Depending on your worldview, you can see the CCCC as many things: guild, advocacy group, social club, publishing house, think-tank, NGO, research sponsor, and so on. But something you don’t really see at the convention is our role in representing our multi-faceted discipline to outside entities whose work impacts us.
Recently, the US Department of Health and Human Services has been soliciting feedback about proposed rules that would govern the protection of human subjects who participate in research projects. After considerable examination of the proposed rules, the CCCC decided to submit an official comment on the rule (see below).
Why worry about human subjects protection? Many of you do work on texts, images, videos, and other objects, and since they’re not people, those things do not fall under the category of human subjects.
However, many of us research people: ethnography, case study, classroom study, oral history, interview, literacy narratives, think-aloud protocol, and contextual inquiry, to name a few. And all of those approaches involve studying other humans; thus the proposed rule could have quite an impact on our field’s research.
This CCCC action originated with the CCCC Research Committee. Member Bradley Dilger coordinated their response. Their hard work—aided by the considerable wisdom of Karen Lunsford and Heidi McKee—deserves our thanks. To learn about tools integral to understanding the 500-page NPRM, please see Dilger’s site, which documents their process.
One of the best things I get to do as chair is work with our committees to evaluate and award research proposals, then mail those we have decided to fund with the good news. Yesterday, we sent out 12 letters informing those teams that their research proposals were funded, and you could see the ripple on Facebook, Twitter, and on various email lists.
Supporting research into our practices, our histories, our classrooms, and our identities isn’t just a feel-good action that the C’s undertakes, a gift to our members. That research benefits us all by becoming knowledge that is presented at the conference, published in our journals, and cited for years to come.
If you don’t think of yourself as a researcher, you should. Inquiry into why certain things happen is the hallmark of educated people and learned societies. The field needs curious and skeptical people to advance our understanding of language use, mastery of writing and composing, the conditions under which we do our work, to name but a few general areas.
“Curious” because we need good researchers who dig into darkened corners to follow the thread of discovery wherever it may lie.
“Skeptical” because we need researchers who ask themselves constantly questions like, “Is this necessarily so?” “Are there other effects at work here?” and “Is there enough evidence that other people can see, or is this just a hunch or a story?”
Helping such researchers achieve replicable, aggregable, and data supported results is an excellent investment in our members and our discipline. As you can seeat this CCCC link, our Research Initiative, now 12 years old, and considerably expanded in recent years, “invites proposals for research that employ diverse perspectives and methodologies including historical, rhetorical, qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic, and textual.”
The deadline is September 1 each year, and I encourage you to find some colleagues, perhaps in Houston at this year’s conference, formulate your research proposal, and let us see if we can help fund your research.
Note: This is the blurb about my talk at the opening session in Houston, April 7th. It’ll be printed in the program, but I wanted to share with the blogosphere.
We watch with concern the various external and internal scavengers that nibble away at our disciplinary, scholarly, and teacherly activities and autonomy, and we sometimes bemoan our position in the humanities as we rage against the machine of STEM political priorities. We sheepishly explain how important we are to the university and society, apologize while not apologizing even as we ask, like Oliver Twist, for some more because we know, we feel, that what we do is valuable—self-evidently valuable.
A Grazing Encounter Between Two Spiral Galaxies (Hubble)
Despite that belief, the value of what we do is not self-evident to anyone outside this room. That value is a proposition that has to be argued, not just once, but over and over, in many forms, from stories to empirical data, and in many settings, from governing bodies to the popular press.
Many of us have difficulty balancing the good we do versus the need to argue for it constantly, about contextualizing our priorities as writers, researchers, and teachers within organizational strategies and mission statements. We are empowered by the stability of a maturing discipline and its centrality in the cosmos, but we also fear the instability of politics, economics, and society as they seek to “fix” what’s wrong with education. We are both on the vanguard and in the crosshairs.
I would argue that we act within this conflicted milieu cautiously, moving slowly, pursuing incremental change, a runcible process from a position of what we already know to a new position of what we also know. And this isn’t a criticism: such an approach comes rationally from working under bureaucracies, time and space constraints, budgets, and material reality. I think this condition applies equally to our classrooms as to this conference, this organization.
At last year’s CCCC Convention in Tampa, I invited the membership to think differently about the conference and about our discipline with a theme of Risk and Reward. I attempted to disrupt the conservatism of incremental change by instituting new modes of presentation, such as the Action Hub for working and learning together, poster sessions so that more members could get on the program, and Ignite presentations that highlighted member innovation.
In this year’s chair’s address, “Making, Disrupting, Innovating,” I continue that theme by making the somewhat risky case that we need to push ourselves well outside of our own comfort zone as an organization and a discipline, much as we ask our students to do. I argue that, in addition to well-known and celebrated threshold concepts of our field, writing is also about making, disrupting, and innovating—on the page, in the classroom, in our programs, in this organization, within our field and beyond to the broader world of higher education, the workplace, and society.
The term “disruptive innovation” has been fashionable amongst high tech gurus and organizational theorists for fifteen years, and refers to the need to abandon traditional practices that, while comfortable, are ultimately harmful precisely because of their comfort. While the concept sometimes evokes a mindless (and needless) overthrow of conventions, it also serves as an encouraging nudge for innovators upon whose inventions such disruption depends.
We are those disruptors, those dreamers of dreams—or at least I argue that we can be. I think we should make more disruption and less accommodation. We should focus more on making and makers and less on outcomes assessment and bureaucrats. We should celebrate writing innovation, and encourage innovation in writing, writing research, writing programs, and writing organizations.
I invite you to attend this talk, where I plan to get out of my own comfort zone, share/enact examples of disruptive practices in teaching, conferencing, researching, and writing, and brainstorm with you how we may see with new eyes and new methods the innovative and disruptive possibilities of our organization and our discipline.
When someone asks how many members the C’s has, I often waffle a little bit, not because I don’t know the answer, but because of the semantics of “membership.”
If you’ll look at your membership card or your convention registration information, you’ll notice that you pay annual membership dues to the NCTE, not CCCC. That’s because the CCCC is a conference of NCTE, not a separate organization with its own tax ID and own membership rolls.
But there are at least three methodologies we can use to answer the question.
First, when you join NCTE, you check a little box about which voting section you want to belong to (elementary, middle, secondary, or college). Currently 6,612 members have “College” marked as their voting section.
Second, we can count NCTE members who want to take CCC as their journal—that number currently stands at 5152, and is the figure we typically give when pressed on the question of number of C’s members.
Third, we can count those who register for the spring convention. At our 2015 convention in Tampa, 3,376 registered and 60 more attended as part of local committee or exhibitors = 3436 in all.
What story do these numbers tell? The difference in the college section numbers and the CCC numbers probably come from the fact that NCTE registers a lot of members from English Education, and while many of them belong to the College Section, they don’t necessarily attend the C’s.
And although you can’t see it, the number of registrations at any given C’s is not the same people every year. One segment of those members (perhaps 40%) will attend every convention. Another segment (30-40%) are long-time members who will attend the convention only when it’s geographically close. And the final segment (perhaps 20-25%) are new members who take advantage of the fact that a big national convention is coming to their geographic area.
The reason we have to guess is that we don’t ask you about your attendance patterns (although we do know who’s attending for the first-time). We have to use database analytics to try to develop these attendance patterns to be completely accurate, but these percentages are good enough for now to illustrate the makeup of a convention.
I’ll blog about this later, but these registration patterns confirm that a) location matters and b) our efforts (Newcomers Committee, C’s the Day game, and general collegiality by all of us) to make first-timers feel welcome have a material and meaningful impact on membership. Why? Location matters because a substantial block of members skip the convention every two or three years because it’s on the other side of the country. Welcoming efforts matter because some of the first-timers get hooked and will attend subsequent conventions—we think that number may be 10-20% of first-timers.
Note: There are many other numeric ways to look at convention activity. For fun and edification, please check out chenchen328’s analysis of the Twitter stream that used our official hashtag #4C15, and which generated 19,840 tweets during March 2015: http://www.tweetarchivist.com/chenchen328/1. I don’t think anyone has done this, but we ought to correlate Twitter activity to both membership and conference registration. If there’s substantial interest out there in the world from people who don’t/can’t attend the convention, or who don’t belong to NCTE, could there be room for an alternate type of membership/participation?
many of us research people: ethnography, case study, classroom study, oral history, interview, literacy narratives, think-aloud protocol, and contextual inquiry, to name a few. And all of those approaches involve studying other humans; thus the proposed rule could have quite an impact on our field’s research.
