Composition Forum 44, Summer 2020
http://compositionforum.com/issue/44/

Building Support through Kairotic Moments: A Conversation with Gail Shuck

Emily Simnitt

Abstract: In this interview, I speak with Gail Shuck about her continued commitment to seize upon what she describes as “kairotic moments” to build a network of support for refugee students, an underserved language-minoritized student population, at Boise State University. Gail describes how she has inhabited her administrative position to work for change and “combat” monolingual ideology, building connections to community agencies, high schools, and academic partners including administrators, faculty, and students. The interview concludes with Gail’s advice to future WPAs.

Gail Shuck is the Coordinator of English Language Support Programs for Boise State University. Her 2006 article “Combatting Monolingualism” has, since its publication, served as a guide for writing program administrators for advocating for more equitable, integrated instruction and support for multilingual students. In it, she draws on Anthony Giddens’ notion of agency which theorizes that the “very rules and systems” that at first appear to prevent change in fact contain the seeds of transformation. She writes that “even if institutional positions like mine are structured in ways that might justify continued marginalization, as I imagine they will be despite our attempts to encourage critical reexamination of pedagogical responsibility, those of us creating and holding such positions must continue to work for change, knowing that change will be the result of this intricate web of human interaction” (71).

Her two decades of work at Boise State exemplify these words, demonstrating a way of being in an administrative position that works for change toward social justice and advocacy for language minoritized students and continues to “combat” monolingual ideology. Gail’s work extends deep into campus at Boise State University and community alike to places such as the English Language Center which provides English language training and cultural orientation for the waves of refugees, most recently from Iraq, Congo, Bhutan, Burma, and Somalia, who have moved to Idaho since it became a resettlement area in 1975. In the last five years, as many as 1,100 new refugees have arrived in Idaho each year—many of them school-aged children who then graduate from an Idaho high school and seek out higher education at Boise State.

What follows is a description, mostly in her own words, of Gail’s work to uncover the language diversity in the institution and the community and build a web of connections between the two in order to advocate for and support language-minoritized students. Gail relates the stories of the people she has met and developed as allies interspersed with explanations of how she draws on those relationships to build networks of support for students that cross institutional and community spaces. Some of the network of support she has developed is formalized—as is evidenced by the list of resources for refugee students on her campus and community (available as a PDF; also available is a PDF list of resources for refugees who may not be students). The resource list represents just a portion of the network that Gail has built. There is an intangible element to her network, too. It resides within her and her readiness to meet new people and her genuine interest in their personal stories. The network itself allows Gail to seize upon what she refers to as “kairotic moments” where she can make connections and make a difference. What follows is the next chapter in Gail’s work to provide leadership on combatting monolingualism.

Emily: The rise of international students in the past decade has led to an increase in attention to multilingual writing instruction. But Combatting Monolingualism: A Novice Administrator’s Challenge still feels so relevant and necessary. In that article, written 14 years ago, you profile Boise State University and the field of Second Language Writing. What has changed for you since then? What is still relevant to how you encounter attitudes about multilingualism in your context?

Gail: For one thing, I am more aware of refugee students. Period. Back then, I knew that the CAMP program existed to provide support for the children of migrant workers, and the TRIO program to serve first-generation and low-income students. I had connected with them already. I knew there was support for international students. There has always been an infrastructure to support international students. There have always been study abroad programs and partnerships between Boise State and other universities in other countries to support recruiting more international students. We have an Intensive English program. There are English proficiency requirements. All of these resources were designed with international multilingual students in mind.

I also knew that there were students who were described to me as “falling between the cracks.” As I learned more about the institution, I realized that the students who were falling between the cracks, as the committee who created my position thought of them, are largely U.S. resident multilingual students. At Boise State, I’ve come to find out, many of those students arrived in the U.S. as refugees. At the time, the only data the institution was collecting on new applicants to the university that might have helped identify language-minoritized students was “what is your native language?” That was it in terms of language diversity. How can you develop support for students the institution doesn’t officially know are there?

Emily: How did you come to better understand the “hidden” community of students?

Gail: I’d say it started in about 2005, three years into my job at Boise State. I had a couple of undergraduate students who became very interested in working with the English Language Center for refugee adults. One of them volunteered there, and she got very excited about it and told me “you have to go.” Another one was doing a TESL certificate in western Washington and had to do a supervised internship when he got back to Boise. He connected with the ELC, too, and said, “Come visit my class sometime. You would love it there.” He was right.

I remember the day that I walked into the ELC. There was a man who walked into the center with me who I learned later was named Clavel, and he had lived in a refugee camp in Tanzania for 26 years. He didn’t know much English at the time. I don’t know how long he had been in the U.S., but he shook my hand and said “thank you” multiple times, even though all I was doing was saying, “Where is the director’s office? Is this the right place? Where do I go?”

He walked me down the stairs to the basement space in this ancient building. I still think about how he was there, welcoming me into this space. The refugee was welcoming me, the native born, native English speaker with all of the privileges that I’ve had, he was welcoming me into that space. There was something so moving about that.

That personal connection inspired me to want to make more. But in that visit, I also saw some of the classes, and I thought, I need to make an institutional connection here. I thought, when I teach classes on TESOL methods, I need to connect my students to this experience, because this is not the Intensive English Program [at Boise State]—this is a different population of students. My students need to understand the differences.

In that moment, I realized that in my teacher training courses, I had been so naively sending my students out to find language instruction in the community without knowing myself what was out there. As so often happens, my students were teaching me a little bit about what was available. I realized that I still didn’t have a sense of the landscape of the city. I had some sense of the landscape of language support and language diversity of the university, but not of the city. To create that connection, I took my class to observe language support at the English Language Center and to help out for an hour. After that experience, something kind of got inside me. It just changes you. There was so much vibrancy, laughter, and fun, and some suspicion of this white woman who walks in who they haven’t met before. But there were a lot of people who were saying “hello, hello, hello” to me, even though they didn’t know me. I just loved being there. At the same time, because of that, I started to become more and more aware of other kinds of integrated refugee support with the resettlement agencies.

Emily: You mentioned that learning more about the official community networks of support for refugee students led to other connections that helped you better understand the “hidden” and underserved multilingual students at Boise State. Can you talk more about the “informal” community networks and what you learned from them?

Gail: During this time, I met one of the co-owners of a Mediterranean restaurant downtown. Once he understood my connection to the institution, he would take new Iranian students under his wing and bring them to me. He had learned that, hey, there’s this person at the university who might know how to support this student. He’d sing their praises, talking about how smart they were. But when I started to get to know the students he was connecting me with, I realized that some of them didn’t have the language proficiency to be successful. We didn’t have anything like cross-cultural composition courses at the time. I had been trying to get something like that set up, but I couldn’t help them all with what we had. And, still, they were at the university. Students were being admitted who were not going to be able to take [for example] Chem 111 unless they had interpreters with them. That was the beginning of my understanding that there is this student population that I haven’t really paid attention to, and I need to be paying attention to them.

It took many more years to become more aware of the structural gaps that were not allowing us to serve refugee students or even immigrant students. We just weren’t serving them because we weren’t identifying them. I was starting to recognize that we needed to find a way to identify them as they were entering the university, but I still didn’t know how to do that exactly. I feel I sort of bumbled my way through. It was more like operating along the lines of Kairos: I would think, “Oh, there’s an opportunity, I can grab it. I could put this person in contact with that person,” but I was still learning how to make those connections part of the structure of support at the institution.

Emily: What I hear you talking about is how you came to be attuned to the language diversity in your community and institution. Boise State is now an institution with an active student refugee support group on campus, curricular support for a range of multilingual students in the first-year writing program, and faculty partners across campus deeply invested in restructuring their own classes to support students from a range of linguistic backgrounds. Can you talk more about how you’ve used what you learned from “attuning” to the linguistic diversity in the community and your work inside the institution that has led to structures of support? What are some of the “kairotic moments” in which you’ve been able to insert advocacy for language-minoritized students into the institutional structure?

Gail: In 2012 we got an influx of Saudi students that was bigger than we could have imagined. We previously had about 300 international students total, and then, all of the sudden, we had 200 freshmen who were from Saudi Arabia, almost doubling our international student population. To add to that, they were getting in with low proficiency. Suddenly we were faced with students who were not prepared for the literacy and language challenges of college. The faculty didn’t know what to do. We were all finding out that their needs were great.

Because the Saudi students in particular were coming in with extra funds, in addition to international student fees, an institutional review committee was set up to identify how to use those extra funds to support Saudi students. It was clear that I had a certain kind of expertise that was needed. I insisted on being part of the committee.

Emily: You’ve said that you saw your role on the committee as twofold: you recognized the need for better support for Saudi students, but you also brought a growing understanding of the community of multilingual students who also needed support but did not come with the visibility or the extra money that accompanied international students. What was it like advocating for language-minoritized students on a committee set up to support a relatively privileged group of multilingual students?

Gail: Every time I raised the issue of how to use the funds to also help domestic multilingual students, they said, “No. We have funds for the international students, and whatever we do has to support the international students.” This led to the committee making suggestions like hiring a tutor in engineering who was Arabic speaking and funding additional advising sessions for Saudi students. I drafted a lot of recommendations that would provide broader language support. I wanted them to understand that at the same time that we needed to support a new population of international students, we also had more and more students from refugee backgrounds, as the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. increased and families who had arrived earlier now had children educated through the public school system who were trying out college. We didn’t have anything at Boise State to support this other, unrecognized group of students.

Emily: I know from my experience working at Boise State during the time that you are talking about that you were able to make significant structural changes to writing course offerings that supported not just Saudi students but other multilingual students. Can you describe some of the changes to writing course offerings that started around this time?

Gail: At the time, we had three writing courses that offered language support prior to the required first-year writing sequence. That became a barrier that Saudi students were trying to get around, and they did. I was becoming aware of the burden of having three courses in a row that students had to pass before they were allowed to take first year writing. Saudi students, for example, faced pressure to finish in four years and not take anything viewed as “extra.” But I also knew their English level was too low to be able to handle the linguistic demands of an unsupported first-year writing course.

I was ultimately able to develop English 101M, a co-requisite model which combines the last language support writing course in the sequence (for three credits) with the usual three-credit 101 course [which satisfies the first of a two-semester writing requirement]. This helps students start first-year writing who would have previously been required to take 1-3 language support courses before starting 101.

I also got permission to lower the enrollment in English 101M to 15 students per section and worked with the campus learning assistant program to embed a tutor in each section. I’m now working to revise the ESOL placement test [which determines which students need additional language support prior to beginning the first-year writing sequence], which has just been a one-draft writing sample. I’ve added language and literacy background questions to pilot with students and will eventually add a link to The Write Class, the directed self-placement tool used by the writing program at Boise State.

Emily: In this example, I hear you drawing on what you have learned by being attuned to multilingual students. There’s the observed behavior – students avoiding classes—and other factors that shape how students navigate the institution, like the way in which the Saudi government funded their students. This adds to understanding how students draw on linguistic resources and what kinds of language support can augment those resources. Can you talk more about how you became aware of how refugee students were navigating the institution and what that reveals about the support they need? How did you bring this to the attention to your growing ranks of allies in the institution?

Gail: This issue with the Saudi students avoiding language support classes was happening at the same time I was becoming increasingly aware of refugee students coming in to the institution and not being well-served. We had one person to coordinate one-on-one tutoring for multilingual students, but struggling refugee students would still go to the Writing Center multiple times a week and get as much tutoring as they were possibly allowed, and then they would go over to our tutoring office and get as much tutoring as they were allowed. They were working hard and trying to find whatever resources there were, and they were still really struggling.

Emily: I remember having conversations with you around this time about how to support students from different backgrounds. I was teaching English 123 [the final class in the sequence of three writing courses with language support prior to first-year writing] for the first time. I had taken workshops and done reading on how to support international students from the Middle East. But when I met my students, I realized I was not prepared for the diversity of linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds they brought into the classroom.

Gail: I had that experience, too. It was 2013 and I had an English 123 class in the summer, and I had a total of 11 students; nine of them were Saudi. One of them was an Ethiopian woman and one was an Iraqi man. The Ethiopian student had come as an immigrant with a fairly economically comfortable family so they didn’t have the same struggles with trauma and poverty. The Iraqi student already had a Bachelor’s degree in engineering. He already had three children and was in his 30s. All the Saudi students were in their early 20s. What I learned from the students in that class was more about the role of socio-economic class and language. There were subtleties that I hadn’t anticipated, couldn’t really anticipate, without meeting the students and working with them as they interacted with each other and the course material. I didn’t even think about refugees when I got to Boise State. Each time I work with them, I learn something new. It’s been a continual process of learning. I’m always learning new things about students. I’m always learning new things about the refugee community here in Boise.

In fact, last spring, I worked with a student who was volunteering at a local high school with refugee students and wanted to do a research project about identity and investment among college students with limited or interrupted education, like that experienced by refugees. One of the students she interviewed is one of four sisters who arrived from Afghanistan in the United States at age 16 having never set foot in a classroom of any kind. She had literacy in Dari, because her family made sure that the girls were taught to read and write at home. I think that happens a lot in Afghanistan as a way to indirectly resist the Taliban. The other was sort of educated in refugee camps and learned a little bit of English by watching TV, but his schooling was on and off through those years. [The student researcher] was interested in how both students were able to stay motivated enough to enter college without really having an understanding about what school is prior to arriving in the U.S.

Through working with the student researcher, I’ve gotten to know more about the Afghani woman and her family. It’s amazing to me, this woman who has never been in school and then enters school in another language in another country at 16. She finishes high school. She tried college but was not ready at all. She got a job and now she is in her 30s and back at school doing a criminal justice degree. She wants to be a police officer. I couldn’t have predicted her path.

What I’m getting at with this story is that there are so many avenues I have found which I can learn about and then tap into and then educate myself more, which then helps me fill in different parts of the network and help others. It might happen like it did with this example through a student research project asking questions about how literacy develops. It’s like all of the people I’ve met and all of the experiences I’ve had come together to build something more. I’ve always approached administrative work as a process of finding allies, getting them in a room, and thinking together about what we need to do. No one person is going to have all of the ideas or know how to enact them. We have to work together. Developing relationships is part of that.

Emily: As we are talking, I’m noticing all of the different individuals you’ve mentioned—from students to faculty to individual administrators. How, then, do you use the relationships and the insight you are building with each of these moments to “attune” the institution to the needs of refugee students? For example, were you able to use your work on the committee to support students from Saudi Arabia to make strides toward supporting students who came as refugees?

Gail: At that time [when working with the committee formed to support students from Saudi Arabia], I thought, I need to put together a kind of institutional review committee targeted toward better understanding refugee students. Even the people who were really kind and well-meaning and supportive of linguistic and cultural diversity [on the committee] were still not recognizing that there were multiple groups of students who needed support and that each group was drawing on different resources to navigate the university.

I wanted to propose to them a refugee support network of some kind. I knew that to make an argument for such a formalized support system that we had to get in a room with the administrators who oversee admissions. I needed to help them see that someone could be resettled as a refugee at age 16 or 17 even and have just a single year of high school and then start classes in college because they had a 3.4 high school G.P.A. It took a couple of meetings, but eventually, they understood and asked, “hat do we do about this?” We started meeting in 2015 and it turned out that the director of admissions is now one of the biggest allies that refugees have on campus.

Emily: I know from attending workshops and conference presentations that your work on creating a more robust picture of linguistic diversity at the institution is ongoing. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve been working with admissions on this project?

Gail: It started with a discussion about what questions we might add to the admission form. The director of admissions was willing to say, “All right, what if we put: Are you a U.S. citizen? Are you a refugee? Are you a permanent resident?” But that was just the beginning. We didn’t know what the form would look like from a student perspective. It took someone who had come as a refugee and founded the Boise State Refugee Alliance to say “No, you have to ask the question this way: Did you come as a refugee? Because people want to say, ‘I’m not a refugee anymore because I’ve arrived’.” They aren’t going to check the “I am a refugee” box.

That was just the start of the process. This first try didn’t give us what we were hoping for. I don’t always see all of the implications each time we make a change. It usually takes multiple attempts. For example, when I created a three-course linked learning community to prepare students 1-2 semesters sooner to enroll in first-year writing and provide additional language support [a precursor to English 101M]. [The classes included] Linguistics 205, which was my attempt at a cross-cultural gen ed course; English 123, a writing course with language support to prepare students to enroll in the first-year writing sequence; and a special topics three-credit writing and reading workshop that supported both of those classes, taught by a TESOL specialist who had worked at the IEP for quite a long time. We set that up thinking, “It’s going to be great.” Then students didn’t want to take it because it was too much English. None of them were English majors, of course. They were trying to get into their other courses for their degree. It didn’t fit into their schedules. They saw it as a burden. It didn’t solve the problem.

Similarly, with the refugee question on the application, we didn’t quite predict how entering students might respond. So, we tried again. We thought, let’s ask a question about how much education the students have had in English medium schools. But then we needed to avoid the difficult term “English-medium schools” because students wouldn’t necessarily know what that meant, it created more complicated syntax. Like, “How many years of education have you had where all of your subjects were taught in English?” That ends up being too much to process. This is where having feedback from refugee students became so valuable. They helped us come up with: “How many years of education in the US have you had?” It actually casts a narrower net, and we might miss those students who went to English medium school in India or Nepal, but at least it gives us some data to look at so that after a few years, we can start to know more about what happens to these students.

The director of admissions has been such a huge ally. I’ve always been finding the allies. I offered four 90-minute workshops my first year as a new faculty member. It was through those workshops that I started finding allies to help me think about what we’d be able to do.

Kairos and Metanoia [Greek for “a transformative change of heart”] are all part of this together. I dismiss it as bumbling when actually there was an opportunity and I reached out and grabbed it but didn’t quite get all of it so now I reflect: How do we do this differently? What perspective were we missing?

Emily: I’ve heard you talk before about your work as “Kairotic”—of being prepared to take action. You’ve described so many small moments and connections that have built up since you first tapped into the refugee community with your visit to the ELC. I’m teaching a community literacy course, and your approach is like a textbook model for establishing connections in the community in order to find out from the community about its needs so that the community itself shapes the partnership with the institution. Do you have other examples of how attuning to the experience of students from refugee backgrounds prepared you to take institutional action?

Gail: The first welcoming into the ELC space has been enriched along the way with more and more interactions with people who came as refugees or the people who serve them. In 2013, the Boise State Refugee Alliance (what the Multilingual Student Alliance was first called) was formed, and I said, sure, I’ll be a faculty advisor. I’ve gone to every single meeting since then. Because of the group, I’ve been able to identify new places to look for allies and support. We do outreach to high schools, and the high schools now know they can call somebody at the university. It could be me, it could be somebody who is in the admissions office. They could call us and say, “Could somebody come out to our sheltered math class at the local high school and talk to them about going to college?” The Multilingual Student Alliance (MLSA) has become a place that people know in the community if they work with refugees. Becoming part of the Alliance was a Kairotic moment that has led to other opportunities. Right now, the alliance is doing more outreach, and two of the members are collaborating with me, a Psychology faculty member, and my undergraduate intern to highlight the MLSA’s role on campus, especially as it boosts students’ leadership opportunities and agency in their own education.

Another important Kairotic moment was the creation of the Center for Global Education. When I learned the president of the university wanted to have a Center for Global Education, I said that I wanted to be on the hiring committee for the director. There needed to be someone on that committee who really understood what language diversity looks like and what language support issues the director is going to have to think about. Any center for “global education” has to recognize global mobility and recognize that immigrants and refugees who are right here in our community, are part of that, and we need to be serving them. It didn’t quite work out as I had planned. When a description of the center went out, it said that it helps Boise State students serve refugees in the community. However, it at least raised awareness that refugees are here and that the university should have a relationship with that community. It’s not a victory, but it’s a start.

I’m also on the Boise State-Refugee Agency Collaboration Team. If Boise State faculty want to do research on refugee populations, we offer ethical guidelines. If Boise State faculty want to help their students understand what it means to be going to college in a community that is a refugee resettlement area, we’ve created a list of strategies so they aren’t overwhelming already overburdened nonprofit agencies. We are working to support them if they want to help their students communicate across difference.

Emily: You’ve described this amazing story of networking, continual change, and daring leadership. I wonder, as you reflect on this work, what would you tell WPAs of the future?

Gail: I’ve been thinking about lately something that Bruce Horner told me in his suggestions for revising an article I’m working on. He told me to use the word “labor” when I had not. The article is about the redesign of a business communication class to better support multilingual students and how it requires these moments of bringing people together. So, I talk about Kairos. He said, “You know, you mentioned at the end of your article research as administrative praxis. You only put that at the end, and it seems really central to what you are describing in the narrative.” Those “labor issues,” that’s the phrase he used, should really be highlighted or foregrounded at the beginning so that we can see those blurry boundaries, the intersections between research and program administration. The act of administering means bringing people together, but it also means asking new disciplinary questions and answering existing disciplinary questions.

For WPAs, it’s really critical to get whoever you need in your corner and to argue that administration requires disciplinary expertise, and that administrative work adds to disciplinary knowledge. It’s not just you, the administrator, figuring out budgets and staffing. It’s broader than that. It’s informed by disciplinary knowledge. Having an administrative role changed everything about what I do. I wouldn’t have that kind of research emphasis I’ve had if I didn’t have an administrative role. Just like I wouldn’t approach administration the same if I hadn’t been able to bring my disciplinary knowledge to the role.

Having the time and space for the two to work together is also necessary. Before I took the position at Boise State, I was also offered another position at another institution where I would be the Basic Writing specialist. They also served a large immigrant population and they were thrilled that I had a TESOL background. But I would have had a 4/4 teaching load and I would have been the ESL specialist on hand who would end up spending most of my “administrative time” doing one-on-one consulting. That’s what the institution expected in how it structured the position. I can imagine that someone would call me and say “I have an ESL student and I don’t know what to do; what are some resources?” So my job would have looked very different, and I wouldn’t have the capacity to build anything. I would be frustrated with just being the one-on-one consultant. Tony Silva has talked about this publicly: you become the default ESL specialist where your expertise is needed, but it’s also not recognized.

As a WPA, you have to get people to help you argue if you are new—or even if you aren’t. Here I am 18 years in the university in this role and I still need to gather my people around me to think about the best strategies for making the argument that administrative work is work informed by discipline. CWPA has put out a set of recommendations that describe what scholarship is if you are a WPA. That was really valuable to me as I was thinking about going up for promotion and how I articulate what I do. It’s so important to be recognized for the kind of labor that is involved in being a WPA and being recognized for the expertise you need in order to be an effective WPA and build effective programs to support language minoritized students.

Emily: You mention CWPA which addresses writing program administration generally. Certainly, “rhetoric” or “writing studies” informs the intellectual work of writing program administration. You have presented and published extensively in second language writing and language and identity in supporting and advocating for language-minoritized students. How would you describe the discipline you are talking about here?

Gail: That’s actually hard - it’s not clear cut for me. Some of it is Second Language Writing as a discipline or as an intersecting discipline between applied linguistics and writing studies. I don’t just work with the writing program. I also work with chemistry professors who aren’t using writing in their classrooms. In that case, my primary goal is to help them understand why it’s equitable to give non-native English speakers extra time on a test. I get so much pushback on this kind of suggestion. My applied linguistics background helps me think about how to explain the process of trying to do school in a language you aren’t totally comfortable in so that faculty understand that teaching multilingual students requires something different, that not all students will be able to process or interact with material in the same way. It requires pedagogical adjustments.

In another example, a committee on writing in the college of business asked me to come talk with them to address the issue of second language learners who they felt shouldn’t be graduating because they can’t write. They showed me the most extreme example of a student who was clearly wrestling with what I would call a non-genre [an idiosyncratic assignment not based on any real-world writing task]. I looked at the prompt and thought, “Of course this is bad—the prompt is so difficult to understand.” But, of course, I didn’t say that out loud. I asked them, “ What are you evaluating her on?” She only had a timed test. In this situation, I drew on my experience with TESOL and writing to make administrative suggestions to support the student.

Sure, it being a WPA requires disciplinary expertise, but it’s broader than that. I have some writing expertise, but I don’t always feel like I have enough to be able to claim that I’m a writing specialist. The discipline is more like applied linguistics as applied to higher education. It’s really an intersection of program administration, writing studies, and TESOL.

Emily: What I hear you saying is that you are able to foster transformation in so many different situations and scales because of the way you have developed expertise while at the same time establishing networks and building connections between students, the community, administrators, and faculty. As we wrap up our conversation, I wanted to ask you about the future. I know that you are working on an edited volume for writing educators based on the idea of classrooms as “plurilingual spaces,” or places in which teachers can “draw on students’ full range of knowledge and experiences as resources for the teaching of writing” (I’m quoting your book proposal here). I especially want to draw attention to the fact that you are thinking of this as “pedagogical and institutional scholarship” that has real practical use for educators. What else is next for you?

Gail: My career has been built at such a rich intersection: program administration, writing studies, and linguistics. I am now a full professor. If I never publish again (even though I’m planning to), but I have changed the institution so that multilingual students will be better served and have more equitable access to education, then I will feel like I’ve done the work I set out to do. At the end of the day, I’m going to continue to figure out how to develop support for students and faculty.

Works Cited

Shuck, Gail. Combating Monolingualism: A Novice Administrator’s Challenge. WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 30, no. 1-2, 2006, pp. 59-82.