Important Dates
Proposal database opens: April 12, 2025
Proposal coach request deadline: May 2, 2025 (submit draft in proposal database, then email CCCCevents@ncte.org with request)
Proposal submission deadline: 9:00 a.m. ET on Monday, June 2, 2025
Proposal notifications: Early September 2025
Session schedule notifications: October 2025
Convention dates: March 4–7, 2026, Cleveland, Ohio
Questions and requests for coaches can be sent to CCCCevents@ncte.org.
SUBMIT A PROPOSAL
Conference and Our Conversations
2026 CCCC Program Chair: Melissa Ianetta
My Convention poem has elevator eyelids and a concierge’s phone ringing without remorse all night.
My Convention poem flaunts its badges and free samples in the face of a chafing dish lobby breakfast bar with sad fruit baskets and scorched coffee urns.
My Convention poem bursts at the heart-seams when the crowd likes its paper even if they didn’t attend, didn’t listen, didn’t seem to quite understand.
My Convention poem goes down on its knees in the exhibit hall trampled by a pod of discount purchasers and last day pack-aways.
My Convention poem is an expectant handshake and wink late night lobby dark where the unsayable is finally said and concerns are translated into conversations of sudden sociability.
—Wendy Bishop, from “My Convention Poem,” included in her 2001 Chair’s address, “Against the Odds in Rhetoric and Composition”
Why go to the conference? What does being together in real time afford that print, digital, and asynchronous online interactions cannot? What do conferences offer that recent “un-conferences” cannot or do not? Naming the theme as Conference and Our Conversations offers attendees the opportunity to create visions of future conferences and share what we’ve enjoyed in the past, even while encouraging us to push forward the current scholarly conversations of the field. At the 2026 conference, I invite you to imagine what CCCC can be, and what your scholarship and ideas about teaching, learning, and the work we do in higher education contribute to CCCC—and to each other. Why do we conference? Why do you conference?
Conference Is Conversations
The first steps to learning to think better, therefore, are learning to converse better and learning to establish and maintain the sorts of social context, the sort of community life, that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value.
—Kenneth Bruffee, “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” 640
Conference as the theme, however, does not work to steer your scholarship—as Bruffee reminds us, the “Conference” in CCCC represents our conversations, the sharing of scholarship and praxis in our panel presentations and hallway chats; the discovery and sharing of new ideas is what makes our community strong. Rather than encourage you to frame your contributions to the 2026 theme, I instead invite you to share what you are working on right now, to offer up what contribution matters to you most. For regardless of our annual theme, we are essentially defined by the learned conversations that take place in our field and in our classrooms. That is, our theme of Conference should inspire some of the 2026 conversation in Cleveland but does not presume to direct a year of research. As you draft your proposal, then, instead of looking to the theme for inspiration, consider this reviewer rubric that will be used to accept proposals and issue invitations. Thus, do not see the Convention theme as a desire to shape *your* scholarly concerns—rather, this theme works to add one more strand to the many conversations that already comprise our community and creates the opportunity to discuss the very specific event that brings us together each year.
Conference Is Community
As framed in the epigraph to this call, the 2026 Convention vision, in part, is shaped by Wendy Bishop’s 2001 CCCC keynote. For Bishop, a conference is community, a place to encounter old friends and new ideas—and new friends and old ideas. So too, in Cleveland we’ll share notions of what the Convention is now and visions of what it might be in the future. To discuss this theme, there will be conversation circles and focus groups to reflect on the idea of a conference and what it can offer to our members. These ideas from our community and about our community will be brought back to the CCCC leadership and shared with membership at the next Convention.
We talk to each other through journals, newsletters, and Web pages. We converse formally through panels and informally in the hallways at our conferences. In our search for understanding how the written word works, we simplify for our students (the five-paragraph essay) and complexify for each other (a Bakhtinian moment in a Vygotskyan process on the margins of the contact zone). Often our unum gets lost in our pluribus [thesis statement].”
—John Lovas, “All Good Writing Develops at the Edge of Risk,” 265
Review Process
As in past years, proposals will be assigned to evaluators using the area clusters. Proposals are generally accepted in proportion to numbers received in the clusters. Selecting a particular cluster neither advantages nor disadvantages your proposal. Sometimes, a single proposal might fit into two or three areas, or a proposal might not fit well into any area. However, if you do not choose a category, your proposal will not be complete and therefore will not be accepted for the program. Please consider these categories as a heuristic and understand that in selecting, you emphasize the primary focus of and the best reviewing audience for your proposal.
Program Format
Proposers should review the program format information carefully prior to selecting their session type for their proposal(s). If you are proposing a Concurrent or Roundtable Session, note that these are 75-minute sessions and require the proposer to submit three or more presenters in the proposal. Members may also submit individual proposals for a 30-minute presentation with one or two presenters included in the proposal.
SUBMIT A PROPOSAL
Important Dates
- Proposal database opens: April 12, 2025
- Proposal coach request deadline: May 2, 2025 (submit draft in proposal database, then email CCCCevents@ncte.org with request)
- Proposal submission deadline: 9:00 a.m. ET on Monday, June 2, 2025
- Proposal notifications: Early September 2025
- Session schedule notifications: October 2025
- Convention dates: March 4–7, 2026, Cleveland, Ohio
Questions and requests for coaches can be sent to CCCCevents@ncte.org.
