composition in part time...I hate this

Ok, here's a few things I'm sure we can agree with:

1. Part time labor is expletive...and exploitative.
2. Full-time, non-tenurable teaching positions are an improvement over part-time labor in ethical terms and certainly in material terms for the people doing the work.

However, here's a completely unrelated question/concern that gets mixed up in this: how do you run a "good" composition program? These questions are unrelated except to the extent that you can say that a good composition program cannot be run on unethical employment practices.

So what do you need to run a good composition program?  You need full-time, tenurable faculty who specialize in composition. How many? I'm not sure, but enough to conduct research, do curriculum development, run assessment, and peform other service related to the composition program. These are things you can't ask lecturers to do (even if they have PhD's in rhetoric and composition, which isn't the case in our department).

Assuming one is paying part-timers adequately, there needs to be faculty development. Again, one cannot expect lecturers to conduct research, attend conferences or do other things to stay current. However, it does strike me as possible to ask adequately comepensated lecturers to participate in faculty development.

Asking for this recognizes a substantive (and what should be obvious) difference between composition and other introductory courses commonly taught by adjuncts in other disciplines. Composition isn't an introduction to something else.  It is a subject and disciplne unto itself. I may be wrong, but I suspect that one does not find much scholarship on "teaching introduction ot chemistry" or biology or psychology or history or philosophy for that matter. Nor is there much, if any, scholarship on teaching introduction to literature. This is a reflection of doctoral education, which in most fields contains virtually no coursework in pedagogy. In the humanities, Rhetoric and Composition, would be the notable exception to this, as the field of Composition, obviously, is an entire disciplinary enterprise that is focused on research and teaching composition.

The fact that most composition courses are taught on the first-year level does not make the teaching of the material any less complex than teaching a graduate course. Of course, teaching an introductory course means that one is providing a cursory, surface, generalized curriculum, that is by definition a different kind of knowledge from that required of a specialized course. It doesn't mean that expertise is not required on the part of the instructor; it simply means that the curriculum is necessarily of a different order from non-introductory courses.

The knowledge required in a composition course, however, is of a different order. It is not knowledge that you are expected to pass on to the students. It is expert, disciplinary knowledge of the writing process and writing pedagogy necessary for teaching the course. The analogy perhaps is not so much your physics professor as it is your fourth-grade teacher. Of course your fourth-grade teacher understands the material s/he's teaching. Most adults comprehend the curriculum of a fourth-grade classroom. That teacher's expertise does not come from knowing the content, but rather in knowing how to teach the content.  Similarly, most people with an MA in English can write a successful undergraduate academic paper. Having such knowledge or ability is not what qualifies one to teach composition.

In short, composition is a specialized disciplinary field. The state doesn't permit people with an MA to just start teaching high school English, so why accept it at the college level? This doesn't mean that people with MA's cannot be or aren't excellent composition teachers or that people with PhD's in rhetoric and composition necessarily are.

However it does mean that if you want to have a successful program in composition, just like if you want to have a successful program in literary studies or economics or mathematics, you need to have faculty that are trained in the field, who conduct research, and who stay current. That could be faculty with MA degrees, provided the possibilty of professional development is there.

I suppose what angers me in this situation is my colleagues' presumption that anyone can teach writing, that it isn't a discipline, that it isn't an intellectual activity that anyone would choose to pursue. In short, that we could never create tenure-track faculty lines around the composition program because composition isn't worthy of tenurable positions and no one would want to take such jobs. Some suggest that everyone in the department should teach composition. I disagree, most of those people aren't qualified to teach composition.

And the funny thing is that I'm not really in favor of composition programs anyway, especially composition programs that are perpetually and structurally underfunded...but that's a different post.