Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction » (New Edition)

Eileen E. Schell is an assistant professor of writing and English at Syracuse University, where she teaches first-year composition, advanced composition, and graduate courses in composition and the history of rhetoric. She was formerly the codirector of first-year composition at Virginia Tech and adjunct instructor of writing at North Seattle Community College.

Fully two-thirds of all part-time teachers in English studies are women, many with no permanent faculty standing, no benefits, no job security, and little or no chance for promotion. How does the "feminization" of writing programs affect the newly formed discipline of rhetoric and composition?

Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers illuminates the complex gendered ideologies that surround writing instruction--drawing on feminist theories of women's work, Marxist theories of class and labor, sociological and economic studies of part-time academic employment, and personal interviews with part-time women writing faculty. Eileen Schell contends that part-time faculty members' interests and contributions have been underrepresented in our research narratives and professional histories in rhetoric and composition. Her book attempts to revalue practitioner knowledge and to reclaim the voices and perspectives of part-time women writing instructors as a vital part of the history and growth of rhetoric and composition as a discipline.

Both a theoretical and practical study, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers not only theorizes the structures of gender and labor in writing programs; it also offers administrators, theorists, and practitioners ideas for improving the working conditions and professional status of part-time writing instructors.