Understanding Wpa Readiness and Renewal

Understanding WPA Readiness and Renewal examines WPA journeys and journeying. Designed for WPA graduate seminars and professional development workshops, this book addresses two questions:

How do people develop readiness to serve as WPAs?

How do experienced WPAs find or create renewal opportunities that help them move forward throughout their lives and careers?

Authors address these questions from a range of perspectives, including their sometimes-intersecting identities as Scholars of Color, LGBTQ+ people, graduate students, adjunct faculty, as well as early, mid-, and later-career WPAs. Authors also draw on their experience teaching at a range of two- and four-year institutions to analyze the complexities, contingencies, and rewards of short and long-term WPA work.

This book offers readers theorized and nuanced understandings of how aspiring, early career, and experienced WPAs plan, lead, and (re)-build their careers and working lives. It helps graduate students better understand the enticements and entanglements of their intended career's work. This book also offers mid- and later-career WPAs ideas for rekindling interest in work that may have become alienating, stagnant, or unrewarding. Chapter authors contend that understanding WPA "readiness" and "renewal" involves questioning inherited definitions of those terms and engaging in theorized, self-aware conversations that reflect, and reflect on, understudied fears and desires about WPA work from graduate preparation to preparing for intentional leadership rotation and retirement.