What does faculty development look like if the underlying assumption isn't that the teachers are the problem, an assumption which, according to Margaret Marshall (2004), has guided educational reform throughout American history? What happens to faculty development when it originates in genuine discussion and mutual respect within a program or department? One answer to these questions might be what we in the first-year writing program at Kennesaw State University call the in-house conference.Like much of the early work in composition, our in-house conference began with an idea -Let's try this -and the theorizing came later -Why did it work, and how can we make it better? In this jointly authored essay, we theorize the local, discussing our in-house conference, or IHC, from several viewpoints -ethical, political, philosophical, pedagogical, and programmatic. Seeing this phenomenon through these terministic screens, we argue that our in-house conference disrupts the usual English department hierarchy, thus shifting the identities of the participants in important ways. Though our work has been in a composition program, we argue, as well, that our experiences can work for faculty development within the many subfields of English studies and even across the disciplines. PedagogyPublished by Duke University Press

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