Reforming CCCC

In the last few days, there's been some good, thought-provoking discussion of the CCCC review process. The posts, in order: Jeff, Jenny, Jenny, Collin, Jenny, Jeff. Jenny, Jeff, and Collin are critiquing the conference for its tendency to accept panels on the same topics every year (service learning, plagiarism, "what I do in my classroom"), and while CCCC still presents a good opportunity to socialize, it lacks intellectual force and vitality, due in part to the review process. I agree, and I've heard others express similar frustration. I've been thinking about the panels I attend at Cs, and as one would expect, I attend panels based on my interests: technology (especially blogs and wikis), feminist rhetorics, and intellectual property. During blocks of time when no panels on these topics are offered, I usually attend the Featured Session with Great Big Name or a history of rhetoric panel or sessions on subjects I don't know much about, such as high-stakes testing or environmental rhetoric. Sometimes I attend friends' presentations just to be a friendly face in the audience, but it's rare (I know! I'm terrible!).

My point is, I, too, flip through the program and see many sessions that elicit the response, "absolutely not." And that's a problem. The proposal Jenny, Jeff, and Geoff had submitted sounds very exciting to me: writing the city, and each person had planned to talk about his or her city (Austin, Detroit, Minneapolis) and their students' engagement with these cities. This is important work, intersecting with geography and cultural studies, scholarship that not only presents a challenge to the ways writing is being taught, but also challenges disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps that's one problem with Cs; for a long time, scholars in rhetoric and composition have struggled to establish rhetoric and composition as a discipline, to procure legitimacy for it, and now that rhet/comp enjoys a status above fledgling (or does it? Taking the long view, I must admit it's no psychology, sociology, or anthropology.), the program chairs and reviewers want to hold our position? I'm not trying to suggest that program chairs and reviewers consciously think this, only that the impulse toward disciplinary coherence is strong, and proposals on new, unfamiliar topics might be at a disadvantage for this reason.

My view here is informed by Berkenkotter and Huckin's (1995) research; Collin, Jeff, and Jenny's posts inspired me to pull my copy of Genre Knowledge off the shelf and re-read the "Gatekeeping at an Academic Convention" chapter, which is all about 4Cs. In the chapter, Berkenkotter and Huckin interpret data from a longitudinal corpus study of a total of 441 4Cs abstracts from 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1992. They've got a lot to say, as you might expect, and I'm not going to go over it all in detail here. They comment on rhet/comp's status as a discipline:

Rhetoric and composition is a highly interdisciplinary field, not yet a true discipline unto itself, and the theme statements from recent CCCC conventions, including some we have not covered in this study, all reflect this fact. It is a field made up of diverse elements and interests, held together in an ever-changing constellation. But there seem to be at least three constants in the field: training in literary/humanistic studies, a commitment to pedagogy, and an interest in grounded (situated) research. (p. 114)

They provide some history of the conference, specifically that it started in 1949 and instituted blind review in 1992, and some details about the review process. They corroborate John's comments on Jeff's first post that the program chair has a great deal of authority and can not only, as John says, accept a proposal rejected by the reviewers, but also reject a proposal accepted by the reviewers. At the time of the study, reviewers were required to give each abstract a 1 (Weak), 2 (Adequate), 3 (Good), or 4 (Excellent). Berkenkotter and Huckin add, "A high score makes it likely that the paper will be included in the program, but does not guarantee it: Other factors, such as a balance of topics, broad geographical representation, and the program chair's particular interests, can intervene" (p. 97). The procedure may not be the same now, but Berkenkotter and Huckin's analysis of the criteria for acceptance stands. They point out that the reviewers look for topics "of current interest to active, experienced members of the rhetoric and composition community," a clearly defined problem, a framing of the problem "in a way that would be seen by experienced insiders as novel and therefore interesting," and "an insider ethos through the use of terminology, special topoi, and/or explicit or implicit references to the scholarly literature" (p. 102).

I find the "novelty" criterion to be the most germane to the critique being made here. It would seem the reviewers don't want groundbreaking research; they only want analysis that slightly extends existing scholarship and maintains disciplinary cohesion. The example Berkenkotter and Huckin provide is a high-rated proposal from 1990 on the concept of voice, which Berkenkotter and Huckin call "a timeworn topic familiar to all compositionists" (p. 110). The author of the proposal addresses the Derridean critique (and the critics) of "voice" and attempts to reconcile it with the position of those who are invested in "voice" as a pedagogically useful concept. She makes a distinction between using the term "voice" warily, which is good, and nervously, which is undesirable and unnecessary. Basically, they want novelty with a little n, not a big N. :)

I hope to find out what others think about the 4Cs review process. Do you think the review process is in need of reform? Collin, in his post, offers what I think is a superb idea: Establish a database of reviewers who truly are experts in their particular areas, instead of simply being friends with the program chair. It's a no-brainer, really; it would make the program chair's job easier, it would make the process fairer for the applicants, and it would improve the overall quality of the scholarship at the conference. Should we go even further and rethink the whole conference? Jenny reflects,

I almost like the idea of making it a huge conference of SIGs and letting the paper/panel model die. Maybe we could just propose and add our names to four or five SIGs and attend those. Everyone and anyone could participate in at least one SIG (thereby getting that all important "name on the program") and attend all the others you want.

You know, that's the way they did it at last year's BloggerCon, and by all accounts, it was great. Daisy might have some comments on this model, having attended BloggerCon.

UPDATE: Collin and Steve have follow-up posts well worth reading.

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B&H

That chapter is one I give out to as many graduate students a/o colleagues as I can. The fact that CCCC stopped making abstracts available for research (as they note at the end of the chapter) has contributed to the opacity of the system, or rather its opacity for those people who aren't FOAC. With as much emphasis as we place on clear expectations, assessment criteria, etc., in our classrooms, it's ironic to me that we're satisfied with the blackbox of CCCC decision-making.

cgb

A voice from the black box

I think I've read most of the postings in these cross-bloggings on the CCCC review process. I'm likely the only former C's chair to have done that, since so far I'm the only active blogger in that group, although some of them are blog readers.

Generating new ideas for organizing the conference has great merit. I suggest all those with ideas put them forward to members of the Executive Committee, that you volunteer to serve on C's committees, and that you consider running for C's office. And I'm not being coy here. C's is actually very responsive to member input. It's just that a lot of the talk doesn't get to the leadership.

I can offer my own perspective on some of the speculations about the review process that have been made in the various blog discussions. The list of reviewers develops from a mix of the forces Collin describes, and is not primarily a reflection of the chair's personal network. The first round of reviews--where most panels are judged--requires close to 70 reviewers across a broad set of topics. I had a list of those who had reviewed in previous years in various categories. The chairs immediately ahead of me were Wendy Bishop, Keith Gilyard, and Victor Villanueva. I consulted with each of them about specific reviewers in areas I didn't know well. I called on a number of previous reviewers, I approached new reviewers based on recommendations of others, and, here's where it can get specific, I insured that each topic had at least one two-year college reviewer, something that had not been done before. These were all established two-year college faculty who had participated in TYCA or CCCC leadership roles.

As for the topics: this is after the 1992 study Clancy references. There had been unhappiness that they did not reflect current concerns and emerging fields. But the job of putting out the call for proposals comes to the new assistant chair with not a lot of lead time. You are elected in October and you have to have your call ready for review by the Officers' meeting in mid-January. It goes to press not long after that so it's in the mail before the March conference.
Victor Villanueva devoted the November 99 Executive committee retreat to an intensive brainstorming about all the categories and sub-categories. I facilitated the discussion, took all the notes from all the groups, and revised the topics and sub-topics. They've been tweaked a couple times since then.

My year there were over 1500 submissions for perhaps 425 session slots. Kathi Yancey and Doug Hesse modified the schedule to try to make more sessions available. The number of meeting rooms in the hotel is the finite limit here. There's a strong mentoring tradition among the officers: Wendy helped me anticipate many problems in the process; I gave all the help I could to Shirley Wilson Logan.

I'll make another point. Like most professional organization, CCCC is led by volunteers. All the reviewers are volunteers, both first and second stage (the 10 who meet in Urbana to review individual proposals and organize them into panels). Not every one I asked agreed to review. That's a limitation in any approach. You may feel that so-and-so is the best expert in a given area, but so-and-so has to agree to do this work, and not be ill, and not be in Europe or Japan, etc. etc.

I can't speak for other Program Chairs, but once I had all the proposals in hand and access to this very funky database (C's has since upgraded), I did a lot of checking of proposals on topics that were not well-represented in the acceptances. And I found several proposals that I thought were scored too low and included them. The program chair has about 10% of the sessions for these purposes. And of course, some accepted panels change their minds and you have to fill in there. While I suppose it could have happened, I've never heard of a panel created by Stage II reviewers being rejected by a Chair.

I'm not trying to defend the WAY THINGS ARE, because my entire professional career has been about change, choice, and improvement in my own teaching and in our profession. The idea of more publicly developing the pool of reviewers has merit. My experience has been that CCCC has a strong membership orientation and is one of the most progressive organizations I've ever participated in. But maybe that's an "insider" view because I served on the Executive Committee for seven years in a row, first in the TYCA rotation and then in the CCCC Officer rotation. I was generally a voice for change, including asking the Committee on Women's Issues (not the correct name--it's late) why their membership included no males. I was the only Officer to vote for the initiative to support part-time/adjunct members with partial subsidies.

This discussion is a good one. It makes the concerns of members more public than they usually are. Now I suggest you all develop a plan of action for getting the views to the Officers and the Executive Committee and see how they respond.

John Lovas
De Anza College
I was CCCC Program Chair in 2001 in Denver.

This is all very fascinating

This is all very fascinating to me. One frustration I am now experiencing for a second year in a row is that if my proposal doesn't get accepted, as a poor graduate student, I cannot afford to go spend 5 days in San Francisco for any reasonable amount of money, and I cannot get funding from my department to go unless my proposal gets accepted.

I'd very much like to participate in the community, and I like this idea of the SIGs that might allow more people to go to the conference. The other reason I like it is that I've heard enough conference presentations where people just read a paper. I know we're interested in rhetoric as a field, but what are we doing as a field to insure we can use rhetoric both in our writing and speaking? I think SIGs might help with this collaborative model of composing we all seem to be harping on. Why have someone read a paper and then answer questions? Can't we move to something more like a sharing of ideas with something closer to equal participation for all voices? Of course that does mean risking something like allowing people to speak who may draw the field away from its establishment as a field. I simulatenously understand and am frustrated by the gatekeeping component to CCCC.

Hannah
Feminisms, Technologies, and Rhetorics

Gonna Go to the Place That's Best

The ratio of 1500 proposals: 452 slots underscores the conference's crisis. Could be the only way around the slot crunch is to regionalize Cs into three or four split venues. In theory, this kind of move would open up the conference(s) to more graduate students, moderate travel costs, and allow Cs to be generally more representative. And what would be compromised, exactly? Anything more than the field's wish for centeredness or the convenience of meeting times with colleagues scattered far and wide? I don't know what the ratio of proposals:slots is this year, but it will continue to be a problem for as long as Cs holds on to the idea of a single conference. Will the burst come when it hits 5000:452?

Might be worth reading Cs present predicament (re: too big) against its historical grabs for membership, particularly when the contested fourth C was formalized, when the role of two-year colleges came to bear, and when ESL and Zero English research reconciled places in the program. In 1953, when membership dipped to 339 (down from 446 in 1950), the scramble toward inclusion and, in effect, legitimacy by majority, had the conference considering "logic, literature, linguistics, semantics, grammar in the composition course; and we were asked to discuss the composition-communication course in the junior college, the liberal arts college, the technical and engineering college, in large schools and universities, in general education, and for the superior, the remedial, and the foreign student" (Gordon Wilson, CCCC in Retrospect). And sure those categories and, to a lesser extent, constituents have shifted over time. But those shifts remain gradual and, I'd argue, none too friendly to the work *least* familiar to the reviewers (which is pretty much what Collin has already pointed out). No good reason, from my humble perspective, that the conference should contribute to disenchantment with the field, professional attrition (in a profession where attrite forces are already plentiful) and untraceable exoduses at the expense of the NCTE. -DM

nice

Very nice breakdown and addition to the conversations going on.

jeff

In case you haven't heard it lately

Thanks, John, for putting on that conference. I was one of Wendy's grad students during the three year period she was involved in putting on 4C's, as well as good friends with Pavel Zemliansky, her assistant. I don't think I really ever want to know all of the complexities of being a 4C's program chair. Or can ever really appreciate the time involved, other than it seems to me Wendy could have written at least one book in the amount of time she seemed to spend on it. Although, maybe, since I'm using Wendy as the example, in her case it would have been three or four books :)

Thanks from me, too

What Charlie said: I have a great deal of respect for the work that the program chairs do, and if my comments have led anyone to think otherwise, I apologize. I know being a program chair is an enormous responsibility which not only includes setting the theme and tone for the conference and rounding up reviewers, but making sure deadlines are met, scoping out hotels, scheduling sessions, politicking and mediating, and a googol of other details. It's an awesome endeavor, and I'm grateful to everyone who has undertaken it.

Great Discussion

on all of the above hotlinked blogs. How do other large, academic professional organizations structure their conventions? Do they have conventions like the 4 C's, or are there other formats that they follow? I'm interested in hearing how we could reimagine structuring the yearly meeting.

--here's my question of the day: what if your 4 C's proposal WAS accepted? Does that make you part of the herd instead of the dynamic, state-of-the-profession dynamo that you thought you were? I myself am not concerned, but I have a friend. . . ;)

Joanna

Regionalizing

I made a major effort as Chair to get the EC to commit to supporting smaller regional conferences, to increase participation and make professional discussion more accessible to those with fewer resources, as you suggest. I even held the Officers' meeting the year I was chair in Monterey, CA and took the officers and staff to Asilomar, a conference center located next to Pebble Beach, for lunch to show them one alternative to the big city hotel-style conference. College Section of NCTE did a nice conference on Multicultural Literature at University of San Francisco last year, with lower housing costs than the hotel pattern. The ideas are out there, but they need some grass roots support.

My proposal was defeated by EC. Perhaps it didn't come with the kind of exigency suggested in these discussions. Part of the issue has to do with what NCTE staff can provide--they have lots of experience with big national conferences. Successful small conferences have been a problem. CCCC used to have the Winter conference, and we started losing tons of money on it. That was the context of my proposal--have conferences around the country on a variety of issues--especially cutting-edge stuff. You could still have the national conference. I think it would lead to greater membership and engage more younger scholars (who are not joining professional organizations at the rate of earlier times). I think there are lots of good ideas here and suggest they get forwarded to people you know on the Executive Committee or on C's committees. And you can always put resolutions before the business meeting on Saturday morning. If members press for a proposal, the leadership will make an effort to respond, within the resource limits.

John Lovas, again

Oh, and thanks Charlie. And no offense here, Clancy. Maybe blog discussions are a good way for members to discuss issues like these and then let leaders know about them.

Thanks

Thanks for this post, Clancy. I've been thinking about this thing for two years now (after I had two panels rejected). Something will have to change. I guess that's the main point that we have to start saying aloud. 4Cs *will* grow. Now, what are we gonna do about it?

-Jenny

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