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Proposal deadline for the 2022 CCCC Annual Convention is 11:59 p.m. EDT on Monday, June 7, 2021.

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The Promises and Perils of Higher Education: Our Discipline’s Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Linguistic Justice

2022 CCCC Annual Convention
March 9–12, 2022
Online

Program Chair: Staci M. Perryman-Clark, Western Michigan University

 

Why are you here?

“Why are you here” was the name of the first college writing assignment I ever assigned as I began my career as a graduate teaching assistant and writing teacher. As I continue to assign personal narratives in first-year writing, I often think about that first assignment. I think about and remember some of the responses students have submitted over the years, ranging from suicide attempts to coming out to stories of racism and implicit/explicit biases about writing abilities based on broad strokes and simplistic assumptions about race, class, and gender.

Given that it has been a while since we have been able to gather in person, and given that the COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed what it means to gather for a convention and what it means to have a conference for the dissemination of research, scholarship, and the widest range of creative activities, I now ask the question, “Why are we here?”

To answer this question, we have to be honest about what we mean by “here.” The location of “here” suggests a sense of belonging. It suggests access. It suggests invitations: Some people will be invited; some will not. Others will accept the invitation; others will decline. With the suggestion of invitations, I recognize that systems of power and privilege enable certain folks to send the invitations and vet guest lists, determining who is worth inviting and who is not. And even for those worthy enough to make the guest list, not all guests will necessarily appreciate one another’s presence. In 2011, with my ride-or-die colleague Collin Craig, I wrote “Troubling the Boundaries: (De)constructing WPA Identities at the Intersections of Race and Gender,” in which we grappled with our first experience attending the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) conference. While we were invited to present our work, which ironically focused on the intersections of race and gender in writing program administration, we were perceived as being out of place because very few Black people attended this conference. In short, our invitation and sense of belonging were questioned.

Fast forward to more than a decade later. Despite being an active member of a scholarly community as well as an academic administrator, my sense of belonging continues to be questioned. I could share the many times I’ve been excluded from key meetings with leaders or the microaggressions I experienced just by my mere existence as juxtaposed with leadership and the authority to make decisions. But I won’t. Not here. Instead, I will simply state that as representatives of a discipline, we bear tremendous responsibility for the gatekeeping practices we employ and who we decide to and decide not to invite to our disciplinary conversations. Now is the time for us to hold ourselves accountable for the gate entry and gatekeeping we practice with our students and each other. For if we don’t, not only will our ethical reputation be at stake but we also risk being so exclusive that our relevance becomes extinct and shifting demographics may potentially lead to a decline in the membership we once treasured, protected, and justified the exclusivity of in the spirit of protecting rigor and the academic integrity of writing studies.

Now it’s time to flip the script, and it just so happens that we got da time today.

Consider the invitation our students receive when they apply for admission to the institutions where we teach. Instead of considering the admissions team as the gatekeepers for postsecondary entrance and instead of considering our introductory writing courses as gatekeepers to advanced writing courses, however, let’s position students as the gatekeepers to higher education enrollment. Let’s consider the following facts: (1) There are fewer high school graduates, and the rate of high school graduation continues to decline (Nadworny 2019); (2) postsecondary enrollment has continued to decline since 2011 (Nadworny 2019; Nietzel 2019); (3) in 2017–2018, whites comprised the minority of college enrollment for the first time; and (4) despite the fact that the pool of Black and Latinx 18-year-olds in the US is not shrinking at the same rate as the pool of white 18-year-olds, especially in regions like the Midwest and Northeast, Black enrollment has fallen sharply since 2017 (Miller 2020). Given these sobering statistics, students are now making choices about whether or not they want to enroll in a postsecondary institution, making competition among postsecondary institutions keen with more pressure being put on chief marketing and recruitment/enrollment officers to sell the optimal college experience to prospective students.

Given enrollment challenges, as a discipline that is committed to the teaching of postsecondary instruction, we can no longer be exclusive about what writing belongs and which writings belong in our classrooms. In making this claim, I acknowledge the 2020 Annual Convention call proposed by Holly Hassel that asked us to consider access and its relationship to what we do as writing teachers; however, I would like to think more about the relationship between access, enrollment, and relevance. As a discipline, how do we remain relevant? How do we use the work that we have done with access to make the case for postsecondary enrollment  to prospective students? What does college writing instruction promise to do for students who have the choice to attend/not to attend college? And what are the perils of not making our case?

When we think of inclusive spaces, Julie Lindquist reminded us in her 2020 call that “teaching inclusively is (only) a matter of teaching ‘about’ diversity, rather than a matter of creating storied learning experiences, or making good on the ones students have. That our primary activity is ‘teaching’ rather than creating learning opportunities for students. That ‘learning’ is an experience that entails only gains, and never losses.” Given this, we must think about the promises and perils of what higher education offers by rethinking how we examine “inclusive” spaces, particularly when we think about student access, teaching, and learning—all commonplace themes in higher education discourse. In the spirit of inclusivity, how do we practice diversity in our teaching—I mean, how do we really practice diversity as opposed to simply teaching about it? And how do our practices afford opportunities to both teach and model inclusivity as well as offer spaces to learn from the wide and diverse range of experiences that students bring with them when they enroll in higher education more broadly and in our writing courses more specifically.

It is clear that given the shifting demographics of college students who enroll in higher education, we can no longer think about diversity and inclusion as abstract concepts or as buzzwords strategically placed in writing program descriptions or on university webpages. Nor can we rely only on the language of our CCCC mission statement, particularly its first sentence that marks CCCC as “committed to supporting the agency, power, and potential of diverse communicators inside and outside of postsecondary classrooms” (emphasis added). While eloquently stated, our mission must critically examine the material and physical realities of those whom we invite to our community. While we have always had ethical obligations to consider access and equity in whom we invite to partake in our disciplinary conversations, we no longer have the fortune of relying on language alone to send the message of an organization that purports to be welcoming, inviting, and hence, inclusive. Even if sincere and genuine in our language, there is no guarantee that students will accept our lip service—let alone our invitation to higher education or our discipline.

Therefore, it is time to think beyond diversity by also revisiting what our discipline historically and presently means about equity and inclusion. Beyond the invitation, how do we really know our pedagogical practices are equitable? How do we really know that our disciplinary practices are equitable? As a field, what evidence have we produced up until this point, what evidence do we need to present, and what evidence might we already have concerning areas for equitable improvement? Put simply, given our historical past, present, and future, where do we go from here? How do we make CCCC a more equitable organization, and how do we take our understanding (old and new) of equity to shape enrollment, teaching, and learning in higher education?

As Julie Lindquist also reminded us in her 2020 Annual Convention call, “What is going well, of course, is the strength and resolve of our organization as a countervailing force in national and local conversations about educational access, adult literacy, rhetorical ethics, and cultural and social diversity. We know that our work as members of CCCC has a renewed exigency and a new urgency.” Given this, I second the exigency and urgency to use what we know about diversity and equity in the pursuit of social justice. Social justice, though, is not a term I use lightly. For me, social justice has life or death consequences. For instance, at my home institution, Western Michigan University, an African American student recently died after contracting coronavirus. Even more recently, a former African American student was shot to death by a security guard in a mental health facility. Placed in relation to recent statistics that acknowledge racial inequities associated with healthcare and coronavirus death (Center for Disease Control 2020; Godoy and Wood, 2020) in addition to the many, many examples of unarmed killings of Black and Brown citizens (far too many to list in this space), I submit that as writing teachers and educators we have a deeper responsibility to commit to social justice.

Perhaps one might see the connections from the examples I just shared in relation to higher education enrollment; however, we must also begin and continue to take a more active role as a discipline in our commitment to social justice: It really is a life and death issue. As Asao B. Inoue (2019) reminded us in his coda, “Assessing English So That People Stop Killing Each Other,” labor-based contract grading practices enable us to critique and resist dominant power and discourses. More specifically, in terms of survival, labor-based contract grading allows opportunities to resist white language supremacy, and, in essence, resist white supremacy in the pursuit of social justice because “they create sustainable and liveable [sic] conditions for locally diverse students and teachers to do antiracist, anti-White supremacist, and other social justice language work, conditions that are much harder to have when writing is graded on so-called quality or by some single standard, and when students’ labors are not fully recognized and valued” (p. 306). Anticipating readers’ potential responses that social justice in writing assessment might be an extreme and far-fetched leap from survival, Inoue further proposes that we rethink survival and killing in the following way:

Do standards in English writing classrooms kill people? Hmm. Maybe a better question is this: In a world of police brutality against Black and Brown people in the US, of border walls and regressive and harmful immigration policies, of increasing violence against Muslims, of women losing their rights to the control their own bodies, of overt White supremacy, of mass shootings in schools, of blatant refusals to be compassionate to the hundreds of thousands of refugees around the world, where do we really think this violence, discord, and killing starts? (p. 306)

When reframing the question in the way Inoue suggests, we can understand how those who judge language from a white-supremacist framework are also and often the same folks who make gatekeeping decisions about justice, decisions that have life and death consequences. Even more recently, April Baker-Bell reminds us that peaking mainstream white English has not enabled a single unarmed Black body to be spared from being murdered by police. In fact, as Baker-Bell (2020) tells it,

If y’all actually believe that using “standard English” will dismantle white supremacy, then you not paying attention! If we, as teachers, truly believe that code-switching will dismantle white supremacy, we have a problem. If we honestly believe that code-switching will save Black people’s lives, then we really ain’t paying attention to what’s happening in the world. Eric Garner was choked to death by a police officer while saying “I cannot breathe.” Wouldn’t you consider “I cannot breathe” “standard English” syntax? (p. 5)

Earlier in this call, I suggested that it is time to flip the script, meaning that it is time to consider the ways in which students are the arbiters of their fates and are the ones positioned as decision makers. Inoue’s discussion of labor-based contract grading affords us one of many ways we might flip the script to afford students decision-granting authority over their futures and lives. Baker-Bell’s ethnographic research on how Black students offer “counterstories” that position their voices as central to dismantling “Anti-Black Linguistic Racism” offers us another example of a way in which students flip the script, reclaim their time, and make decisions about the education for which they are willing and/or unwilling to pay. Given these historical moments in time and higher education, we have no choice but to see students as decision makers over their lives and futures. Granting that authority, then, is one of many ways that we can use our roles as higher education educators to pursue social justice.

Therefore, I invite you to consider how you promise to educate students in the pursuit of social justice. What are the perils for not doing so? How might our physical location and space of the conference in the city of Chicago provide us with a unique opportunity to consider diversity, equity, and social justice as essential and foundational to what we do as writing teachers? What specifically can we learn from the demographics of Chicago about social justice that we can bring back to our own local campuses? And how does the city itself become an invitation for writing teachers to consider the implications of our work as connected to the greater work of higher education? As we consider this invitation and our willingness to accept it, given the higher education landscape, we must also ask not only, “Why are we here?” but also, “Given that we are now here, how does higher education survive? How do we as a discipline survive?

Perhaps our survival might take the form of resistance; Malea Powell (2002) has long argued through rhetorics of survivance a survival that “imagines resistance and survival in the face of violent assimilation strategies” (p. 404). As a field, then, we must resist assimilationist tropes of access including the violence imposed on acquiring edited American English as a life skill. Further, we must also understand that our ability to advocate for resistance in pursuit of social justices also rests on our own survival, for if we do not create welcoming spaces for inclusion, our students will resist our invitations. Without students, not only do our institutions not survive, but we also risk survival as a field.

But, really, it ain’t enough for us to just survive. As much as I am interested in survival, I am also interested in establishing a high quality of life. Put simply, I want us to thrive! I want us to innovate. Vershawn Ashanti Young’s 2019 CCCC CFP identifies our field as a living body by asking us what might happen if we “think of rhetoric and composition as live, as embodied actions, as behaviors, yes, as performances inside of one pod—our discipline—that lead to the creation of texts, to presentations, that invite mo performances and certainly mo co-performances.” Echoing Young, I ask us to think of our work as a living entity that impacts and shapes the future of education for students across a wide range of institutional contexts. And I want us to create hope and promise for how our work impacts higher education’s future in the most innovative and exciting of ways. I want to us to dream and reimagine what we might become.

 

Proposals for CCCC 2022

Regardless of role or session type, proposals will be judged based on the following criteria:

  • connects teaching and learning in postsecondary writing to larger issues of higher education enrollment and access;
  • promotes and/or advances diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially for historically oppressed populations, in pursuit of social and/or linguistic justice;
  • is situated within current and relevant scholarship or research in the field;
  • reflects an awareness of audience needs relevant to the topic; and
  • demonstrates a clear and specific plan that aligns with the criteria for the selected session type.

In essence, I want an institution, an organization, and a convention that is all the way live, an “event that is extremely lively, exciting, dynamic. Also live” (Smitherman, 2006, p. 21).

As you consider this call, I leave you with a final word from my academic mother, Geneva Smitherman, a word that builds on past wisdom of our elders as we reimagine the future: “As I have learned from the elders and sacrifices of many thousands gone, the role of the linguist—indeed the role of all scholars and intellectuals—is not just to understand the world, but to change it” (p. 145).

I very much look forward to gathering with you all together in person in Chicago in 2022!

Staci M. Perryman-Clark
2022 Program Chair

 

Program Clusters

2018

1. Pedagogy (#Pedagogy)
2. Basic Writing (#BW)
3. Assessment (#Assess)
4. Rhetoric (#Rhetoric)
5. History (#History)
6. Technology (#Tech)
7. Language (#Language)
8. Professional Technical Writing (#PTW)
9. Writing Program Administration (#WPA)
10. Theory (#Theory)
11. Public, Civic, and Community Writing (#Community)
12. Creative Writing (#Creativewriting)

2019

1. First-Year and Advanced Composition
2. Basic Writing
3. Community, Civic & Public
4. Creative Writing
5. History
6. Information Technologies
7. Institutional and Professional
8. Language
9. Professional and Technical Writing
10. Research
11. Writing Pedagogies and Processes
12. Theory
13. Writing Programs

2020

1. First-Year and Basic Writing
2. Writing Programs and Majors
3. Approaches to Learning and Learners
4. Community, Civic, and Public Contexts of Writing
5. Creative Writing and Publishing
6. History
7. Information Technologies and Digital Cultures
8. Institutions, Labor Issues, and Professional Life
9. Language and Literacy
10. Professional and Technical Writing
11. Research
12. Theory and Culture
13. Inventions, Innovations, and New Inclusions

2021

1. First-Year Writing
2. College Writing Transitions
3. Labor
4. Writing Programs
5. Community, Civic, and Public Contexts of Writing
6. Reading
7. Access
8. Historical Perspectives
9. Creating Writing and Publishing
10. Information Literacy and Technology
11. Language and Literacy
12. Professional and Technical Writing
13. Theory and Research Methodologies

2022

1. First-Year Writing
2. College Writing and Reading
3. Institutions: Labor Issues, Professional Lives, and Survival
4. Writing Programs
5. Community, Civic, and Public Contexts of Writing
6. Approaches to Teaching and Learning
7. Inclusion and Access
8. Histories of Rhetoric
9. Creating Writing and Publishing
10. Information Literacy and Technology
11. Language, Literacy and Culture
12. Professional and Technical Writing
13. Theory and Research Methodologies
14. Antiracism and Social Justice

 

Works Cited

Baker-Bell, April. Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity and Pedagogy. Routledge, 2020.

Center for Disease Control. “Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Ethnic Groups.” www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html.

Craig, Collin Lamont, and Staci Maree Perryman-Clark. “Troubling the Boundaries: (De)Constructing WPA Identities at the Intersections of Race and Gender.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 34, no. 2, 2011, pp. 37–58.

Godoy, Maria, and Daniel Wood. “What Do Coronavirus Racial Disparities Look Like State by State?” NPR, 2020, www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/30/865413079/what-do-coronavirus-racial-disparities-look-like-state-by-state.

Inoue, Asao B. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. WAC Clearinghouse, 2019.

Miller, Ben. “It’s Time to Worry About College Enrollment Declines Among Black Students.” Center for American Progress, 2020, www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-postsecondary/reports/2020/09/28/490838/time-worry-college-enrollment-declines-among-black-students/.

Nadworny, Lisa. “Fewer Students Are Going to College. Here’s Why That Matters.” NPR, 2019, www.npr.org/2019/12/16/787909495/fewer-students-are-going-to-college-heres-why-that-matters.

Nietzel, Michael. “College Enrollment Declines Again. It’s Down More Than Two Million Students in This Decade.” Forbes, 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2019/12/16/college-enrollment-declines-again-its-down-more-than-two-million-students-in-this-decade/?sh=3b9d012b3d95.

Powell, Malea. “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 53, no. 3, Feb. 2002, 396–434.

Smitherman, Geneva. Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans. Routledge, 2006.

CCCC Position Statement on the Role of Reading in College Writing Classrooms

Conference on College Composition and Communication
March 2021

Rationale and Purpose

This position statement affirms the need to develop accessible and effective reading pedagogies in college writing classrooms so that students can engage more deeply in all of their courses and develop the reading abilities that will be essential to their success in college, in their careers, and for their participation in a democratic society. This statement assumes that, like instruction in writing, instruction in reading is most ethical and effective when it engages students’ diverse experiences, needs, and capacities and when it works from an asset-based (rather than a deficit-based) theory of learning. The statement outlines principles and best practices for developing reading-centered pedagogies and curricula and identifies resources and sites at postsecondary institutions that can support this work.

Horning et al. define college-level reading as “a complex, recursive process in which readers actively and critically understand and create meaning through connections to texts” (7). Research that assesses the alignment between new college students’ prior reading experience and the expectations of college reading tasks suggests that many students are likely to encounter different and challenging reading tasks upon entering college (Jolliffe and Harl; Rodrigue; Jamieson; Stanford History Education Group; Ihara and Del Principe; Wineburg and McGrew). Students are also reading in increasingly diverse modes and for distinct purposes as reading moves increasingly to screens rather than paper.

This statement acknowledges that students are regularly reading (Jolliffe and Harl), that they have reading skills, and that they are using a range of technologies to support their reading. Technology has allowed students to engage with readings by listening to texts, seeing texts in various font sizes, and copying and making notes on texts. Use of synchronous technology, such as digital annotation programs, allows students to practice deep reading strategies while gaining almost immediate access to their peers’ approaches to reading. Moreover, the web provides digital examples of cultural knowledge formation (such as rhetorical reading) that communities of color, LGBTQ communities, and disability communities have cultivated offline for years. Instructors can mobilize these technologies to support students’ development of deeper reading habits.

For decades, community college curricula have directly addressed students’ reading habits, and community college instructors have researched and published on best practices for integrating instruction in reading and writing (Goen-Salter; Raufman and Barrow; Bickerstaff and Raufman; Boylan and Bonham). Only recently, however, have those who teach at four-year institutions begun to argue for the importance of reconnecting the act of reading to writing. Not since the 1980s and early 1990s have those outside of community colleges paid sustained attention to reading as the counterpart of writing in the construction and negotiation of meaning.

Definition(s) of Reading

College-level reading varies depending on the reader’s primary purpose, and different reading approaches each have their own emphasis: “rhetorical reading” and “reading like a writer” suggest reading texts for the purposes of understanding the impact of writerly choices, “close reading” is focused primarily on textual interpretation, and “active reading” and “mindful reading” suggest a type of mindset or orientation toward a text.

Reading, then, goes well beyond mere comprehension of words and texts, and instructors need to realize that students may be more or less familiar with different types of reading. Indeed, individual students may be proficient with multiple reading approaches or may struggle with basic comprehension. This position statement marks CCCC members’ commitment to recognizing all college-level reading as a “complex, recursive process in which readers actively and critically understand and create meaning through connections to texts” (Horning  et al., 7).

The strategies that follow are proven effective. They are suggestions for those who wish to integrate reading more deliberately into their teaching practices.

Principles to Support the Teaching and Learning of Reading

Principle 1: Teach Reading Comprehension

Strategies:

  1. Create text-specific or general reading guides for students that include comprehension questions, important vocabulary terms, and other relevant resources that students can use as they engage texts.
  2. Preview texts for students by providing context (whether historical or related to the immediate classroom), thus helping students tap into what they already know about the subject and helping to provide the purpose for each reading assignment.
  3. Teach students how to develop and use graphic organizers (e.g., maps, webs) to help them visualize relationships between concepts and ideas within texts.
  4. Teach students to read strategically by paying attention to key parts of a text, such as its title, introduction (or abstract), conclusion, and paragraph topic sentences.
  5. Encourage students to take the 25-word summary challenge, in which they summarize the text in 25 words or fewer.

Principle 2: Teach Reading Approaches That Move Beyond Basic Comprehension

Strategies:

  1. Don’t lecture the readings; make students responsible for getting main ideas and details through creating their own reading guides that outline the main ideas, define key terms, and note connections to other texts read in the course.
  2. Ask students to synthesize two viewpoints and/or address opposing viewpoints on the same topic.
  3. Provide exercises and/or use peer review to help students support one another and anticipate readers’ expectations.
  4. Promote rhetorical reading, wherein students examine a text for its communicative nature and elements. Help students identify how context influences readers.
  5. Teach students how to “read like a writer” (RLW) by identifying moments of writerly choice in the text and considering whether similar choices might arise in their own writing.

Principle 3: Foster Mindful Reading to Encourage Students to Think Metacognitively about Their Reading in Preparation for a Variety of Reading in Different Contexts

Strategies:

  1. Teach the SQ5R approach: survey (the text or reading), question (engage in inquiry), read (engage in active reading), respond (think about the text and the initial questions), record (annotate in the margins), recite (paraphrase key ideas), and review (reflect on the reading and revise notes).
  2. Teach annotation explicitly and/or use software such as Hypothesis to support the development of digital annotation practices.
  3. Encourage reflection through reader response journals, discussion board postings, or similar approaches.
  4. In addition to asking students to reflect encourage them to anticipate the uses of various reading approaches in future courses and contexts.
  5. Teach students how to create a difficulty inventory in which they list the difficulties (e.g., vocabulary, allusions, historical context) they encounter while reading and for each difficulty indicate one resource that can help mitigate or surmount that difficulty.

Principle 4: Teach Students How to Read Texts Closely and Focus on Significant Details and Patterns

Strategies:

  1. Support students’ focus on a text’s language and vocabulary by asking them to look up key vocabulary, terms, and concepts and to consider how meanings change over time.
  2. Help students explore organizational patterns in texts from different disciplines, such as linguistic features, stylistic characteristics, and the presence or absence of jargon.
  3. Ask students to write passage-based papers that focus their attention on a single passage, including the textual elements within the passage (e.g., word choice, tone, punctuation, repetition), as well as the passage’s relationship to the text as a whole.
  4. Provide students the opportunity to practice reading a text multiple times in order to pay attention to different elements, such as how a writer incorporates sources, defines key terms, or addresses opposing arguments.
  5. Focus on the generic elements of a text to foster discussion of genre conventions and how those conventions can influence reading.
Preparing Teachers for Reading Instruction in Writing Courses

Given the tremendous variety in new instructor training programs, it is important for facilitators to prioritize what they want students to know and do with regard to reading. Some programs may be limited to a single session devoted to reading, whereas a more ideal approach would be to integrate the discussion of reading throughout an entire training program. Additionally, as the representations and needs of students constantly shift, it is also important to consider how to integrate accessible and culturally relevant approaches to reading instruction into the overall fabric of writing programs. Doing so encourages writing teachers—from senior faculty to first-time teachers—to develop reading pedagogies that serve ever-changing student populations and are responsive to the contemporary moment.

Strategies for training instructors to teach reading include the following:

  • Introduce the idea that reading and writing are connected activities as a foundational threshold concept that instructors should keep in mind as they teach, plan lessons, and design their syllabi.
  • Plan talks or activities aimed at familiarizing writing instructors with several kinds of reading approaches and the purpose(s) behind each.
  • Encourage instructors to think through what they want students to learn from reading and consider what kinds of texts and types of reading would best serve their goal(s).
  • Guide writing instructors to consider the range of reading approaches and techniques that students will need to engage productively with a variety of modalities. Recognizing how technological mediums interplay with genre conventions (e.g., online versus print newspaper article) introduces useful conversations about reading as a rhetorical process informed by rhetorical decisions.
  • Brainstorm and/or practice different ways that instructors might model various kinds of reading for students—for instance, showing students how they read a text and stopping to demonstrate the kinds of questions they ask as they read.
  • Review and answer questions about specific programmatic policies regarding the types and relevance or appropriateness of texts to be assigned for specific student populations at your institution (e.g., literature, videos?), as well as reasonable page length expectations. This discussion might address texts composed using varieties of Englishes and/or texts that acknowledge the rhetoric of citation practices in order to better engage audience needs via font styles and organizational schemas.
  • Encourage instructors to use published texts and student writing in similar ways and to avoid assigning only published texts as examples of good writing while urging students to search for errors only in student-produced texts.
Supporting Readers across Campus Units

This section notes important stakeholders on campuses that can contribute to building a culture of support surrounding reading development. This statement encourages communication and collaboration among writing program administrators, writing instructors, and the various members of these units—libraries, writing centers, and centers for teaching and learning—so that all stakeholders are working together to support students’ reading development throughout their academic careers.

Libraries

Librarians have long been at the forefront of information literacy education. Although campus librarians are often used for one-shot presentations about how to access and search their institution’s databases, they can work consistently with faculty across the disciplines to help faculty identify information literacy concepts relevant to specific disciplines (Anderson et al. 16). They can also support students as they develop the capabilities that inform strong reading practices, including paying attention to a source’s relevance, biases, and credibility.

Writing Centers

As Muriel Harris, G. Travis Adams, and Gary Griswold have pointed out, writing centers are always already reading centers because most college-level writing assignments also involve reading. Therefore, it is important that writing center directors are educated on reading pedagogy so they can deliberately incorporate attention to reading in the training given to writing center tutors. Doing so will allow tutors to support students’ literacy development in more comprehensive ways by preparing them to address reading-related writing issues.

Centers for Teaching and Learning

Often given a name such as Center for Teaching Excellence, centers for teaching and learning are seen as hubs of pedagogical innovation and faculty development, and, according to Mary Wright, are supposed “to be responsive to institutional goals and priorities, and to work in collaboration with faculty and academic units, guided by their learning goals” (qtd. in Lieberman). These centers need to be prepared to support faculty as they integrate reading instruction into their courses.

Works Cited

Adams, G. Travis. “The Line That Shouldn’t Be Drawn: Writing Centers as Reading Centered.” Pedagogy, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 73–90.

Anderson, Jennifer, et al. “Collaboration as Conversations: When Writing Studies and the Library Use the Same Conceptual Lenses.” Teaching Information Literacy and Writing Studies: Volume 1, First-Year Composition Courses, edited by Grace Veach, Purdue UP, 2018, pp. 3–18.

Bickerstaff, Susan, and Julia Raufman. From “Additive” to “Integrative”: Experiences of Faculty Teaching Developmental Integrated Reading and Writing Courses (CCRC Working Paper No. 96). Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, 2017, https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/media/k2/attachments/faculty-experiences-teaching-developmental-reading-writing.pdf.

Boylan, Hunter R., and Barbara S. Bonham, editors. Developmental Education: Readings on Its Past, Present, and Future. Bedford/St. Martins, 2014.

Goen-Salter, Sugie. “Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation: Lessons from San Francisco State.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 27, no. 2, 2008, pp. 81–105.

Griswold, Gary. “Postsecondary Reading: What Writing Center Tutors Need to Know.” Journal of College Reading and Learning, vol. 37, no. 1, 2006, pp. 59–70.

Harris, Muriel. “Writing Centers Are Also Reading Centers: How Could They Not Be?” Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom, edited by Patrick Sullivan et al., National Council of Teachers of English, 2017, pp. 227–43.

Horning, Alice S., Deborah-Lee Gollnitz, and Cynthia R. Haller, editors.  What Is College Reading?  WAC Clearinghouse/UP of Colorado, 2017.

Ihara, Rachel, and Annie Del Principe. “What We Mean When We Talk about Reading: Rethinking the Purposes and Contexts of College Reading.” Across the Disciplines, vol. 15, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1–14, https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/articles/ihara-delprincipe2018.pdf.

Jamieson, Sandra. “Reading and Engaging Sources: What Students’ Use of Sources Reveals about Advanced Reading Skills.” Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum, special issue of Across the Disciplines, vol.10, no. 4, 2013, http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/reading/jamieson.cfm.

Jolliffe, David, and Allison Harl.  “Texts of Our Institutional Lives:  Studying the “Reading Transition” from High School to College:  What Are Our Students Reading and Why?”  College English, vol. 70, no. 6, 2008, pp. 599-617.

Lieberman, Mark. “Centers of the Pedagogical Universe.” Inside Higher Ed, 28 Feb. 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/02/28/centers-teaching-and-learning-serve-hub-improving-teaching.

Raufman, Julia, and Hilda Barrow. “Learning to Teach Integrated Reading and Writing: Evidence from Research and Practice.” NADE, 26 Feb. 2015, https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/media/k2/attachments/nade-2015-integrated-reading-writing.pdf.

Rodrigue, Tanya K.  “The Digital Reader, the Alphabetic Writer, and the Space Between: A Study in Digital Reading and Source-based Writing.” Computers and Composition, vol. 46, 2017, pp. 4–20.

Stanford History Education Group. Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. 2016, https://sheg.stanford.edu/upload/V3LessonPlans/Executive%20Summary%2011.21.16.pdf.

Wineburg, Sam, and Sarah McGrew. “Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information.” Teachers College Record, vol. 121, no. 11, 2019, pp. 1–40.

Suggested Reading List

“The Act of Reading: Instructional Foundations and Policy Guidelines.” Position Statements, National Council of Teachers of English, 5 Dec. 2019, https://ncte.org/statement/the-act-of-reading/.

Baron, Naomi S. Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World. Oxford UP, 2015.

Bunn, Michael. “Motivation and Connection: Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 64, no. 3, 2013, pp. 496–516.

Carillo, Ellen C. Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer. Utah State UP, 2014.

Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain. Penguin Random House, 2009.

Del Principe, Annie, and Rachel Ihara. “A Long Look at Reading in the Community College: A Longitudinal Analysis of Student Reading Experiences.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 45, no. 2, 2017, pp.183–206.

—. “‘I Bought the Book and I Didn’t Need It’: What Reading Looks Like at an Urban Community College.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 43, no.3, 2016, pp. 229–44.

Flippo, Rona F., and Thomas W. Bean, editors. Handbook of College Reading and Study Strategy Research. Routledge, 2018.

Grayson, Mara Lee. “Race Talk in the Composition Classroom: Narrative Song Lyrics as Texts for Racial Literacy.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 45, no. 2, 2017, pp. 47–68.

Inoue, Asao B. “Teaching Antiracist Reading.” Journal of College Reading and Learning, vol. 50, no. 3, 2020, pp. 134–56.

Kamil, Michael L., et al., editors. Handbook of Reading Research: Volume IV. Routledge, 2011.

Kareem, Jamila. “A Critical Race Analysis of Transition-Level Writing Curriculum to Support the Racially Diverse Two-Year College.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 46, no. 4, 2019, pp. 271–96.

Keller, Daniel. Chasing Literacy: Reading and Writing in an Age of Acceleration. Utah State UP, 2014.

Morrow, Nancy. “The Role of Reading in the Composition Classroom.” JAC, vol. 17, no. 3, 1997, pp. 453–72.

Seidenberg, Mark. Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It. Basic Books, 2017.

Smith, Cheryl Hogue. “Fractured Reading: Experiencing Students’ Thinking Habits.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 47, no. 1, 2019, pp. 22–35.

—. “Interrogating Texts: From Deferent to Efferent and Aesthetic Reading Practices.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, pp. 59–79.

Sullivan, Patrick. “‘Deep Reading’ as a Threshold Concept in Composition Studies.” Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom, edited by Patrick Sullivan et al., National Council of Teachers of English, 2017, pp. 143–171.

Sullivan, Patrick, et al., editors. Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom. National Council of Teachers of English, 2017.

Sullivan, Patrick, and Christie Toth, editors. Teaching Composition at the Two-Year College, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017.

Tinberg, Howard. “When Writers Encounter Reading in a Community College First-Year Composition Course.” Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom, edited by Patrick Sullivan et al., National Council of Teachers of English, 2017, pp. 244–64.

“What Does it Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready? The English Literacy Required of Community College Students.” National Center on Education and the Economy, 2013, https://ncee.org/college-and-work-ready/.

Willingham, Daniel. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. Jossey-Bass, 2017.

Wolf, Maryanne. Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Harper, 2018.

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