Category: Uncategorized

Important Dates

Proposal database opens: late March 2026
Proposal coach request deadline: 9:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, April 14, 2026 (submit draft in proposal database, then email CCCCevents@ncte.org with request)
Volunteer to review proposals or to be a proposal coach: May 11, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: 9:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Proposal notifications: Early September 2026
Session schedule notifications: October 2026
Convention dates: April 14–17, 2027, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Questions and requests for coaches can be sent to CCCCevents@ncte.org.

Design Writing Futures

2027 CCCC Program Chair: Donnie Johnson Sackey, The University of Texas at Austin

The late 1960s are often credited with the institutionalization of futures studies within the academy. As a practice, it has been a means of cultivating foresight—helping individuals, communities, and institutions understand how our choices shape what kinds of individual and collective futures become possible or preferable. The Futures Cone emerged within this line of inquiry to visualize multiple potential futures radiating outward from the present. While its conceptual roots trace to Norman Henchey’s (1978) taxonomy of possible, plausible, and probable futures, which was later developed by Charles Taylor (1990) and Trevor Hancock and Clement Bezold (1994) through models illustrating ranges of plausibility and preference, it was Joseph Voros who refined and popularized the Futures Cone by expanding its categories to include projected, preposterous, and preferable futures (Figure 1). Today, the Futures Cone serves as a foundational heuristic in speculative design, emphasizing that the future is not singular but plural, uncertain, and shaped by human values and imagination—perhaps a just use of imagination (Jones and Williams, 2020).

Figure 1. Joseph Voros’s refinement of the Futures Cone, which expands possible futures to include projected, preposterous, and preferable trajectories.

During times of despair—when political, social, or ecological collapse narrows our sense of possibility—the Futures Cone serves as a speculative design heuristic that reopens imaginative space. By visualizing multiple possible, plausible, and preferable futures, it resists the fatalism that often accompanies authoritarianism, racial retrenchment, or systemic oppression. Rather than predicting outcomes, the cone invites rhetorical and design practices oriented toward agency, multiplicity, and care, reminding us that the future is neither predetermined nor predictable. In this way, the Futures Cone becomes a tool for reclaiming futurity itself—for envisioning justice-oriented worlds even amid crisis.

Designing, Writing, and Futuring in Milwaukee

The theme “Design Writing Futures” offers a disciplinary opportunity to reclaim or lean into imagination. As Silvio Lorusso (2023) articulated, design does not emerge from a blank slate; it emerges from wicked problems, chaos, contingency, and instability (What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion). The act of designing draws a boundary—a magic circle—that temporarily orders one piece of reality while excluding the overwhelming, uncontainable rest. That boundary is always porous; entropy inevitably intrudes. “Design Writing Futures” invites us to consider not only what design can do, but what it cannot contain.

Design is left with only one option: staring chaos in the eyes, waiving the somewhat reassuring notion of “complexity.” For chaos is not complexity: complexity is a field where various forms of expertise compete; chaos is the repressed that returns when the experts fail. If as James Bridle argues, “complexity is not a condition to be tamed, but a lesson to be learned,” chaos is a grievance that has nothing to teach. (Lorusso, 2023, pp. 17–18)

Chaos, in Lorusso’s framing, is what erupts when our systems—technical, social, political—collapse under their own limitations. Complexity invites learning. It challenges assumptions and requires humility. It forces us to consider systems, entanglements, and interdependencies. As teachers, scholars, and researchers in writing studies, we know a thing or two about designing amid complexity despite the ways our institutions often frame the future in simplistic, narrow, predetermined ways: through enrollment algorithms, budgetary projections, technocratic reforms, or reductive narratives about the value of the humanities. As writing teachers, scholars, and researchers, we work at the intersections of constraints and possibilities. We—especially those of us at two-year colleges and in teaching-intensive roles—navigate material precarity, limited autonomy, and shifting mandates. Our work inherently involves imagining student futures—academic, civic, professional, and communal. Foresight and futures-thinking methods—frequently drawing on the Futures Cone—have been adopted in community and development work (e.g., by the United Nations Development Programme, community-development coalitions, and social-movement organizers) as tools for participatory visioning, equitable planning, and resistance to linear, inevitability-driven narratives. More broadly, contemporary scholarship on foresight, environmental justice, and design as hope treats design/futures thinking/speculative methods as tools for reimagining seemingly doomed problems (e.g., climate crisis, systemic inequality) through hope-based, justice-centered design practices (Costanza-Chock, 2020; Design Justice Network, 2018; Kim et al., 2025; Smith-Foster & Castle, 2022; Thailand Institute of Justice, 2021).

I believe this wider landscape of justice-oriented foresight underscores why the Futures Cone is so valuable to our own field: It equips us with a framework for imagining futures not dictated by current political or institutional pressures. As a design heuristic, the Futures Cone reminds us that these trajectories are not inevitabilities. Instead, it prompts us to imagine and design writing futures that resist shrinkage, standardization, and fatalism by illuminating the full range of possible, plausible, probable, preferable, and even preposterous futures available to us. By visualizing multiple trajectories rather than a single path, the Futures Cone can help us identify the small, everyday decisions that can shift probable futures toward preferable ones, whether in assignment design, program advocacy, or broader commitments to justice and democratic engagement.

In this sense, “Design Writing Futures” is not simply a theme but a method for taking stock of our present conditions, for tracing the institutional forces that shape which futures become legible, and for foregrounding the local knowledges, rhetorical capacities, and design practices that our field already cultivates. In this moment of reflection and call to conference, I find it important to look to scholarship and research in writing studies that treat design thinking not as a tool for corporate innovation or product design, but as a rhetorical, pedagogical, and ethical methodology for institutional critique and change (see Purdy, 2014; Tham & Pellegrini, 2025; Thominet, 2022; Turner & Rose, 2025)—or as Richard Marback (2009) articulated, an embrace of wicked problems through “a process of responding to others” (p. 419). “Design Writing Futures” urges us to attend to the lived experiences of students and instructors whose futures are too often constrained by policy decisions outside their control; to examine how writing, rhetoric, and literacy operate as technologies for imagining otherwise; and to mobilize speculative, critical, and justice-oriented design practices as tools for rethinking what teaching, research, scholarship, and service in writing can and should become.

Ultimately, “Design Writing Futures” calls our community to use our disciplinary expertise—in rhetorical criticism, multimodal composing, community engagement, language justice, writing program administration, and design thinking—to craft futures that are more inclusive, more just, and more imaginative than the ones currently projected for us. In doing so, it invites us to refuse despair, to cultivate foresight, and to participate actively in shaping the worlds that writing makes possible.

Possible Futures: Opening Imagined Trajectories

• What new possibilities for writing, pedagogy, or community engagement emerge when we treat the future as plural rather than predetermined? For instance, how might approaches like multimodal composing, local archival projects (Project Mend, n.d.), or mutual aid-oriented literacies (Middleton, 2023), shift what we imagine writing can do—and for whom?
• How does the work you’re already doing gesture toward a writing future that our field has not yet fully recognized or valued? This might include emerging practices such as anti-carceral feedback models (Fernandes et al., 2023; Moro, 2020), community storytelling with climate-affected groups, culturally-sustaining assessment practices, accessibility-forward writing program design, data feminism, or design justice (Libertz, 2025).
• What imaginative, speculative, or emergent practices does your work invite us to consider as seeds for future disciplinary directions? For example, does your teaching experiment with infrastructural literacies (Edwards, 2021; Hutchinson & Novotny, 2018), restorative pedagogies (Pierce, 2025), counter-mapping (O’Brien, 2024), Indigenous speculative design (Ko et al., 2025), or other forms of rhetorical invention that help students imagine alternatives to dominant narratives? For example, how might Black speculative storytelling, which Tao Leigh Goffe (2022) argued is not escapism but a political method of “stealing away” colonial time to undo its logics (p. 110), reshape the speculative futures we imagine? How does your work draw on traditions in which the impossible becomes a strategy for survival, critique, and worldmaking?
• What might it mean to design for future scholars, researchers, and teachers? What might futures-oriented design resemble when grounded in responsibility rather than disruption? Consider Indigenous approaches to futures thinking (e.g., seven generations principle)—which critique dominant futurist narratives that prize speed, novelty, disruption, innovation, and individualism (Clarkson et al., 1992). How does your research and scholarship help our scholarly community and larger publics cultivate responsibility to and kinship with humans, nonhumans, and the planet?

Plausible Futures: Tracing Emerging Trends

• How might emerging technologies, pedagogies, sociopolitical dynamics, or cultural shifts plausibly shape writing and rhetoric in the next decade? For example, what might happen as AI-assisted composing becomes normalized (Duin & Pedersen, 2021; 2023), as students navigate new community literacies shaped by the expanding footprint of data centers (Edwards, 2025), or as campuses contend with racial retrenchment and anti-trans policies that directly affect whose literacies, identities, and futures are supported (Kynard, 2013; Maraj, 2020; Patterson, 2020)?
• How does your work map the potential consequences (intended or unintended) of these near-future trends for writers, students, teachers, or communities? This might involve anticipating how automated plagiarism detection reshapes trust, how multilingual AI tools shift language instruction (Ghimire, 2025; Gonzales, 2022; Lawrence, 2024), how datafication affects student privacy, or how political polarization impacts public-writing assignments and assessment (Giroux & Paul, 2024).
• What rhetorical, ethical, or design questions should the field grapple with as these trends develop? For instance: What counts as authorship in human-AI collaboration? How should writing programs respond to widening inequities in tech access or increased digital surveillance (Kelley, 2022)? How might community partners be impacted by shifts in digital infrastructure or civic communication tools?

Probable Futures: Making Visible What Might Otherwise Be Assumed

• What dominant trajectories or institutional forces are currently shaping the “probable” future of writing and rhetoric? For instance, how are shifts in student demographics, the platformization of learning, changing workplace literacy expectations (Hart-Davidson et al., 2024), climate-related disruptions, multilingual student populations, or the growing influence of design justice reshaping what writing instruction is likely to become?
• How must we interrogate and reimagine these trajectories? Does your work reveal tensions in these emerging paths, offer counter-narratives to enrollment-driven restructuring, challenge platform-dependent writing ecologies, rethink the labor conditions shaping writing programs, or highlight new forms of public, community, or digital writing that complicate current assumptions?
• Whose futures become probable under existing systems—and whose futures are obscured, constrained, or ignored? For example, which students, teachers, or communities are served by these probable trajectories, and which are sidelined? How do these systems differentially shape possibilities for multilingual writers, first-generation students, contingent faculty, or community partners whose literacies fall outside institutional norms (Scott et al., 2025)?

Preferable Futures: Envisioning Just, Inclusive, and Life-Affirming Cultures of Writing

• What practices, pedagogies, or policies might move us toward more humane, equitable futures for writing programs, classrooms, workplaces, and communities? How might we cultivate preferable futures by designing pedagogies that honor multilingual and transnational literacies as intellectual assets rather than deficits? What might it look like to build writing cultures that respond compassionately to shifting patterns of reading, attention, and cognitive load—creating slower, more accessible, or more multimodal environments that support diverse ways of engaging with texts (Arola, 2015)?

Preposterous Futures: Challenging the Limits of the Imaginable

• What speculative, “preposterous,” or radical futures might productively disrupt the field’s assumptions? What might happen if the semester collapses into micro-residencies where students cycle between community partners, workplaces, and local ecologies—turning rhetorical education into a rotating set of lived contexts rather than classroom assignments? Or what might happen if we work with students to design their own literacy technologies (interfaces, scripts, reading protocols, cognitive tools), making writing instruction a site of technological invention rather than technological adoption (Hart-Davidson, 2001)?
• How can counterfactuals, alternative histories, or impossible futures help us rethink what rhetoric and writing could become? What might emerge if we imagine futures where campuses abandon proprietary platforms, where public communication infrastructures are community-owned, or designed in response to climate-disrupted conditions (Hopkins, 2023)? How might alternative histories make strange our assumptions about what literacy or what our disciplinary trajectories “should” be (Jones et al., 2016; Piercy, 1997)?
• How might we harness imagination to resist fatalism, authoritarianism, or narrowing senses of possibility? For instance, how might imaginative writing practices—counter-mapping, speculative composing (Coleman, 2021; Sundvall, 2019), crip technoscience interventions (Rauchberg, 2022), multilingual storytelling (Krasova & Moroz, 2024), or attention-restoring pedagogies (Tench, 2022)—help us break from presumed limits—stay with the trouble—and cultivate expansive, justice-oriented futures for writers (Haraway, 2016)?

Special Cluster: Futures beyond Crisis
I invite proposals that take up the challenge of imagining, theorizing, and practicing futures that persist beyond crisis. This special cluster seeks work that confronts the pressures of despair while cultivating alternative trajectories—futures shaped by resilience, collective care, reparative imagination, and rhetorical possibility. Contributors are encouraged to explore how writing, teaching, research, and community engagement can open space for futures that are not foreclosed by collapse, but nurtured through persistence, maintenance, and hope. Consider:

• How are you responding to conditions in which political, social, environmental, or institutional despair narrows our sense of what futures are possible?
• How are you working to resist fatalism by expanding (rather than foreclosing) our imaginative and rhetorical capacities?
• What does it look like to design resilient, hopeful, or liberatory futures even in moments of collapse or uncertainty?
• In contexts where systems fail or infrastructures collapse, what forms of rhetorical or pedagogical persistence become necessary to rebuild collective futures (e.g., mutual aid literacies, community archiving, restorative communication)?
• What futures emerge when we center slow work, maintenance, and everyday persistence rather than “innovation” as the engine of disciplinary possibility?

Acknowledgements
I am incredibly grateful for the intellectual support of Timothy R. Amidon, Jim Ridolfo, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Jennifer Stewart, and members of the CCCC Executive Committee for their generous feedback during the development of this CFP.

References

Important Dates

• Proposal database opens: late March 2026
• Proposal coach request deadline: 9:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, April 14, 2026 (submit draft in proposal database, then email CCCCevents@ncte.org with request)
• Volunteer to review proposals or to be a proposal coach: May 11, 2026
• Proposal submission deadline: 9:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, May 27, 2026
• Proposal notifications: Early September 2026
• Session schedule notifications: October 2026
• Convention dates: MApril 14–17, 2027, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Questions and requests for coaches can be sent to CCCCevents@ncte.org.

Thursday–Friday, March 5–6

The following sessions are available for viewing by in-person Convention attendees and by those not in attendance, but who have registered for the Livestream option. Livestream registrants will receive connection information prior to the Convention. All #4C26 registrants will have access to the recorded Livestream content after the Convention.

Whova Information
Livestream registrants will receive information to log in to the Whova app prior to the Convention. Access the download instructions here. Whova can be accessed on mobile devices as well as via a desktop application.

2026 CCCC Standing Group and SIG Virtual Business Meeting Information
Several CCCC Standing Groups and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are holding a virtual option for their meetings in 2026, which occur during and following the 2026 CCCC Annual Convention. Learn more. (Note: These meetings will NOT be available through the Whova app.)

Thursday, March 5 

8:30–10:15 a.m.
Opening General Session
The 2026 CCCC Exemplar Award, Scholars for the Dream Travel Award, and Chairs’ Memorial Scholarships will be announced. CCCC Chair Kofi J. Adisa will share his chair’s address.
In-Person Attendees: Grand Ballroom AB (Ballroom Level C4)

10:30–11:45 a.m.
Professional and Technical Writing
A.1 Conferences and the Scholarly Conversation of Our Field
In this session, editors from CCCC-affiliated journals and book series reflect on how knowledge produced at the conference shapes—and is shaped by—publishing in our field. They discuss how the conference has supported their growth as writing-studies scholars, examine the current publishing landscape in relation to the conference, and share their hopes and concerns about the future of knowledge-making in our professional community.
In-Person Attendees: Room 307 A (Atrium Floor 3) 

Chair: Lori Ostergaard, Oakland University, Rochester, MI
Presenters: Kimberly Bain, Palm Beach Atlantic University, FL
Matthew Davis, UMass Boston
Darin Jensen, Salt Lake Community College, UT
Stephanie Kerschbaum, University of Washington, Seattle
Kara Taczak, University of Central Florida, Orlando

12:15–1:30 p.m.
Approaches to Teaching and Learning
B.1 Hay Resistencia En La Casa: Chicanx Pedagogical Resistance through Rasquache, Pláticas, Zines, and Cultural Sustainability
This panel responds to a question common in many of our disciplinary and classroom conversations: How do we respond to the current moment? When the powerful use intimidation, cruelty, and AI to hurt our communities, this panel believes in homegrown resistance. Centering Chicanx DIY and everyday practices, this panel will present pedagogical responses meant to support and empower our communities.
In-Person Attendees: Room 307 A (Atrium Floor 3)

Presenters: Casie Cobos, Baylor University, Waco, TX
Marcos Del Hierro, Texas A&M University San Antonio
Ayde Enriquez-Loya, California State University, Chico
Marilyn Garcia, Texas A&M University San Antonio

1:45–3:00 p.m.
Antiracism and Social Justice
C.1 (Everybody Can’t Be Outside, the Outside) Tomorrow Can’t Be Borrowed: Hip-Hop Activism’s Relevance to Teaching and Writing about Possible Lives
This panel makes a call to action during a crucial time for teacher-scholar-activism. Because intellectual activism and radical pedagogy are under threat, the panelists acknowledge the need for deeper insights regarding hip-hop activism’s contributions to pedagogical approaches in classrooms, on campuses, and in communities of HBCUs and two-year colleges, honoring their activist missions and histories.
In-Person Attendees: Room 307 A (Atrium Floor 3)

Presenters: Damon Cagnolatti, Cerritos Community College, Norwalk, CA
David Green, Howard University, Washington, DC
Steve Lessner, Northern Virginia Community College, Wakefield

3:15–4:30 p.m.
Inclusion and Access
D.1 Crip Composing in the Era of Generative AI: Balancing Ethical Challenges, Writerly Affordances, and Embodied Needs
Three disabled scholar-teachers explore the ethical complexities of using generative AI in writing, examining how these tools simultaneously offer access and perpetuate bias while reshaping disabled composition practices.
In-Person Attendees: Room 307 A (Atrium Floor 3)

Presenters: Andrew Harnish, University of Alaska Anchorage
Millie Hizer, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond
Gabriella Wilson-Kopko, Towson University, MD 

4:45–6:00 p.m.
College Writing and Reading
E.1 Reimagining Remediation, Basic Writing, and Course Placement: A Cross-Institutional Conversation
In this session, Basic Writing faculty from diverse institution types across the country will come together in conversation to reimagine commonplaces related to various models for Basic Writing instruction and course placement within and beyond their institutions.
In-Person Attendees: Room 307 A (Atrium Floor 3) 

Presenters: Anthony DeGenaro, Ohio Dominican University, Columbus
Ashleigh Fox, Community College of Allegheny County, Pittsburgh, PA
Angela Gaito-Lagnese, Community College of Allegheny County, Pittsburgh, PA
Charles Grimm, Georgia Highlands College, Rome
Amanda Sladek, University of Nebraska at Kearney
Respondent: Jessica Nastal, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL

Friday, March 6

11:00–12:15 p.m.
All-Attendee Session
Conversations That Carry Us Forward: Perspectives from Past CCCC Chairs
In this conversational panel, past CCCC chairs draw on their experiences as program chairs to reflect on the role of the annual convention in our disciplinary and professional lives. Guided by shared questions, the panel will explore the past, present, and future of the conference and its place in building scholarship and community. Panelists will consider the balance between tradition and innovation, examining how membership and belonging are supported—or sometimes hindered—by our longstanding practices and organizational structures, and what possibilities might shape the conference’s future.
In-Person Attendees: Grand Ballroom AB (Ballroom Level C4) 

Moderator: Holly Hassel (2022 chair; 2021 program chair)
Panel: Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt (2018 chair; 2017 program chair)
Doug Hesse (2005 chair; 2004 program chair)
Gwendolyn Pough (2011 chair; 2010 program chair)
Vershawn Young (2020 chair; 2019 program chair)

4:45–6:00 p.m.
CCCC Annual Business Meeting
All members and nonmembers of CCCC are invited to attend and vote at the business meeting.
In-Person Attendees: Room 307 A (Atrium Floor 3)

6:00–7:15 p.m.
CCCC Awards Presentation
At this reception we announce the recipients of the 2026 CCCC and select TYCA awards. Past CCCC Chairs, distinguished guests, and international participants will be recognized.
In-Person Attendees: Room 307 A (Atrium Floor 3)

October 2025

Note: This policy is specific to the College Composition and Communication journal and its authors, reviewers, and editors. This policy does not extend to any other CCCC or NCTE publication and does not supersede NCTE’s journal policies. Further, given the rapid-moving nature of AI, frequent changes and updates to this policy by NCTE can be expected.

In recognition of the growing influence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) writing technologies, College Composition and Communication (CCC) affirms its commitment to ethical, responsible, and human-centered approaches to writing knowledge production. As the flagship journal in composition studies, CCC upholds the core values of transparency, intellectual integrity, mutual respect, originality, authenticity, inclusivity, and fairness. This policy outlines how authors, reviewers, and editors can engage with GenAI responsibly in ways that reflect and support those values.

Guiding Principles

CCC understands writing as a rhetorical, collaborative, and contextually situated practice. GenAI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and similar text-generating platforms can shape how knowledge is produced, circulated, and received. As a result, CCC encourages deliberate, reflective use of these technologies that advances the goals of ethical authorship, disciplinary engagement, and critical discourse. CCC also recognizes divergent perspectives on GenAI and seeks to foster shared standards while remaining attentive to evolving technologies and disciplinary debates.

For Authors

Authorship and Accountability

Authors are responsible for the originality and intellectual integrity of their submissions. GenAI tools may be used to support, but not act as a substitute for, scholarly labor. CCC defines authorship as the product of human inquiry, interpretation, and rhetorical decision-making.

GenAI Disclosure Requirements

CCC’s generative AI policy requires potential authors to disclose GenAI use in the rhetorical decision-making, research, and writing processes that accompany preparing texts for possible publication. This disclosure should be no more than two hundred words and should

• name the tools used (e.g., ChatGPT 4.0, Claude);
• describe what tasks GenAI supported (e.g., generating ideas, getting advice, outlining, creating written content, drafting, editing, proofreading, formatting);
• clarify the percentage of the submission that is solely the result of human authorship; and
• confirm that you are responsible for the originality and intellectual integrity of your submission, own the rights to any content produced by GenAI, and vouch for the ethicality and integrity of any statements or citations created by GenAI.

Editorial Use of Disclosures

GenAI disclosures will not affect publication decisions. Instead, they provide context for reviewers and editors. Editors may choose to include AI disclosures in accepted articles to promote transparency in scholarly communication.

If you did not use GenAI in the preparation of your submission, you do not need to create a disclosure statement. Otherwise, please include your AI disclosure statement in the same document as your CCC submission.

For Reviewers

Equitable Evaluation

A submission’s use of GenAI (if transparently disclosed) should not in itself be grounds for rejection. Reviewers are expected to assess submissions based on CCC’s review criteria, which are included with each review invitation.

Reviewer Use of GenAI Tools

To protect author confidentiality and maintain scholarly integrity:

• Reviewers may not input any portion of a manuscript into a GenAI platform, including for summarizing, rewriting, or assessing.
• Reviewers may use GenAI tools for minor tasks, such as drafting their own reviewer comments or notes, provided that
  • the manuscript is not copied or quoted directly into the tool and
  • the review remains the product of the reviewer’s own critical judgment.

Declining a Review

Reviewers who object to engaging with work that involves GenAI, due to professional or ethical beliefs, are encouraged to decline the review invitation and state their reasoning in the provided response form. CCC respects these professional boundaries while maintaining fairness in review assignments.

For Editors

CCC is committed to facilitating responsible editing practices in response to and in connection with GenAI use through

• ongoing conversations with our editorial board, authors, and reviewers;
• integration of GenAI-related disclosures and practices into our workflows; and
• periodic review and revision of this policy as technologies and ethical concerns evolve.

In Sum

This policy is not punitive but provides guidance for writers, reviewers, and editors. It clarifies that

• authors must disclose GenAI use transparently and specifically;
• reviewers must not rely on GenAI to conduct the review itself, nor compromise manuscript confidentiality;
• editors will ensure that disclosure is not a basis for bias while making final decisions; and
• all parties are accountable for upholding the values of human-centered scholarship and transparent engagement.

This policy reflects the journal’s ongoing effort to balance open inquiry, fair use, and ethical responsibility with the field’s evolving understandings of both the possibilities and the limitations of GenAI. It is neither a blanket endorsement nor an outright rejection of these tools. Rather, it recognizes the complexity of the current moment and seeks to support honest, reflective, and dialogic practices in writing, editing, and publishing. CCC will continue to revise this policy as technologies, needs, and scholarly practices develop.

We encourage all authors and reviewers to consult this policy prior to submission or review.

The CCC editorial team wishes to thank the 2025 CCC AI Task Force (Ira Allen, Antonio Byrd, John Gallagher, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson) for their diligent work in generating the working policy document from which this final policy was drawn. We also thank our editorial board for their feedback throughout the drafting process.

Registration for the 2025 CCCC Fall Virtual Institute will close at 9:00 a.m. ET on Monday, November 3.

All registrants will receive an email with connection information on the evening prior to the Institute (November 2) and a reminder email on the morning of the event (November 3).

Institute sessions will NOT be recorded.

Teaching Writing as a Public Good
November 3 | 10:30 a.m.–7:30 p.m. ET

ALL-ATTENDEE OPENING — 10:30–10:45 a.m. ET

Institute Co-Chairs:

• Sherita V. Roundtree, Towson University
• Amy J. Wan, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center, CUNY

CONCURRENT SESSIONS A – 10:45 a.m.–12:00 p.m. ET

Session A.1 – When Private Companies “Capture” the Means of Public Writing and Education: Evading Platform Capture in the College Writing Classroom
This session begins with an overview of platform capture, including its key features and processes. Next, presenters and attendees work in small groups to generate a list of key campus stakeholders and questions they might ask about capture on their own campuses and/or in their professional organizations. Finally, we will share out, synthesize key points, and identify next steps for further application beyond the session. Ultimately, our hope is that attendees will leave the session with a plan for spotting, pushing back on, and avoiding platform capture in their own teaching and writing.

Speakers: Jennifer Sano-Franchini, West Virginia University
Megan McIntyre, University of Arkansas
Maggie Fernandes, University of Arkansas
Michael Black, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Kofi Adisa, Towson University

Session A.2 – Resisting Cisness in Social Media Curriculum
This generative workshop addresses the urgent need to rethink how we teach social media composing amid escalating anti-trans legislation, platform hostility, and the erosion of education as a public good. While digital writing curricula often normalize corporate-owned, profit-driven platforms, trans and allied communities have long created alternative online spaces grounded in safety, consent, and mutual aid. Participants will collaboratively examine these models, question assumptions about cisnormativity in “public writing,” and develop sample course materials that reframe social media pedagogy around care, community, and justice.

Speakers: Vee Lawson, San Jose State University
Avery Edenfield, Utah State University
Erin Green, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Ada Hubrig, Sam Houston State University
Ruby Mendoza, Santa Clara University

CCCC FVI LOBBY – 12:00–12:30 p.m. ET

Grab a snack and join your colleagues for networking and open discussion between sessions!

CONCURRENT SESSIONS B – 12:30–1:45 p.m. ET

Session B.1 – Rooted: Writing Environmentalism on Campus
This session introduces Rooted: Sustainability Writing at USC, a new public writing initiative that publishes short-form student writing on sustainability at and around the University of Southern California. Students will revise pieces from sustainability-themed writing courses for our web and print publication, creating space for student voices in debates about what sustainability should look like on campus and beyond. We seek feedback on fostering student voice, navigating institutional and political tensions, and supporting public-facing writing that contributes to inclusive, impactful sustainability conversations. Our session includes a brief writing exercise, breakout discussions on audience, politics, and place, and whole-group reflection.

Speakers: Rochelle Gold, University of Southern California
Corinna Schroeder, University of Southern California
Rebecca Fullan, University of Southern California
Liz Blomstedt, University of Southern California

Session B.2 – MAKING THE GOOD BETTER: Four Perspectives on Improving a Writing Program’s Commitment to the Public Good
Four faculty from Roger Williams University will present a materials showcase to encourage discussion and creativity around opportunities within general education writing programs to make space for student participation in the public sphere. We recognize the ways the pandemic, politics, and AI have radically challenged the context and culture that shape our ongoing attempt to engage students in the public-facing work that many of us take to be a cornerstone in the vocation of teaching.

Speakers: Jennifer Campbell, Roger Williams University
Dahliani Reynolds, Roger Williams University
Genette Merin, Roger Williams University
Diane Beltran, Roger Williams University

CCCC FVI LOBBY – 1:45–2:15 p.m. ET

Grab a snack and join your colleagues for networking and open discussion between sessions!

CONCURRENT SESSIONS C – 2:15–3:30 p.m. ET

Session C.1 – Public Writing in Process
In this session, each speaker will present for 15 minutes and the last 30 minutes of the session will include a generative group discussion.

Speaker 1: Whose Good? Reframing the “Public” in Public Writing
Jason A. Walker, East Texas A&M University
Calls to center public writing in composition classrooms often presume a shared understanding of “public good.” Yet for many international and undocumented students in the US, those presumed definitions do not represent their lived experiences. In the current landscape, public writing can feel less like civic engagement and more like exposure. In response, I argue for an approach to teaching writing that includes redefining “public,” expanding notions of audience beyond US citizens or institutions, and validating rhetorical work done in home languages, diasporic communities, and digital spaces. My paper draws on the work of Nancy Frazer, Royse and Kirsch, and Weisser, and interrogates the assumptions behind public writing pedagogy through the lens of students who are often excluded from both real and imagined audiences. Considering classroom experiences with international, undocumented, and ESOL students, I explore how conventional approaches to public writing can inadvertently marginalize those students in a public sphere that is increasingly tenuous and, potentially, legally constrained. Ultimately, my paper seeks to challenge the presumed understanding of the “public good” in writing instruction while offering pedagogical approaches that allow students who live at the edges of citizenship to write powerfully and safely. It calls for a writing curriculum that not only includes these students but actively reshapes public discourse with them at the center.

Speaker 2: Language, Languaging, and Public Good: Translanguaging AI Literacy for Civic Writing
Jung-Hsien Lin, University of California, Irvine
This session presents a draft Canvas module designed for a lower-division writing course for multilingual students at a minority-serving institution. The module integrates generative AI with foundational academic writing skills—summary, paraphrase, synthesis, and response—while foregrounding translanguaging across Mandarin and English. Students critically examine AI outputs, reflect on multilingual meaning-making, and compose short public-facing texts with process notes on rhetorical and ethical choices. Grounded in literacy studies and the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI, the module highlights how multilingual, AI-supported pedagogy can cultivate civic agency, linguistic justice, and equitable approaches to writing as a public good.

Speaker 3: Writing as a Collective (and) Public Good
Laura Clapper, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
How can we teach writing in such a way as to open new possibilities for collective action? What are the collective ethics involved in writing for/as public good, and how could we engage them more meaningfully? I share a set of tools from socialist and Black feminist activists and feminist political scientists who have been centering collective dimensions of ethics in exciting ways in recent years. I invite experimentation with these feminist tools from outside our discipline, seeing how they might complement or even avail some new affordability from some of our own compositionist feminist tools already at hand.

Session C.2 – Public Writing in Process
In this session, each speaker will present for 15 minutes and the last 30 minutes of the session will include a generative group discussion.

Speaker 1: Thinking about and Re-Thinking Public Writing for Scholars and Student Writers
Sharieka Botex, Duke University
Drawing on Kynard and Baker-Bell’s (2017) articles, Sharieka discusses navigating desires to succeed in academia and using Black women’s scholarly and literacy traditions (Pough; Royster) to address varied audiences. Sharing her conception of Bean and Melzer’s Contemporary Issues Journals, she encourages attendees to avoid what Weisser (pp. 239–240) views as typical assumptions about public writing. Sharieka intertwines Logan and Pough’s guidance for teaching student writers, and Connor’s (7) point that all “. . . our disciplinary ideas have been based in people’s struggle for a better life,” to inspire teachers to realize students mustn’t actually address public audiences to write humanity-considerate and solution-oriented content.

Speaker 2: Building Tech Comm for Community Action: Workshopping a Public Archive of Pedagogical Resources
Traci Gardner, Virginia Tech
This session invites participants to collaboratively workshop a developing site, Tech Comm for Community Action [https://tc4ca.tracigardner.com/], designed to support instructors teaching technical and scientific communication with a focus on justice-oriented community engagement. The site shares assignments and related resources that center storytelling, digital activism, and rhetorical awareness. Participants will reflect on areas in development and consider questions such as these: What’s missing? What would make this resource more useful or more just? What public(s) does this serve—and who might be excluded?

Speaker 3: From Theory to Praxis: Develop a Trans Rhetoric Undergraduate Course
Timothy Oleksiak, University of Massachusetts Boston
I share a syllabus-in-development on a trans rhetoric course. The presentation unfolds around three critical questions: 

1. 1. Who am I to teach such a course (Patterson, 2018; Love, 2019)?
   2. How can teachers of trans rhetoric think about this area of study free from, but not ignorant of violence surrounding trans lives (Gills-Peterson, 2024; Hubrig et al., 2024; LeMaster, 2025)?
   3. What assignments emerge from a commitment to trans object-making and archival work?

The presentation will situate the course in the political contexts of my communities and university, share a broad vision of the course, and include drafted assignment sheets.

CCCC FVI LOBBY – 3:30–4:00 p.m. ET

Grab a snack and join your colleagues for networking and open discussion between sessions!

CONCURRENT SESSIONS D – 4:00–5:15 p.m. ET

Session D.1 – Individual Material Showcases
In this session, each speaker will present for 15 minutes and the last 30 minutes of the session will include a generative group discussion.

Speaker 1: Grounded in Place: Teaching Research through Local Engagement
Wren Bouwman, Iowa State University
Students often approach research by tackling large, global topics drawn from major news outlets, but this tendency can leave them disconnected from the immediate contexts where change is most tangible. Rooted in the belief that writing instruction should equip students not only with academic research skills but also with civic agency, this materials showcase presents a scaffolded sequence of assignments that culminates in a community-centered research project for intermediate composition courses. This approach tethers global issues to local communities, guiding students from sourcing local news to attending community meetings or interviewing residents, and culminating in a final project that connects broad concerns to nearby realities. Drawing on Flora’s Community Capital Framework, the assignments help students examine how various forms of capital are invested in their communities while identifying opportunities for meaningful contribution. The session will share assignment descriptions, example lesson plans, and strategies for adapting them across diverse teaching contexts. Ultimately, the showcase demonstrates how composition courses can be reimagined as spaces where students develop not only rhetorical skills but also the critical awareness and civic dispositions essential for writing with and for the public good.

Speaker 2: Writing Care into Contested Spaces: Public Writing in a Professional Writing and Art Course
Candace Epps-Robertson, Independent scholar and formerly tenured professor
This presentation explores how professional writing pedagogy can engage contested institutional spaces, using museums as a case study. Over two semesters, I taught an undergraduate course, Professional Writing and Art, at UNC-Chapel Hill, in which students produced zines, guides, and critical texts for an art installation I curated at the campus museum. Framed around themes of care, play, and community, the course asked how writing might foster more equitable, responsive museum practices. I will share course materials, highlight challenges in balancing creativity with institutional constraints, and offer strategies for designing public writing projects attentive to care and justice.

Speaker 3: Student Activism as Public Leadership in the Era of Accountability
Charles McMartin, Florida State University
Teaching writing as a public good requires thinking systematically about the rise of the accountability era in education. Marked by the 2006 Spellings Commission Report and the 2010 Common Core Curriculum, accountability discourse shifted higher education’s value from civic ideals to market-based logics. To claim the teaching of writing as a public good, we can turn to the leadership of student activists who model democratic engagement. Accordingly, this material showcase introduces a heuristic for designing writing assignments that center student activists’ efforts to influence public opinion on their campus and in their local communities.

Session D.2 – Individual Material Showcases
In this session, each speaker will present for 15 minutes and the last 30 minutes of the session will include a generative group discussion.

Speaker 1: The Great Speckled Bird and Public Multimodal Writing
Christian Gallichio, Emory University
This material showcase will walk attendees through the process of creating and implementing a course that utilized public multimodal writing as a means to explore and catalog underground and alternative newspapers from the 1960s and ’70s. Students created a website that hosted their work and wrote all of their assignments with the knowledge that their work would be built upon by subsequent classes, creating a continuum of writing and editing instead of a closed loop that instructor-facing assignments often create. This presentation will not only showcase my own course, but will also involve attendees in considering how to best navigate public-facing writing that challenges both students and institutions.

Speaker 2: Reading and Writing Environmental Equity for the Public Good
Barbara George, Carnegie Mellon University
This material showcase explores the critical reading and writing in a course that explores the complex challenges in communicating “the environmental public good” as related to equity with freshmen with global backgrounds. The course is centered on critically analyzing research, policy, and lay communication in the form of research agendas and advocacy within government agencies, educational programs, and nonprofits. The materials cover scaffolded assignments and framing the final research paper. This includes an analysis of sustainability goals, definitions of environmental justice, and the reality of shifting political and policy landscapes. The institute audience will interact with links for the course.

Speaker 3: Writing for the Public Good: Civic Engagement in the First-Year Composition Classroom
Elizabeth Labanna Harney, North Dakota State University
In this study, I examine how a first-year writing course can function as a civic space where students engage with pressing social issues and develop as ethical citizens. Too often, writing classrooms avoid such concerns, leaving students disconnected from the world. To address this gap, I designed assignments including the Op-Ed for Change, How-To Community Guide, Digital Advocacy StoryMap, Civic Dialogue Podcast Episode, and Participatory Photography Project. Using qualitative analysis of student writing, reflections, and observations, I explore how learners respond and develop identities as socially responsible writers.

CCCC FVI LOBBY – 5:15–5:45 p.m. ET

Grab a snack and join your colleagues for networking and open discussion between sessions!

CONCURRENT SESSIONS E – 5:45–7:00 p.m. ET

Session E.1 – Public Writing Pedagogy in a Time of Crisis: Generating Solidarity and Resistance
This generative group explores the evolving challenges and ethical complexities of teaching public writing in a time of heightened political scrutiny and institutional precarity. Against a backdrop of recent attacks on academic freedom, self-directed and institutionally mandated censorship, and increasing surveillance and risk, this group interrogates what it means to teach and to write “publicly” when the very notion of “the public” is contested and unevenly accessible. Through collaborative discussion and resource sharing, the group aims to foster solidarity and resistance across diverse contexts, while reimagining public writing as a space for advocacy, relationality, and transformative pedagogy.

Speakers: Kristen Wheaton, Utah State University
Megan Heise, Utah Tech University
Mary Ellen Greenwood, Utah State University
Rachel Quistberg, Utah State University

Session E.2 – Crowdsourcing Feminist Futures: Public Writing for Coalition and Change
This session explores how digital, crowd-sourced public writing can connect lived experiences of national issues to collective action. Drawing on feminist theories and methods, along with library perspectives on information ethics and access, presenters will discuss how to ethically create and circulate stories in online spaces while navigating the affordances and constraints of digital platforms. We will showcase our collaborative project, Feminist Dispatches From . . ., which pairs snapshots of daily life with “microactivist” prompts. Participants will contribute stories, imagine new digital spaces, and leave with strategies for sustaining accessible, activist-driven public writing projects.

Speakers: Nerissa Nelson, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
Kelli Gill, Montana State University
Holly Hassel, Michigan Technological University
Vee Lawson, San Jose State University

All-Attendee Closing – 7:00–7:30 p.m. ET

Institute Co-Chairs:

• Sherita V. Roundtree, Towson University
• Amy J. Wan, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center, CUNY

Labor, Land, Water, and Writing: The Costs of Generative AI in the Writing Classroom

These events are free for CCCC members. Not yet a member? Join today!

Join CCCC for a critical, nuanced, and thoughtful exploration of generative AI, its costs, and its effects on college writing instruction and writing research. This three-part Reading Circle will be a collaborative space to exchange knowledge and pedagogical practices.

 

SESSION 2

Discussion of Enduring Digital Damage by Dustin Edwards

Brief Remarks by Dustin Edwards
Facilitated by Hannah Hopkins & Donnie Johnson Sackey
Wednesday, December 10
4:00–5:00 p.m. ET

Dustin Edwards is an associate professor of rhetoric and writing studies and director of the Writing Center at San Diego State University. His research areas include digital and material rhetorics, environmental and land-based rhetorics, technical and professional communication, and rhetorics of science and technology. He is author of Enduring Digital Damage: Rhetorical Reckonings for Planetary Survival (2025).

 

Hannah Hopkins is an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her research engages the tools, practices, and methods that help us make sense of and with large-scale networked infrastructures. Her current book project examines how expanded perceptual fields inform un/shared understandings of environmental impact.

 

Donnie Johnson Sackey is an associate professor and associate chair of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, and a fellow in Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy. His book Trespassing Natures: Species Migration and the Right to Space was published in 2024.

 

 

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SESSION 3

Teaching Writing with Generative AI, Labor, Land, and Water in Mind

Discuss how we might apply Hao and Edwards’ work to the teaching of writing.
Facilitated by Maggie Fernandes, Vyshali Manivannan, and Travis Margoni
Monday, January 12
4:00–5:00 p.m. ET

Maggie Fernandes (she/her) is an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Arkansas. Her scholarly expertise is in digital/cultural rhetorics, institutional oppression, and user experience design. Her work has been published in Computers and Composition, Composition Studies, Enculturation, and Kairos. She is one of the cofounders of the Refusing Generative AI in Writing Studies website.

 

Dr. Vyshali Manivannan is an Eelam Tamil American chronically ill scholar whose work emphasizes the culturally specific nature of chronic pain through diasporic-disabled composition, a practice with which GenAI is incompatible. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Writing, and Cultural Studies at Pace University–Pleasantville.

 

Travis Margoni is an English faculty member at Yakima Valley College, where he has served as department chair and leads WAC initiatives. He has been a member of the CCCC and TYCA Executive Boards. Margoni’s scholarship has been published by TETYC, Kendall Hunt, and the WAC Clearinghouse.

 

 

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Register by clicking each date below.

Wednesday, December 10 | 4:00 p.m. ET
Monday, January 12 | 4:00 p.m. ET

Throughout this series, members will:

• Access research and resources related to generative AI and how it affects labor, land, water, and writing instruction;
• Connect with colleagues who have a shared interest in unpacking issues related to generative AI in writing pedagogy and research;
• Develop pedagogical works in progress with colleagues in the discipline;
• Discuss the ethical implications of generative AI, which is broadly being taken up in writing classrooms and at education institutions across the US and beyond;
• Gain a deeper understanding of the ethical issues of teaching, writing, and doing research with generative AI; and,
• Address approaches to teaching given this new context of ubiquitous generative AI.

Please contact profdev@ncte.org with questions. Registration will close 90 minutes prior to the event’s start time.

Institute Date: November 3, 2025
Proposal Deadline: Wednesday, August 13, 2025, at 9:00 a.m. ET
Submit a Proposal

Important Dates

* Informational Meeting with Co-chairs:
Tuesday, July 22, 2025, 3:00–4:00 p.m. ET (Optional)
Register to Attend via Zoom
* Proposal deadline: Wednesday, August 13, 2025, at 9:00 a.m. ET
* Proposal notifications: Early September 2025
* Fall Virtual Institute: Monday, November 3, 2025

Please email cccc@ncte.org with questions.

Applications are now being accepted for several need-based waivers for presenters accepted to the Virtual Institute program. Applications are due by September 15, 2025.

About the Virtual Institute

The CCCC Virtual Institute is an opportunity for teachers and researchers in composition and rhetoric to be in conversation with one another outside of the Annual Convention. This one-day event will have a program of presentations, roundtables, showcases, and workshops, all of which will be open to registered attendees. The goal of the annual Virtual Institute is for CCCC members to learn from one another and engage with each other on a topic of broad significance to the field. 

Register to Attend

Registration Rates:

• $60 CCCC members
• $30 Students
• $155 Nonmembers

Teaching Writing as a Public Good

2025 Virtual Institute Program Co-chairs: Sherita Roundtree, Towson University, and Amy J. Wan, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center, CUNY

“The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself.”
—bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

SUBMIT A PROPOSAL

The theme of the second annual CCCC Fall Virtual Institute is Teaching Writing as a Public Good. CCCC selected this theme given the ongoing push in the United States to privatize public services, and the continued attacks on public education (Commer 2024), revocation of grants for higher education (Cantwell 2025), and deconstruction of other public services and resources more broadly. Personhood itself is also under threat as evidenced by dehumanizing anti-trans, anti-immigrant, and anti-choice legislation and policies. And minoritized people continue to face precarity due to state-sponsored violence, such as the increased militarization and authoritative freedom of police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and some political representatives. These material and ideological conditions make our work not only more challenging but also devalued. These sociopolitical understandings about the relationship between writing classrooms and the public lead us to consider the following questions, which serve as a guide for this year’s institute:

• What role does composition as a field play amidst such hostility toward ourselves, our students, and our communities? 
• How is writing a vital practice in the struggle to survive?

Writing as a public good, and the teaching of writing as a way to cultivate that public good, is a political commitment—an urgent one. This commitment calls for our collective movement, efforts, and thinking inside and outside our academic institutions. Writing as a public good is often assumed to be a goal of writing classes from the first year and beyond in two- and four-year institutions. It implies a shared benefit, community, and relationality, as well as a writing practice that has an impact beyond the classroom door (Mathieu 2005). Writing classes that take up the mantle of the public good often move beyond the classroom and institutional space by allowing students to practice writing in community, social, disciplinary, and professional contexts. But such classes might also be making assumptions about who the “public” is and what serves as good for them, ignoring community dreams and desires. 

Our hope is that the institute’s conversations will complicate common assumptions that writing is always a public good while also examining ways to strengthen writing’s efficacy in public spaces. We recognize the variety of frameworks that conceive of writing as a public good, including ones that emerge from considerations of virtue and ethics (Duffy 2019), justice (Kynard 2018, Hubrig 2020), citizenship and democracy (Jacobson and Shah 2023, Wan 2014), civic engagement (Holmes 2016), community writing (Blancato et al. 2022, Johnson 2017, Moss 2010, Pritchard 2017, Sackey 2024), work (Bollig 2025), technology (Pigg 2021), multimodality (Tham and Jiang 2024), social movements (Richardson and Ragland 2018), and public policy (Commer 2024, Flowers 2024). We also draw from literacy studies to avoid assumptions that writing’s “good” is autonomous (Street 1984, Vieira et al. 2020). In addition, we encourage that we all keep in mind how writing—and the teaching of writing—can enact and perpetuate great harm for various publics.

And while composition as a field has a long history of both explicitly and implicitly connecting our work with the public and imagining what we do as/for a public good, our relationship with the public has not always been reciprocal. Our expertise often feels ignored when public discourse on social media, major news outlets, and public-facing academic publications address issues of literacy and writing through a narrow scope of what it is and is not, what can and cannot be—despite our field challenging binaric literacy assessments and documenting the multiplicity of literacies over time. To that end, this year’s Virtual Institute provides an opportunity for us in rhetoric and composition to consider how we might do more to foster reciprocity with the public through public writing, collaboration, service, instruction, and so on. 

We hope that part of these discussions will question the idea of writing as a public good while also prioritizing idea generation, interaction, and collaborative learning toward the cultivation of hooks’s “engaged voice.” This year’s institute provides a space for us, as teachers and researchers, to be in conversation with one another about the ways we can realize that commitment. We seek proposals that address some of (but are not limited to) the following questions:

• Teaching Public Writing:
  • What are best practices for projects and classroom practices that can guide students with their public writing?
  • How does critical thinking help bridge the gap between writing classrooms and public spaces? 
  • What are the conflicts between teaching and believing in the value of writing for the public good and the way that the concept of “public good” has been weaponized toward different student populations? 
• Public Perceptions of Writing
  • What does the public understand writing to be? 
  • How does our work as writing researchers and practitioners engage public perceptions about the purposes and possibilities of writing?  
• Reassessing the Idea of a “Public Good”
  • What are our assumptions about what is “good” for ourselves and others? 
  • How are our assumptions about the public good informed by our own subject positions and/or local contexts?
  • How do we manage the labor (emotional, physical, institutional) of public writing?
• Contexts for Public Writing
  • Who and/or what informs how the public is defined and what communities are/are not accounted for within those definitions? 
  • How do public policies limit and/or expand the potentialities of writing as a public good? 
  • How do we teach when there is active local legislation against it? 
  • How do institutional and political contexts affect public writing projects? 
• Public Writing Technologies 
  • What affordances and constraints accompany digital and multimodal public writing projects?

Program Format

We invite Group (4–6 people) and Individual proposals for this year’s CCCC Fall Virtual Institute, devoted to critical conversations on “wicked problems” challenging rhetoric and composition. We will prioritize proposals that speak to the ways they might engage a virtual audience. 

Presenters will choose one of four session formats that prioritize interaction and application among themselves, attendees, and the public—broadly defined. Across these session formats, presenters and attendees will have an opportunity to workshop in-process materials; connect theory to practice; respond to topic-specific positionings; and learn from others who are doing this work. Session formats include the following:

1. Public Writing in Process: This session format invites presenters to collaboratively workshop in-process program plans, curricula, assignments, or other forms of public writing beyond the classroom and/or lead virtual institute attendees to workshop their classroom and other public writing materials. Presenters will facilitate a participatory, process-based session that practices the steps of document revision in real-time. This session structure is ideal for those who have materials that are in draft form or in need of reimagining and could benefit from collaboratively generated feedback.
2. Material Showcase: This session format invites those who have incorporated public writing into their programs, courses, assignments, or other forms of scholarship. Presenters will describe a program, class, assignment, or other context for public writing, offering an opportunity to share details about implementation, considerations of local contexts, success stories, as well as frictions and roadblocks, and offer advice for those interested in developing their own projects. We imagine that these sessions are an opportunity for attendees to hear from and ask questions of colleagues who have worked on public writing projects and learn about best practices.
3. Roundtables: This session format invites both groups and individuals to discuss an element of public writing including but not limited to theory and history to practice considerations; administration; curriculum; assessment; writing for public audiences; translating the concerns of our field for the public, including in public policy and legislation; community writing; labor and public writing. Roundtable participants should propose a topic and their stance, and they should be prepared to present a short position, participate in a conversation with other presenters, and prepare a couple of questions that invite attendees to the conversation.
   
4. Generative Groups: This session format mirrors the approaches of a think tank where a group (or more) discusses a series of questions, offers a set of instructions, and/or provides a set of tools for idea building. This session is meant to not only prioritize creation and development for presenters but also for attendees. Proposals for these generative groups should identify a problem of policy or practice, using the session time to work together to develop a response and/or plan of action. In this case, presenters should consider an activity structure that encourages attendees to identify the implications of the group activity for their own communities and contexts.

Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria

For Group (4–6 speakers) Proposals

Group sessions will be 60 to 90 minutes in length.

• Proposals should be no more than 1,000 words long.
• The proposal should speak directly to the session format—public writing in process, material showcase, roundtable, generative group.
• The proposal is grounded in a concept or series of concepts related to public writing and the session format.
• The proposal offers explicit ideas about how the presentation will engage a virtual audience.

Although this is not a deal breaker for program acceptance, we encourage and will prioritize proposals that include presenters from two or more of the following institution types: community colleges, HBCUs, tribal colleges, colleagues from institutions outside the United States, teaching colleges, HSIs, and/or AANAPISIs. 

For Individual Proposals

Individual presenters will have 15-30 minutes of presentation time and will be combined with other individual presenters in 60-90 minute sessions based on the focus of the presentations.

• Proposals should be no more than 500 words long.
• The proposal speaks directly to the session format—public writing in process, material showcase, roundtable, generative group.
• The proposal is grounded in a concept or series of concepts related to public writing and the session format.
• The proposal offers explicit ideas about how the presentation will engage a virtual audience

Please note that you do not need to be on the program to attend scheduled sessions and share ideas with the larger learning community at the Virtual Institute.

SUBMIT A PROPOSAL

Works Cited

Blancato, Michael, et al. “Brokering Community-Engaged Writing Pedagogies: Instructors Imagining and Negotiating Race, Space, and Literacy.” Literacy in Composition Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2022, pp. 23–46.

Bollig, Chase. “Postcapitalist Professionalization: Civic Education and the Future of Work.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 76, no. 3, 2025, pp. 370–95.

Cantwell, Brendan. “What Will Be Left of Higher Education in Four Years?” Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 June 2025. https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-will-be-left-of-higher-ed-in-four-years

Commer, Carolyn D. Championing a Public Good: A Call to Advocate for Higher Education. Penn State UP, 2024.

Duffy, John. Provocations of Virtue: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing. Utah State UP, 2019. 

Flowers, Katherine S. Making English Official: Writing and Resisting Local Language Politics. Cambridge Press, 2024. 

Holmes, Ashley J. Public Pedagogy in Composition Studies. National Council of Teachers of English, 2016.

Hubrig, Adam. “‘We Move Together’: Reckoning with Disability Justice in Community Literacy Studies.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, 2020, pp. 144–53. 

Jacobson, Brad, and Rachael W. Shah. “Building Our Ideals into Program Structures: Democratic Design in Program Administration.” Composition Studies, vol. 51, no. 2, 2023, pp. 86–105. 

Johnson, Latrise P. “Writing the Self: Black Queer Youth Challenge Heteronormative Ways of Being in an After-School Writing Club. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 52, no. 1, 2017, pp. 13–33. 

Kynard, Carmen. “Stayin Woke: Race-Radical Literacies in the Makings of a Higher Education.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 69, no. 3, 2018, pp. 519–29. 

Mathieu, Paula. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. Boynton/Cook, 2005.

Moss, Beverly J. “‘Phenomenal Women,’ Collaborative Literacies, and Community Texts in Alternative ‘Sista’ Spaces.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–24.

Pigg, Stacey. Transient Literacies in Action: Composing with the Mobile Surround. WAC Clearinghouse, 2021. 

Pritchard, Eric Darnell. Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy. Southern Illinois UP, 2017.

Richardson, Elaine, and Alice Ragland. “#StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 12, no. 2, 2018, pp. 27–56. 

Sackey, Donnie Johnson. “How Community Means.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, 2024, pp. 50–55.

Street, Brian. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge UP, 1984.

Tham, Jason, and Jialei Jiang. “Understanding Writing Instructors’ Feelings toward the Affordances of Multimodal Social Advocacy Projects: Implications for Service-Learning Pedagogies.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 76, no. 1, 2024, pp. 4–34.

Vieira, Kate, et al. “Literacy Is a Sociohistoric Phenomenon with the Potential to Liberate and Oppress.” (Re)Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Utah State UP, 2020, pp. 36–55.

Wan, Amy J. Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times. U of Pittsburgh P, 2014. 

The following resolutions were passed at the CCCC Annual Business Meeting held on Friday, April 11, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Resolution 1

Whereas Kofi J. Adisa gathered us to celebrate the 76th CCCC Convention, bringing together a wide range of diversity in cultural identities, disciplinary interests, approaches, and intersections to college composition and communication;

Whereas Kofi J. Adisa called us to consider “Computer Love” with his call to engage with “Extended Play, B-sides, Remix, Collaboration, and Creativity,” inviting attendees to engage in the playful musicality of language and joy in composition pedagogy and praxis; and

Whereas Kofi J. Adisa “let the music guide [him],” inviting us to Baltimore, home of The Sound Garden, where he has tasked us with composing “our song,” as “an obligation to remix what is now into what will be”; and

Whereas Kofi J. Adisa engages the B-sides, seeking collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches that invite us to remix and sample in our pedagogical approaches to writing, and his scholarship similarly invites us to imagine how we might work toward a culture of Generative AI Literacy;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2025 Conference on College Composition and Communication extends our many, many thanks to Kofi J. Adisa’s dedication to our profession, our organization, and our discipline.

Resolution 2

Whereas E. Mairin Barney and members of the Local Arrangements Committee have made significant contributions to support new attendees and returnees and to enhance the Convention experience;

Whereas E. Mairin Barney and members of the Local Arrangements Committee created a comprehensive guide in the form of an inviting website that highlighted the various sections in the Baltimore area and its local history; and

Whereas they worked diligently to provide attendees with detailed information about the city’s local cuisines, about record stores, independent bookstores, thrift stores, and other attractions, and about the literary and cultural historical significance of Baltimore;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2025 Conference on College Composition and Communication expresses our deepest appreciation to E. Mairin Barney and members of the Local Arrangements Committee by applauding their energy and efforts.

Resolution 3

Whereas Elaine MacDougall, Carmen M. Meza, and James Wright coordinated development of the Accessibility Guide for the 2025 Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Convention, deepening the field’s commitment to a culture of access at all levels;

Whereas Elaine MacDougall, Carmen M. Meza, and James Wright drew on the wisdom of predecessors and experts in the field to create a guide that aims to simultaneously sponsor accessibility literacy for all participants and render the conference experience meaningfully accessible to attendees across differences;

Whereas they worked diligently to provide attendees with detailed accessibility information, including descriptions of conference spaces for visual and auditory access, access for people with mobility impairments, access for parents and lactation rooms, access for neurodivergent attendees and others who benefit from quiet spaces, access information for nonbinary and gender-nonconforming attendees; and crucial information on how to collectively co-create a loving culture of access; and

Whereas they fostered development and organized volunteer staffing of an Access Hub that, in line with best practices highlighted by disability studies scholars in the field, invited both those with identified access needs and those without into communal thinking and practice of access as a mode of loving commitment to shared possibility;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2025 Conference on College Composition and Communication expresses our deep gratitude to Elaine MacDougall, Carmen M. Meza, and James Wright, and to all who worked with them on growing and enacting a culture of access that we hope will continue to flower in conferences to come.

Resolution 4

Whereas the current onslaught of presidential Executive Orders and pronouncements from the Department of Education, as well as legislation in many states, have attempted to dictate what faculty can and cannot teach and research, as well as which programs should and should not exist;

Whereas Vice President Vance has targeted professors as “the enemy,” leading to faculty harassment, intimidation, and threats for carrying out research and fostering culturally responsive teaching and learning environments;

Whereas Project 2025 explicitly calls for an end to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives and programs of any kind in higher ed, and calls for reduced if not entirely eliminated enforcement of Title IX protections for our marginalized colleagues;

Whereas CCCC has built on the subject-matter expertise of faculty who teach and research writing, rhetoric, communication, and program administration to publish statements committing to linguistic diversity, linguistic justice, students’ rights to their own language, disability studies, ethical research, social justice, and supporting fair standards and practices regarding promotion, tenure, and reappointment of faculty; and

Whereas CCCC members recognize that vigorous and tough-minded academic disagreements are a vital aspect of participation in free expression and in the candid and courageous thinking required in university intellectual life;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the CCCC Committee on Academic Freedom, Tenure/Renewal/Reappointment, and Employment Security requests that NCTE/CCCC leadership

1. publicly reaffirm faculty’s rights to select instructional materials and pedagogical approaches for use in their classrooms, while citing existing position statements and resources;
2. commit to working with other academic associations (whether discipline-based or not) to resist policies that violate principles of professional autonomy, academic freedom, and shared governance;
3. develop tools and resources for faculty, graduate students, staff, and administrators that respond to legislative and government actions at the federal, state, and local levels that impinge on academic freedom; and
4. develop public-facing resources that define academic freedom as an indispensable working condition required in writing and communication classrooms.

Committee Members

Kofi Adisa (Co-Chair), Howard Community College
Michael Black, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Antonio Byrd, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Dana Driscoll, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Maggie Fernandes, University of Arkansas
David Green, Howard University
Sarah Z. Johnson, Madison Area Technical College
Carmen Kynard, Texas Christian University
Megan McIntyre, University of Arkansas
Patti Poblete, South Puget Sound Community College
Jennifer Sano-Franchini (Co-Chair), West Virginia University

Committee Charge

The CCCC Special Committee on Generative AI in College Composition and Writing Studies is charged with identifying and developing a set of deliverables to roll out over the next three years intended to guide how rhetoric, composition, and writing studies teacher-scholars, students, and administrators think through the question of Generative AI in the profession.

To do so, the Special Committee is encouraged to consider: (1) the impacts and implications of Generative AI especially as related to our professional practices, e.g., research, teaching, publication, theory-building, public and community engagement, hiring, peer review, editorial work, etc.; and (2) what members of our discipline need to navigate these issues, keeping in mind how factors like labor, disability, language diversity, access, and other ethical concerns must be taken into consideration.

Deliverables may—but need not—include:

• a CCCC Position Statement on Generative AI,
• a brief guide on the topic designed for undergraduate student audiences,
• teaching materials and lesson plans related to Generative AI or the development of digital literacies that can help students navigate questions about GenAI;
• a speaker series foregrounding refusal perspectives; and/or
• a review of existing CCCC Position Statements that would benefit from the inclusion of points related to Generative AI.

Whatever they are, the deliverables will be grounded in disciplinary scholarship, and they will foreground the ethical and political implications of Generative AI for writing instruction and literacy development broadly understood, as well as the ethical and political concerns surrounding Generative AI use.

 

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
Volunteer to review proposals or to be a proposal coach: May 19, 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.

The 2026 CCCC Annual Convention will include offsite participation options for those who are not able to physically travel to Cleveland. In addition, CCCC has convened a Task Force to Develop a Plan for Actionable Accessibility at the Convention, as part of our ongoing efforts to develop a long-term, sustainable plan for foregrounding accessibility at the Convention.

Melissa Ianetta, program chair for the #4C26 Annual Convention, breaks down what you need to know to create a proposal for next year’s Convention in Cleveland.
Watch the Video or Read the Outline

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)
• Volunteer to review proposals or to be a proposal coach: May 19, 2025
• 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.