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).