As I reflect on my professional experience, I see it can be very easy for me to get into a “say yes to everything” mentality regarding service. I enjoy working with people and getting to know them through acts of service (or acts of committee work, as the case may be), and service is an activity that I have privileged throughout my life. As a child, I was heavily involved in the Boy Scouts of America, and through service earned that organization’s highest achievement of Eagle Scout. I have enjoyed serving my local communities by feeding the homeless or participating in my local church and community missions. Beyond this is the service context of my own life as a parent of a child with chronic illness (and my spouse and two other children, who even without chronic conditions need serving).
At the same time, the “sure, I can do that” mentality can lead faculty to overextend themselves. Doing the right service is more important than doing service. This is not simply manifested in a statement that reads “I attend all departmental and college meetings and participate actively in program review, development, and assessment.” Neither is the right service that which is most politically beneficial to the servant (what will make people like me; what will make my administrators notice me). Rather, the right service is that which best fits one’s interests and skills while still asking the servant to move beyond themselves and do for others. I am proud to put my expertise and experience in technical writing, online learning, and instructional technology into action as I serve the university and the profession as an advocate, representative, and editor.
At the department level I have been working steadily to promote and advance the new writing studies track and the English department, whether through using simple design and writing skills to create flyers and materials or doing curriculum mapping of the writing studies track with Dr. Susan Murphy (Tab 18). In my second year, I proposed a new digital portfolio assessment for the English capstone, and am excited to see where this medium takes us and our students. Another important part of both serving and learning about the department was my work on the ad hoc committee for English MA recruitment (Tab 18) with Dr. Kelly Bezio. Each of these tasks involved applying analytical and research skills alongside content analysis, graphic design, and web writing—and learning a lot about colleagues across the department. I have also worked on other department-level committees and initiatives, serving on the Scholarship Committee and the MA Exam Committee, serving as a question reviewer or reader for multiple graduate students, and all the other duties that faculty invest in their departments.
Aside from teaching, the activity that has most defined my time at TAMU-CC has been the writing studies faculty’s long collaboration on the proposed Master of Arts in Digital Content Management and Design program. Dr. Chuck Etheridge and I have shared lead authorship on this document through its many phases from precis to full proposal (Tab 19). This research, writing, and editorial task has involved many hours of original research: exploring related programs, reviewing scholarly literature about technical writing programs at the graduate level, researching content development and management trends, locating workforce and market data for program demand, curricular planning, and generating rationales that align with Momentum 20/20 and 60x30TX plans. Beyond the proposal, we have developed and reviewed seventeen new graduate courses—two of which I wrote syllabi for. Many hours of writing, editing, and meetings have gone into this major program addition.
At the college level I currently serve on the CLA Curriculum Committee. More importantly, I have used my experience and knowledge of online education on the CLA Online Teaching Task Force. This group revised and updated teaching policies and guidelines for the College of Liberal Arts (Tab 20). My role here was both a participant in discussions developing our ideas into recommendations and as a writer/editor. I took the lead on updating and editing the committee’s final written report to the Dean and the College, working through not only our content updates and guidelines, but also updating language and carefully considering how these changes should best be framed for future decision-making and what conceptions of technology and student agency they build in—a concern that also motivates my scholarship.
I have been also been active in developing and delivering technical writing workshops for students in the Mechanical Engineering program with Dr. Glenn Blalock and Dr. Charles Etheridge. This work, through the Strada MSI Measuring College Value Grant (Tab 21) has also turned into a curriculum mapping project involving gathering writing assignments from engineering faculty, identifying which technical writing skills are emphasized and which are taught, and pinpointing how the curriculum might be improved. Such work also provides research opportunities in technical communication.
Finally, I serve my discipline and profession through editing and helping beginning scholars publish their work. At the same time as I came to TAMUCC, I was stepping into a Section Editor position at Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, the premier online, peer-reviewed journal in computers and writing. This work includes design, development and copyediting work of scholarly webtexts in a variety of digital formats. Over the last three years, I have mentored authors and helped put two issues per year (nineteen reviews across six issues) into publication (Tab 22). My work as a Reviews Section Editor means that most of our authors are first-time web writers, and my co-editor and I must teach them fundamentals of coding and digital writing alongside the rhetorics of book reviews. This kind of service draws on my teaching and research emphases, and I have been able to extend lessons learned by mentoring digital scholars into my classrooms in Writing for the Web and Editing.