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College Composition and Communication is published exclusively for professors of college composition at two- and four-year institutions.

As the publication for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), this highly respected journal is a valuable resource for products and services surrounding the study and teaching of reading and writing at the college level. Make your presence known to this actively involved audience looking for up-to-date products and services available in today’s market.

Circulation: 5,000*

Published: September, December, February, and June

Published on March 5, 2020

Vibrant organizations are those that respond to the needs of their community and adapt and change to grow with the times in which they exist. In 2019 the Conference on College Composition and Communication endeavored to do both, and the accomplishments outlined in this Year In Review illustrate these efforts.

Friday, March 13, 2020
1:00–2:00 p.m. ET

Watch the webinar recording

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

In this CCCC webinar, three faculty members—Justine Post (Ohio Northern University), Sybil Priebe (North Dakota State College of Science), and Stephanie West-Puckett (University of Rhode Island)—share their theory and strategies surrounding the most time-consuming and, arguably, important work we do with students: grading. How might we maximize the effectiveness of our labor and ensure that we are treating our students fairly at the same time? The first speaker will introduce a framework for understanding feedback as a cycle of interpretation, negotiation, and communication between instructors and students and will consider the role that students’ goals play in shaping their understanding of instructor feedback. The second speaker will explain how, after years of strict policies and a highly structured instructor-centric approach to assessment, she fell down a Twitter rabbit hole and came out the other side with a softened approach to grading. The third speaker looks at how four alternative assessment practices can help to promote a more capacious understanding of “good writing” in the writing classroom and will show participants how to integrate socially just approaches to assessment into their own contexts. An audience-driven Q&A with the speakers follows, facilitated by Salt Lake Community College professor and TYCA archivist Stephanie Maenhardt.

Share your learning on Twitter at #4Cchat.

Conference on College Composition and Communication
November 2019

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is an organization committed to inclusive, equitable, and sustaining learning environments; our classrooms, departments, and campuses should strive to be spaces that nurture our professional growth and that make it possible for students and teachers to do their best work. The CCCC continuously strives to fulfill the goals and values of our mission statement to support “the agency, power, and potential of diverse communicators inside and outside of postsecondary classrooms.”

In cases where minoritized and marginalized teacher-scholars are threatened, harassed, or adversely targeted based on their linguistic, religious, gender, and/ or racial characteristics, inhibiting the fulfillment of their professional responsibilities, CCCC affirms that academic institutions have a responsibility to protect and support minoritized and marginalized faculty.

Protection and support of minoritized and marginalized faculty may be offered in the following ways:

• Public statements from institutional leadership on incidents of harassment, hostility, and violence. Such statements should acknowledge the incident and provide evidence-based reassurances of how the incident is being handled.
• Plans for the safety and security of the targeted individual, including but not limited to campus police or security escort when on campus, providing on-site security for classes, and other work-related functions
• Provisions for compensated time or alternative methods of fulfilling faculty professional responsibilities until the affected individual is able to return safely to their workplace
  • Arrangements to meet responsibilities for teaching assignments (for example, short-term or long-term online course instruction or coverage of class meetings), including distance technology options for mentoring and advising of undergraduate and graduate students, where applicable
  • Fiscal resources to ensure the individual is able to fulfill their expectations for research and publication, as appropriate, in order to meet the contractual obligations of the position, as well as desired levels of participation in professional activities
  • Options for completing or reassigning service and governance responsibilities, whether elected or appointed, including securing alternate representation
  • Documented support for either the continuation of administrative work, temporary release or reassignment of administrative work, or permanent release or reassignment of administrative work, as is appropriate to the individual case.
• When relevant, the extension of time on the faculty member’s tenure and promotion clock
• Fiscal and logistical resources for the targeted individual to access counseling and mental health care, including health care professionals outside of the university

Institutions also can look to and adapt their short-term and long-term leave policies for faculty who experience emergency and/or crisis situations in relation to threats of violence and violent acts against marginalized faculty. Likewise, institutions should ensure that any strategies for accommodating the affected faculty member’s workload do not disproportionately affect other potentially vulnerable faculty members.

These best practices reflect the principles outlined in the following organizational documents:

• CCCC Standards for Ethical Conduct Regarding Sexual Violence, Sexual Harassment, and Hostile Environments
• NCTE Statement on Anti-Racism to Support Teaching and Learning
• CCCC Mission Statement
• CWPA Position Statement on Bullying in the Workplace

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

The CCCC 2025 Workshops below will be held on Wednesday, April 9, and Saturday, April 12, 2025, at the following times:

Wednesday, April 9:

• All-Day Workshops: 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. ($40)
• Morning Workshops: 9:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. ($20)
• Afternoon Workshops: 1:30–5:00 p.m. ($20)

Saturday, April 12:

• Afternoon Workshops: 2:00-5:00 p.m. ($0)

You can add any of these workshops for CCCC 2025 during the registration process. Please note that workshops will be in person only.

Wednesday, April 9, 2025

All-Day Workshops, 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. ($40)

Theory, Research Methodologies, and Praxis
W.1 Creative-Critical Multimodal Play as Rhetorical Pedagogy and Practice
This day-long workshop explores the scholarly and pedagogical uses of creative-critical play with theatrical exercises and multimodal texts. Creative critical practice, the facilitators argue, offers many opportunities to the writing classroom. Purposefully designed exercises that harness creative-critical play towards rhetorical and linguistic analysis can expand literacy practices. 

First-Year Writing
W.2 Empowering Diverse Voices with Generative AI in Multilingual Composition Classrooms
Generative AI as a writing tool empowers English language learner (ELL) voices and fosters equity in multilingual composition classrooms. Writers from diverse language backgrounds and cultural perspectives can use generative AI to enhance writing skills, spur creativity, and gain confidence while composing. Presenters will share experiences with generative AI in their composition curriculum. 

Creative Writing and Publishing
W.3 Feminist Workshop: Can I Get a Beat? Or, Collaboration and Publication in the Field
Sponsored by the Feminist Caucus
The Feminist Workshop focuses on the equity work needed in publication and editing. We center reverb to imagine publication as a storytelling place with consequences, the place the discipline bears witness as a collective “we.” We invite folx to join expert panelists in experiential reflection, examination, making, and conversation rooted in wanting inclusive publication-oriented opportunities. 

Theory, Research Methodologies, and Praxis
W.4 International Writing Research: Remixing Perspectives through Collaboration
Sponsored by the International Researchers Consortium
This annual workshop connects writing researchers whose work crosses national borders, bringing international perspectives to CCCC. Consistent with the 2025 theme, participants will gather to engage, listen, collaborate, and remix by playing and sampling research projects representing globally diverse questions, methodologies, modalities, and sites. 

Inclusion and Access
W.5 Latinx Caucus Workshop
Sponsored by the CCCC Latinx Caucus
In this full-day workshop, members of the CCCC Latinx Caucus present on intersections of rhetoric and identity to then guide attendees in activities designed to help them teach about these issues in their courses. 

Approaches to Teaching and Learning
W.6 Mixing It Up: Composing Undergraduate Research Practices into a New Tune
The workshop explores strategies for integrating undergraduate research (UGR) initiatives within writing studies. Drawing on research and speakers’ experiences, practical tools and approaches for designing and implementing projects will be offered. Participants will leave with a concrete action plan for developing and sustaining undergraduate research initiatives in their writing programs. 

Information Literacy and Technology
W.8 The Generative AI Advantage in Teaching Writing
This is the Age of AI, and AI has permanently changed everything in writing and humanities instruction. We can’t go back, but few professors know how to move forward. In this full-day interactive workshop, Michelle Kassorla and Eugenia Novokshanova will equip you with the tools you need to unlock the power of AI in the writing classroom. 

Morning Workshops, 9:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. ($20)

Inclusion and Access
MW.1 ACCESS n Action: Accessible and Inclusive Course Design Strategies
This workshop will meet attendees where they are, whether they are working on the first or fifteenth iteration of a course. Participants will come away from this workshop with a Google folder of models, heuristics, and selected readings that they can employ for iterative, accessible, course design. 

Approaches to Teaching and Learning
MW.2 Effective and Ethical Approaches to Sentence-Level Feedback on Student Writing
We will explore ethical and effective approaches to providing feedback on student writing, particularly at the sentence level, within the context of social justice concerns related to linguistic inclusion, racial equity, and Generative AI. Ample time will be allotted for critically and collaboratively refining our approaches to feedback, an opportunity we teachers of writing are rarely afforded. 

Information Literacy and Technology
MW.3 Extended Play: Exploring Generative AI in Online Writing Instruction
Sponsored by the Online Writing Instruction Standing Group
During this hands-on workshop attendees will actively use generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT). Facilitators will guide us through instructional applications of GenAI especially in asynchronous teaching modalities. In addition to dedicated assignment (re)design time, attendees will develop broader guideline/policy statements around ethical use of GenAI tools tailored to their local contexts. 

Approaches to Teaching and Learning
MW.4 From Bad Ideas to Good Practices of AI and Writing in College
This workshop reframes problematic ideas around AI and writing. Attendees will explore research-informed best practices on AI for the college classroom. They will participate in a framing segment before selecting one of three tracks: assignments, instructional strategies, and policy. Each track will include guided activities to create teaching resources, before participants present in groups. 

Information Literacy and Technology
MW.5 Generative AI and Writing Assessment
Sponsored by the Writing Assessment SIG and the MLA-CCCC AI Task Force
This workshop aims to support participants as they consider how shifts in writing assessment, alongside the rise of generative AI, have altered both their approaches to assessment and their own working/labor conditions and make informed choices about the use of Gen AI in classrooms and institutional assessment contexts. 

Inclusion and Access
MW.6 Humanizing Basic Writers, Transforming Basic Writing Programs: Enacting Mike Rose’s Model of Remix, Collaboration, and Creativity
Sponsored by the Council on Basic Writing
This workshop will, first, review the humanizing principles and practices Mike Rose applied to basic writers and the programs that served them. Then the workshop will guide participants to enact those principles in the site-specific contexts of their own institutions and communities. Participants will emerge with active steps to remix, collaborate, and create community in their programs. 

Information Literacy and Technology
MW.7 Playing OUR Songs: CCCC Edits Wikipedia
Sponsored by the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative
Join this workshop to edit Wikipedia for knowledge equity and improve articles on key topics in composition and rhetoric. 

Information Literacy and Technology
MW.8 Remixing B-sides of AI in Writing Classrooms and Writing Programs
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing rapidly, and this half-day workshop aims to fill a need for faculty who struggle with understanding how or whether to work with or against AI in their writing assignments and programs. This intensive workshop focuses on understanding the nuances of working with AI, and the ethical implications of embracing AI. 

Antiracism and Social Justice
MW.9 Remixing the Writing Classroom for Social-Global Justice
This workshop is an opportunity for concerned writing teachers to work towards more justice-driven practices, a praxis we argue must begin on Day 1 of every course. We ask: How do we want our teaching to function in the lived experiences of students and the communities with which we co-exist? How can the writing produced in classrooms translate outside the university and impact the world? 

Writing Programs
MW.10 Writing Programmatic Self-Studies: Gathering Data and Advocating for Change
Attendees will learn strategies for collecting data from diverse campus units about their writing program(s) and using it to compose self-studies that emphasize strengths, identify current needs, and advocate for change. Members of the CWPA Consultant-Evaluator panel will share insights about writing effective self-studies and work individually with attendees to begin the process themselves. 

Theory, Research Methodologies, and Praxis
MW.11 Writing Research Proposals Workshop
Sponsored by the CCCC Research Committee
In this half-day workshop, participants are invited to come together to think about and write successful research studies and proposals. Graduate students and scholars of all ranks are welcome. 

Inclusion and Access
MW.12 Writing with Executive Dysfunction
This workshop is for neurodivergent writers and those who work with them, featuring a mix of activities including timed writing, small group discussion, and collaborative resource sharing. 

Afternoon Workshops, 1:30–5:00 p.m. ($20)

Approaches to Teaching and Learning
AW.1 “Play at Your Own Risk”: Workshopping Risk and Failure Pedagogies
What makes a risk worth taking—in writing and teaching? Our workshop plays with this question through creative, collaborative exercises. Participants will play with classroom activities that can foster risk-taking in their students and themselves and collaborate with others to expand their sense of the stakes involved in risk and failure pedagogies. 

Language, Literacy, and Culture
AW.2 Demystifying AI: How Large Language Models Call Us toward More Focused Attention to Language in Writing Classrooms
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are becoming commonplace in our lives and classrooms, but understanding of how these models work is far less widespread. Our workshop offers a linguistically informed introduction to LLMs and presents classroom activities designed to help students see LLMs as a tool for exploring patterns in language, rather than a replacement for their own unique voices. 

Approaches to Teaching and Learning
AW.3 Generative AI and More: Wrestling with Controversial Issues in and around Multilingual Writing
Sponsored by the Second Language Writing Standing Group
The workshop explores a range of controversial issues related to multilingual writing. Our opening panel discusses ethical concerns and pedagogical opportunities for digital technologies like Generative AI. Several roundtables continue this discussion, while others consider related topics, like multimodality, intertextuality, interdisciplinarity, linguistic justice, and linguistic autobiography. 

First-Year Writing
AW.5 Liberation through Writing: Remixing First-Year Composition through Unique Lenses
Through revising a single English 101 unit based on Writing about Writing by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, we intend to provide four unique frameworks or lenses (Creative Writing, Indigenous Rhetorics, Digital Environments, and Antiracism and Black Voices) to empower first-year writing instructors to remix or revise their English 101 course assignments while maintaining curriculum integrity. 

Theory, Research Methodologies, and Praxis
AW.6 NNESWIs’ Remixing: Integrating Professional (A-Side) and Transnational, Cross-Cultural Knowledge (B-Side) of Teaching and Research
Sponsored by the Non-Native English-Speaking Writing Instructors (NNESWIs) Standing Group
This workshop shares NNESWIs’ teaching, learning, and research experiences, discusses their strengths and challenges, and demonstrates how they “remix” by integrating their professional strengths (A-side) and rich transnational and cross-cultural knowledge (B-side) in teaching and research to successfully establish themselves and maximize their students’ learning experiences. 

Approaches to Teaching and Learning
AW.7 Persuasive Games: Rhetorically Remixing Games and Writing Assignments
Sponsored by the Council for Play and Game Studies
This workshop will explore how writing teachers can remix existing games or assignments to recreate alternative ideological systems often aimed for social justice by rhetorically changing the game’s mechanics, rules, and/or narrative. Participants will explore rhetorically remixing games by discussing, playing, and designing their own social justice games that teach writing and rhetoric. 

Community, Civic, and Public Contexts of Writing
AW.9 Reclamation: A Handcrafted Rhetorics Approach to Remix
Sponsored by Handcrafted Rhetorics
Disconnections between ourselves and our world are seen in the mental health issues in our classrooms and communities and in the health of our environment. This workshop argues that this can be addressed through handcrafted rhetorics, namely those based in reclamation. Participants will collage, fibercraft, and upcycle, exploring how we might reclaim our attention, material, and making. 

Approaches to Teaching and Learning
AW.10 Remixing Peer Review: Playful and Liberatory Pedagogies to Maximize Student Engagement
This workshop previews playful and practical strategies for remixing peer review. Participants will bring a piece of their own writing to experience models of review from a student’s perspective. They will also evaluate each model for accessibility, cultural responsiveness, and student engagement potential. Participants will leave with several concrete strategies for their own writing classroom.  

Community, Civic, and Public Contexts of Writing
AW.11 Remixing Prison Literacies and Pedagogies
Sponsored by the Prison Literacies + Pedagogies Standing Group
This workshop samples the pedagogical work and access points born of system-impacted scholar-writers, themselves remixing the writing classroom. 

Institutions: Labor Issues, Professional Lives, and Survival
AW.12 Remixing the Harmony: Intentional Balancing out the Triad of Self, Academia, and Family as Parents in the Academy
Designed for parents in the academy, the session utilizes mindful activities like restorative movement, reflective writing, and optional small-group discussion to unpack personal needs and opportunities for change. Reflecting on different tools, resources, and strategies, participants will create unique self-preservation approaches to help them survive rather than simply thrive in academia. 

Saturday, April 12, 2025

Afternoon Workshops, 2:00–5:00 p.m. ($0)

Institutions: Labor Issues, Professional Lives, and Survival
SW.1 “You Are Entirely More Than the Job Market”: Crafting Prefigurative Counterstories on the Job Market
In this workshop, we address the need for hearing the B-side experiences of the job market. Through reflexive prefigurative counterstorytelling, we encourage participants to build together alternative ways of being and doing (on) the job market. We also advocate for forming and participating in communities of practice and adopting inclusive practices for professional growth. 

Information Literacy and Technology
SW.2 An Afternoon of Community Building through Audio Storytelling
Sponsored by the Sound Studies and Writing Collective
Beginning and seasoned audio editors are invited to collaborate in creating and sharing audio storytelling projects. Participants will support each other and leave the workshop with a completed audio project, ideas for scholarly and/or pedagogical applications, and connections to others interested in soundwriting. 

Community, Civic, and Public Contexts of Writing
SW.3 Community Writing Mentorship Workshop
Sponsored by the Council on Community Writing Special Interest Group
This workshop offers peer-with-peer mentoring and feedback to attendees at any level of experience with research design, relevant scholarship, project evaluation, job and tenure evaluation strategies, ethics of community work, and more. This session is led by a diverse group of prominent, engaged scholars within the field of community writing. 

Approaches to Teaching and Learning
SW.4 Engaging in Computer Love: Navigating toward Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Multimodality in Composition
In this workshop, participants will explore the concept of creating a digitized Zine, a multimodal alternative to the traditional essay, grounded in Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. I will provide an overview of the scholarship that gives purpose and meaning to the development of this project and how to use the Canva platform. 

Community, Civic, and Public Contexts of Writing
SW.5 Exercises in Attunement: A Creative Work-in-Progress Workshop for Writing Teachers by CLJ’s Coda
By workshopping creative works-in-progress, we will experience community writing as a relational praxis sustained by creative writing and inclusive editorial practices. We will explore how community-based praxis can inform more attuned classroom practices to meet diverse student needs and how community writing’s focus on relationships can be employed in classroom settings. 

Institutions: Labor Issues, Professional Lives, and Survival
SW.6 From Draft to Publication: A Hands-on, How-to Workshop on Publishing in Peer-Reviewed Journals
The editors of Teaching English in the Two-Year College, College English, and College Composition and Communication propose a Saturday afternoon writers’ workshop to include an overview of citation justice, five mini-lessons on writing for publication interleaved with workshops to apply those lessons to their scholarly projects, and guidance on forming writing groups for long-term success. 

Creative Writing and Publishing
SW.7 Shared Dancing at the Silent Disco: A Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop
Sponsored by the Creative Nonfiction Writing Standing Group
Replacing bass-booming clubs, silent discos circumvent rules, celebrating creative expression. Attendees dance to music transmitted to headphones for an experience individual and communal. This interactive workshop parallels that space of active art and quiet focus. Through prompts from creative nonfiction writers, it provides dedicated writing time, small-group sharing, and pedagogical discussion. 

Community, Civic, and Public Contexts of Writing
SW.8 Text Power Telling: Remixing Community and Technology to Create Safe Writing Spaces for Sexual Trauma Survivors
This workshop will introduce participants to “Text Power Telling,” a nonprofit that offers writing workshops and a digital creative arts magazine for sexual trauma survivors. Participants will have the opportunity to experience a TPT workshop, writing together in our anonymous online forum to protect privacy while also sharing a secure physical space with other survivors to cultivate community.

Conference on College Composition and Communication
November 2019

Executive Summary: This statement establishes principles for graduate student mentorship that is inclusive, equitable, sustained, and networked. These principles are intended for graduate faculty and program administrators in masters and doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition and related fields to help sustain robust mentorship and related initiatives (including redirecting resources; creating a culture of mentorship; encouraging curricular innovation; developing extracurricular panels or workshops; and provoking discussion among graduate faculty and students, among other efforts.)

Ethical mentorship¹ requires ongoing institutional and interpersonal efforts to move graduate students into, through, and beyond degree completion toward satisfactory job placement beyond or within the academy. The imperative for mentorship is especially urgent now in light of pervasive precarity within higher education including scarcity, contingency, overloads, corporatization, and labor exploitation (e.g., Bérubé, 2013; MLA Task Force, 2014). In these contexts especially, mentoring relationships can become flexible responses to students’ differentiated needs as well as a part of larger efforts to dismantle institutional biases and exploitative practices. Graduate faculty and administrators have a responsibility to engage in inclusive, differentiated, and collaborative mentorship with graduate students. We thus affirm the following principles for sustaining mentorship that is responsive to local conditions, needs, and individuals:

Make academic practice and conventions accessible: Graduate study necessitates that students take on new languages, discourses, epistemologies, and ways of being, and navigate unfamiliar and potentially hostile spaces and discourses. Each student, with their ranging prior experience and positionalities (e.g., neurodiverse, veteran, parent, working-class background, multilingual) will experience the culture(s) in their graduate program differently. To help make academic cultures explicit and accessible, mentors can:

Demystify practice: Explicitly address discourses, genres, research methods, and networking, especially with minority, first-generation, and/or historically underrepresented or marginalized students who may disproportionately labor to acclimate to and work within an institutional academic culture as a “foreign place with a different language” (Sinanan, 2016, p.156).

Demystify writing and research: Teach students to identify, acclimate to, and interrogate (with the possibility of resisting and transforming) academic discourses and practices. Graduate faculty should work to unpack and make available disciplinary ways of critically writing, researching, and publishing (Micciche with Carr, 2011; Brooks-Gillies et al., 2015).

Advocate for financial support: Advise on professional opportunities, like conference travel, mindful of students’ varying financial situations. Advocate in departments and programs for adequate or increased financial support for critical professionalization activity (e.g., conference travel, summer support, job market support).

Enact collaborative and networked mentorship: More than a one-to-one relationship alone, graduate students and mentors benefit from a networked approach. Complementing mentorship in students’ home departments, graduate mentors can encourage horizontal mentoring (VanHaitsma and Ceraso, 2017) and facilitate mentorship across their institution (and even in other institutions and the field) to help meet varying needs, intersectional positionalities, interests, and concerns. To practice networked mentoring, graduate mentors can:

Scaffold mentoring: Enact advising schemes which intentionally build mentoring relationships with multiple faculty and program stakeholders (e.g., assign students a first-year advisor, then assign a different second-year advisor before they select a dissertation or thesis director). Networked mentoring can also involve the expertise of various stakeholders, including alumni, university career centers, graduate school personnel, mental health professionals, faculty in other departments, field organizations, and so on.

Manage relationships: In co-advising situations graduate students should not be responsible for managing or resolving potential conflicts. Moreover, the labor and responsibility of mentorship should not be disproportionately placed on students themselves nor on the generosity of any individual mentor. It should not be assumed that certain students should be mentored by certain faculty, that mentoring is any single faculty member’s responsibility, or that mentoring is limited only to those sharing scholarly interests.

Practice mentoring as transformation: “Remaining wedded to outmoded systems, including a model of apprenticeship in higher education that reinforces the false assumption that professorship is the only meaningful career for humanities doctoral recipients, does a tremendous disservice to all individuals and organizations that benefit from humanistic perspectives” (Rogers, 2013, p. 21). More than apprenticeship, mentorship can take transformation as its paradigm, as new pathways to success embrace the diverse needs of contemporary graduate students and the worlds in which they live and work (see Smith, 2012; MLA Task Force, 2014). To enact mentorship as transformation, graduate mentors can:

Learn about mentees’ intentions: Those involved in the mentorship of graduate students should learn why each student has chosen to pursue graduate education and how to (re)imagine “the field” and its varied work in ways that exceed mentors’ own.

Learn about job markets: Graduate students and mentors should learn about the state of the academic job markets, including the casualization (i.e., the current climate of nontenure track and contingent labor) of the academic workforce. Mentors and graduate students should learn about resources for quality positions outside higher education, including careers in education, nonprofits, government, etc. Some resources include MLA’s Connected Academics initiative, Versatile PhD, or #Alt-Ac Academy.

Validate and help students prepare for diverse careers: Graduate students should be encouraged and validated for career aspirations, choices, and outcomes beyond (ever fewer) conventional academic tenure-track positions (MLA Task Force, 2014). Toward mentorship that imagines a rich range of postgraduation options, we recommend that mentors:

Avoid myths: Mentors should not invoke or imply damaging and unrealistic myths about what success on the (academic) job market must look like (e.g., that only R1 academic positions are desirable, that a national academic job search is the only way to secure satisfactory employment). Instead, faculty should work with graduate students to imagine myriad postdegree options and follow students’ leads on working to meet their goals (see also Miller, et al., 2015).

Share information: Mentors and students should share information about writing careers, academic job markets, and where program graduates go. Programs might consider tracking and making available information about student job placement after graduation (Rogers, 2013, p. 19) and/or build networks among recent graduates and current students for horizontal mentoring.

Embody commitments to inclusion and diversity through differentiated mentorship: Mentorship is, of course, never one-size-fits-all. Students coming from undergraduate and graduate work at minority serving institutions (for instance, a student of color entering a predominately white institution) may experience the academy as a “brave space,” a positioning which leaves them to take on additional emotional and mental labor as they give up a former condition in favor of a new way of seeing and understanding (Arao & Clemens, 2013). While all graduate students work to become socialized into their varied roles as graduate students (Golde, 1999), historically underrepresented and marginalized groups benefit from mentorship practices in and outside of the classroom (Okawa, 2002). Toward practicing inclusive and differentiated mentorship, mentors should:

Stand as an ally: To practice allyship (see Edwards; Patel) mentors can, to start, reflect on their own privileged positions and work to understand the experiences of those they’re allying themselves with; publicly identify their allyship efforts by marking their own and others’ positionalities of privilege, practice self-reflection, and “initiate the change toward personal, institutional, and societal justice and equality” (Kendall, 2003).

Rhetorically listen: Mentors should practice rhetorical listening, which “signifies a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture” and combats how whiteness may function as an invisible racial category that influences the lens through which the listener may hear certain voices (Ratcliffe, 2005).

Make and protect space: Mentors should never engage in exclusionary practices, such as using stereotypical language, engaging in microaggressions, or enacting privileged acts of socialization. Mentors should practice vigilance against and intolerance for implicit or explicit bias. In sum, mentors should make and protect spaces for all graduate student issues and concerns.

Efforts to enact a culture of equitable and accessible mentoring are in the interest of all stakeholders in higher education to realize a diverse future scholar population that will continue to enact change throughout our field and varied institutions.

¹Domains of mentorship include (but are not limited to) field knowledge; research practices; academic discourses and critical writing; classroom, tutoring, administration, and other work training and experience; networking; professional development (including conferences, publication, research grants, institutes, and so on); life-work balance; time-to-degree planning; as well as securing employment post-graduation in a range of possible settings, including positions in government, higher education, nonprofits, education, etc.

References and Further Resources

“#Alt-Ac Academy: a Media Commons Project.” #Alt-Ac Academy. http://mediacommons.org/alt-ac/

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life.  Durham: Duke UP.

Arao, B., & Clemens, K. (2013). From safe spaces to brave spaces. The art of effective facilitation: Reflections from social justice educators, 135-150.

Bérubé, M. (2013, Feb. 18).  The humanities, unraveled. The Chronicle of Higher Education, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Humanities-Unraveled/137291/.

Brooks-Gillies, M., Garcia, E.G., Kim, S.H., Manthey, K., & Smith, T.G. (2015). Graduate reading and writing across the disciplines, introduction [Special Issue]. Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning, and Academic Writing 12(3).  https://wac.colostate.edu/atd/graduate_wac/index.cfm

Eble, M.F., & Gallet, L. Lewis (2008). Stories of mentoring: Theory and praxis. Anderson: Parlor Press.

Edwards, K. (2006). Aspiring social justice ally development: A conceptual model. NASPA Journal 43(4), 39-60.

Golde, C. M. (1998). Beginning graduate school: Explaining first-year doctoral attrition. New Directions for Higher Education, 1998(101), 55-64. doi:10.1002/he.10105

Kendall, Frances E. (2003). How to be an ally if you are a person with privilege.  http://www.scn.org/friends/ally.html

Lopez, M. (n.d.) On mentoring first generation and graduate students of color. MLA Commons. https://clpc.mla.hcommons.org/on-mentoring-first-generation-and-graduate-students-of-color/

Micciche, L.R. with A. Carr (2011). Toward graduate-level writing instruction. CCC 62(3), 477-501.

Miller, S., Pereira, M., Rummell, K., Simon, K., & Walsh, R. (2015). Myth busting the job search. ADE Bulletin, 154, 77-85.

MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. (2014). Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. The Modern Language Association of America.. https://apps.mla.org/pdf/taskforcedocstudy2014.pdf

Okawa, G. Y. (2002). Diving for pearls : Mentoring as cultural and activist practice among academics of color. College Composition and Communication, 53(3), 507–532.

Patel, V.S. (2011). Moving toward an inclusive model of allyship for racial justice. The Vermont Connection 32, 78-88.

The Ph.D. Placement Project. (2013). The Ph.D. Placement Project. The Chronicle of Higher Education,  https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/phd/

Ratcliffe, K. (2005). Rhetorical listening: Identification, gender, whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Rogers, K. (2013). Humanities unbound: Supporting careers and scholarship beyond the tenure track. Scholarly Communication Institute, http://katinarogers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Rogers_SCI_Survey_Report_09AUG13.pdf

Sinanan, A. (2016). The value and necessity of mentoring African American college students at PWIs. The Journal of Pan African Studies (Online), 9(8), 155-166.

Smith, S. (2012). At the crossroads: Transforming doctoral education in the humanities. ADE Bulletin 152, 7-16.

VanHaitsma, P., & Ceraso, S. (2017). “Making it” in the academy through horizontal mentoring.” Peitho, 19(2), 210-233. http://peitho.cwshrc.org/making-it-in-the-academy-through-horizontal-mentoring/

Wright, G., ed. (2016). The mentoring continuum: From graduate school through tenure. Syracuse: Graduate School Press Syracuse University.

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

This year CCCC is piloting a mentorship initiative for graduate students who will be applying for jobs in the next cycle (2020-21). Volunteer mentors from among the CCCC membership will assist with the following:

• general consultation/discussion of career planning, the state of the market, interpreting job ad language
• feedback on letter and CV
• practice interview with feedback (via video or phone)
• practice interview with feedback (in person at the CCCC Convention in Milwaukee)
• follow-up communication

Because this is a new pilot initiative, we will be limiting the number of participants to 20, prioritizing first-come-first-served, student need, and inclusivity. Participants must be members of CCCC. If you’re interested in receiving mentoring, please fill out this survey form by October 18, 2019.

Thank you for considering the role of session chair the CCCC Annual Convention! The session chair’s role is an important one to ensuring that the Convention runs smoothly. These guidelines provide an overview for serving as a session chair.

Before the Convention

Contact the presenters in your assigned session and introduce yourself. You can access contact information by logging into the unique URL to your presenter portal.

Request outlines or papers and other presentation material from panelists so you can familiarize yourself with the presentations included on your panel prior to the Convention. Use this information to help develop introductions, transitions, and possible questions to use during the session.

Remind presenters to consider accessibility as they prepare their presentations (e.g., creating materials in accessible formats, ensuring text and images are large and easy to read from a distance, captioning all audio and video materials). Encourage them to visit the Composing Access; the site has multiple resources on preparing accessible presentations.

Encourage your panelists to make their materials available online prior to the Convention.

During the Session

Arrive early and connect with all panelists: confirm speaker order, double check pronunciation of names and introduction information, and review how the session will run. Determine how time signals will be given and how time limits will be handled.

Introduce the session. Provide the overall session title and, if needed, a brief overview of the session (e.g., the presentation order or the common topic or theme connecting all presentations). Name all presenters at the beginning of the session, but wait until it’s the presenter’s turn to speak before giving a full individual introduction. Remind audience members to hold their questions until the end to ensure all presenters get the full speaking time they were allotted and prepared for.

Introduce each speaker, including affiliation/title and the title of the presentation.

Keep time: no more than 12–15 minutes per presenter to allow a full 15 minutes (and ideally more) at the end of the session for Q&A and discussion.

As needed, assist with distribution of presenters’ print materials during the session.

If relevant, provide some closing remarks that will help initiate discussion during the Q&A period. Ideally, be prepared with a question or observation about each presenter’s work to ensure all presenters have a chance to participate in the post-presentation discussion.

If someone is employing an ASL interpreter in your session, be sure the interpreter is positioned in a clear, well-lit place up front.

Moderate the discussion: repeat audience members’ questions so the whole room can hear them; direct questions to the appropriate presenter(s); try to balance participation among audience members and presenters to the extent possible; and keep the discussion flowing.

When the session time is over, stop discussion and thank presenters. Encourage presenters and audience members to continue conversations outside the session room to allow the next group of presenters ample time to set up.

If possible, help facilitate post-presentation discussion and information dissemination by posting to social media about the session, by encouraging presenters to make their materials available online, by inviting continued discussion after the session, etc.

Thank you to the following CCCC 2022 Documentarians!

Kelly I. Aliano, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

Emily Plummer Catena, Florida State University

Chen Chen, Winthrop University

Trace Daniels-Lerberg, University of Utah

Alexander Evans, Cincinnati State Community and Technical College

Lauren Esposito, Marywood University

Jenn Fishman, Marquette University

Christa Fraser, University of California, Merced

Kat M. Gray, Virginia Tech University

Jennifer Grouling, Ball State University

Lena Hakim, Wayne State University

Megan Kane, Temple University

Vee Lawson, Michigan State University

Reymond Levy, Florida International University

Dr. Bryan A. Lutz, Ohio Northern University

Kate Maddalena, University of Toronto Mississauga

Pamela J. Mahan, Texas State University; University of Texas at San Antonio

Dr. Bunny McFadden, unaffiliated/independent scholar

Dan Metzger, Northeastern University

Sarah L. Morris, West Virginia University

Nitya Pandey, Florida State University

Stephanie Hassan Richardson, Georgia State University

Kylie Stocker, Tiffin University

Dr. Peggy Suzuki, New York University

Dr. Kimberly Thomas, New York University

Hailey Whetten, Marquette University

Jessie Wiggins, James Madison University

Kristina Wilson, DePaul University, Northwestern University