Discipline

Human Subjects

~ Joyce ~ Leave a comment

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, YEOMEN'S SCHOOL, NAVAL TRAINING STATION: Newport, Rhode Island. In order to perform efficiently and expeditiously the clerical work on board a modern warship, yeomen must be proficient in stenography and typewriting; hence this group of young enlisted men resembling a class in a business college.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.

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Supporting Research, Creating Knowledge

~ Joyce ~ Leave a comment
Ivan Sakhnenko, The Anatomy Lesson
Ivan Sakhnenko, The Anatomy Lesson

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 see at 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.