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CCCC Convention Siting and Hostile Legislation: Guiding Principles (November 2013, revised March 2019)

2025

April 9–12, 2025, Baltimore, MD
“Computer Love”: Extended Play, B-sides, Remix, Collaboration, and Creativity

To encourage and support local outreach during CCCC conventions, three Standing Groups have received funding from CCCC to host local outreach activities during the 2018 CCCC Annual Convention in Kansas City Please see the details of these events below.

W.11 – Isolated Languages and Out of Sync Labors: A Transformative Exchange between Military and Civilian Higher Education Faculty at the Army Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas
Wednesday, March 14, 2018 – 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.

The US military and higher education have a long history of deeply influencing each other. The end of World War II and the first GI Bill drove innovation and change across higher education, and led to a significant transformation of composition praxis and pedagogy. The social unrest of the 1960s and ‘70s caused a schism between the two institutions. One byproduct of this schism was the isolating of Professional Military Education (PME) from higher education. (The term PME describes the entirety of the military education and training system that includes vocational training, undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate instruction.) This division hobbled collaborative research and limited exchanges between the two academic communities, butmost important,it constrained opportunities to prepare students for transitioning into or out of the military. Just as the aftermath of World War II and the GI Bill triggered an influx of students into higher education, however, the 9/11 attacks, conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and post-9/11 GI Bill have renewed an interest in working with student veterans and students on active duty. Faculty in higher education and PME have begun to reexamine their areas of mutual interest and initiate the building of institutional relationships reflective of the vital role both higher education and PME play in shaping students and national culture.

This workshop aims to facilitate and hasten the transformative development of more systematic relationships between civilian specialists in writing studies and PME faculty by promoting an immersive exchange. The leadership of the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) has agreed to host the workshop and believes that the immersion of workshop participants in an academic military environment willpresent opportunities to find deeper, mutual connections, and allow participants of 4C18 to gain a more complete understanding of the goals and practices of the PME system. The need for this understanding is particularly urgent, given that most specialists in writing studies have little knowledge of, and even less access to, the PME system and its stakeholders despite a rise in students aspiring to join the military or veterans matriculating into civilian higher education. This workshop will serve as the initial scaffolding for greater future interaction and collaborative research by civilian specialists in writing sudies and PME faculty.

Visit the CCCC all-day workshop descriptions for further details. You can register for this workshop online via the CCCC Convention registration form.

 

Activist or Educator: Rethinking the Transformative Potential of Education in Prison
Wednesday, March 14, 2018 – 3:30-5:30 p.m.
Teaching in Prison: Pedagogy, Research, and Literacies Collective, a CCCC Standing Group, will facilitate a symposium at a Kansas City correctional facility with Leigh Lynch, executive director of Arts in Prison. Arts in Prison provides opportunities for inmates to prove that they are more than the sum of their crimes. By providing arts education and experiences—including a wide range of writing and literacy based activities—for inmates in Kansas state prisons and detention centers, these members of society, who have been locked away and often forgotten, are given a chance for self-reflection and an opportunity to create a range of writing for themselves and the public.

Approximately 5-6 Standing Group members will join Lynch and students in the Arts in Prison writing and poetry program for a dialogical symposium/workshop on the power of writing to build connections between writers behind bars and communities on the outside.
 
The goal is to create a space for incarcerated students to share and discuss their work. Students’ work will be  featured on the CCCC Standing Group’s website, Prison Writing Networks. Such publications can be useful to educators and activists in cultivating connections both inside and outside of prison and might also prove useful in college classrooms as well as in secondary schools.
 
Each of the incarcerated students who participates in the workshop will receive books and writing materials.

 

Writing with Current, Former, and Future Members of the Military and Caregivers on the Homefront Workshop
Saturday, March 17, 2018  – 5:30-8:30 p.m. – The Kansas City, MO Police Academy

 

Members of the Writing with Current, Former, and Future Members of the Military, a CCCC Standing Group, will work with a nonprofit in Kansas City, Missouri, Caregivers on the Homefront, to offer a three-hour workshop for 20 military, veteran, and first responder caregivers focusing on building individual capacity for storytelling with applications to five areas:

 

• Admittance and scholarship essays/interviews for postsecondary or graduate programs;
• Employment cover letters and interviews;
• Media, fundraising, resources;
• Grant writing; and
• Blogs, vlogs, and social media.

Nearly 5.5 million people in the United States care for an injured, ill, or disabled military service member or veteran, and no study has calculated the number of those caring for injured, ill, or disabled first responders (Ramchand et al., 2014). Caregivers provide daily living support for care recipients, often in sacrifice of their own goals. Caregivers face distinct challenges in their pursuit of a postsecondary education, suitable employment, and adequate health care. Additionally, many caregivers suffer from caregiver fatigue and elevated stress levels, and they frequently lack supportive social and employment networks (Ramchand et al., 2014). To combat these concerns, most caregivers rely on the services and programs of veteran and caregiver nonprofit organizations. As they seek out resources or employment, caregivers face the daunting task of telling potential employers, media outlets, higher education administrators, or even the public their stories. The work of a caregiver is difficult, isolating, stressful, and nearly indescribable to those who haven’t experience it; however, caregivers can learn to leverage their stories to reach their goals.

Caregivers on the Homefront is a nonprofit organization founded by Shawn Moore (a military caregiver, Elizabeth Dole Foundation fellow, and Kansas City police officer) and her husband, Bryan Moore – an Army veteran. Uniquely, the organization brings together veteran and first responder caregivers. Caregivers on the Homefront is one of the few nonprofit organizations to support veteran families from any military service era.

CCCC has developed position statements on a variety of education issues vital to the teaching and learning of writing.  Characteristically, a position statement is a short summary of what is currently known about an issue and the organizational beliefs about that issue.  Generally, in addition, the statements include the history and background of the issue, the exigency for the statement, supporting information, and a short reference list.  Statements also often include implied suggestions for putting recommendations to practice.

Position statements result from the work of a CCCC Executive Committee- commissioned task force that researches a proposed issue, drafts and revises a position statement, and presents the revised position statement to the Executive Committee for its approval in order to represent the organization at large.

Because policy statements are documents of the entire CCCC organization, they cannot be originated by one individual. CCCC member groups who have an issue about which they would like to propose a statement should first check with the CCCC Chair or Administrative Liaison for suggestions, support, and information about whether the issue is already addressed elsewhere (NCTE position statements, for example).

Issues that are addressed by position statements come to the forefront of CCCC concern in a variety of ways:

1. A position can stem from a resolution or sense of the house motion passed at an Annual Business Meeting.
2. A position could be the result of a Strategic Governance motion passed by the CCCC EC (i.e. they’ve researched an issue for a year and decided CCCC’s best course of action is a position statement on that issue).
3. A position could come out of an already existing committee that suggests the need for a statement to the CCCC EC.  
4. A position could be written if there is a feeling among the Officers and/or the EC that there is some exigency for such a statement.  An example of this is the Statement on the Multiple Uses of Writing.  Sometimes the exigency is presented to an Officer or EC member by a CCCC member, an NCTE staff member, or simply through the natural course of information sharing within the organization.

Return to the main CCCC Position Statement page.

by the Conference on College Composition and Communication
(May 1998, revised May 2016, revised June 2021)

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), composed of 5,100 scholars who teach at colleges and universities across the nation, is deeply committed to the development of literacy for all students. The “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” resolution and the “National Language Policy,” passed by CCCC in 1974 and 1988 respectively, continue to be strong organizational statements for appropriate pedagogies to ensure that all students are afforded the same opportunities to realize their potential as learners and citizens. Given continuing myths and misconceptions in the media and in the nation’s schools about the language many African American students use, the public deserves a statement reflective of the viewpoints of language and literacy scholars on Ebonics.

Ebonics is a superordinate term for a category of Black Language forms that derive from common historical, social, cultural, and material conditions. It refers to language forms such as African American Language, Jamaican Creole, Gullah Creole, West African Pidgin English, and Haitian Creole, as well as Afro-Euro language varieties spoken in European countries. The term “Ebonics” was created by Black psychologist Dr. Robert Williams in 1973 to identify the various languages created by Africans forced to adapt to colonization and enslavement (Williams, 1975).

The variety of Ebonics spoken by African Americans in the United States—known as Black English Vernacular, African American English, U. S. Ebonics, African American Language, among other names—reflects a distinctive language system that many African American students use in daily conversation and in the performance of academic tasks. Like every other linguistic system, the Ebonics of African American students is systematic and rule governed, and it is not an obstacle to learning. The obstacle lies in negative attitudes toward the language, lack of information about the language, inefficient techniques for teaching language and literacy skills, and an unwillingness to adapt teaching styles to the needs of Ebonics speakers.

Brief, Selective Historical Walk through Ebonics

We offer the following summary for readers interested in the issue of U. S. Ebonics over the centuries, including attendant language education issues. In 1554, William Towerson, an Englishman, took five Africans to England to learn English and serve as interpreters in the slave trade and in Britain’s colonization campaign on the west coast of Africa. Three of them returned to the African Gold Coast in 1557. “It is reasonable to accept this as the date from which the African use of English began” (Dalby, 1970, pp. 11–12). During the centuries of enslavement and colonization, “Negro English” (and other Ebonic language forms) was primarily of interest to historians and folklore scholars, the former principally concerned with the linguistic origins of the language (e.g., Harrison, 1884; Krapp, 1924; Mencken, 1936), the latter with what was perceived as its exotic appeal (e.g., Bennett, 1909; Gonzales, 1922). Although these early scholars acknowledged the African language origin of the U. S. variety of Ebonics, most considered the Africanness pathological, inferior, and “baby talk” (Harrison). Gullah Blacks were considered “slovenly and careless of speech” with “clumsy tongues, flat noses and thick lips” (Gonzales). A critical exception in the early twentieth century was Black linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner, born in North Carolina in 1895. Turner’s lifelong study of the Gullah language was motivated by a chance encounter with two Gullah women students in his class at South Carolina State College in Orangesburg (Holloway and Vass, “Lorenzo Dow Turner: A Biographical Dedication,” 1993, p. ix).  Believed to be the first U. S. Black linguist, Turner mastered several African languages to help him in his quest to uncover the origin and system of Gullah and other varieties of U. S. Ebonics. His decades of research on Ebonics, which included making his own phonograph recordings of speech in Gullah communities, was published in his Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect in 1949. Countering the “baby talk” and intellectual inferiority myths about Black Language and its speakers, he described linguistic processes such as sound substitutions of Africanizing English, which resulted under conditions of foreign language acquisition and the experience of enslavement and neo-enslavement. He thus demonstrated the African language background of Gullah and its connection to other varieties of U. S. Ebonics.

The legacy of Beryl Bailey, believed to be the first Black woman linguist, is critical to this twentieth-century historical account of Ebonics. Bailey was the first linguist to apply Chomsky’s new syntactic theory paradigm (known in those years as “Transformational-Generative Grammar”) to an analysis of Ebonics, in this case to her native Jamaican Creole. She published her work in Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach in 1966. Professor and Chair in the Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department at Hunter College in New York, Bailey theorized and was beginning to validate the conception of a Black linguistic continuum from the Caribbean to the United States (“Toward a New Perspective in Negro English Dialectology,” 1965). However, this line of research was cut short by her untimely death.

In Colonial America and after 1776 in the United States of America, there was no concern about the denial of education to Africans. Education was not essential to the performance of slave labor; in fact, there were laws making it illegal to teach the enslaved to read and write. Then, in the post-Emancipation era, Jim Crow emerged and with it the establishment of “separate but equal” education. Hence, the relationship between U. S. Ebonics and the education of U. S. slave descendants only began to be addressed in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and the subsequent push for school desegregation and equality of education for African Americans. Further, it was not until the emergence of the Black Freedom Struggle of this era that White scholars began to publish scientific, linguistic studies of the rule-governed system of U. S. Ebonics (e.g., Stewart, 1967; Dillard, 1967; Labov, 1970).

The pedagogical issue in the latter half of the twentieth century and continuing into this second decade of the twenty-first century continues to be how to achieve maximum language and literacy skills for African American students who use U. S. Ebonics, in speech and in writing, and in and outside of the classroom—and at the same time, enhance their sociocultural, intellectual self-esteem and community rootedness. This challenge was addressed in the King v. Ann Arbor federal court case (1977–79) and in the Oakland, California School Board’s Ebonics Resolution (1996), available here: https://www.linguistlist.org/topics/ebonics/ebonics-res1.html.

From King v. Ann Arbor to the Oakland Ebonics Resolution

The King ruling established the legitimacy of African American Language/ “Black English” within a legal framework and mandated the Ann Arbor School District to take “appropriate action” to teach the Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary school children to read in the [standardized English] of the school, the commercial world, the arts, science, and the professions.”

—Smitherman, 2006, p.12

The parents of the children in the Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School who brought a federal lawsuit against the Ann Arbor School District were a small group of single female heads of households. While there were some other Black children at King School, they were middle class, like the White children at King School. The children from the Green Road housing project, being both Black and poor, were thus a minority within a minority at King School. Their U.S. Ebonics presented a variety of English that King School teachers had negative attitudes toward, and these teachers had not been trained to teach the “three R’s”—and reading was crucial for the mothers of these children—to young children who did not use Standardized English in the classroom. Because of their language—“Black English”/U. S. Ebonics—the children were classified as learning disabled and assigned to speech correction classes. Judge Charles Joiner ruled in the parents’ favor, finding that the Ann Arbor School District had failed to provide equal educational opportunity to the children by not “taking into account” the language barrier presented by their “Black English.” The mandated remedy was ongoing training for the teachers at King School.

In the case of the Oakland, California Unified School District, Blacks were not a minority. Rather, they comprised 53% of the school district population. Students K–12 were all adversely affected by Oakland’s lack of a language education policy around the issue of Ebonics. The Resolution sought to address the problem by providing education in Ebonics, using the students’ primary/home language as a bridge to teaching them “Standard English.” This is the situation of twenty-first-century African American students in urban districts nationwide. (See United States Senate Hearing on Ebonics, available here: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-105shrg39641/pdf/CHRG-105shrg39641.pdf.)

Despite the national uproar and negative, distorted media treatment around Oakland’s Ebonics Resolution, the District was on the right track, according to UNESCO, for example—that is, using the students’ home/mother tongue to teach them language and literacy skills.

The Way Forward

Teachers, administrators, counselors, supervisors, and curriculum developers must undergo training to provide them with adequate knowledge about Ebonics and help them overcome the prevailing stereotypes about the language and learning potential of African American students (and others) who speak Ebonics. CCCC thus strongly advocates new research and teaching that will build on existing knowledge about Ebonics to help students value their linguistic-cultural heritage, maintain Black identity, and to read, write, speak, and listen with critical discernment and power.

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

Bailey, B. (1965). Toward a new perspective in Negro English dialectology. American Speech, 40(3), 171–77.

Bailey, B. (1966). Jamaican Creole syntax: A transformational approach. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Bennett, J. (1909). Gullah: A Negro patois. South Atlantic Quarterly, 8, 39–52.

Dalby, D. (1970). Black through white: Patterns of communication. Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press.

Dillard, J. L. (1967). Negro children’s dialect in the inner city. The Florida FL Reporter, Fall, 2–4.

Gonzales, A. (1922). The Black border: Gullah stories of the Carolina Coast. Columbia, SC: The State Company.

Harrison, J. A. (1884). Negro English. Anglia, 7, 232–79.

Holloway, J. E., & Vass, W. K. (1993). Lorenzo Dow Turner: A biographical dedication. The African heritage of American English. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Krapp, G. (1924). The English of the Negro. The American Mercury, 2, 190–95.

Labov, W. (1970). The logic of non-standard English. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Mencken, H. L. (1936 [1919]). The American language. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

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

Stewart, W. A. (1967). Sociolinguistic factors in the history of American Negro dialects. Florida FL Reporter, Spring, 2–4.

Turner, L. D. (1949). Africanisms in the Gullah dialect. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Williams, R. L. (ed.) (1975). Ebonics: The true language of Black folks. St. Louis, MO: Institute of Black Studies; reissued, 1997, by Robert L. Williams and Associates.

Suggested Work on African American Language and Literacy Pedagogy

Alim, H. S. (2005). Critical language awareness in the United States: Revisiting issues and revising pedagogies in a resegregated society. Educational Researcher, 34(7), 24–31.

Alim, H. S., & Smitherman, G. (2012). Articulate while Black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the U. S. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Baker-Bell, A. (2013). “I never really knew the history behind African American language”: Critical language pedagogy in an Advanced Placement English language arts class. In K. C. Turner & D. Ives (Eds.), Social justice approaches to African American language and literacy practices [Special issue]. Equity & Excellence in Education, 46(3), 355–370.

Carpenter Ford, A. (2013). “Verbal ping pong” as culturally congruent communication: Maximizing African American students’ access and engagement as socially just teaching. In K. C. Turner & D. Ives (Eds.), Social justice approaches to African American language and literacy practices [Special issue]. Equity & Excellence in Education, 46(3), 371–386.

Gilyard, K., & Richardson, E. (2001). Students’ right to possibility: Basic writing and African American rhetoric. In A. Greenbaum (Ed.), Insurrections: Approaches to resistance in composition studies (pp. 37–51). Albany, NY: SUNY University Press.

Haddix, M. (2015). Cultivating racial and linguistic diversity in literacy teacher education: Teachers like me. New York, NY, & Urbana, IL: Routledge & National Council of Teachers of English.

Jackson, A., Michel, T., Sheridan, D., & Stumpf, B. (2001). Making connections in the contact zones: Towards a critical praxis of rap music and hip hop culture. In H. S. Alim (Ed.), Hip hop culture: Language, literature, literacy and the lives of Black youth [Special issue]. Black Arts Quarterly, 21–26.

Kinloch, V. (2015). Urban literacies. In J. Rowsell & K. Pahl (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of literacy studies (pp. 140–156). London, England: Routledge.

Kinloch, V. (2010). Harlem on our minds: Place, race, and the literacies of Urban youth. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Kirkland, D. E. (2013). A search past silence: The literacy of young Black men. New York, NY, & London, England: Teachers College Press.

Kirkland, D., & Jackson, A. (2009). “We real cool”: Toward a theory of Black masculine literacies. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3), 278–297.

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

Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74–84.

Morrell, E., & Duncan-Andrade, J. (2002). Promoting academic literacy with urban youth through engaging hip-hop culture. English Journal, 91(6), 88–92.

Muhammad, G. E. (2015). Searching for full vision: Writing representations of African American adolescent girls. Research in the Teaching of English, 49(3), 224–247.

Paris, D. (2012). Language across difference: Ethnicity, communication, and youth identities in changing urban schools. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Perryman-Clark, S. (2012). Ebonics and composition: Extending disciplinary conversations to first-year writing students. Journal of Teaching Writing, 27(2), 47–70.

Rickford, J., Sweetland, J., Rickford, A., & Grano, T. (2012). African American, Creole, and other vernacular Englishes in education: A bibliographic resource. New York, NY, & Urbana, IL: Routledge & National Council of Teachers of English.

Rickford, J., Sweetland, J., & Rickford, A. (2004). African American English and other vernaculars in education: A topic-coded bibliography. Journal of English Linguistics, 32(3), 230–320.

Smitherman, G. (2000). Talkin that talk: Language and education in Black America. New York, NY: Routledge.

Smitherman, G., & Baugh, J. (2002). The shot heard from Ann Arbor: Language research and public policy in African America. Howard Journal of Communication, 13(1), 5–24.

Williams, B. (2013). Students’ “write” to their own language: Teaching the African American verbal tradition as a rhetorically effective writing skill. In K. C. Turner & D. Ives (Eds.), Social justice approaches to African American language and literacy practices [Special issue]. Equity & Excellence in Education, 46(3), 411–427.

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

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

Email Questions

1. A call for Resolutions will appear in the February issue of College Composition and Communication. Proposed resolutions received by the chair of the Resolutions Committee two weeks before the conference require the signature of only five conference members; however, additional signatures are welcome as a means of indicating the base of support for the resolution.
       
2. The function of the Resolutions Committee is to review all resolutions presented and to prepare resolutions of its own in areas in which it or the Executive Committee believes conference action is needed. Special attention will be given to including areas covered in sense-of-the-house motions passed at the last Annual Business Meeting. In reviewing resolutions, the Resolutions Committee is responsible for combining all resolutions that duplicate one another in substance and for editing all resolutions.  

   The Resolutions committee will report all properly submitted resolutions to the Annual Business Meeting with a recommendation for action.  

   Resolutions that call for conference action in the areas in which the CCCC Constitution assigns authority to the officers or the Executive Committee will be clearly labeled as advisory to the officers or the Executive Committee.

   Resolutions of appreciation may be prepared by the CCCC officers and may be presented by the Resolutions Committee.

   The Resolutions Committee will hold an open meeting during the Special Interest Group time period to clarify and discuss these resolutions with concerned conference members. It is especially urgent that the authors of resolutions or their delegates come to this meeting. Although no new resolutions may be added at this time, members suggesting additional resolutions will be informed that they may introduce sense-of-the-house motions at the Annual Business Meeting in accordance with the rule give in item 4 below. The Resolutions Committee will also have a closed meeting after the open meeting to make such editorial and substantive changes as the deliberations of the open meeting may suggest.
       

3. As necessary, resolutions will be retyped so that complex changes will be incorporated into the copies of the resolutions distributed at the Annual Business Meeting.

   During the report of the Resolutions Committee at the Annual Business Meeting, one member of the committee will read the “resolved” portion of each resolution and move its adoption. Adoption will require only a simple majority of members present. Action will be taken on each resolution before the next resolution is presented.

   The CCCC officers at their post-convention session will determine the dissemination of, and the action to be taken on, all resolutions adopted.
       

4. Members may offer sense-of-the-house motions for discussion and action. Such motions, if passed, will be announced to CCCC members, not as official CCCC statements, but as the will of the majority of members at the Annual Business Meeting. Sense-of-the-house motions can affect action by the Executive committee, or by another appropriate CCCC body, as well as become the substance of a resolution at the next annual convention. In order to be considered, sense-of-the-house motions of no more than 50 words must be presented in writing (three copies) to the chair of the Annual Business Meeting before the adoption of the agenda.

Email Questions

The following resolutions were passed at the CCCC Annual Business Meeting held on Saturday, March 22, 2014, in Indianapolis.

Resolution 1

Whereas Adam Banks has worked as program chair to ensure all the voices in the profession are provided a platform to share their traditions and insights, especially helping us see the opportunities in the changing landscapes of technology, media, disabilities issues, LGBQT issues, rhetoric, and other venues;

Whereas he has organized our time together to foster dialogue not only among ourselves, but also with organizations and diverse individuals whose work and insights can inform our classroom and disciplinary practices, as well as our hearts and minds;

Whereas his scholarship in African American rhetoric and new media helps us see tradition and the future in new ways, and whereas his teaching inspires ways of envisioning tradition and theory to inspire a generation of young scholars; and

Whereas he has done all this work in a spirit of generosity, goodwill, collaboration, and swag;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication express our deep appreciation to Adam Banks for his many contributions to us and to the profession.

Resolution 2

Whereas Tracy Donhardt and the Local Arrangements Committee have provided a remarkably comprehensive Hospitality Guide that informs convention attendees of entertainment, cultural, edible, and drinkable options in Indianapolis;

Whereas Tracy Donhardt and the Local Arrangements Committee members have made themselves readily available to attendees as resources for getting around the city and the convention;

Whereas Tracy Donhardt and the Local Arrangements Committee have included a section of the guide specifically to provide information on a variety of gender-friendly nightlife options;

Whereas Tracy Donhardt and the Local Arrangements Committee have followed in the long tradition of helping convention attendees have satisfying experiences with the convention and in this year’s location of Indianapolis; and

Whereas Tracy Donhardt and many members of the Local Arrangements Committee have made these contributions to support us at the convention in spite of the limited support generally afforded contingent faculty;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication express our deep appreciation to Tracy Donhardt and the Local Arrangements Committee by applauding their energy and efforts.

The following resolutions were passed at the CCCC Annual Business Meeting held on Saturday, April 9, 2016, in Houston.

Resolution 1

Whereas, in the spirit of activism and public engagement emerging from her scholarship in assessment, basic writing, and writing program administration, Linda Adler-Kassner has reimagined the CCCC Annual Convention as a catalytic converter for public action and a celebration of our diversity, creating a rich forum for composition scholars/teachers not only to share their theories and practices through posters, workshops, and presentations, but also to practice public scholarship and advocacy in venues such as the Taking Action Workshops and the Pitch Practicing, Knowledge Shaping, and Writing for Change stations in the Action Hub, not to mention the whiteboards, suggestion postcards, and Closing Plenary Session that will synthesize all the Taking Action suggestions;

Whereas she has connected with convention presenters and attendees through social media to tell the emerging story of CCCC 2016 and energize presenters and attendees for this signature event, setting the bar even higher for future conference chairs;

Whereas we all spent time with Linda in her office as she delivered key information to us in her informational videos, spoke directly to each of us whenever there was a key deadline, process, or idea that needed to be translated or communicated, and encouraged us to ask questions;

Whereas we can see the tangible evidence of change in every convention space, and we have seen her everywhere; and

Whereas she has done all this work in a spirit of generosity, goodwill, and collaboration;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2016 Conference on College Composition and Communication thank Linda Adler-Kassner for her many contributions to us and to the profession.

Resolution 2

Whereas in the spirit of inclusiveness and in response to Houston’s vote to abolish the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, the Local Arrangements Committee moved to build and foment connections between our organization and members of the Houston LGBTQ community;  

Whereas the local committee designed and curated a web guide that facilitated convention attendees’ exploration of Houston’s identity through its businesses, neighborhoods, and other cultural centers; and

Whereas in the spirit of accessibility, the Local Arrangements Committee collaborated with the Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition to ensure that the 2016 CCCC was an accessible convention by providing an accessibility guide, producing a video on how to use the accessibility guide, as well as encouraging presenters to consider how they could make their presentations accessible and advocating that future CCCC conventions be accessible;  

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2016 Conference on College Composition and Communication thank its Local Arrangements Committee co-chair Jen Wingard and committee members Geneva Canino, Casie Cobos, TJ Geiger, Allison Laubach-Wright, and Nathan Shepley and applaud their efforts.

Resolution 3

Whereas the Indianapolis Resolution, a collaboratively drafted resolution reenvisioning the Wyoming Resolution, provides a needed response to unfair labor practices experienced by contingent labor and other writing instructors;

Whereas the majority of postsecondary writing instruction is the responsibility of contingent labor who need and deserve the support of our professional organization; and

Whereas, as of March 2016, the Indianapolis Resolution has received well over 300 endorsements, including current members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Executive Committee and several other former members and officers;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that:

• We ask that the chair commit to appointing a member to an interorganizational labor board in keeping with Section A of the Indianapolis Resolution.
• We ask CCCC to work with relevant committees, task forces, and the general membership to mentor graduate students and contingent faculty on the realities of our labor conditions.
• We ask CCCC journal editors and convention organizers to encourage labor-oriented research in keeping with Section C of the Indianapolis Resolution.

Resolution 4

Whereas the contingent status of an increasing cadre of writing instructors is seemingly entrenched in our institutions; and

Whereas advocates for contingent writing faculty often need support on an ad hoc basis;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Conference on College Composition and Communication dedicate a liaison for contingency issues (e.g., fair labor standards, unemployment insurance claims, legal issues related to hiring/nonrenewals).

Resolution 5

Whereas contingent faculty often receive low pay for their work and are often precluded from summer teaching;

Whereas contingent faculty may lose teaching assignments at the last minute, thus making it impossible to find replacement work; and

Whereas many universities and unemployment offices invoke “reasonable assurance of continued employment” as grounds to deny unemployment claims between academic terms;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Conference on College Composition and Communication Chairperson issue a statement affirming that faculty on contingent appointments do not have “reasonable assurance of continued employment.”

Resolution 6

Whereas the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) collects employment data for tenure-track/tenured (TT/T) faculty but much less systematically for non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty; and

Whereas more complete employment data for NTT faculty improve advocacy efforts at the department, college, campus, and national levels;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Conference on College Composition and Communication call for NCES to reinstate the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty (and to collect the same employment data through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) for part­time and full­time NTT faculty as it does for TT/T faculty.

Resolution 7

Whereas laws such as the Affordable Care Act and the Public Student Loan Forgiveness Act stipulate minimum number of hours worked per week in order to determine eligibility based on guidelines that institutions sometimes use to report actual hours to the IRS and Department of Labor; and

Whereas CCCC is best positioned to articulate the ratio of in-class/out-of-class hours worked based on research and best practices in writing instruction;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Conference on College Composition and Communication articulate a minimum acceptable ratio of in-class/out-of-class hours worked for the purposes of calculations to determine eligibility for both health insurance and public student loan forgiveness.

The following resolutions and sense of the house motions were passed at the CCCC Annual Business Meeting held on Saturday, March 24, 2007, in New York City.

Resolution 1

Whereas, in 1990, the U.S. Census Bureau began categorizing individuals and families as “linguistically isolated” if their household is one in which no member l4 years old and over (1) speaks only English or (2) speaks a non-English language and speaks English “very well” [Source; U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Summary File 3, Matrices P19, P20, PCT13, and PCT14]; and

Whereas there is no threat to the primacy of English, since 82% of the U.S. population speaks only English at home and more than two-thirds of those who do speak a language other than English at home, primarily Spanish speakers, also speak English “well” or “very well” (2000 Census); and

Whereas the Census does not ask about proficiency in any language except English, even though multilingualism is a valued norm in most communities worldwide, and even though every national study of education in the U.S. decries the failure of most of the U.S. population to speak a second language, including the failure of immigrants’ children to keep their heritage language; and

Whereas a widespread and growing English-only ideology, fostered by misinformation about the desire and ability of immigrants to speak English, has led numerous states to declare English their official language, thus denying bilingual services and/or making it illegal to teach children in their heritage language even when they are also taught in English; and

Whereas increasing linguistic intolerance and linguistic profiling in housing, employment, education, health, and child custody cases have been documented throughout the U.S.; and

Whereas the term “linguistically isolated” conveys the false and damaging view that people who do not speak English “very well” have no contact with English speakers and/or are outside the pale of U.S. society; and

Whereas the Census Bureau’s application of the term “linguistically isolated” to all members of a family, in which no one over the age of l4 speaks English “very well,” incorrectly categorizes the children in those families under the age of l4 who do speak English very well; and

Whereas the Census Bureau categorizes as “isolated” only the small percentage of households in the U.S. where adults have some difficulty with English, rather than the majority of households in which only English is spoken;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Conference on College Composition and Communication join the American Anthropological Association and other professional organizations in urging the Census Bureau to include on the long-form questionnaire a question about proficiency in languages other than English.  Further, we urge that the Census Bureau discontinue classifying those who speak English less than “very well”–and all members of their household–as “linguistically isolated” because the term is inaccurate and discriminatory, and the classification promotes an ideology of linguistic superiority that foments linguistic intolerance and conflict.

Resolution 2

Where as Cheryl Glenn’s identities as Program Chair, grandmother, sister, rhetorician and scholar, and Jon’s girlfriend has helped us understand what matters; and

Whereas we are well acquainted with Cheryl’s kindness, gentleness, collegial generosity, great good humor, and willingness to share her cake; and

Whereas her scholarship on women, on rhetoric, and on the power of silence has inspired us; and

Whereas this conference in the heart of New York City has paid special attention to newcomers, graduate students, and international scholars and has allowed so many CCCC colleagues to represent their identities through reading, writing, speaking, listening, and silence;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication thank Cheryl Glenn for her many gifts to us and to the profession.

Resolution 3

Whereas Paul Puccio and the Local Arrangements Committee have assembled a rich list of New York’s historical, cultural, and entertainment attractions; and

Whereas Paul Puccio and the Local Arrangements Committee have provided an intellectually rewarding, professionally valuable, and socially pleasurable conference; and

Whereas Paul has revealed to us in his own gentle and polite way his vision of the New York skyline from the vantage point of his own New Jersey terrace and delivered it to us in song; and

Whereas Paul Puccio thus has developed commendable expertise for the career he will assume upon retirement;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication applaud Paul Puccio and the Local Arrangements Committee for their hard work and generous hospitality.

Resolution 4

Whereas we appreciate Akua Duku Anokye’s steady attention to issues of representation, community, and honesty within our organization and the profession; and

Whereas she has taught us to pay attention to the voices we hear and to appreciate the company we keep; and

Whereas she takes a little bit of New York with her everywhere she goes; and

Whereas she has the rare ability to be sincere and gracious and smart all at once; and

Where as she will soon be a grandmother and will pass along the gift of stories and the strength of women;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication thank Akua Duku Anokye for her leadership and service to the profession.

Sense of the House Motions

S1. Even though the Committee on the Status of Women originally did not ask to be reconstituted, it now supports our motion urging the CCCC Executive Committee to reconstitute the Committee on the Status of Women with a streamlined charge.  This committee provides an essential component of the governance structure promoting strategic conversations about the social, political and economic conditions for women.

S2. CCCC should:

1. Support consideration of and strategic use of open source software whenever possible;
2. Explore use of open source software within its own organization;
3. Encourage and support CCCC members pursuing open source alternatives; and
4. Educate CCCC’s members about the results of these initiatives, including associated costs.

The following resolutions and sense of the house motions were passed at the CCCC Annual Business Meeting held on Saturday, April 5, 2008, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Resolution 1

Whereas open source software is freely distributed software with open, accessible code that can be readily improved upon by communities; and

Whereas open source software has the potential to control spiraling technology costs because software and upgrades are often free; and

Whereas open source software allows teachers, students, and institutions to participate in customizing software according to the specific, situated needs of a program or institution; and

Whereas open source software development permits collaboration with other institutions and organizations in its creation and maintenance; and

Whereas investment in open source software can prevent vendor lock dependence, that is, dependence upon one software company because it controls maintenance, development, and support; and

Whereas the open source development model parallels the academic model of knowledge creation and distribution; and

Whereas open source embodies a set of principles in which collaboration, peer review, and public knowledge are highly valued; and

Whereas investment in open source software development by institutions results in software which can be freely shared with all of education with the benefits described above;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Conference on College Composition and Communication support consideration of and strategic use of open source software whenever possible; will explore the use of open source software within its own organization and recommend that educators, institutions, and other educational organizations do the same; will educate CCCC’s members about the results of CCCC initiatives to use open source software; and will inform CCCC’s members about the associated costs of any open source implementation by CCCC.

Resolution 2

Whereas T.R. Johnson and the local arrangements committee invited us to “take the boat to the land of dreams” and “steam down the river down to New Orleans” and made sure that the band was “there to meet us/Old friends to greet us”;

Whereas they opened to us “Basin Street—Where black and white meet/In New Orleans, the land of dreams,” a city now dear to all of us, a home revived and reviving, soon to be thriving, where we celebrate our common bonds;

Whereas we acknowledge that providing local arrangements for several thousand writing teachers and rhetoricians is not an easy task, even in the Big Easy; and

Whereas T.R. Johnson and the Local Arrangements Committee gave us incomparable recommendations on local food, music, art, museums, and tourist attractions, making our stay in New Orleans truly one to be remembered;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication applaud T. R. Johnson and the Local Arrangements Committee for their hard work and generous hospitality.  Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Resolution 3

Whereas Charles Bazerman has over the last thirty years been Involved in Constructing Experience, Shaping Written Knowledge, creating Informed Readers of All of Us, Side-by-Side, examining What Writing Does and How It Does It, and leading us as we strive toward Writing Selves, and Writing Societies;

Whereas he has in the 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication asked us to (re)examine “Writing Realities, Changing Realities,” challenging us both to write and change our own and others’ realities in the midst of a city whose reality is written on, by, and through its people, its traditions, and its geographies and whose realities are indeed changing; and

Whereas, we all strive to meet his challenge and embrace his vision by emulating his humanity, civic responsibility, intellectual acuity, fancy footwork, and commitment to the profession;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 59th CCCC Annual Convention Conference on College Composition and Communication warmly and respectfully thank Charles Bazerman for his leadership and service to the profession.

Publications

• College Composition and Communication
• Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series
• FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty

Position Statements