” 

“Whose notions of ‘voice’ dictate how I read my students’ writing?”). We can 

allow them the benefit of discovering the key concepts of a foundational reading 

later in their teaching practice when concepts such as craft of argument 

or process intervention invite informed dissensus. 

Demonstrating rhetorical power as something we make and share is beneficial 

both for WPAs who lack or disavow power in the traditional sense and 

for TAs who need help finding places of (personal and programmatic) power. 

In both cases, our TAs may just “do what they want” because they discount our 

leadership, or because they have never experienced distributed power and don’t 

see what it offers. Instead of promoting their cynicism, we help them become 

invested in defining the space in which they teach, the institutional context 

in which we all work, and the disciplinary controversies in which we are all 

embroiled by the very act of teaching. This movement requires making power 

structures more visible and redefining power as relational. 

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One site for this work is in program articulation; we want TAs to recognize 

that TA education materials and program documents—from syllabi to 

goal statements—are tools for program negotiation and that there is benefit 

in learning how they were created and how to re-create them. For example, 

TAs in Tarez’s practica learned the difficulties of pedagogical articulation 

when they collaboratively mapped the program’s goals and outcomes to 

each of their assignments to consider evaluation criteria for writing projects 

that they thought were too sophisticated. Tarez’s TAs systematically asked 

themselves what the criteria looked like in tangible and nontangible terms and 

articulated those criteria for multiple audiences, including students, tutors at 

the university’s writing center, and different academic and athletic advisors. The 

intended outcome was for her TAs to learn the art of constructing assignment 

sheets consistent with programmatic justifications and disciplinary goals and 

to learn how to question when conditions made it challenging to enact them. 

An unexpected, welcome outcome was that they compiled a set of resources 

to pass along to other teachers and curriculum builders who were wrestling 

with (or resisting) the same approach. Kate and her TAs collaborated on a retention 

effort to help students in danger of failing class change their learning 

behaviors. In their practicum, Kate’s TAs discussed their first-year students and 

retention problems and Kate shared local retention data. They talked about 

how to compose letters inviting students with attendance or work completion 

problems to a conference. Instead of Kate sending out a single official letter, 

enacting a traditional power role, each TA wrote letters himself or herself based 

on shared criteria. Thus, the individual most able to make final decisions about 

who gets the letter and how the letter is composed is the informed teacher. In 

this way, TAs enact their teaching responsibilities and confront assumptions 

they might have about students’ abilities to learn or commit to the class. TAs 

became interested not just in the practical details of a particular project, but 

also in the significance of their roles as teachers invested in student learning. 

Reflexive activities like these model institutional critique for the sake of reform, 

not critique. 

Identifying and naming value conflicts—that is, resistance about who can 

teach writing or what can be taught—as pedagogical differences and treating 

them as opportunities for conversation about the social, material, and 

intellectual conditions that cause them to arise in the first place help us to 

incorporate them more systematically into our practica. Paying attention to 

our TAs’ vocabulary, using our own vocabulary of generative words to create 

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experiential involvement, understanding that the naming our TAs do signals 

consciousness, and seeing these principles at work in literacy where thought 

and language are always altering reality (Ronald and Roskelly 618) are ways to 

work with conflict productively. We see this when working with definitions, 

including TA, grading, service, language, and writing. For example, two of Kate’s 

TAs, former editors, held firmly to the value of line-editing student papers until 

experience responding to student papers and reading Kearns’s article “Encouraging 

Editing” caused them to rethink their approach and adopt his heuristic. 

Had Kate insisted TAs respond to student papers uniformly, they probably 

would have stopped talking about their experimentation in the practicum. In 

this case, her silence manifested a willingness to hear their ideas that created 

space for dialogue and discovery. Practicing listening—even to silences—as an 

act of nascent understanding is vital, as is committing our practica to practicing 

long-term theory knowledge and embracing other avenues or sites for building 

interest in pedagogical study. Tarez draws on teaching metaphors, the CCCC 

position statement on writing, and autoethnography to give her instructors 

outlets for questioning their roles within a broader perspective. Kate uses Lorraine 

Code’s description of subjectivity to help TAs identify and explore their 

often-competing roles. Certainly, questions about pay, respect, and responsibility 

enter such discussions, providing vital opportunities to practice constructive 

critique. It is important to encourage TAs to understand that critiquing the 

TA enterprise is acceptable, since our ongoing theory building is indicative of 

how we critique it daily, but assuming the enterprise to be irrelevant is not. 

Modeling dialogic negotiation is our most holistic, elaborated aspect of 

this heuristic. While we can use the practicum to help our TAs understand how 

their past writerly identities affect their present beliefs about teaching writing, 

we should not base our pragmatic or rhetorical success on how their resultant 

identities align with ours. Rather, we should base our collective success on 

how well we all learn to communicate through these beliefs, how well we all 

practice intersubjective collaboration, and how strongly we commit to teaching 

even with conflicts unresolved. For example, discussing the use of points 

versus letter grades as value oriented can help TAs identify or dis-identify with 

particular ways of thinking about evaluation and perhaps better choose what’s 

appropriate in their classroom. While we value practical knowledge stemming 

from intersubjective positions and reflection on past experiences, we don’t 

privilege a “whatever works” style of teaching that many inexperienced TAs 

rely on because it often translates into what is easiest or most familiar versus 

what is pedagogically sound. Likewise, TAs’ signs of resistance in our practica 

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may reveal their lack of satisfaction, which suggests the “truths” under which 

they operate about teaching writing and composition pedagogy are situationally 

insufficient for them as well. 

This is notable when TAs argue—often against their personal experience 

and disciplinary knowledge—that students should write “the research paper” 

only because they need to know it for college, or that students who cannot 

master stylistic devices on the sentence level cannot grapple with complicated 

assignments. We must use our rhetorical positioning as WPAs and rhetorical 

theorists to engage our TAs in productive discourse as a way of allowing 

resistance to emerge dialogically through asking questions like “What can or 

should first-year composition accomplish?” and “How do you locate yourself 

in this conversation, even temporarily?” Responding to questions about how 

institutional contexts impact what they do in the classroom (i.e., “How much 

can or should non-native writers ‘write with an accent’?” or “How do students’ 

professional identities affect their attitude toward the writing class?”) can help 

TAs to anticipate the pragmatic difficulties of achieving disciplinary ideals on 

particular campuses without implying that those ideals shouldn’t still direct 

their teaching. 

While we acknowledge the temporal, contextual, and shifting nature of 

our theorizing, we value the possibility of participating in it even still. Our ways 

of enacting this heuristic aren’t particularly radical, but when taken together 

as a feminist pragmatic rhetoric, they gain impact and meaning as a theory 

rather than a loose set of administrative and teaching practices. We say this 

because we, like Rose and Weiser, “look to theory for its explanatory power—its 

power to help understand the problems, situations, and contexts of our work, 

thus positioning us to make decisions and take actions based on a richer 

understanding of their implications” (189). As Yarbrough reminds us, we look 

for ways to uncover and interrogate shared beliefs that prevent interlocutors 

from embracing still further beliefs (2–3). Taken in this light, TA resistance 

turns into as much a part of the writing program activity system as is creating 

program documents or handling student plagiarism cases. What results from 

our theorizing are WPAs and TAs who become participants in an intellectual 

pursuit whose conflicts won’t all get resolved at the end of the day. Their positioning 

is neither ignored nor elevated but is acknowledged as emergent, and 

ours is, too. The consequent program administration is intellectual, theoretical; 

it seeks an understanding of the relationship between knowing and doing, and 

becomes a site—in fact, can extend to multiple sites (including the committee 

table, the emails and hallway conversations, the program documents, and the 

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TA training program at large)—for ongoing reflection, negotiation, and action. 

This negotiation, we feel, gives our TAs and ourselves an important “rhetorical 

agility” (Kill 223). It allows us and them to acknowledge their resistance 

as a productive tension that they must deconstruct and reflect on to position 

themselves as teachers within their program’s and institution’s context. 

Recasting WPAs as Feminist Pragmatic Rhetoricians 

As feminist pragmatists and WPAs, we understand reform to mean a fairly 

specific agenda to change composition programs into “something better.” 10 

We are particularly concerned with using the site of TA training to create 

more humane relationships between WPAs and TAs and—by extension—a 

better learning experience for the first-year students our TAs teach. We extend 

Donald Bushman’s argument for casting WPAs as pragmatists to posit WPAs 

as feminist pragmatic rhetoricians who practice a discourse that offers both a 

vision of relating differently to TA resistance in practica and a means to meet 

that vision through reform. We further extend Seigfried’s historicized study of 

the intersections between American pragmatism and feminism to encourage 

our interest in recasting writing programs as spaces for using this discourse to 

negotiate a “new intellectual and social order” (19). We view our work as a starting 

point for disciplinary negotiation, as means with a hoped-for consequence. 

Because TA education is a critical space to articulate writing program 

identity, it is a significant site for repositioning WPAs in relationship to these 

ambivalent “insiders,” who may well be future composition instructors and 

noncomposition colleagues in our own and other institutions, in addition to 

being citizens who share their experiences and beliefs about writing publicly. 

In general, it includes seeing feminist pragmatic rhetoric as a way of offering 

new opportunities for TAs and WPAs to learn new beliefs and practices 

for communicating within and about their programs and for creating those 

programs. When we recognize TA education as a dynamic instantiation of 

writing programs and re-see gaps as sites of possible change, as Freirean untested 

feasibility, then we believe we can change the ways we’re viewed and 

view ourselves, the ways we view our TAs and they view themselves, the ways 

we communicate, the ways we all experience TA education, and thus the way 

writing pedagogy is perceived and enacted in our programs and institutions. 

As such, writing program administration provides an optimal site for practicing 

rhetoric as an “endeavor” and for understanding “persuasion” as more broadly 

defined (Selzer 280). 

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Notes 

As we write and work together frequently, we alternate the listing of our names 

by ascending or descending alphabetical order and not by pre-determined order 

of importance. 

1. We use the term teaching assistant to mean graduate students whose role in the 

classroom is instructor of record and whose role in the practicum is that of trainee 

or mentee, although we recognize that this term does not adequately describe 

their role. 

2. We situate this discussion within such ongoing work in rhetoric, writing, and resistance 

as Kopelson’s “performing neutrality” in order for composition instructors 

to demonstrate the exigencies underlying critical thinking; Ebest’s understanding 

constructive resistance as a process of learning in the TA classroom; Kill’s noticing 

and evaluating students’ “uptake” on genre as a way to encourage authentic 

self- or classroom-identity; and Butler’s reconfiguring of the writing classroom as 

a “countermonument,” or disciplinary space that encourages a kind of push-pull 

reflection of its own limitations. We further situate our theorizing in Anderson’s 

discussion of agency as “praxis,” specifically in his suggestion that rhetorical agency 

can (should) reside in lived experience. 

3. Changing the rhetorical situation of discourse in the TA practicum does not 

replace potential structural changes that can support our ideological stances, such 

as changing the mentoring practicum from one ungraded credit to a three-credit 

graded course, or recommending that mentoring practica give more support and 

authority to student WPAs and more accountability to TAs. 

4. These perceptions persist despite ongoing research, in and beyond composition 

studies, which argues for the value of graduate coursework in writing pedagogy. See, 

for example, Chapman and Tate; Ritter; and the MLA report “Advice to Universities 

and Graduate Programs on Graduate Student Rights and Responsibilities.” 

5. We see much evidence of the implicit values and practices of pragmatism in 

composition and rhetoric from scholars who insist that our theories and teaching 

practices mutually reinforce one another. Discussing all such published works goes 

beyond the scope of this project; the scholarship we outline briefly here represents 

only a few texts that explicitly consider composition and rhetoric as pragmatism. 

6. Marcia Dickson’s collaborative program, for example, stresses the importance of 

making power structures visible (148). Sheryl Fontaine and Susan Hunter’s efforts 

to shift the notion of instruction as immersion to instruction as invitation revises 

power dynamics. 

7. These are particular instances of the kinds of general resistance Sally Barr 

Ebest sketches out via Kearney and Plax in Changing the Way We Teach (7). The 

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strategies for constructive resistance she suggests are ones we see as embracing 

pragmatism holistically because they focus on the relationship between experience 

and reflection. 

8. Our notion of “convergence” differs somewhat from the notion that Chaim 

Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca put forward in their New Rhetoric and that 

(feminist and) communication scholars such as Mallin and Anderson have adapted 

in order to theorize a more constructive argumentation. 

9. To clarify, this does not mean convincing our TAs to be content with unsatisfying 

answers to their epistemological queries; nor does it mean permitting them to reject 

program standards. The adage “let’s all agree to disagree” is not what we have in 

mind, either, for it shows a lack of commitment to transgressing the disagreement 

and represents the disagreement as normative. 

10. For more thorough discussion on the benefits of curricular and programmatic 

change, see Robert Connors’s “Abolition Debate in Composition” and E. Shelley 

Reid’s “Changing for the Better.” 

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165–70. 

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Tarez Samra Graban 

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Program Administration, Rhetorica, and Writing on the Edge. 

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