Today is my last day as Chair of the CCCC, and while it seems like only yesterday that I stepped up in a blog post called Solstice, a lot has happened this year.  I’ll leave it to you to read the chair’s report in the Dec 2016 issue of CCC for the nitty gritty of what I think we accomplished this year, but I’d like to share some thoughts on what it’s like, personally, to have been in this position, as well as some long-range thoughts on the organization.

Other than some high-visibility moments like running last year’s convention or giving this year’s address, the chair spends almost all of her term tending the rules, budgets, and problems of the organization and its members.  The officer’s committee (chair, past chair, associate chair, assistant chair, and secretary) meet monthly, either face-to-face or teleconference, to touch base on tasks remaining, new budget information, and upcoming actions.  This committee is enabled and activated by Kristen Suchor, NCTE liaison and  institutional memory of our organization, Jessie Moore, Secretary and wise soul, Shelly Rodrigo, parliamentarian, strategist, and overall Sturgis-master, and Emily Kirkpatrick, the NCTE Executive Director and powerhouse.

So the chair (and the officer’s committee) does the following things, most of which you don’t see:

• follow up member-based resolutions and motions from last convention
• write and rewrite statements
• review and revise position statements
• allocate moneys to approved projects
• create new projects (with funding and logistics hopefully thought-out)
• name members to fill vacant positions
• help each other do our respective tasks
  • Assistant chair with the call for papers
  • Associate chair with convention logistics
  • Chair with making good decisions
• populate all award committees and ensure they review nominations and issue awards timely (thanks to all who served this year, by the way)
• formally award all scholarships and awards
• inform members of their awards (one of the best things, by the way)
• review the progress of all ongoing projects in terms of outcomes and budgets
• receive requests from editors, committees, standing groups, and members. These run from the mundane to the downright colorful.
• coordinate with the NTCE (the chair and associate chair serve on the NCTE’s Executive Committee, which has its own set of responsibilities and aggressive meeting schedule)
• think strategically about trends and the future of the C’s

This last point is really important, but can be lost in the blizzard of bureaucracy. But the Chair and the Officer’s committee, as well as the Executive Committee, must pay attention to overall health of the C’s and look ahead to trends that affect us. As I depart the Chair’s position, I offer a few key trends I believe continue to be vital for our organization to monitor:

Membership continues to shrink, even as the convention registration remains quite strong . We take this to mean that the experience of a convention is valuable, but that the benefits of the other 51 weeks’ worth of membership is not clear to our members. Since we are a membership-driven organization, this is a problematic trend.

Writing instruction, especially what we’d traditionally call first-year composition, or Comp I, or intro to college writing, continues to move out of college classrooms and into high school, or dual-credit, classrooms.  I think it is inevitable that nearly all FYC will be taught outside of college, probably within the next 10 years.  As a guild of writing professionals, we have to figure out what that means for us.

Technology in the form of ubiquitous computing and portable devices is having a profound influence on literacy.  How do writers and readers do their work when all their reading, writing, revising, note-taking, collaboration, and drafting has to take place on small screens, enabled by voice-input, typed with thumbs, “corrected” by auto-correct, mirrored in the cloud on all their devices, and promulgated in non-text (emojis or Snap) or small-text (Twitter) formats?  Our organization should research this issue and weigh in on best practices for writers, readers, and instructors.

We are apparently living in a post-truth, or perhaps post-rational, world. Maybe it’s just me, trained in classical rhetoric and modern argumentation theory, but I feel quite lost when my understanding of the foundation of good rhetoric (the giving of good reasons via solid rhetorical appeals in a shared rationality) feels irrelevant or bypassed.  I have a lot of trouble re-casting rhetoric as something less than noble deliberation among parties who have shared values and who want to revolve conflicts.  In any case, our discipline has an opportunity to understand this concept of rhetorical action (even as propaganda, gulp, and a nod to Trish Roberts-Miller), and give our members some guidance on implications for research, teaching, and service to our society.

In order to deal with these issues, I think we need to foster the best and the brightest from our discipline to research issues, publish findings, innovate in the classroom and the marketplace, and participate in CCCC—meeting with member-groups, running for elected office, and volunteering to serve in any number of research, teaching, or service committees.

I have tried to open up our historically opaque organization to such opportunities, and I have a lot of confidence in the sequence of next chairs (Linda, Carolyn, and Asao) to continue such efforts.  I urge you to take us up on this invitation:  to propose something big and audacious (while do-able and budget-able, of course) that addresses our thorny issues.  I think the long-range health of our organization, as well as our discipline, depends on such action and creativity.

This year has been fun, challenging, frustrating, and quite rewarding. I consider it the highlight of my professional career to serve my field as Chair of the C’s and to work with such energized colleagues. Thanks for giving me the opportunity.

 

At the most recent meeting of the CCCC Executive Committee (NCTE in Atlanta), we enacted this Statement on Language, Power, and Action.

 

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?

 

 

While a majority of our organization’s efforts lie in planning and conducting our spring get-together, we also take to heart the highlighted phrase (below) from the NCTE constitution that authorizes the CCCC:

Conferences are authorized by the Executive Committee of the Council for specific or indefinite terms with the principal responsibility for holding meetings for exchange of views on specific professional topics…. A conference when authorized shall have the responsibility for planning its meetings and interim activities, subject to the approval of the Executive Committee of the Council…. All individual voting members of a conference shall also be members of the Council.

Those interim activities are quite robust:

• Overseeing our academic journals, College Composition and Communication and College Composition and Communication Online
• Managing our book series Studies in Writing and Rhetoric
• Sponsoring FORUM
• Awarding research with our CCCC Research Initiative, which funded 13 research projects last year
• Finding and recognizing winners for our ~20 research, travel, and service awards and grants.
• Researching issues in the field and developing position statements
• Participating in NCTE advocacy efforts at the federal level
• Working with our newly created CCCC Policy Fellow
• Issuing statements about timely issues
• Coordinating with other learned societies
• Supporting innovative projects proposed by our members
• Developing and housing databases of living and relevant information for our field

So we take to heart the etymology of “conference” (L conferre,  con– + ferre to carry or bear) as a sense of conferring/working together throughout the year in addition to convening or coming together at our spring convention (L convenīre, con– + venīre to come).

In this election season, it’s tempting to ask CCCC or NCTE to issue a statement for or against a presidential candidate. Don’t count on it. We are organized as a 501(c)(3) organization, which means is that we should not do the following:

• carry on propaganda
• attempt to influence legislation
• participate in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office (and this includes publishing or distributing statements)

The good news is that while we are utterly forbidden from participating in any political campaign, we are allowed some degree of lobbying (trying to influence legislation). But the tax code makes it very clear that such activities can’t be a substantial amount of our activity (it’s safe to say we stay well below that limit). Please see the NCTE Statement on Lobbying for full information.

In talking with lawmakers and regulators, what do you think our organization’s priorities should be? What are your personal priorities? What about the broader field’s priorities?

NCTE sponsors an annual Advocacy Day, where members are invited to Washington to meet their legislators and tell them about issues of literacy and education they care about. The next such event is Feb 25, 2016, and you’re all invited to participate.

Just don’t ask us to contribute to a campaign or write an endorsement for a candidate (or group of candidates). As tempting as that is, we just can’t do it.

At our annual CCCC convention, we typically register 3000-3500 people. While most of those registrations take place in advance of the convention, quite a large number of registrations take place on-site. This probably means that while long-term members register in advance, people near convention cities attend because it’s a big convention that’s close.

We have felt, therefore, that keeping the convention moving every year increases access, on average, to all attendees. Depending on where you live, two-thirds of the time the convention city ought to be no further than one airline hop (or, if you’re so inclined, a reasonable drive). Unfortunately, the other third of the time, you may have quite a commute. We’ll talk about this in later blog posts, but the available of travel moneys is a major factor in enabling members to attend the conference. The other economic factor is the cost of housing. Actual registration costs represent a miniscule portion of a member’s convention budget.

There may be alternative meeting structures that can mitigate those costs to our members, and it’s worth exploring those alternatives. But I also think the bell will not toll for face-to-face meetings any time soon, as too many of us value the camaraderie, collaboration, and improvisation between members as we share ideas, argue with each other, and work through the issues of our discipline in real time.

While the C’s held its first conventions in the 50s in the Midwest or New York City, we have been moving around ever since the 60’s, generally in a pattern like this: East, Central, West, Central, East, Central, and so on…. After this year in Houston, the sun also rises on our future meetings as they go west to Portland (2017), then central Kansas City (2018), then east Pittsburgh (2019), then central Milwaukee (2020). We are set to choose the west city for 2021 in the next few months.

For your visual enjoyment, here’s a map of all our conventions. Single red dots are cities that have hosted only one meeting. Darker red dots with numbers indicate cities that have hosted us multiple times. Green dots are the future meetings. As you can see, Chicago holds the record with 10 conventions, followed by St. Louis and New York with 5, and Minneapolis and San Francisco with 4.

Today is the shortest day of the year, at least in the northern hemisphere. Here in Texas, the sun appears on the southeastern horizon, soars across the sky low in the south and, after a mere 9 hours and 55 minutes, dips out of view in the southwest.

Your experience varies, of course, depending on your location on the globe, but it seems to me this is as good a date as any to begin my work as chair by reflecting on our organization, our discipline(s), and the work that stands before us.

And my view from 33.582° N, 101.79° W, is that while time is short in many respects, there is also an incredible and expansive range of possible futures for us. The following is a list (in no particular order or comprehensiveness) of topics that are both challenges and opportunities for the C’s.

• Inclusiveness. The C’s has worked diligently for decades to create a welcoming and inclusive organization. From the creation of the Scholars for the Dream Award (1993) to the Luiz Antonio Marcuschi Travel Awards (2012), the C’s has been reaching out to underrepresented groups to join, participate, and help guide our organization. Challenge: this task is never complete, and we must continue to work to maintain an equitable and representative organization. Opportunity: new ways of engagement, more transparency of operations to encourage more participation, reach out to new and continually underrepresented populations (international teachers/researchers, contingent faculty, graduate students and retired members, to brainstorm a few)
• Definition. What exactly do we do and how should we do it? What about the line between spoken and written language? What about multicultural and multilingual approaches to composition? How does technology, social media, non-verbal communication impact our definitions? Challenge: harder and harder to promulgate a single vision of what it means to be literate, what good writing is, and how to adapt to changing expectations. Opportunity: create an organization and a culture that embraces all types of communication, representing new modalities in our governance, our scholarship, and our convention. 
• Organizational Actions. What should we be doing? Just meeting? Advocating? Publishing? Making the whole world a better place, or just focusing on the writing classroom? The mission statement gives us broad concepts, but no guidance as to how to be (conservative or progressive, growing or contracting, canonical or expansive). Challenge: organizational fragmentation with smaller and more specialized constituencies who want more focused action and direction—it’s harder and harder for such a big organization to maintain one coherent vision in that setting. Opportunity: while it’s not possible to do everything, we need to have a deep and honest discussion about what we can do and how we want to be, and then make the space and the exigency for those multiple voices and visions. It may mean inventing/experimenting with a completely different organizational structure or culture, but the mission should drive the organizational structure, not the other way around. 
• Playground issues. More learned societies out there, more competition for travel money and mindshare. But that means more opportunities for partnerships and coalitions. Can we work and play well with others? Challenge: we need to work harder to make the case that the C’s is worth joining and attending. Opportunity: more perspectives, cross-disciplinary opportunities, more diversity of background and opinion.
• Vertical Disintegration. Dual Credit and Advanced Placement is already eroding FYC, and will probably succeed in moving all first-year writing instruction out of higher education within the next 10 years. Do we fight to retain this market, or do we pivot to others, such as writing in the disciplines, advanced writing, writing in the workplace, etc? Challenge: we may be losing a key component of our long-held identity. Opportunity: composing and communicating happens everywhere, and not just in FYC classrooms.
• Location, location, location. Does the convention always have to be a big affair that has inherent financial burden on travelers? Is there room for virtual meetings or smaller, more localized meetings? Challenge: we’ve always done conventions this way. Opportunity: the world is filled with good models of participation that make use of alternative structures.
• Audience Awareness. With social media filled with hyperbole, lists of things (#10 blew my mind!), and light-speed refresh/update, how do we disseminate our carefully- (and slowly-) crafted position statements and other collective thoughts better and faster? Challenge: we’re not set up to do that. Opportunity: we can learn how to be more influential, more relevant.

What have I missed? What would you add to the list?