Figure 2: An Interview with Kathleen Yancey In our case, I was directing the Pearce Center, which at the time was basically a faculty development center for communication across the curriculum. Carl Levitt had been my predecessor. He had been the founding director of the Pearce center. He left, I cycled in, and he had done some interesting work in the prior year, which was the first year I had been at Clemson. He observed that the communication across the curriculum program, I think at that point was ten years old, that it had really served faculty well, and therefore the students, but it had served the students indirectly rather than directly. So, a question that we had thought about the last year that he was with us had to do with how we might engage students in ways that we had not previously. And given that context then when I had begun directing the Pearce Center, I took up that question in earnest. The argument I made at the time was that if you were going to engage with students in a communication across the curriculum program, you needed to do it because of the very nature of the program, you needed to do it in a space that we really didn’t have. That is to say if the students want to learn about speech, by in large they go to comm. studies programs. If they want to learn about writing they go to English departments or to writing programs or writing departments. Sometimes they go to writing the discipline classes, but the point here is that it’s all itemized. They’re going any number of places to do work that under the rubric of CAC might be done in one stop. So, conceptually that was what we argued, and it turned out that the Class of 1941, which has a distinctive role in Clemson’s history, decided that they would donate a million dollars. So, it was for a renovation project that was to create some kind of a space for students doing exactly this kind of work. What we’d hope to do was to create a space where collaborative work wasn’t the center of the space, where there was however prevision for individual work, where there was prevision for other kinds of events. It was a site for composing of all varieties. It was a site for sharing such composing. A site for bringing people together to do lots of different kinds of work that in one way or another, all of which was connected to composing in print, on the screen, which we conceived of at the time as being digital, visual, and oral. To be engaged at an enterprise like that is A.) a wonderful opportunity. B.) works better if you engage a whole lot of people, and C.) is never really complete. As much as I was influenced by that experiences, and there’s no question I was. At the same time what we were working with here at FSU was so radically different. So, let’s start with the price tag. Okay, so at Clemson I had a million dollars to spend, which I indicated I didn’t spend all of it, but I spent a lot of it, and here I had $25,000.00. Also in terms of the space, we at 4,000sq feet at Clemson and FSU we had basically an oversized closet. So, I mean a really different thing. I didn’t arrive, it wasn’t like I arrived on campus and said, “We’ve got to get FSU a digital studio.” It didn’t work that way. Basically I came here, and early on in my career I taught a one credit course, we have a lot of one credit course here that I’ve never encountered any place else, but and I wouldn’t say we live on them, that’s an overstatement, but we use them a lot. And I really wanted to know how I could make certain efforts that had been very successful at Clemson, see if they could work here, and if so, how they would work. This is a very different campus, it’s two and a half times the size of Clemson campus in terms of population, just FYI. Its strengths are very different. Clemson is a STEM institution, land grant. We are not a land grant. Everyone thinks we are but we’re not. Our historical strengths have been in humanities, performing arts, and the sciences. So it’s really a different kind of place. Also, Clemson was, and assuming to still be a laptop campus, and because it’s a STEM place they have a lot of stuff going on with technology. We do have stem activity, but we’re not a STEM campus, we’re definitely not a laptop campus. And I’d have to verify this, but I’m pretty sure we, at FSU serve many more underserved students. Our grant percipient rate is something in the neighbor of 23%. So, I taught this one credit course on electronic portfolios to see how it would work, and it worked okay. It wasn’t a rising success, but it also wasn’t a complete dud. So, and I certainly learned a lot. One of the things I learned really quickly is that we had nowhere to send students. So, I could send them to the writing center. Nobody in the writing center knew electronic portfolios from shola. We did have two computer labs that were all the way across campus, and there was nobody there that could help you. I mean you could show up, you could get yourself a machine, but you know if you’re in trouble, you’re SOL. So, these are not good situations. So, immediately I knew that we really needed to have some place to send students. That this was without this nothing was going to fly. I’m a big believer, as I indicated with the class of 41 studio, we basically use it to help students, but we also use it as a site for a development program. I hear, and I’m not talking about architectural, I’m talking about program in the British sense of the word program, meaning you’ve got a host of activities going on. And I was pretty certain that if we created a digital studio that we, even though it was going to be small, I thought its focus would be the English department. We’re a big English department. We have something like 1,800 English majors, in addition to all the students we serve in the Gen Ed and first year Comp. and so forth, and that if we were savvy about this that we could begin to stage events that would enable the people in the department who by and large the faculty and the TAs weren’t terribly conversant with digital technology. They weren’t hostile to them, they just didn’t know very much about them. And, if you want to make change, one of the way you can make change is by showcasing stuff. So, people get a look at it. Also, my experience has been that when you start doing that that they’re actually a lot of people that have been engaged in this work, they just haven’t surfaced. There’s been no occasion. So at functions as a kind of Bitzerian prop, if you will, and that actually in fact happened. So my sense was that we could do some of what we had done in the Class of 41 Studio, but that we would really focus it more on the department, that it would be much more humanities based kinds of work, that it would probably have a real connection with the program I had come here to lead, which was a graduate program of Rhetoric and Comp. So, I saw it doing very different kinds of things, forwarding a very different kind of agenda. And because I was a little less beholden to the sort of mantra of print, oral, visual, and digital, you can begin to conceptualize this works through some other kinds of lenses. That’s my way of saying that if you’re lucky each of these opportunities gives you another chance to rethink on some of the issues that had informed your work previously but that rethinking that rearranging, if you will allows you to invent a new. And I think that’s basically what we did with the studio here. But the other thing is that it’s turned out, and I didn’t anticipate this at the time, but we have developed a major since then called Editing, Writing, and Media, and this has proven to be a wonderful site for that activity as well. So, a lot of good, both short term and long term has been made available and possible through the studio here. After I’d had this experience with the one credit class, and I knew I wanted to do this, then I started looking around for two things actually. One was space because if you cannot, my experience at Clemson was also influential in that regard unless you had money, even if you had money for a new building, which I mean I wasn’t going to have, even if I had money for that I’d have to find the ground on which to put it. I don’t know on campus where space isn’t at a premium. So, you have to find a space. The good news there was that we’d had this, we really did have this room. Not very big. It was used back in the day for first year comp. when we, there was a moment when we required students to basically have a tutorial, a group tutorial that was connected to first year comp., and we hadn’t done that in years. So, this room sat there vacant. And then the question was money, and at the time we didn’t have it anymore, well that’s not true. I think we do, it’s configured somewhat differently. There was a program where you could apply for relatively small, from an institutional perspective, relatively small sums of money, up to something like $75,000.00 I think, for exactly this kind of work. We had so little digital technology on campus, we’re a very decentralized campus, so I shouldn’t say. I know they’re digitalized technology on other parts of the campus, but much of our studio here thought of largely in terms of serving the needs of English. The other programs that feature digital technology across campus do the same thing. They focus on a much smaller unit, and that on some level is the FSU way. So, there wasn’t going to be technology that we would be able to access for our students, and so this program was available. And I thought well, it didn’t take very much to write it up. I mean I had to do some homework, I had to, we were going to change the room some. So that cost money, that’s renovation money that comes out of one pot of money. Then there’s technology that comes out of another pot of money. So, you have to do your homework, you have to talk to the people and just a lot of face time, and get estimates. You don’t want to ask for so much money that it makes people’s eyes pop out, but you don’t want to ask for too little cause you can’t do what you need to do. In working through this, I consulted chiefly with my two colleagues in Rhetoric and Comp who were very vested in technology and there was only the three of us at the time anyways. So that was Mike O’Neal. I’m pointing to his office on the other side of the wall, and Kristie Fleckenstein who’s on the other side of that wall, and we worked through what we thought would work. And Deborah Coxwell-Teague was very interested, but not digitally savvy, and so basically, and she had never written one of these grants herself. So I mean, she was sort of part of the thinking, but less involved than the other two. It had to go through the chair, of course, and the chair thought it was a good idea. He signed off on it, and that’s not really where he lived either, so he didn’t have much input. And that was pretty much it, until we got the funds and we started involving graduate students. Thinking about it, and I’ll say also, during part of this time we started to strategic planning for the writing center because the digital studio was attached to the writing center for first year comp. and for the graduate program. Thinking about how these different spaces might interact with each other. So, that’s where I got the funds. That’s basically how we thought about working it, and then some of the ideas for how we might connect with each other came from those strategic planning meetings.