Author: ksuchor

Thank you for registering for the CCCC 2018 Live Stream Event. Visit the schedule of events that will be live streamed for dates and times of the live stream.

 

Session Room Live Stream

Thursday General Session Live Stream

Thank you for attending the CCCC Virtual Conference, “Flavor of the 2011 CCCC Convention.”

Session Recordings

Your registration includes access to the session recordings. Click on the links below to download the sessions. Depending on your connection, it may take up to 30 minutes to download the file. However, on most high-speed connections, it will only take a few minutes. If you have any additional questions, or have trouble viewing the recording, consult the Elluminate Technical Resource section or contact CCCC.

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Session #2: Thursday, April 14, 2011
Communicating Tradition: Textual Politics in the Composition of Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club with Chris Teuton
NOTE: For this recording, please skip ahead to 6:20 minutes using the audio advance toggle at the bottom of the screen as the session didn’t begin until that time.

Session #3: Tuesday, April 19, 2011
A Future of Writing Studies with Sid Dobrin

Session #4: Wednesday, April 27, 2011
What to do with a Million Texts: Rhetoric, Composition and High Performance Computing with Dean Rehberger

Session #5: Friday, April 29, 2011
Questioning Pedagogical Contested Space: A Chicana Perspective with Dora Ramirez-Dhoore, Patricia Trujillo, and Carol Brochin-Ceballos
PowerPoint Presentation (PDF format)

Session #6: Friday, May 6, 2011
The State of Dual-Credit/Concurrent-Enrollment Writing Courses with Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt, Christine Farris, Kelly Ritter, and Duane Roen
PowerPoint Presentation (PDF format)

Did you miss the 2011 CCCC Convention in Atlanta? Did you attend the Convention but run out of time to see all of the stellar sessions? If so, check out the first CCCC Virtual Conference, bringing you a “flavor of the 2011 CCCC Annual Convention” from the convenience of your desktop!

Over the course of a month following the 2011 CCCC Convention, CCCC will host five, 60-minute virtual sessions that were presented in Atlanta. With FREE registration, you not only have the opportunity to attend the live virtual events, you will also gain full access to the on-demand recordings of those events which you can revisit at any time and even share with your colleagues in your department. You will have the freedom to attend as many of the virtual events as you wish but still have access to all of them on-demand after each session.

Registration Information

Seats are limited for this event, REGISTER TODAY!

FREE Registration includes:

• Live access to all five, 60-minute virtual sessions
• On Demand recordings of each of the five sessions
• Added Bonus: Access to the recording of CCCC Chair Gwendolyn D. Pough’s Address from Atlanta
• Extended conversations and resource sharing in an eGroup within the CCCC Conneted Community for all registrants

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Conference Information: All Our Relations: Contested Space, Contested Knowledge

Session 1 Cancelled

Session 2 April 14 1 to 2 pm EDT

Session 3 April 19 12 to 1 pm EDT

Session 4 April 27 2 to 3 pm EDT

Session 5 April 29 1 to 2 pm EDT

Session 6 May 6 1 to 2 pm EDT

Session 2: Thursday, April 14, 2011 – 1 to 2 p.m. EDT

Communicating Tradition: Textual Politics in the Composition of Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club

Presenter: Christopher B. Teuton, University of Victoria
For the past several years Christopher Teuton has been collaborating on a book project with a group of esteemed Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band elders and cultural traditionalists who call themselves the “Turtle Island Liars’ Club.” Now in the editorial stage and under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press, Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club will represent the first volume of transcribed Western Cherokee oral traditional stories published in over forty years. This session explores how Cherokee Stories was constructed through multiple nodes and channels of communication—oral, graphic, digital, and visual. More than simply a collection of orally recorded stories, the back story of the composition of Cherokee Stories shows how the book emerged within a complex matrix of forms of communication and technologies working sometimes in concert, other times at odds with one another as the Liars’ Club expressed their ideas concerning Cherokee culture, tradition, and teachings. Today, when elders email and Facebook as well as tell stories around the fire, what are the textual politics of communicating tradition?

Session 3: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 – 12 to 1 p.m. EDT

A Future of Writing Studies

Presenter: Sid Dobrin, The University of Florida, Gainesville
This is a presentation about writing and writing theory, and how changes outside of the field require substantial changes within. Synthesizing diverse discussions of posthumanism, visual/rhetoric, design, materiality, and ecology, the speaker considers what a future of writing studies might look like, if it wants to remain relevant intellectually. In order to engender and encourage conversations of possibility and opportunity in the current, burgeoning, self-critical moment in composition studies, this presentation considers a significant shift in approaches to writing studies that challenges entrenched ideas and assumptions that have defined composition studies—assumptions like the autonomous (student) subject and the role of visuals (in) writing. Such challenges to and within contested disciplinary spaces create discomfort, of course, and part of that discomfort emerges in this presentation as challenges to the mythologies and the removal of the guarantors upon which composition studies has relied, such as the management of student identities. As this presentation argues, however, we must do so in order to map writing studies’ intellectual future beyond composition studies’ academic past.

Session 4: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 – 2 to 3 p.m. EDT

What to do with a Million Texts: Rhetoric, Composition and High Performance Computing

Presenter: Dean Rehberger, Michigan State University, East Lansing
Dean Rehberger is the Director of MATRIX: the Center for Humane Art, Letters, and Social Science Online and also Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures. His primary areas of research include: information design and architecture; digital libraries, museums and archives; Internet technologies in the classroom; and hybrid learning environments. He recently coedited the book, Virtual Decisions: Digital Simulations for Teaching Reasoning in the social Science and Humanities. An expert in user experience design, Dean oversees MATRIX’s multi-partner, multi-site projects in digital libraries, humanities and social science computing. He has helped to bring in over $16 million in grants for the digital humanities. He is a seasoned leader in implementing major humanities technology projects that involve collaboration among multiple institutions, both in the U.S .and internationally. Dean is faculty advisor to the MSU Usability and Accessibility Center and teaches humanities computing, and rhetorical theory and history. Dean was recently awarded a Digging into Data Challenge Competition (www.diggingintodata. org), funded NSF, NEH, JISC, SSHRC, and consists of an international, multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Illinois, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Michigan State University, and the University of Sheffi eld. The challenge explores the ways we do qualitative research on large quantities of digital media. The digital humanities and high performance computing promise to open up new avenues of research and change the face of scholarship in the humanities. Dean will speak about these new paths and how scholars in rhetoric and composition can take a leading role and be agents of change in the humanities.

Session 5: Friday, April 29, 2011 – 1 to 2 p.m. EDT

Questioning Pedagogical Contested Space: A Chicana Perspective

Presenters: Dora Ramirez-Dhoore, Boise State University, ID
Patricia Trujillo, Northern New Mexico College, Espanola
Carol Brochin-Ceballos, University of Texas, El Paso
In paying respects to “all our relations,” this presentation directs our attention to how individuals listen to the rhetoric regarding racialized notions of how Ethnic Studies is brought into and taught in the classroom as a contested space. The story of the Chicana/o as a minority has been complicated with memories and lived realities of English-Only laws, propositions that break up families, rhetoric that dehumanizes (“illegal aliens”), and the list continues. This session focuses on a movement that has been part of “cultural pedagogy” referring to the idea that “education takes place in a variety of social sites including but not limited to school.” Cultural pedagogy acknowledges that “pedagogical sites are places where power is organized and deployed” (Steingberg and Kincheloe). This panel interrogates “contested knowledge” while remembering all our relations, by not forgetting the political and educational histories of students of color.

Dora Ramirez-Dhoore’s presentation “Difference is in the Voice: Listening to the “minor-ity” perspective in Academia” draws on the educational and thus political history of the Chicana/o student in the academy and how it affects their learning and success in the academy. She focuses on two of the texts that have been monitored by AZ House Bill 2281:  Rudy Acuña’s Occupied America and Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  Patricia Trujillo’s “Writing/Righting/Riting Northern New Mexico: A Statement on Improving Writing at Northern New Mexico College” examines how faculty and students at Northern New Mexico College, a traditionally Hispanic and Native American serving institution, are co-creating a writing community around the concept of “academic rigor/cultural relevance,” in efforts to understand not only the grammar/ mechanics/ context of academic writing, but also how to understand the grammar/mechanics /context of the colonization that has shaped (is shaping) their literal community. Carol Brochin Ceballos’s presentation, “The Borderlands Literacy Project: (Re)Conceptualizing Literacy Practices in Transnational Spaces” uncovers the historical, cultural, and sociocritical literacy practices (Gutierrez, 2008) within the third space—in this case the geographical region of the US/Mexico borderlands and the spaces between official and unofficial literacies (Kirkland, 2009).  She documents a series of literacy events enacted with pre-service and practicing teachers at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) that place at the center activities geared to uncover the role of both official and unofficial literacy practices and the ways in which these literacy practices are shaped by living within and across transnational communities.

Session 6: Friday, May 6, 2011 – 1 to 2 p.m. EDT

The State of Dual-Credit/Concurrent-Enrollment Writing Courses

Presenters: Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt, Yakima Valley Community College, WA
Christine Farris, Indiana University, Bloomington
Kelly Ritter, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Duane Roen, Arizona State University, Tempe
In this session, we will consider some recent scholarship on dual-credit/concurrent writing courses, especially the recent NCTE book, College Credit for Writing in High School: The “Taking Care of” Business, edited by Kristine Hansen and Christine R. Farris. The panelists, all members of the CCCC working group on dual-credit/concurrent enrollment writing courses, will also present data collected in a survey of CCCC, TYCA, and NCTE Secondary Section members. Panelists will also engage the audience in conversation about recent scholarship, the CCCC survey data, and audience members’ experiences with dual-credit/concurrent-enrollment writing courses. This panel’s aim is to provide a closer examination of how existing programs operate, as well as how they are evaluated and researched in order to help us take informed and responsible positions in this controversy.

Paul T. Bryant

The original article was published in College Composition and Communication in February 1974. The updated version below has been edited by graduate students…explanation of project goes here…

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THE TITLE IS DELIBERATELY AMBIGUOUS. It could be taken negatively or affirmatively, as a failure to learn from experience or as an affirmation that despite past mistakes, we may yet get it right. The ambiguity is deliberate to suggest both possibilities. In effect, I have good news and bad news. Let’s take the bad news first.

There is an old saying that a goose is a very stupid animal, because for a goose it is a brand new world every morning. Geese resolutely refuse to learn from experience. Instead they insist upon being constantly surprised, puzzled, and alarmed by everything that happens, even when it happens over and over again. Their consciousness can handle only the present, never the past or future. I mention this bit of barnyard folklore because we as college teachers of composition too often seem to operate on the same basis. Too often we behave as if there is no continuity in the teaching of composition, as if the subject has just been invented and every idea for teaching it is new at the moment. We fail to draw on the experience of colleagues. We learn neither from past successes, of which there have been a few, nor from past failures, of which there have been all too many. As a group, we are the living proof of the adage that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.

When I first considered this subject, I thought of making a survey of back issues of various journals to gain evidence showing the cyclical, non-linear way in which we wander through the many approaches to teaching composition, abandoning “old” ones only long enough to forget about them. Then we return to them as new discoveries, which we insist on finding “exciting” and “innovative,” always those words, as if our vocabularies of approbation were limited. I was going to appeal to the historical record for evidence of how little we have made use of past experience and of how much needless and unproductive repetition of failure such a lack of historical sense has cost.

To my embarrassment, I found that I, too, was proposing to do what has already been done. My own incomplete knowledge of the past was about to lead me to commit the very fault of which I complain, and to do it in the very act of complaining. As recently as the October 1972 issue of College Composition and Communication, Robert Gorrell discusses this problem with wit and insight (pp. 264-270) in an article entitled “The Traditional Course: When Is Old Hat New.” In that same issue, Richard Jordan presents “An Interview with Ben Jonson, Composition Teacher” (pp. 277-278), demonstrating that many of our “exciting and innovative” ideas about composition go back at least as far as 1640.

They have made the point, so I will refrain from plodding back through dusty volumes of bound journals merely to document in detail the number of times some of our most current and fashionable innovations have been tried and discarded, by our predecessors and even by ourselves.

Please don’t misunderstand me here. I do indeed object to the repeated reinvention of the same pedagogical wheels just so that we may continue to revolve in the same unproductive academic circles generation after generation. But I do not object to change, even when it may not always lie in a clear and direct line of improvement. Just as every age must reinterpret and re-evaluate works of art in terms of that age’s own values, experiences, and visions of the beautiful, so every generation must seek its own best modes of teaching and of learning, based on its own needs and style of thinking. Whether or not such modes resemble those of any earlier generation is beside the point. At the same time, however, selecting our most useful devices and techniques for teaching, we should not waste our energies, and make ourselves intellectually shabby into the bargain, pretending that useful old ideas are really new pedagogical breakthroughs. The millenium cannot arrive quarterly with every issue of College Composition and Communication. Millenia are generally spaced farther apart than that.

Most people will probably agree with my principal point, although perhaps not all will like my way of making it, so there is no need to labor it further. On the other hand, it is more difficult to put such generalizations into practice than it is to enunciate them. Let me try to go a step beyond the generalization to suggest at least a few guidelines for applying it to our real situation in the teaching of composition.

Let us begin from the assumption that teaching composition is both a science and an art and that this dual nature offers opportunities as well as problems.

Teaching composition is a science to the extent to which it deals with objective, reproducible phenomena involved in or affected by the teaching process. For example, psychologists can tell us much about the learning process in the normal human mind, linguists can tell us much about the function and interaction of the elements of language, and both groups should be able to tell us much about how language patterns are acquired by the normal mind. These are matters about which we can learn by objective, empirical means, and the knowledge thus gained can be used as a base for further investigation and further knowledge. We can move ahead in the accumulation of such knowledge in a clearly linear fashion. Once a principle is established, it can be stated and used, and need not be reestablished for every new generation. Every generation of composition teachers not only can, but is obligated to, stand upon the intellectual shoulders of the generations that have gone before. An ahistorical, know-nothing approach to this type of knowledge is wasteful and stupid, to say the least.

What I am suggesting, of course, is that to the extent to which the teaching of composition lends itself to the scientific approach, we should learn to behave as do professional scientists, building upon previous knowledge in the most systematic way possible. By this I mean that we should learn to construct clear and specific hypotheses concerning teaching methods, learn to formulate adequate tests for those hypotheses, accept or modify or reject hypotheses on the basis of our tests, and then move on to new ground. Every significant hypothesis should be tested objectively, not just offered and debated and finally forgotten, and the tests should be carefully designed and controlled. A subjective report from one teacher on the basis of a single trial is not enough. We should attempt in our professional journals to record as adequately as possible all new knowledge as we develop it, and we should learn to consult those journals carefully as a part of the process of formulating hypotheses and as a part of the preparation of our own reports for those journals. Our editorial standards should be rigorous enough to avoid repetitive reporting of the same hypotheses or discoveries. Our personal intellectual standards should be rigorous enough for us to avoid repeating experiments that have already been made, except for the purpose of checking results in which we lack confidence. In short, we should bend every effort to making the development of this aspect of our field as linearly progressive as possible.

Teaching is an art, too, and does not altogether lend itself to the scientific, objective approach, of course. The effectiveness of the individual teacher with a specific subject matter, both in the classroom and with individual students, may be heavily influenced by a whole concatenation of characteristics that might be summed up as individual style. Style is something every artist must develop personally, individually, uniquely. Without it, the artist is little more than a technician, if that, and the same is true for the teacher. We all know highly effective teachers whose personal styles would be absolute disaster for anyone else, and who in turn could not succeed with any other style in their own teaching. So what can we say about style? Can we communicate with each other on the subject? Can we learn from each other on anything more than a personal basis? I believe that we can.

Most of us have substantial backgrounds in literature. With such backgrounds, we should be the last to deny the validity and usefulness of tradition, of the influence of one artist upon another, of the existence of “schools” of writing made up of people whose styles are similar because they draw upon similar techniques or similar subject matters or just interpretations of the nature of reality. These are not linear, objective matters that can be treated in the same way as the kind of information developed by the scientific method, but they are not chaotic, formless, and absolutely random either. Artists can learn from each other. Regardless of how innovative they may try to be, they do draw consciously and unconsciously upon an artistic tradition. Certainly if a contemporary writer produced poetry in heroic couplets and claimed that he had invented a new poetic form, which he found exciting and innovative, he would be taken as absurd and ignorant. Yet we are sometimes guilty of similar absurdities because we do not know the history of the pedagogical techniques in our field, and we have no tradition for checking that history before triumphantly announcing our discoveries. The editors of our journals seem to have no such tradition, either.

If we as teachers are to make any progress in the art of teaching, we must develop this sense of a pedagogical tradition, a bank of successful artistic experience upon which we can draw at need. Otherwise, not all of us will have the genius to invent the sonnet all over again, or whatever the pedagogical equivalent might be, and our students will be the poorer for it.

Most of us have had some experience with student government on college campuses. We have been alternately frustrated and amused by the tendency of student officers to regard themselves each year as the new brooms designated to sweep out all the old dust of the past and run student government the way it should really be run, for a change. The result too often is a complete lack of continuity that keeps student-government programs from accomplishing as much as their sometimes considerable resources would lead us to expect from them. We as teachers of composition have behaved in much the same way, trying to be new brooms every year or so, sweeping out experience that might have been of some value to us, changing direction and emphasis so often and so unsystematically that we finally are lost, wandering in circles. Probably the only really dependable feature of composition programs across the country, the one thing we can count on, is that students will resent having to take the courses, and faculty from other departments will complain that we don’t teach the students to write well enough. Everything else seems to be in an unending flux. Of course, it is not entirely. We have learned, we have made some progress, we are capable of moving. What we must do if we are to move at a rate commensurate with our numbers, our resources, and our abilities, is to break out of our erratic circles and begin some linear progress. As I have suggested, we can do this by learning both from scientists and from artists to build systematically on past experience and knowledge already acquired by others.

One device we may wish to develop to !elp us achieve responsible linearity is a eadily accessible, widely disseminated annual bibliography on teaching composition, perhaps in the pages of College Composition and Communication.

Both scientists and literary scholars use similar bibliographies as a means for keeping informed and for checking on what has already been done before offering articles for publication or undertaking research programs. Such a bibliography on teaching composition would serve much the same purpose. It would help us to avoid meaningless repetition. It should help us to move forward into genuinely new knowledge. I urge careful consideration for such a project.

Another possibility might be the commissioning of an annual review of “the state of the art,” written by a leading scholar and practitioner of college composition and communication. Many fields of science rely regularly and gratefully on such reviews.

Such careful building on the knowledge of others may do less for our soaring egos than will unrelated solos in a wild blue historical limbo, but it will do a great deal more for our students and for our own intellectual integrity. If we can accomplish this, or if we are willing to begin, at least, we can then take my title in its positive sense. We can say that we will learn from past successes and past mistakes, and building on that knowledge we can make a brand new world every morning that will be better than the one we had the night before.

I totally agree with this article.

Colorado State University
Fort Collins

Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) series. 176 pp. 2011. College. NCTE/CCCC and Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0-8093-3019-5.

Listen to the Podcast interview with author Mary Soliday and CCCC member Elaine Hays…

…and view a video, “Access to Learning,” from the author:

 

Purchase Everyday Genres from Southern Illinois University Press.

Author Information

Mary Soliday completed her PhD in British literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she directed the first university-wide writing center. She completed her dissertation on eighteenth-century fiction in 1990, and then taught at the City College of New York, City University of New York for 17 years. At City, Soliday directed the campus writing center and then the writing across the curriculum program. With Barbara Gleason, she wrote a FIPSE grant to develop a writing program that mainstreamed remedial students with freshmen. She also taught upper-level writing intensive courses in literature.

Soliday joined the faculty at San Francisco State in 2008, and began to direct a new writing across the curriculum / in the disciplines program while also teaching in the undergraduate writing and literature, and MA in Composition, programs in the Department of English. She has made, and maintains, a website for the SF State WAC program (http://wac.sfsu.edu)

Soliday is the author of The Politics of Remediation: Institutional and Student Need in Higher Education (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), which received the 2004 Outstanding Book Award from the College Conference on Composition & Communication; Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments Across the Disciplines (Studies in Writing & Rhetoric, Southern Illinois U P, 2011); and many articles in essay collections and journals such as College English and College Composition and Communication.  She is currently working with her composition colleagues on a study of how students transfer writing and reading skills across rhetorical situations.

Tags

Writing across the curriculum; WAC; writing in the disciplines; WID; genre theory; CUNY; writing fellows; faculty development

Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) series. 181 pp. 2009. College. NCTE/CCCC and Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN/ISSN: 978-0-8093-2931-1

Listen to the Podcast Interview with author James Ray Watkins Jr. and interviewer Lindsay Rose Russell:

Purchase A Taste for Language from Southern Illinois University Press.

Book Description

In A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies, James Ray Watkins Jr explores the value of college-level education in literature and language.  Using a blend of genres (biography, autobiography, history, manifesto), Watkins traces a family past in order to imagine a more democratic future for English studies, both within the academy and in America at large. Watkins’ opening analysis of the influence an English composition textbook had on his accountant father’s professional writing gives way, in chapters two and three, to a theorization of English studies as inculcation into language for both pragmatic and aesthetic ends.  As Watkins argues in chapter four, the late twentieth century has witnessed an internal imbalance within English such that pragmatic writing is both academically and institutionally undervalued and aesthetic writing is only implicitly understood as imparting crucial cultural competencies and skills.  In his fifth and final chapter, Watkins imagines a future for English that not only acknowledges American class differences but intercedes in them to advocate for the equal importance of pragmatic and aesthetic languages within student, instructor, and citizen communities.  Watkins insists that English studies is central to the professional and cultural worth of a twenty-first century college education.

Author Information

James Ray Watkins Jr. is an online educator working full time for the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. He also teaches for the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. His website, Writing in the Wild, includes a blog and resources for writers and teachers.

Reviews

Reviewed by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)

Reviewed by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011).

 

Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) series. 192 pp. 2011. College. NCTE/CCCC and Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-3048-5.

Listen to the Podcast Interview with author Rebecca S. Nowacek and interviewer Angela Rounsaville:

Book Description

The question of how students transfer knowledge is an important one, as it addresses the larger issue of the educational experience. In Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act, Rebecca S. Nowacek explores, through a series of case studies, the issue of transfer by asking what in an educational setting engages students to become “agents of integration”— individuals actively working to perceive, as well as to convey effectively to others, the connections they make.

Author Information

Rebecca S. Nowacek is a professor of English at Marquette University.

Purchase Agents of Integration from Southern Illinois University Press.

Tiffany Rousculp is founding director of the Salt Lake Community College Community Writing Center and author of the SWR Series book Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center.

In this conversation with C. C. Hendricks, Rousculp talks about the founding of the CWC, the impact that its locations have had on its staff’s work and on its clientele, the process of writing her book, and the importance of blurring boundaries between the world of higher education and the larger communities it inhabits. She also offers some advice for others interested in engaging in community literacy work. (30:31)

 

Hear more from our authors and learn about their work in the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series.

 

Mara Holt, Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice: A History

 

 

 

 

 

Sandra L. Tarabochia, Reframing the Relational A Pedagogical Ethic for Cross-Curricular Literacy Work

 

 

 

 

 

Leslie Seawright, Genre of Power: Police Report Writers and Readers in the Justice System

 

 

 

 

 

Kathleen Blake Yancey and Stephen J. McElroy, Assembling Composition

 

 

 

 

 

Ashley J. Holmes, Public Pedagogy in Composition Studies

 

 

 

 

 

Leigh Ann Jones, From Boys to Men: Rhetorics of Emergent American Masculinity

 

 

 

 

 

Tiffany Rousculp, Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center

 

 

 

 

 

Rhea Estelle Lathan, Freedom Writing:
African American Civil Rights Literacy Activism, 1955-1967

 

 

 

 

 

Rebecca S. Nowacek, Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines

 

 

 

 

 

Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau, The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations

 

 

 

 

 

James Ray Watkins Jr., A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies

 

 

 

 

 

Kelly Ritter, Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960

 

 

 

 

 

Conference on College Composition and Communication
March 2017, Revised November 2024

Bibliography of Resources Supporting UR in Rhetoric and Writing Studies (September 2024, pdf)

Executive Summary

Undergraduate research is a widely recognized, high-impact educational practice that offers student researchers and their mentors unique opportunities to engage in shared, discipline-based intellectual inquiry. For undergraduate research in writing studies and rhetoric to flourish at two- and four-year institutions, whether it is embedded in curricula or located in co- and extracurricular opportunities, it must be well defined and well supported by relevant campus units (e.g., departments, programs, campus policies) and by the allocation of available campus resources.

Introduction

Part educational movement, part curricular innovation, undergraduate research is now widely recognized as a “high-impact educational practice”: a method of teaching and learning known to substantially benefit students from a variety of backgrounds across a range of instructional contexts, including curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities.¹ On one hand, undergraduate research in all subject areas may involve significant writing. On the other hand, undergraduate research in writing creates unique, discipline-specific opportunities.² Students who become undergraduate writing researchers obtain knowledge of writing that can be learned only through direct participation in full-fledged creative or critical inquiries. As undergraduate writing researchers, students also have the unique experience of contributing actively as subject experts to one or more communities (e.g., department or program, campus, or discipline). Mentored undergraduate research also contributes to student retention and graduation rates, fosters relationships with campus and community members, teaches information literacy, and more. Likewise, faculty, staff, and graduate students who teach and mentor undergraduate writing researchers gain distinctive opportunities for student-centered instruction, collaboration (e.g., coresearch, coauthorship), and professional development.

This position statement reflects CCCC members’ ongoing commitment to undergraduate research, including hosting the CCCC Undergraduate Researcher Poster Session at each Convention since 2012 and charging the Undergraduate Research Committee with sponsoring activities and initiatives related to undergraduate research in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies. This statement also supports members’ efforts to foster undergraduate research in writing at their home institutions, whether two- or four-year colleges or universities. To that end, the statement affirms undergraduate research in writing as a distinctive activity, and it outlines principles and best practices for mentoring undergraduate writing researchers, developing curricula that support undergraduate research in writing research curriculum, and building and sustaining campus infrastructure that can sustain undergraduate writing research activities.

Recognizing Undergraduate Research in Writing

At its most robust, undergraduate research includes the following elements: the formation of one or more mentoring relationships, identification and construction of research questions, preliminary study and project planning, information gathering and analysis, and the feedback loop of peer review and revision associated with the circulation of findings, whether through publication or public presentation.

In writing studies, undergraduate research reflects the breadth of available methods and methodologies developed and used by professional writing researchers, including textual, archival, and digital scholarship; quantitative and qualitative empirical research; and creative inquiry. Undergraduate research in writing also reflects the full range of students, faculty, and staff involved in college writing. Undergraduate researchers can be first-year students, two-year college students, English language learners, writing or English majors and minors, writing tutors, supplemental instructors, and/or students from any discipline who engage in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), Writing in the Disciplines (WID), or Writing in the Major (WIM). Mentors of undergraduate researchers in writing are similarly diverse. They can be full-time and part-time faculty members, graduate students, staff, administrators, writing center personnel, and/or community members affiliated with relevant campus programs. Mentoring relationships, whether formal or informal, should benefit from various forms of institutional support calibrated to mentors’ roles and status and should be part of the institutional reward system.

No single model for integrating undergraduate research in writing into postsecondary education exists. Instead, undergraduate research in writing can be curricular (e.g., course-embedded undergraduate research, undergraduate research completed for credit, etc.), cocurricular (e.g., summer undergraduate research experiences), or extracurricular (e.g., internships, co-ops, or rotational programs). It can take place during a single quarter or semester, over a summer, or across a period of years. Whatever the case, undergraduate research in writing should follow established ethical standards for inquiries of different kinds, including archival work, community-based projects, studies that involve online or digital media, and studies that involve human participants.³

Principles and Best Practices for Undergraduate Research in Writing

For undergraduate research in writing to flourish, it must be actively cultivated and sustained through individual relationships; through scaffolding provided by campus initiatives and strategic plans; and through infrastructure provided by campus units (e.g., programs, departments), policies, and resources. Specifically:

For students
Undergraduate research in writing starts with well-supported undergraduate researchers or students who have one or more opportunities during college to work formally or informally with one or more mentors on well-defined, well-scaffolded projects that align with both institutional learning outcomes and students’ own educational goals.

Good mentors

• Can be faculty and instructors of any status or rank, graduate students, or staff, if institutionally supported in that role.
• Build relationships with interested students and promote undergraduate research opportunities.
• Have relevant knowledge of not only writing practices and processes but also writing research methods and methodologies.
• Are willing and able to communicate regularly with undergraduate researchers, offering guidance and feedback over time, at every stage of a project.
• Connect undergraduate researchers with available experts (e.g., librarians, statisticians) and relevant disciplinary and institutional resources (e.g., data collection and analysis software, funding opportunities).
• Help undergraduate researchers comply with ethical standards for writing inquiries, including (but not limited to) certification and project approval procedures specific to research with human participants.
• Guide researchers through dissemination in various media and offer a conduit to disciplinary and institutional support.

Well-defined projects

• exigence, addressing a research question of pressing interest and importance to the student researcher and the field, relevant communities, and others invested in the topic.
• Make a genuine contribution, however modest, to public knowledge of writing, whether academic (e.g., disciplinary knowledge), professional, or community based.
• Fit into students’ schedules over a set period of time, with flexibility to evolve, and may extend work on an existing project that other research team members will continue to develop later.
• Follow relevant ethical standards.
• Have concrete and realistic goals for distribution.
• Extended CCCC’s mission to support ethical teaching and effective learning.

Well-aligned projects

• Reflect relevant learning outcomes, whether for a single course or course of study.
• Advance students’ individual college-level educational goals.
• Scale appropriately to the complex lives of new majority students (e.g., adult learners, working students, etc.).
• Are eligible for support from available sources (e.g., course credit, travel funding).
• Reinforce students’ postgraduate plans.

For mentors
Mentoring undergraduate research in writing can enrich research and scholarship, enliven teaching, and enhance professional development in alignment with mentors’ own job responsibilities and career goals.

Pedagogically, mentors

• Draw on and expand their existing instructional expertise to focus holistically on mentees’ interests and needs.
• Tap and extend their existing scholarly expertise to help students move through the research process, from identifying a research question through relating project findings to the larger scholarly, professional, or community conversation.
• Seek opportunities to learn from their undergraduate research partners and to co-construct knowledge.
• Promote knowledge transfer by helping undergraduate researchers recognize and reflect on how they are using previously acquired knowledge and how they are building skills and abilities they will be able to apply subsequently in their academic, professional, and personal lives.
• Foster relationships among undergraduate researchers to facilitate near-peer mentoring, whether mentors work one-to-one with students, in small groups, or in teams involving multiple mentors and mentees.
• Help students build networks of connection on campus and within broader local and disciplinary communities through relationships forged in conjunction with their projects, contributing to their mentoring constellations.⁴

As researchers and scholars, mentors

• Draw on existing disciplinary expertise in rhetoric and composition/writing studies and adjacent fields.
• Expand their disciplinary knowledge to engage student researchers’ interests and needs.
• Develop research and workflow protocols for effective and ethical collaboration with undergraduate researchers.
• Help student researchers navigate institutional structures that facilitate or regulate research (e.g., IRBs, funding processes, linking projects to curricular credit).
• Introduce students to presentation and publication opportunities, particularly those that feature undergraduate research.
• Collaborate with students on the co-construction of knowledge and the coauthorship of publications and presentations.
• When appropriate, draw from existing scholarship on undergraduate research and also contribute to it.

As members of campus, local, and disciplinary communities, mentors

• Foster and contribute to the development and ongoing delivery of curricula that support undergraduate research in writing.
• Participate actively in building and sustaining campus capacity for undergraduate research.
• Identify opportunities for undergraduate researchers to collaborate with community and workplace partners.
• Connect campus efforts with regional, national, and international initiatives for undergraduate research.
• Advocate for institutional resource allocation to undergraduate research offices, departmental programs, and other entities.

For institutions
To build and support a culture of undergraduate research that includes writing studies, and to ensure all writers have access to opportunities to participate, individual colleges and universities must provide infrastructure, scaffolding, and sustaining resources.

Infrastructure consists of

• Campus leadership informed about how writing, as a discipline that draws on humanities, social sciences, and fine arts methods and methodologies, fits into the larger campus picture of undergraduate research.
• Inclusion of writing scholars on campus committees that make decisions about undergraduate research opportunities and resources.
• Attentiveness to the needs of undergraduate researchers in writing by relevant campus units (e.g., IRBs, libraries, stats centers).
• Policies (e.g., hiring, annual evaluation, tenure, and promotion) that recognize and reward involvement in undergraduate research.

Scaffolding comprises

• Support for lower- and upper-division courses that incorporate research or elements of research and thus require special accommodations (e.g., equipment, location, credit hours, time or financial compensation).
• Inclusive recruitment of students to undergraduate research opportunities.
• Professional development opportunities for mentors.
• Inclusion of undergraduate researchers and their mentors in relevant campus events and publications.
• Awards that recognize and celebrate excellence in undergraduate research.
• Mechanisms for assessing the impact of undergraduate research on campus.

Resources include

• Funding to support undergraduate researchers through the full arc of undergraduate research, from question posing to data collection and analysis to circulation.
• Funding to support undergraduate research mentors’ involvement in all stages of their mentees’ work, regardless of mentors’ ranks and campus roles (e.g., adjunct, non-tenure- track, and tenure-track faculty members; graduate students and postdocs; staff; administrators).
• Access for spaces and tools for completing undergraduate research, including software licenses, storage for physical and virtual data, poster printers, and so on.

Endnotes

1. See George D. Kuh, High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Do, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter (AAC&U, 2008). Kuh’s analysis of data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) demonstrates that high-impact practices, including undergraduate research, not only improve retention and graduation rates but also promote deep learning and gains in general, personal, and practical knowledge. Kuh traces the value of high-impact practices to the ways in which they require students to invest considerable energy in purposeful intellectual activities; to be engaged with faculty and peers in substantive work and to receive feedback on that work; to connect with people from diverse backgrounds; and to transfer their developing knowledge and skills across contexts, including classrooms, campus organizations, the workplace, and the wider community.
2. DelliCarpini, Dominic F., Jenn Fishman, and Jane Greer, editors. The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies. Parlor Press, 2020.
3. See CCCC Guidelines for the Ethical Conduct of Research in Composition Studies.
4. Moore, Jessie L., Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, and Tim Peeples. 2024. Mentoring Matters: Supporting Students’ Development of Mentoring Constellations in Higher Education. Center for Engaged Learning. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/mentoring-matters.

Acknowledgments

This statement was generously revised by the CCCC Committee on Undergraduate Research. The members of this committee included:

Jessie Moore, Co-Chair
Michael Neal, Co-Chair
Dominic DelliCarpini
Abby Dubisar
Michelle Grue
Tina Iemma
Shurli Makmillen
John Pruitt
Michael Rifenburg
Sarah Singer

This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.