Collaborating Across the Curricula

Each of us  has worked as an adjunct and/or temporary faculty. We know the pressures of being the last to get teaching assignments, the scramble from school to school, and the pressure to serve a variety of curricular objectives. Between endless travel, low pay, and the grind of grading, it can be difficult to find places for your own expertise in the classroom. These personal costs are high, but when adjuncts talk about their work, the focus quickly turns to helping students succeed. Our goal is to serve your dedication by providing practical tools, tactics, and strategies that make your commitment more manageable, satisfying,and more visible to institutions that hire full-time faculty.

This handbook and the associated web site provide the rationale for creating assignments that meet various departmental frameworks, and simultaneously enables you to draw on your experience and expertise to serve your students.  It provides tools, term-long topics, and assignments that let adjuncts answer even the most restrictive of departmental composition strategies: the approach through rhetorical modes. Its three writing-to-learn steps offer a natural set of class sessions and assignments that can serve your own content, while solving the “what do I do in class?” problem that affects all teachers.

The adaptability to a variety of curricular strategies can serve to strengthen your integration into a department, even a department with a different approach to composition. Whether you choose to use separate topics for each assignment or to focus on a single topic throughout the term, this book can serve as a sort of template that absolutely respects the curricular framework of wherever you find yourself teaching. Balancing your individual talents with institutions’ requirements can distinguish your work.                              

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