Author: ksuchor

Conference on College Composition and Communication
July 2020

This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!

As with previous CCCC/NCTE resolutions and position statements, we situate this demand in our current historical and sociopolitical context. Our current call for Black Linguistic Justice comes in the midst of a pandemic that is disproportionately infecting and killing Black people. We write this statement while witnessing ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protests across the United States in response to the anti-Black racist violence and murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and a growing list of Black people at the hands of the state and vigilantes. We are observing calls for abolition and demands to defund the police. We are witnessing institutions and organizations craft statements condemning police brutality and anti-Black racism while ignoring the anti-Black skeletons in their own closets. As language and literacy researchers and educators, we acknowledge that the same anti-Black violence toward Black people in the streets across the United States mirrors the anti-Black violence that is going down in these academic streets (Baker-Bell, Jones Stanbrough, & Everett, 2017). In this current sociopolitical context, we ask: How has Black Lives Mattered in the context of language education? How has Black Lives Mattered in our research, scholarship, teaching, disciplinary discourses, graduate programs, professional organizations, and publications? How have our commitments and activism as a discipline contributed to the political freedom of Black peoples?

It is commonplace for progressive scholars and teachers today to acknowledge students’ multiple language backgrounds. In fact, CCCC/NCTE has created numerous resolutions and position statements related to language variety since the 1974 “Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution,” a response to the Black Freedom Movements and new research on Black Language of the time. Since then, CCCC/NCTE policymaking in relation to language rights has included the following: Expanding Opportunities: Academic Success for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students; CCCC Statement on Ebonics; CCCC National Language Policy; CCCC Statement on Second Language Writing and Writers; Resolution on the Student’s Right to Incorporate Heritage and Home Languages in Writing; Supporting Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Learners in English Education; Resolution on Affirming the CCCC “Students’ Right to Their Own Language”; Resolution on Diversity; Resolution on Bilingual Education; Resolution on Developing and Maintaining Fluency in More Than One Language; Resolution on Language Study; Resolution on Inclusion; Resolution on English as the “Official Language”; Resolution on English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education; Resolution on the Responsibility of English Teachers in a Multilingual, Multicultural Society; Resolution on Preparing Effective Teachers for Linguistically Different Students; Resolution on the Students’ Right to Their Own Language.

Though CCCC/NCTE has been active in the ongoing struggle for language rights, Kynard (2013) reminds us that “the possibilities for SRTOL [were] always imagined, and yet never fully achieved [and this] falls squarely in line with our inadequate responses to the anti-systemic nature of the ’60s social justice movements” (p. 74). In reflecting on the current historical moment and movement for Black lives, Baker-Bell (2020) argues that “the way Black language is devalued in schools reflects how Black lives are devalued in the world . . . [and] the anti-Black linguistic racism that is used to diminish Black Language and Black students in classrooms is not separate from the rampant and deliberate anti-Black racism and violence inflicted upon Black people in society” (pp. 2–3). Today, we uphold the updated CCCC statement on Ebonics that explicitly states:

Ebonics reflects the Black experience and conveys Black traditions and socially real truths. Black Languages are crucial to Black identity. Black Language sayings, such as “What goes around comes around,” are crucial to Black ways of being in the world. Black Languages, like Black lives, matter.

As an organization that proclaims “to apply the power of language and literacy to actively pursue justice and equity for all students and educators who serve them,” we cannot claim that Black Lives Matter in our field if Black Language does not matter! We cannot say Black Lives Matter if decades of research on Black Language has not led to widespread systemic change in curricula, pedagogical practices, disciplinary discourses, research, language policies, professional organizations, programs, and institutions within and beyond academia! We cannot say that Black Lives Matter if Black Language is not at the forefront of our work as language educators and researchers! In our efforts to move toward Black Linguistic Justice, we build on the historical resolution/policymaking work within CCCC/NCTE that has laid the foundation for our discipline, but we want to be clear: This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! PeriodT!

This list of demands was created by the 2020 CCCC Special Committee on Composing a CCCC Statement on Anti-Black Racism and Black Linguistic Justice, Or, Why We Cain’t Breathe! The members of this committee include April Baker-Bell, Bonnie J. Williams-Farrier, Davena Jackson, Lamar Johnson, Carmen Kynard, and Teaira McMurtry, six Black language scholars whose lived experiences as Black Language speakers inform our teaching, scholarship, research, and activism. Through our collective work on these demands, we are channeling the Black Radicals who came before us, both in our disciplines and in our communities! We intentionally created a fluid text from our multiple voices rather than a singularly voiced, standardized, white document.

We DEMAND that:

1. teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm, which reflects White Mainstream English!
2. teachers stop teaching Black students to code-switch! Instead, we must teach Black students about anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy!
3. political discussions and praxis center Black Language as teacher-researcher activism for classrooms and communities!
4. teachers develop and teach Black Linguistic Consciousness that works to decolonize the mind (and/or) language, unlearn white supremacy, and unravel anti-Black linguistic racism!
5. Black dispositions are centered in the research and teaching of Black Language!

We expand on this list of demands in the section below.

DEMAND #1: We Demand that Teachers Stop Using Academic Language and Standard English as the Accepted Communicative Norm, which Reflects White Mainstream English!

The language of Black students has been monitored, dismissed, demonized—and taught from the positioning that using standard English and academic language means success. Since these terms’ early inception, schools have upheld linguistic ideologies that continue to marginalize Black students. Socially constructed terms like academic language and standard English are rooted in white supremacy, whiteness, and anti-Blackness and contribute to anti-Black policies (e.g., English only) that are codified and enacted to privilege white linguistic and cultural norms while deeming Black Language inferior. The learning of standard English has historically been obligatory despite our knowledge that linguistic shaming and dismissal of Black Language has a deleterious effect on Black Language speakers’ humanity (Smitherman, 2006; Rickford & Rickford, 2000). We must acknowledge that Black students’ language education continues to perpetuate anti-Black linguistic racism (Baker-Bell, 2020) and creates a climate of racialized inferiority toward Black Language and Black humanity.

We DEMAND that:

1. teachers and researchers acknowledge that socially constructed terms such as academic language and standard English are false and entrenched in notions of white supremacy and whiteness that contribute to anti-Black linguistic racism.
2. teachers STOP telling Black students that they have to “learn standard English to be successful because that’s just the way it is in the real world.” No, that’s not just the way it is; that’s anti-Black linguistic racism. Do we use this same fallacious, racist rhetoric with white students? Will using White Mainstream English prevent Black students from being judged and treated unfairly based solely on the color of their skin? Make it make sense.
3. teachers reject negative perceptions of Black Language and no longer use racist linguistic ideologies that perpetuate hate, shaming, and the spirit murdering (Johnson et al., 2017) of Black students.
4. teachers and researchers reject anti-Black linguistic racism as a way to describe the deficit positioning of Black students’ use of Black Language.
5. teachers acknowledge and celebrate Black students’ use of Black Language in all its linguistic and cultural glory.
6. teachers and educational researchers champion linguistic justice (Baker-Bell, 2020).

DEMAND #2: We Demand that Teachers Stop Teaching Black Students to Code-Switch! Instead, We Must Teach Black Students about Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and White Linguistic Supremacy!

We DEMAND that language and literacy researchers and educators stop the promotion of code-switching. This approach does not celebrate and love on Blackness and Black Language. In fact, when teachers force Black youth to code their language, it is a form of anti-Black linguistic racism. We DEMAND that language researchers and educators recognize that it is destructive and injurious to ignore the interconnection between language, race, and identity. As Black Language speakers and scholars, we don’t encourage code-switching, because it places whiteness and White Mainstream English on a pedestal while showcasing Blackness and Black Language as inferior, lesser, and secondary. Instead, we encourage, utilize, and elevate the beauty and brilliance in Blackness and Black Language.

We DEMAND that:

1. teachers stop policing Black students’ language practices and penalizing them for using it in the classroom.
2. teachers stop utilizing eradicationist and respectability pedagogies (Baker-Bell, 2020) that diminish Black students’ language practices.
3. Black Language is acknowledged in the curriculum.
4. teachers are trained to recognize Black Language and work toward dismantling anti-Black linguistic racism in their curriculum, instruction, and pedagogical practices.
5. teachers stop promoting and privileging White Mainstream English, code-switching, and contrastive analysis at the expense of Black students. This is linguistically violent to the humanity and spirit of Black Language speakers.
6. teachers recognize that multiple languages can coexist (Young et al., 2014).

DEMAND #3: We Demand that Political Discussions and Praxis Center Black Language as Teacher-Researcher Activism for Classrooms and Communities!

The historical processes of defining and pursuing CCCC/NCTE policies in relation to multilingualism have been vital to classrooms and communities.. However, teacher-researchers must keep pushing further and lay out the specificity of Black Language. Educators who research and support Black Language must move beyond merely understanding and codifying current scholarship, data-driven study, and linguistic analyses. They must be activists. Respect for Black Language fundamentally requires respect for Black lives, a political process that must inherently challenge institutions like schools whose very foundations are built on anti-Black racism. We DEMAND political discussions and praxis of Black Language as guided by the work of teacher-researcher-activists in classrooms and communities who stand against institutions that seek to annihilate Black Language + Black Life.

We DEMAND that:

1. researchers, educators, and policymakers stop using problematic, race-neutral umbrella terms like multilingualism, world Englishes, translingualism, linguistic diversity, or any other race-flattened vocabulary when discussing Black Language and thereby Black Lives.
2. researchers, educators, influencers, and public scholars reject notions of a single nonmainstream language category that erases the linguistic, cultural, and political specificity of Black Language and Life struggles.
3. researchers, educators (in and out of schools), and activists frame Black Language struggles in historical and ongoing Movements for Black Lives.
4. ALL WORK related to Black Language and Black youth commit unequivocally to the freedom, dignity, and creativity of young Black people’s lives rather than demand more data extraction and labor from them.
5. researchers, scholars, educators, and all everyday Black folx center Black Language on its unique philosophies and survivances of Black Life rather than on a set of linguistic departures from a fictional, white norm.
6. researchers, scholars, educators, school/district/national leaders, administrators, and activists address anti-Blackness as endemic to how language functions, how English/education has been historically situated, and how college writing has been actively constructed.

DEMAND #4: We Demand Black Linguistic Consciousness!

We DEMAND the cultivation of Black Linguistic Consciousness. Raising Black Linguistic Consciousness requires place and space for divulging untold truths. This, in turn, prioritizes the reversing of anti-Black linguistic racism, the healing of the souls of Black folks, and the empowering of agentive political choices that call for the intentional employment of Black Language (Baker-Bell 2020; Kynard, 2007; Richardson, 2004). This is the exercising of liberation. Further, this requires that all students get an opportunity to learn about Black Language from Black language scholars or experts (via texts, lectures, etc.). For Black students specifically, it is imperative that they learn Black Language through Black Language; that is, they learn the rich roots and rhetorical rules of Black Language (Baker-Bell, 2020) by any means necessary. At the same time, this warrants the ceasing of anti-Blackness and miseducation—specifically, ineffectual language arts instruction—that misguidedly limits language mastery to White Mainstream English (revisit Demand #1). Black students need the kind of artful language instruction in which they are positioned as the linguistic mavens they are who can teach you a thing or two about language.

We DEMAND that:

1. teachers and researchers decolonize their minds (and/or) language of white supremacy and anti-Black linguistic racism and study the origin theories and sociolinguistic principles that exist about Black Language.
2. teachers engage their students in “Black linguistic consciousness-raising that provides them with the critical literacies and competencies to name, investigate, and dismantle white linguistic hegemony and anti-Black linguistic racism” (Baker-Bell, 2020, p. 86).
3. teachers reject deficit descriptions and other misnomers (e.g., home language, informal English, improper speech, etc.) that disrespects the existence and essence of Black Language. Call it what it is: Black Language!
4. teachers, researchers, and scholars put some respeck on Black Language and refrain from engaging in Black linguistic appropriation (Baker-Bell, 2020). This means that you stop the hypocrisy. Realize that it is not okay for Black Language to be used by nonnative users for popular and capital gain while native users are simultaneously mocked and widely denigrated.
5. teachers not dismiss Black Language simply as a dialect of English, and do not treat it as a static anachronism—it’s not a thing of the past, spoken only by Black people who are positioned in a “low” or “working class.” Recognize it as a language in its own right! Revisit Demand #1 again.
6. teachers respeck Black thought and how that thought manifests in Black speech and writing. That is, it might not sound like you desire it to, but remember, it sounds real right, regardless of unrelenting white supremacist socialization.

DEMAND #5: We Demand that Black Dispositions Are Centered in the Research and Teaching of Black Language.

We DEMAND that research and the teaching of Black Language center the work of Black language scholars whose research agendas and expertise are informed by their lived experiences as Black people and Black Language speakers. We specifically call for the centering of scholarship by Black women and early career Black language scholars whose scholarship is often marginalized in the research literature. We denounce the centering of research by white scholars on Black Language, which has too often been elevated in the field and deemed leading and foundational scholarship (e.g., Caldwell, Labov, Wolfram, Heath, etc.). This has contributed to many white and non-Black scholars of color gaining a platform to discuss Black Language and culture without including Black perspectives or commitments to the political freedom of Black peoples. This is an act of dehumanization and erasure of Black bodies from our own lived experiences! We demand that researchers, teachers, editors, and those in positions of leadership within CCCC/NCTE (and all professional organizations) call out these examples of anti-Black violence as well as hold themselves accountable.

We DEMAND that:

1. teachers assign readings that are written by foundational and contemporary Black language scholars.
2. teachers include assignments that give Black students the option to explore or connect with their cultural knowledge and perspectives.
3. professional organizations whose popularity hinges on Black language scholars’ presentations and service learn to center them and not the white scholars who merely tokenize such work.
4. research submitted for publication on Black Language and culture be reviewed by Black language scholars whose research agenda and expertise are informed by their lived experiences as Black people and Black Language speakers.
5. the review process for CCCC/NCTE journals (and all educational scholarship) include criteria that reflect a Black-centered citation politic. When evaluating manuscripts on Black Language and culture, authors must include citations that center the scholarship of Black scholars whose research agenda is informed by their lived experiences as Black people and Black Language speakers.
6. graduate programs in the fields of composition studies and English education develop the next generation of researchers’ Black Linguistic Consciousness of citationality politics and a Black activist research disposition.

CODA

If reading this made you feel some kinda way, instead of coming for these demands, let us help you redirect that energy. If you thought these demands were simply about teaching within traditional white norms or fixing Black students and their language practices, you got it wrong! This is a DEMAND for you to do much better in your own self-work that must challenge the multiple institutional structures of anti-Black racism you have used to shape language politics. To all the upper-level college administrators, mid-level college managers, WPAs, deans, department chairs, superintendents, school district leaders, principals, school leaders, curriculum coordinators, state and national policymakers, and editors: We see y’all! Don’t get it twisted—these demands are for y’all too!

Don’t get silent when it comes to Black Lives and Black Language in these academic streets! Keep that same energy when it comes to fighting for Black Lives in our field that you had when you used the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on your social media platforms following George Floyd’s murder; chanted #SayHerName for Breonna Taylor and #AllBlackLivesMatter for Tony McDade at your first #BLM protest this summer; sent that email/text to your Black “friend” to profess your allyship; and helped craft that Black Lives Matter statement on behalf of your institution or department.

We DEMAND Black Linguistic Justice! And in case you’ve forgotten what WE mean when WE say Black Lives Matter, we stand with the words of the three radical Black organizers and freedom dreamers/fighters—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi—who created the historic political project #BlackLivesMatter:

Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ humanity, our contributions to this society, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.

This list of demands was generously created by the 2020 CCCC Special Committee on Composing a CCCC Statement on Anti-Black Racism and Black Linguistic Justice, Or, Why We Cain’t Breathe! The members of this committee include:

April Baker-Bell, Chair, Michigan State University

Bonnie J. Williams-Farrier, California State University (Fullerton)

Davena Jackson, Boston University

Lamar Johnson, Michigan State University

Carmen Kynard, Texas Christian University

Teaira McMurtry, University of Alabama at Birmingham

REFERENCES

Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge & National Council of Teachers of English.

Baker-Bell, A., Jones Stanbrough, R. J., & Everett, S. (2017). The stories they tell: Mainstream media, pedagogies of healing, and critical media literacy. English Education, 49(2), 130–52.

Johnson, L. L., Jackson, J., Stovall, D. O., & Baszile, D. T. (2017). “Loving Blackness to death”: (Re)Imagining ELA classrooms in a time of racial chaos. English Journal, 106(4), 60–66.

Kynard, C. (2007). “I want to be African”: In search of a Black radical tradition/African-American-vernacularized paradigm for “Students’ right to their own language,” critical literacy, and “class politics.” College English, 69(4), 360–90.

Kynard, C. (2013). Vernacular insurrections: Race, Black protest, and the new century in composition-literacies studies. SUNY Press.

Richardson, E. (2004). Coming from the heart: African American students, literacy stories, and rhetorical education. In E. B. Richardson & R. L. Jackson II (Eds.), African American rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 155–69). Southern Illinois University Press.

Rickford, J. R., & Rickford, R. J. (2000). Spoken soul: The story of Black English. Wiley.

Smitherman, G. (2006). Word from the mother: Language and African Americans. Routledge.

Young, V. A., Barrett, R., Young-Rivera, Y., & Lovejoy, K. B. (2014). Other people’s English: Code-meshing, code-switching, and African American literacy. Teachers College Press.

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

Thursday, July 16, 2020
3:00–4:30 p.m. ET

View the webinar recording

CCCC membership is required to attend and view a recording of this webinar. Join now.

This panel, featuring three CCCC 2020 award winners, focuses on activist transnational rhetorics, the influence of language ideologies on transnational students’ identities as writers, and approaches for affirming linguistic diversity in the writing classroom. An audience-driven Q&A as well as networking time will follow the presentations.

Presenters:

Wenqi Cui, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, “Multilingual Writers’ Identity Construction through Academic Writing Discourse Socialization”

Subhi Hindi, University of Houston, “The Commonplace Writing Classroom: Code-Meshing FYC Students’ Rhetorics in College Writing”

Zhaozhe Wang, Purdue University, “Assemble Commonplaces through Activist Rhetoric in Transnational Cyber-Public Spaces”

Moderator: Vershawn Ashanti Young, CCCC Chair, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Respondent: Michael A. Pemberton, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro

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View additional webinars in the CCCC Webinar Series.

CCCC Task Force on Intersectionality and Equity-based Perspectives (2024–2025)
Alexis McGee, Chair
Lisa King
Eunjeong Lee
Donnie Johnson Sackey

CCCC Task Force to Revise Scholarship in Rhetoric, Writing, and Composition: Guidelines for Faculty, Deans, and Chairs (2024–2025)
Paul Matsuda, Chair
Andrea Lunsford
Aja Martinez
Jennifer Mitchell

CCCC Task Force to Revise the Statement on Globalization in Writing Studies Pedagogy and Research (2024–2025)
Steven Fraiberg, Chair
Tarez Graban
Alena Kasparkova
Teresa Mateo-Girona
Xiqiao Wang

CCCC Task Force Revising the Statement on Preparing Teachers of College Writing (2024–2025)
Brad Smith, Chair
Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt
Doug Kern
Khirsten Scott
Qianqian Zhang-Wu

CCCC Task Force on a Statement on Online/Social Media Engagement for Academic Purposes (2024–2025)
Michael Trice, Chair
Maggie Fernandes
Wyatt Paige Hermansen
Quang Ly
Katja Thieme

Monday, May 18, 2020
2:00–3:00 p.m. ET

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CCCC membership is required to attend and view a recording of this webinar. Join now. To view this video with closed captioning, hover over the bottom right of the video and click “CC” and “English.

Recent disruptions to standardized testing are forcing many institutions to consider alternative methods for writing placement. The presenters in this webinar—Katherine Conlon (UMass Lowell), Ann Dean (UMass Lowell), Jeroen Gevers (University of Arizona), and Erin Whittig (University of Arizona)—will share their recent experiences implementing Directed Self-Placement and offer support for those looking into new placement approaches, while acknowledging there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to DSP. Participants will be encouraged to ask questions that help them develop their own strategies for developing local DSP expertise, establishing connections with other stakeholders on campus, getting “buy-in” from various stakeholders, addressing common challenges such as resistance from faculty, staff, and administrators, overcoming disagreements over relevant constructs or program goals while implementing DSP, designing valid and effective DSP instruments, and supporting students throughout the DSP process. Presenters will share material resources that participants can use at their own institutions.

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April 29, 2020

As a result of continued uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, CCCC leaders have made the difficult decision to postpone the 2020 CCCC Summer Conference at Boston University, July 9–10, until the summer of 2021. We express our sincerest thanks and appreciation to Ellen Carillo and Jason Courtmanche, University of Connecticut; Alice Horning, Oakland University; and Matthew Parfitt, Boston University, for their planning, leadership, and commitment in developing the program for Critical Literacies in the 21st Century Classroom.

Look for updates on future CCCC events on Facebook and Twitter.

Nomination Deadline: July 1, 2025
Initial Application Packet Deadline: July 30, 2025

Purpose: Established in 2020, the CCCC Outstanding Teaching Award is presented annually to honor the discipline’s practitioners and make visible the best teaching practices of the field. The intent of this award is to honor teaching and CCCC members who do their primary work in the classroom every day. CCCC offers two awards each year—one for an Emergent Outstanding Teacher and the other for a Sustained Outstanding Teacher. Awardees will receive $500 for travel, classroom, or other educational funding.

Eligibility: Educators are eligible to apply if they teach primarily during a student’s first year in college or in students’ first college writing classes, including:

• first-year composition
• basic writing
• first-year seminars
• accelerated learning
• general education
• developmental writing
• other writing models that occur during a student’s first-year standing in higher education

Award Criteria: The award winners will be chosen by the committee based on evidence illustrating:

• use, adaptation, and/or embodiment of research-informed practices
• student learning among a diverse group of learners with multiple literacies and language practices
• responsive and effective teaching methods, assignments, and activities
• an engaged classroom with thoughtful curriculum delivery that promotes student agency
• meaningful, informed, democratic, and equity-driven assessment practices
• inspiration of students and other teachers.

The committee will also consider institution type (e.g., tribal colleges, four-year residential, four-year urban, teaching-intensive, minority-serving, two-year colleges, open admissions, small liberal arts), contact hours, number of students, populations and communities served (e.g., students with disabilities, nontraditional students, L2/language diversity, racially diverse), and teaching frameworks (e.g., social justice pedagogy, universal design, culturally sustaining pedagogies).

Award Specifics: Awardee selection involves a three-part process. All materials must be submitted as PDFs emailed to cccc@ncte.org. This award is intended to recognize excellence in teaching and learning practices, and materials submitted should be designed for and used in first-year writing courses. Materials should reflect the applicant’s classroom practices (rather than materials generated for the purpose of writing program administration more broadly).

FIRST: Nominations are due by July 1, 2025. Nominating letters submitted by a colleague who knows the nominee’s work will take the place of the letter of support in the initial application packet. Those nominating should cc the person being nominated to prompt the nominee to complete an initial application. The nominating letter: establishes the nominee’s eligibility (i.e., teaches primarily or exclusively first-year writing and aligned writing courses in a college setting); indicates the appropriate award category for consideration (see category descriptions); and describes how the nominee works within and beyond standards defined by disciplinary scholarship and practices, establishing connections between the nominee’s teaching and theory. (Reflect, for instance, on how the nominee’s teaching and learning practices enact and/or critically challenge the NCTE Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age, NCTE Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing, and/or CCCC Principles for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing.)

Self-nomination is also an option, and can be completed by submitting a letter that’s comparable to the cover letter in the initial application packet (see “Cover letter” below). Meeting the July 1 deadline is not required for self-nomination, but will give nominees time to have their eligibility confirmed and to seek support as needed with submitting the initial application packet.

SECOND: Initial application packets are due by July 30, 2025. In one PDF, please submit:

1. Cover letter (not required if submitted via self-nominated by July 1; no more than 750 words) The cover letter: introduces self as a nominee — including years of teaching, course load(s), institution type(s) — and one whose work may exemplify the best teaching practices of the field; forecasts what would be seen by the committee in a teaching and assessment portfolio; details the nominee’s professional context, including institutional working conditions and challenges.
2. Support letter (see nominating letter specifications above; not required if submitted via nomination letter by July 1)
3. Teaching philosophy (no more than 750 words)
4. Curriculum vitae

The selection committee will use this rubric to determine which nominees will advance.

THIRD: Nominees invited to submit second-round application packets will be contacted in early August 2024, and should submit the following in a single PDF by September 15, 2025.

1. Critical reflection of teaching with supporting materials
   1. Reflection: establishes the framework for the nominee’s approach to designing and teaching first-year writing, including the ways in which professional development and/or scholarship have informed teaching practice (no more than 750 words).
   2. Supporting materials: provides evidence of how peda-/andragogy is enacted, e.g., selections from syllabi, trademark assignments, other teaching materials that illustrate how the nominee engages learners (no more than 10 pages).
2. Assessment philosophy with supporting materials
   1. Philosophy: articulates and theorizes the nominee’s approach to writing assessment in their professional context(s) (no more than 750 words).
   2. Supporting materials: provides evidence of how assessment is enacted, e.g., teaching materials, sample student work (no more than 10 pages).
3. Teaching observation (from a colleague or other qualified individual)
4. Up to 3 additional letters of support that speak to the nominee’s teaching (from, e.g., students, colleagues, or administrators)

The selection committee will use this rubric to determine which nominees will be awarded.

Award recipients will be notified by early February. Award recipients will be honored at the CCCC Annual Convention during the awards presentation and will receive a plaque and $500 for travel, classroom, or other educational funding. The recipients will also be honored at the Teacher-to-Teacher event during the CCCC Annual Convention and therein give a workshop, lead a discussion, and/or speak at the event.

E-mail questions

Outstanding Teaching Award Winners

2025

Sustained Award
Iris D. Ruiz, University of California, Merced

Honorable Mention
Emergent Award
Charles C. Grimm, Georgia Highlands College

2024

Emergent Award: Philip B. Gallagher, Mercer University
Sustained Award: David M. Grant, University of Northern Iowa

2023

Emergent Award: Qianqian Zhang-Wu, Northeastern University
Sustained Award: Douglas S. Kern, Valencia College
Honorable Mention, Sustained Award: Emily Sendin, Miami Dade College

2022
Not awarded.

2021
Jessica Kubiak, Jamestown Community College, NY
Bernice Olivas, Salt Lake Community College, UT

Recorded Webinars

CCCC membership is required to access the recordings of these webinars. Join now. You will need to log into your CCCC/NCTE account and go to your Library. To view the videos with closed captioning, hover over the bottom right of the video and click “CC” and “English.”

Queerness, Cultural Rhetorics, and Decoloniality: Expanding the Conversation(s)
November 13, 2020

Interrogating, Responding, Reconfiguring Disability in College Composition: Challenging Common Tropes
September 24, 2020

Challenging the Common Place: Transnational Rhetorics and Linguistic Diversity
July 16, 2020

Placement in the Pandemic: What to Consider When You’re Considering Directed Self-Placement
May 18, 2020

Online Environments and Your Students: Strategies to Inform Writing Instruction
April 22, 2020

Your Endless Stack of Papers: Maximizing the Effectiveness and Fairness of Assessment in Composition Classes
March 13, 2020

Academic Publishing: Three Editors on What You Need to Know
October 24, 2019

Wednesday, April 22, 2020
1:00–2:00 p.m. ET

Watch the webinar recording.

CCCC membership is required to view the recording. You will need to log in to your CCCC/NCTE account. Join now. To view this video with closed captioning, hover over the bottom right of the video and click “CC” and “English.

In this CCCC webinar, three faculty members—Troy Hicks (Central Michigan University), Jessie Borgman (Arizona State University), and Casey McArdle (Michigan State University)—share their theories and practices for online writing instruction. Hicks will share his strategies for connecting with students in an online environment through conferring with as well as responding to writing using web-based tools. Borgman and McArdle will discuss the Personal, Accessible, Responsive, Strategic (PARS) approach to online writing instruction, their co-created website, The Online Writing Instructors Community (www.owicommunity.org), and their recently published book, Personal, Accessible, Responsive, Strategic: Resources and Strategies for Online Writing Instructors. They will offer several quick and easy strategies that online writing instructors can incorporate into their classes to facilitate a better user experience for both faculty and students. An audience-driven and facilitated Q&A with the speakers follows, facilitated by Brett Griffiths, Director of Reading and Writing Studios at Macomb Community College.

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View additional webinars in the CCCC Webinar Series.

We Are All Writing Teachers*: Returning to a Common Place

2021 CCCC Annual Convention
April 7–10, 2021
Spokane, Washington

Program Chair: Holly Hassel, North Dakota State University, in collaboration with Julie Lindquist, Michigan State University (CCCC 2020 Program Chair)

See Holly’s blog post, CCCC 2021 Decisions and Advice, for recommendations for proposers who are resubmitting or revising accepted (or unaccepted) proposals from the 2020 Convention.

Submit a Proposal for the 2021 CCCC Convention

Call for Proposals

The mission of CCCC includes the following goals:

• sponsor and conduct research that produces knowledge about language, literacy, communication, rhetoric, and the teaching, assessment, and technologies of writing;
• create collaborative spaces (such as conferences, publications, and online spaces) that enable the production and exchange of research, knowledge, and pedagogical practices;
• develop evidence- and practice-based resources for those invested in language, literacy, communication, rhetoric, and writing at the postsecondary level;
• advocate for students, teachers, programs, and policies that support ethical and effective teaching and learning.

Our annual gathering regularly seeks to work toward these goals for research, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. The 2020 CCCC Convention in Milwaukee faced an unprecedented challenge, and to meet the responsibilities we have to our communities in the face of what the World Health Organization named a global pandemic, our annual opportunity to gather, converse, and collaborate looked much different in 2020. To move the work of Milwaukee forward, I invite us to link Julie Lindquist’s call to consider commonplaces with these stated goals of the organization, as well as the role, value, and work of teaching in the field.

In her CCCC 2020 CFP for Milwaukee, Lindquist invited us to inquire into the terms of inclusivity by considering how our field is governed and organized by what Aristotle described as topoi, or commonplaces, or “a store of common understandings, a set of shared cultural resources, by means of which rhetoricians could construct arguments.” She asked us to reflect, as well, on how commonplaces would come to signify “ideological means for exclusion from the most exclusive and privileged scenes of knowledge production” as well as on how “If the commonplaces of a given community (or culture) give us a way to understand what it believes and values, then they are also a way for us to see how it defines and defends its borders.”

This year, the theme for the convention tackles what both Julie and I view as one of our most contested sets of commonplaces—common understandings of our roles as teachers and scholars. Though the field of composition and rhetoric (or writing studies, a somewhat more expansive term) has been called by Joseph Harris a “teaching subject,” the conditions in which we work vary greatly, and the cultural value of teaching in the field is not matched by the material value provided.

I hope to focus this year’s convention on practice—practice that is theoretically situated, evidence based, and research informed, but practice nonetheless. It has been twenty years since our convention focused explicitly on teaching (1999, Atlanta: “Visible Students, Visible Teachers”), and as a two-year college teacher-scholar whose career has focused on systematic inquiry into the teaching and learning of college composition, I’m especially drawn to returning this year in Spokane to the work of our teaching, particularly in first-year writing and other transitional moments in our college classrooms.

More than ever before, we have been called upon to explore new possibilities for teaching and learning in remote, synchronous, and asynchronous ways. I invite you to submit proposals that address the following dimensions of the field of writing studies, all while critically engaging with one of the key commonplaces that Lindquist called to our attention in 2020: dynamic questions that “entail ideas about learners and learning—what learners do and need, how learning happens, and on what grounds learning may be refused.”

WE: CCCC and the convention it sponsors serve diverse audiences. One of the preoccupying questions of the field is who we are. Composition Studies? Rhetoric? Rhetoric and Composition? Writing Studies? Communication studies, rhetoric studies, and other adjacent fields also have found a place at the convention. Disciplinarity has remained an intense focus since foundational works like Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987) and in recent works like Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity (Malenczyk, Miller-Cochran, Wardle, and Yancey, 2018). Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy (Ruiz and Sánchez, 2016) and many others have interrogated dominant rhetorical traditions. The question of who belongs and who is excluded from the work of writing studies suffuses our scholarly conversations, even as some teachers of writing continue to document how the field does not reflect their needs (Larson, 2019).

ARE: Our profession and discipline occupy diverse spaces: traditional liberal arts colleges, community and technical colleges, online, hybrid, tribal colleges, HBCUs, HSIs, Research 1 institutions, STEM campuses, and high school dual-enrollment classrooms. We teach through interactive video, in community centers, in writing centers, in prisons, and across the curriculum and across campus units. We teach first-year students in credit-bearing courses and in courses that help students transition to postsecondary literacy, including nondegree credit and basic writing courses, integrated reading and writing, first-year seminars, and corequisite support courses (Stretch, Studio, ALP). We teach creative writing, technical writing, writing-intensive literary studies courses, upper-division, and discipline-specific courses. We continue to teach writers to enter into our scholarly conversations and disciplinary conversations throughout graduate education. We conference, freewrite, use models, and use workshopping and peer review. We use assessment to inform instruction. We ask students to journal, to document their reading difficulties and insights, to address learning outcomes, to build relationships with their instructors and with each other. We read and analyze texts, and we engage with communities inside the classroom, on campus, and beyond. We respond to real and imagined audiences.

ALL: The question of who teaches writing, what counts as scholarly expertise, and who is or is not invited to see themselves as a member of the profession is a pressing issue in the field. Writing teachers are students in masters’ programs in English, doctoral students, contingent faculty (from a range of employment positionalities—full-time lecturers with benefits; those on a semester-by-semester contact; those with rolling horizon contracts), full-time faculty, those on the tenure track, tenured, high school teachers credentialed by college programs; faculty from a wide range of disciplines teaching first-year seminars; faculty working across the curriculum infuse their disciplinary courses with writing instruction and writing activities. Is there any single uniting identity that speaks to the work that writing studies does and what constitutes participation in its knowledge making (Penrose, 2012)? And what opportunities for institutional and collegial collaboration might make the field more inclusive, more connected?

WRITING: What are we teaching when we say we teach writing? As instructors and as a profession, we use the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, the WPA Outcomes for FYW, or textbooks on genre, writing about writing, threshold concepts, and digital composing. We use theories from rhetorical, critical, composition, feminist, antiracist writing, and practitioner/kitchen table theories. We are decolonizing our syllabi and seeking authentic audiences for our students and their ideas. We use the position statements, resources, and documents from NCTE, CCCC, TYCA, CWPA, RSA, NCA, and many other professional organizations. Likewise, critical attention to what “writing” means in the 21st century continues to animate our field (Inoue, 2019; Kareem, 2019; Wyatt and DeVoss, 2017; Young, 2004 and 2013) and press us to consider what communication, composing, and writing instruction look like in the immediate and more distant future. If we teach visual rhetoric, communication, speaking, digital media, or other fields emerging from and adjacent to writing studies, do we still teach “writing”?

TEACHERS: Some members of CCCC and academics working in related fields see a clear division between their responsibilities as teacher or scholar; others identify as primarily one or the other. My own identity has—through my entire career—rested primarily on my role as a teacher, even as I have engaged in the work of contributing to professional conversations through publication, research, and service. At this year’s convention, I invite proposers to consider how their teaching and teacherly identity are constituted. Regardless of whether you hold a primarily teaching-intensive or primarily research-intensive appointment, what value do you attach to teaching, advising, mentoring? How do you make space for it in your work? And how do we (or do we not) value it in the profession, from the first year of college to graduate education? Leonard Cassuto and Elaine Maimon have both called for renewed and intense attention within the field of English studies to the quality of teaching at the foundation of college writing and in graduate programs. Patrick Sullivan has asked two-year college instructors to consider themselves “teacher-scholar-activists,” while Brett Griffiths calls for “autonomous teacher advocates” who take an “assertive and visible role in . . . explicitly shaping learning outcomes in their departments and communicating them to others” (60). This call for assertiveness and visibility also compels me to continually ask who and what we are “disciplining” when we are engaged in field-building—and how we are participating not just in school but schooling. Are our teacherly practices supporting growth—or compliance? Are our students learning, or being schooled (Warner, 2019)?

AND YET*. . . As Linda Adler-Kassner has written, “writing is never just writing,” and so we know that even as we are all writing teachers, we teach, learn, write, and research from different places and positions. We work within colonized institutions and places; we work within an academic hierarchy in which teaching and research are becoming increasingly separate activities, with a smaller class of writers and researchers allowed time and labor to contribute to knowledge and rapidly growing class of faculty with limited time to devote to ideas, research, scholarship, and inquiry. Some of us work as apprentices as graduate workers; others work on semester-to-semester contracts, with limited access to resources typically afforded to college faculty. Some of us rarely interact with first-year students; others work exclusively with students who are just encountering college literacies and learning. Some of us teach writing within extremely constrained circumstances; some writing teachers operate from a place of complete autonomy. Some of us, in WPA roles, set the agenda and curriculum for others; some teach from the agenda of those in charge.

And more, does the field’s body of knowledge about teaching and learning reflect these diverse spaces, places, and people? Are we deploying empirical methodologies to understand our classrooms across program types? Are we sufficiently inviting students into our inquiries as co-researchers? Are we using methods of systematic inquiry (Hassel, 2013) that will build foundations for informing program development, praxis, and professional knowledge?

Our programs, students, and positions are diverse, and the texture of our work and day-to-day realities are similarly diverse. It is my hope that CCCC 2021 in Spokane centers the disciplinary conversation on the work of the teaching of writing, and our diverse positions and practices.

At CCCC 2021 in Spokane, you’ll see a convention where new features or changes respond directly to the feedback from CCCC members, while others bring forward the exciting opportunities for engagement that could not be replicated by an online version of CCCC:

• Stage 1 Review: There is an open invitation for CCCC Stage 1 reviewers this year. Many CCCC members express a lack of clarity about how to get involved in the process of building the program. Please indicate your willingness to participate as a Stage 1 reviewer on this form by Friday, May 8, 2020. This decision responds to multiple reports from CCCC constituent groups.
• Availability of Proposal Feedback: The CCCC Committee on the Status of Graduate Students (what is called in the CCCC constitution a “special committee”—or a committee formed for a period of 3 years to achieve a specific goal or purpose) conducted a survey of graduate students presented in this report. In response, the reviewer comments and feedback from the Stage 1 proposal review will be made available to submitters following the review process.
• Special Interest Groups: Historically, the Special Interest Groups have been held concurrently in two evening slots on Thursdays and Fridays. There has long been member interest in having these dispersed throughout the program so that attendees can connect with others in an interactive setting, across multiple professional and personal interests. In 2021, SIGs will be held during the regular convention program day in addition to the four evening slots, leaving evenings freer for program participants and allowing attendees to attend multiple SIGs as part of their convention schedule. This decision responds to questions asked during the 2019 business meeting and the postconvention survey on member engagement which asked conventiongoers about their most significant convention experience. Over and over again, a theme identified was the opportunity to engage in small, interactive group settings with peers who share personal and professional interests and identities.
• All-Convention Conversation: The Thursday convention plenary has been reserved for awards and the Chair’s address. Spokane 2021 will feature a second plenary on Friday morning that offers attendees the opportunity to engage deeply in discussions about the future of the organization. The session will be led by the CCCC Committee for Change, which has been charged (2019–2022) by past CCCC Chair Asao B. Inoue with reviewing and addressing the CCCC governance documents—the constitution and bylaws—to increase transparency and inclusion in the organization.
• Changes to the Clusters: Most of the clusters to which you can identify and categorize your proposals remain the same. There are a few new additions and adjustments:
  • Access: This year’s special cluster makes space for presentations, workshops, or sessions that address the topic of “access.” I define this broadly, both in the sense of making our classrooms, practices, and research available to all, and in the sense of making college accessible to the full range of students who are pursuing postsecondary education.
  • Reading: Though reading remains a kind of implicit dimension of writing instruction, this cluster designation aims to encourage proposals that focus on the role of reading in writing courses, whether that is critical reading, Integrated Reading and Writing Courses (IRW), writing about reading, or other sessions that will help us as a discipline to consider the interconnected nature of reading and writing practices.
  • Labor: Though labor can be broadly defined, I think here of the very specific definition of labor as our working conditions and draw inspiration from concerns, strategies, and goals of the Labor Movement. This cluster dedicates a space for the material conditions of writing instruction and the influence of labor conditions on teaching and learning conditions.

In addition, to continue the work that was put on hold from Milwaukee 2020, several features of the 2020 program will be part of the 2021 program:

• Documentarians: To launch the work that would have taken place in Milwaukee, the Spokane convention will include the Documentarian role, led by Julie Lindquist and her team at MSU. As Julie wrote in 2020:

A commonplace about program participation is that in order to be listed as a contributor to the convention program, you must have a role in a scheduled session. In 2020, a new “speaking” role will be introduced: the Documentarian. The CCCC Documentarian role is an opportunity for attendees to participate in a new way, and to take part in a collaborative inquiry into what a conference is and does—and for whom—and to teach the rest of us. The Documentarian role has been designed to respond to four primary questions about how attendees experience the CCCC Annual Convention:

What does it mean to attend the convention? The efforts of Documentarians will help the CCCC community better understand the range of attendees’ convention experiences.

What do we learn at the convention? The Documentarian role is designed not only to document things that happen at the convention, and the perspectives of those who experience those things, but to help Documentarians—and those who may benefit from their stories—identify the learning they did by way of their convention experiences.

What are the outcomes of a convention experience? The results of the Documentarians’ efforts will be made available to the CCCC community in a variety of ways, including both formal and informal publication of the resulting documentary stories.

What does it mean to be included? How diverse are our experiences? The Documentarian role is meant to provide a new form of convention access to a broad range of attendees. Because they fill a “speaking” role (technically, a speaking back role), Documentarians will appear on the program.

Documentarian roles are available to those with or without another speaking role at CCCC. For example, it is possible to be on the program solely as a Documentarian or as a panelist and a Documentarian. Documentarians’ products will be realized as a variety of written (i.e., alphabetic—not filmed or audio-recorded) products that capture highlights of, and reflections on, Documentarians’ convention experiences.

What will YOU do should you serve as a Documentarian? As a Documentarian, you’ll complete a brief instructional module, attend the convention, choose a path through the convention experience, record some observations about the things you see and hear, and then compose a reflective narrative about your experiences. To help you along in this work, you’ll be given a prompt and a set of guidelines for planning, attending, documenting, and reflecting on your experience with the convention. You’ll also be encouraged to meet and connect with other Documentarians throughout the convention in any spaces made available for this purpose. You can indicate your interest in serving in a Documentarian role as part of the regular review process.

• Engaged Learning Experience Sessions: Julie Lindquist’s 2020 CFP introduced “Engaged Learning Experience” sessions, an alternative genre of concurrent session, a dedicated space for invention, problem-solving, and experiential learning. We encourage those who proposed ELEs for 2020 to submit proposals for these sessions to the 2021 convention. As with all sessions, leaders should think in terms of a learning goal and a means for moving participants toward it. In the case of Engaged Learning Experience sessions, some means for moving toward learning goals might include things like problem-solving groups, spoken-word poetry, dramatization/improv, making, role-playing, storytelling.
• Think Mobs: As a discipline, we share certain commonplaces of knowledge and practice—but, as we all know, local institutions have their own commonplaces of intellectual and practical activity. To open opportunities for further conversations about commonplaces of work, practice, and professional life, Julie Lindquist and her team will arrange pop-up discussion groups in locations on- and off-site. Details from the Local Arrangements Committee website will offer more information about times and places.

For questions about the convention, contact Convention Chair Holly Hassel or Convention Assistant Andrea Stevenson. For questions about Documentarian roles, Think Mobs, or Common Grounds, contact Julie Lindquist. For questions about Spokane and the work of the Local Arrangements Committee, contact Bradley Bleck. Other questions? Contact us.

Submitting Your Proposal

Review Criteria
Each proposal will be evaluated regarding how well it

• addresses teaching and learning in postsecondary writing;
• is situated within relevant scholarship or research in the field;
• reflects an awareness of audience needs relevant to the topic;
• demonstrates a clear and specific plan that aligns with the criteria for the selected session type.

Program Clusters

Works Cited

Adler-Kassner, Linda. “2017 Chair’s Address: Because Writing Is Never Just Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 69, no. 2, 2017, pp. 317–340.

Cassuto, Leonard. The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It. Harvard UP, 2015.

Griffiths, Brett. “Professional Autonomy and Teacher-Scholar-Activists in Two-Year Colleges: Preparing New Faculty to Think Institutionally.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 45, no. 1, 2017, pp. 47–68.

Hassel, Holly. “Research Gaps in Teaching English in the Two-Year College.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol 40, no. 4, 2013, pp. 343–363.

Inoue, Asao. “How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, or, What Do We Do about White Language Supremacy?” Keynote Address. Conference on College Composition and Communication. March 14, 2019.

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. 271–296.

Larson, Holly. “Epistemic Authority in Composition Studies: Tenuous Relationship between Two-Year English Faculty and Knowledge Production.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 46, no. 2, 2018, pp. 109–136.

Maimon, Elaine. Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation. Stylus, 2018.

North, Stephen. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Heinemann, 1987.

Penrose, Ann. “Professional Identity in a Contingent-Labor Profession: Expertise, Autonomy, Community in Composition Teaching.” WPA, vol. 35, no. 2, 2012, pp. 108–126.

Ruiz, Iris, and Raúl Sánchez. Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy. Palgrave-McMillan, 2016.

Sullivan, Patrick. “The Two-Year College Teacher-Scholar-Activist.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 42, no. 4, 2015, pp. 327–350.

Warner, John. Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019.

Wyatt, Christopher Scott, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, eds. Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms. Parlor Press, 2017.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Keep Code Meshing.” Literacy as Translingual Practice: Between Communities and Classrooms, edited by Suresh Canagarajah, Routledge, 2013, pp. 278–286.