The diverse stories CCCC Documentarians craft about their experiences help answer the question “What is a conference experience?”
Why Participate?
We’re hoping the Documentarian experience will
- help you make sense of your experiences at the 2025 CCCC Annual Convention in a more focused and purposeful way;
- allow you to compose a story that will be circulated to others in your professional community–others who need to hear it;
- invite you to set goals for future participation; and
- allow your voice to contribute to growth in the Convention and in the field more broadly.
What Does a Documentarian Do?
Before the Convention
- Complete an instructional module and the demographic survey.
During the Convention
- Complete daily surveys that will be delivered to you each morning and evening of the conference.
- Document your experience as you move through your day.
- Possibly map your locations as you move through each day of the Convention.
- Take notes on your experiences with people, panels, and events.
After the Convention
- Complete a reflective survey within one week after the Convention.
How Can I Join?
Every year, you have the opportunity to express your interest when you submit a proposal for the CCCC Annual Convention. Those who commit to being Documentarians in advance have a spot on the CCCC program.
However, you can still join later! To do so, email documentarianscccc@gmail.com.
Purpose of Documentarians
We’re hoping to use this experiential data for future Convention planning informed by a deeper understanding of varied, individual experiences—to learn, for example,
- what aspects of the Convention hold value for (which) attendees,
- what kinds of social and professional interactions take place and what makes them meaningful or valuable, and
- how people interact with planned Convention events and virtual spaces and how they potentially make their own spaces in pursuit of Convention experiences they desire.
We may also share portions of the anonymized information reported in the surveys with others in the wider professional community.
Why is Documentary-Making Important?
Documentary-making is a methodology of forecasting learning—because emergent stories (such as stories about a Convention we have not yet finished attending) are representations of things that the documentary makers did not yet know when they began documenting their experiences. And given this approach to their making, documentary stories are stories of learning. Telling documentary stories of learning is a task of recollection: making selections from the many documents generated along the path to the learning identified in the documentary story.
These evolving documentary stories are facilitated by acts of projection (prior to the experience) and collection (during the experience) directed at and by our knowledge of that future forensic act of recollection otherwise known as documentary storytelling (after the experience).
We offer that the more that documentaries can be recollections of documented events, the more they can enable discoveries of developing experiential learning (see Lindquist and Halbritter, 2019).
Your work as a Documentarian will inform two sorts of documentary stories:
- The story of the world we have in common, as an aggregate of diverse experiences
- The story of the world as you (yourself) experience it
Together, these stories comprise an archive of member experiences that can be used for learning about our field and Convention experiences.
History of the CCCC Documentarian Project
Inspired by the work of Documentarians for the Conference on Community Writing, the CCCC Documentarian Project took shape in 2019 in preparation for the 2020 Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Convention. Project leads Julie Lindquist, Bree Straayer, and Bump Halbritter designed a reflective survey protocol for Documentarians to use to gather notes on their experiences across the Convention week. The data provided by these reflective surveys allows CCCC to “learn more about the needs and experiences of its members” (Lindquist et al. 1); through reflecting on their experiences and reviewing them in light of the whole data set, Documentarians craft their stories for the CCCC audience.
In 2020, Documentarians reflected on their experiences during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, including during the week that CCCC was canceled. In 2021 and 2022, Documentarians explored their experiences during the all-online Convention events. In 2023 and 2024, Documentarians captured their experiences in Chicago and Spokane. The early work of the Documentarian project is captured in two volumes: Recollections from an Uncommon Time: 4C20 Documentarian Tales (NCTE / CCCC / WAC Clearinghouse, 2023) and Recollections from Our Common Places: 4C21–23 Documentarian Tales (NCTE / CCCC / WAC Clearinghouse, 2025).
In 2025, Adrienne Jankens and Jennifer Grouling assumed facilitation of the Documentarian project.
2025 Documentarians
Lisa Bailey
Clarissa Codrington
Sarah Dammeyer
John Paul Dela Rosa
Stephanie Hedge
Adrienne Jankens
Mirna Jimenez
Kayla Landers
Elizabeth Lopez
Quang Ly
Jenny McFadden
Donald Moore
Havva Zorluel Özer
Stephen Quigley
Cindy Ross
Lia Schuermann
Jennifer Grouling Snider
Evan Thomas
Katherine Tirabassi
Matthew Ussia
Nicole Weaver
Tom William
