Cultivating Capacity, Creating Change
2017 CCCC Annual Convention
March 15–18, 2017
Portland, Oregon
Program Chair: Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt
CCCC is in its seventh decade as an organization. Through its history, its members quite literally built a scholarly discipline, professionalized the teaching of writing, and fought to ensure access and justice for students. Today, CCCC members continue to expand and deepen understandings of rhetoric and writing; transform literacy teaching and learning and foster the conditions in which it occurs; and engage rhetoric and writing for a range of purposes, including advocacy, both inside and outside of the academy.
However, as a mature organization, we struggle with identity and the messiness and dissonance inherent in democratic endeavors, and we face an increasingly challenging, even hostile, external environment for the work we do. Our ability to sustain ourselves, both individually and collectively, requires purposeful cultivation, and that concept, cultivate, is the centerpiece of CCCC 2017. To cultivate is to enrich, nurture, enable, foster, and grow, all activities that this year’s Convention is designed to facilitate. A generative and re-generative concept, the theme cultivate is appropriate both to the productive region surrounding the CCCC 2017 convention site, Portland, Oregon, and to the actions necessary to develop the current and future generations of teachers, scholars, and leaders.
Late NCTE Executive Director Kent Williamson recognized that our organization—and its membership—must conscientiously create the conditions that ensure long-term vitality. He envisioned capacity building and collaboration as the way forward: mindfully developing and empowering members, who can use their capacity to act on behalf of themselves, their colleagues, and their students and, collectively, the organization and the profession at large. By cultivating member capacity, members can create change. It is labor-intensive yet rewarding work, enabling members and the organization to grow and flourish organically, from the inside out.
My goal for CCCC 2017 is to use the Convention as a space to cultivate members and member capacity for action. To achieve this involves reenvisioning the first “C” in CCCC, Conference, as more than an association of professionals, but a “meeting of minds,” and it involves engaging as a “conference,” as the etymology of conference suggests, coming together to discuss and work on shared interests and issues. To that end, I would like to build upon the transformative work of my immediate predecessors to encourage innovative and interactive session proposals, to create space within the program for the less structured, grassroots exchanges among members, and to plan a Convention that utilizes our time together to the fullest, from Wednesday’s preconvention workshops through Saturday’s closing events.
While CCCC 2017 will maintain the traditional aspects of our Annual Convention—showcasing members’ scholarly and professional work, participating in meetings (SIGs, caucuses, and governance activities), networking and socializing—it will also include spaces that invite member engagement in capacity building, including the continuation of the Action Hub and “Dialog” sessions to promote organizational transparency, innovations of Chair Joyce Locke Carter. Additionally, the 2017 Convention will feature two new highly interactive sessions that draw upon member expertise and interests: a series of “Cultivate” sessions, which are designed to build member capacity in particular ways, whether cultivating new voices in scholarship, preparing future faculty or future organizational leaders, developing our public voice, or sustaining ourselves as professionals; and a series of “Think Tank” sessions, which provide space during the convention for members to work together on various professional and organizational issues and, later, share their work and offer recommendation or action items in a closing plenary. For these new “featured” sessions, which are not part of the regular peer review process, a later call for topics and potential facilitators will be issued in summer to invite member input and participation.
With you, I hope to make the annual convention more than an event; I would like it to become a space for conversation and activity that continue throughout the year. The convention theme, then, is intended to be action-oriented. Cultivate should describe the overall convention experience, rather than prescribe the acceptable (and accepted) themes of proposals. I want “Cultivating Capacity, Creating Change” to promote the notion—and facilitate the activity—of a “Conference,” not to direct the members’ scholarly work, although sharing ideas and examples of intellectual and professional “cultivation” is welcome.
As we look ahead to our next gathering in Portland, Oregon, I invite us to consider how we can use our time together to cultivate ourselves, one another, CCCC, and the field.
- How do we cultivate new voices in the field and in the organization?
- How do we create broader understanding and appreciation of our disciplinary landscape?
- How do we develop future writing teachers, scholars, and leaders?
- How do we sustain and enrich our members in their varied interests throughout their careers?
- How do we, individually and collectively, cultivate our public voice?
- How do we build our capacity to take actions on issues important to our members?
- How do we conscientiously create the conditions for learning and for change?
- How can we build and maintain relationships, connections, and alliances?
- How can we foster openness, transparency, and consciousness in our membership and the organization at large?
What better place than Portland, the city that embodies the notion of environmental sustainability, to work together to find answers about how to sustain ourselves? Situated at the confluence of two rivers, surrounded by the forested Cascade mountain range, at the top of the fertile Willamette Valley, Portland is a place of productivity and possibility. The Willamette Valley’s fertility is the result of both its geologic history—volcanic activity and Ice Age floods—and modern cultivation practices. Similarly, CCCC’s capacity for growth and change is built on the work of our predecessors and our own continual, mindful cultivation. I encourage us to use our time together, March 15–18, 2017, to tend to our Conference, so we continue to grow and thrive.

Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt
Yakima Valley Community College
Yakima, WA
2017 Program Chair
work that revolutionizes—work that changes ideas and people for the better—but how might our work be more than its product or outcome? How might our work be change, be revolutionizing, be labors that are the practices of transformation themselves? How might we use our annual conference as a space for languaging, for laboring with and about language, for practicing transformation and revolution with and through language?
mselves transforming labor, and they may be the best outcome or product we might hope for in our research, teaching, or other work. In short, the fact that we language may be all we have for sure. For instance, what if the point of any writing class or article was mainly the languaging inherent in that work: writing the syllabus, reading and dialoguing with students over their languages, drafting and revising of an article or book, reading scholarship in the field, or listening to colleagues in meetings? What if the goal was the process, the labor, the languaging itself? How might this subtle change revolutionize us, our classrooms, our conference? We usually focus on something else that languaging gives us or produces for us, the article, the syllabus, the lesson or comment that is meant to help a student. What if we didn’t act this way? What if the point wasn’t the article to be published but engaging in articling, or syllabusing, or lessoning, or reading, or writing—in short, what if the point was the languaging? And what if that languaging could be labored at in com
passionate ways that brought us together while engaging with our differences, be they racial, ethnic, linguistic, bodily, ideological, or something else. In a way, I’m arguing that seeing our diverse intellectual efforts as languaging is also to see our labors as intersectional. What if the key to a socially just tomorrow was really acting socially just today, changing the now structurally through attention to our languaging, being aware of our constellated histories as relatives and relations invested in collectively working to changing today structurally through languaging, through an acknowledgment that all labors and laboring matter and function in distinctive, rhetorical ways?
r four years old. I am saying something to my brother, my mom listening on, looking down and smiling but her eyes are confused. Her soft, warm hand rests on the back of my neck. She doesn’t understand what I’m saying, but I know she’s listening. I feel her warm, loving hand. My brother responds, and I feel the words like bubbles coming from my mouth. The act of twin-languaging was mouth acrobatics. I conjured the sounds from the back and bottom of the mouth, curling the tongue often, and drawing in the cheeks on both sides because sometimes the sounds came from the sides of our tongues, near the cheeks. Our voices would raise in pitch. This is what I remember of our twin-language, the language that nurtured my brother and me. I have only good feelings about it. It was fun to do, meant only to do, with my brother. But others heard us: “you shouldn’t let them talk like that.” As we grew into the larger social world, we quickly lost our intimate twin-language. The language came and went like breath, sustaining us for just a moment.
ur bodies to language. What implications might thinking about languaging as fully embodied labor mean? What might it mean to language self-consciously as transforming at our national convention? How might we transform our sessions and labors at our convention by conceiving of our languaging labors there as labors of transformation? Who or what might be transformed? What new language-labors might we propose and engage in? How might our languaging there also engage deeply and meaningfully with the material and emotional aspects of languaging? What would happen if we wrote lovingly, loved how we wrote, asked students to do the same, designed courses and curricula with goals around cultivating or engaging with how language makes us feel and how we feel when we language?
s for particular scenes of languaging and laboring. What languaging do you propose to have happen in your session? What would that laboring look like, feel like, sound like? Who would be laboring in the session? What might the experience be in that moment? And how might that session be only about the languaging and laboring in that session? I urge us to be more mindful about what we propose, that we propose laboring and not simply papers, presentations, or products. I urge us to think of what we want to do at the conference as that, as doing, as laboring, as languaging that is the transforming acts that we hope for our conference and ourselves. I urge us to think of our labor together as communal laboring, as laboring done not just with others but for them.
ngly. I’m hoping this will encourage a more inclusive conference, one less fragmented, where folks who may not have engaged in some sessions in the past may do so this time, and one that is more intersectional in nature. These changes, I hope, will also capture the strongest and most compelling proposals.
ors of languaging make, create, and destroy, how might knowing this—paying attention to our languaging as labor that defines and makes us and our futures, that destroys or harms us, that transforms—help us make more socially just futures at our national convention, or in our classrooms, in our work with others? How do we language in ways that are antiracist or decolonizing or working against gender binaries and harmful assumptions about sexuality or (dis)ability or resist patriarchal assumptions? How do we language in ways that do not oppress others? How do we language in ways that bring larger publics to our table for communion or take us to their tables? How might we use our time in Kansas City to labor for the urgent social justice issues that confront us today, in our classrooms, writing programs, communities, nation, and world?
How might we language for human freedom? How might we language for now, this moment, in our bodies, as much as for tomorrow?
The Action Hub is our onsite common space where members can meet, brainstorm, write, and take other actions on what they have learned from convention panelists. This year’s Action Hub is jam-packed with opportunities to use, think about, and engage in writing as a strategy for action.
C’s the Day