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Transnational Writing Program Administration, edited by David Martins. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. 348 pp.
"Transnational" and "translingual" are terms increasingly heard in writing studies conversations, but what these terms might mean in the actual teaching of writing-and in the design and management of writing programs-is gradually evolving. The important collection of essays under review here addresses aspects of program design and management that all WPAs will consider vital. Reading this collection of thoughtful and incisive essays will provide readers much food for thought.
However, current WPAs and others looking for models or confident advice on building "transnational" writing-centered initiatives will be hard pressed to find them here. Except for parts of some chapters and the entire essay by Doreen Starke-Meyerring, which describes several successful Globally-Networked Learning Environments (GNLEs), the overwhelming tone of the collection is pessimistic. The essayists tend to be much more emphatic on what to avoid than on what to do.
Coming in for stern attack throughout the collection are U.S. universities that have expanded across borders with programs that try to replicate what has been successful in their home environments in the U.S. The juxtaposed chapters by Danielle Zawodny Wetzel and Dudley W. Reynolds (Carnegie Mellon University) and by Alan S. Weber et al. (Weill Medical College at Cornell) provide detailed narratives of how assumptions behind writing curricula and expectations about students that fit the home campuses failed, as part of the Education City initiative in Qatar. Wetzel and Reynolds give a frank appraisal of how courses, methods, and expectations had to evolve in Qatar in order to fit the language and cultural backgrounds of the students-while also attempting to "protect the brand" of Carnegie Mellon. In the chapter by Weber et al., the segments written by Ian Miller, Rodney Sharkey, and Autumn Watts, all of whom taught at the Doha campus, describe why the original model failed and how all aspects of design and approach had to change to be of service to students.
The chapter by Shanti Bruce is particularly striking in this regard, as it is the only essay in the collection that offers a first-hand account by a WPA of how vital it is for U.S. writing program managers to teach in the cross-borders programs they...