CLiC-May2011_LL

Texas A&M-Commerce

Converging Literacies Center (CLiC)

White Paper

May 2011

“Writing Democracy in the Engaged University”

Shannon Carter, Associate Professor of English

Department of Literature and Languages

Texas A&M-Commerce

([email protected])

http://www.shannoncarter.info

Executive Summary: Request the opportunity to establish Texas A&M-Commerce’s Converging Literacies Center

(CLiC) as an official research center within the Texas A&M University System.

Created in 2007, the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) is an interdisciplinary, collaborative effort to promote a better understanding of how texts and related literacy practices may develop, sustain, or even erode civic engagement across local publics, especially among historically underrepresented groups. Pursuant to the Texas A&M University System Policy for the “Creation of Centers and Institutes,” the current paper offers “a rationale for creating the entity, its impact on the education and training of students, the sources and future expectations of financial support, the governance and advisory structure, and the mechanisms for periodic review" (Policy 11.02.1). In 2008, Richard Selfe (Ohio State University) served as outside consultant for CLiC, offering a series of recommendations based on his two-day visit with stakeholders across the campus. White paper thus includes responses to key recommendations and describes CLiC activities in its first four years, focusing in their impact.

C

2007- Carter attends DMAC, Ohio

State University; CLiC is established

2008-Dunbar-Odom attends DMAC,

OSU, Outside Consultant visit (Selfe, OSU), Partnership with CWPA (MoU) to create National Conversation on Writingdatabase (Gee Library), National Search for new Literacy Studies Scholar (Adkins, PhD, U of Louisville)

2009-Writing with New Media

(graduate course); CLiC begins first documentary; Commerce Week on Writing; CLiC Talks est.

2010-Texas Historical Marker

(Mt.Moriah); Oral History Interviews;

BWe (2009/2010 issue published);

archival projects (national, local)

2011-CLiC Documentary (complete);

Writing Democracy conference;

Kairos special issue on digital

scholarship by undergraduate researchers

*abbreviated list

1. MISSION

The mission of the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) is to promote a better understanding of how texts and related literacy practices may develop, sustain, or even erode civic engagement across local publics, especially among historically underrepresented groups. With a view toward promoting more robust public discussion, CLiC supports historical, theoretical, and empirical research on rhetoric and writing as manifested in everyday local contexts and over time. CLiC is highly attentive to new media’s role in our increasingly literate lives, thus projects emerging from and informing CLiC often engage new media as both object of inquiry and the form through which these findings are communicated. Likewise, CLiC develops educational and outreach initiatives designed to address relevant civic issues.

2. OVERVIEW

Established in 2007, the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) is an interdisciplinary site for the study, teaching, and support of writing and writers in everyday contexts. In that writing in 21st century contexts is increasingly digital, CLiC studies and supports writing with new

media (sound, video, images) as much as it does more traditional forms of writing (print, alphabetic texts). In that extensive research in

literacy studies has revealed literacy practices as fundamentally place-based, people-oriented, and dynamic (Street 1991, 2003; Street and Heath 2008; Gee 1989, 1999, 2003; Royster), CLiC attends to the

everyday, local dimensions of writing and writers by promoting research and preservation projects that document the ways in which literacy has manifested itself across regions like Northeast Texas and

among populations like the ones Texas A&M-Commerce serves: at once rural and increasingly urban (suburban), agricultural and increasingly technological, grounded in the local and shaped by the larger global factors that likewise condition local publics across the nation. Poverty is common, wealth increasingly concentrated; local publics such as those across North Texas are (almost simultaneously) fluid and static, homogenous and diverse, integrated and segregated, conservative and staunchly liberal (see O’Donald and Wilkison’s The Texas Left, 2010).

By leveraging existing resources, CLiC has taken a leadership role in “returning [Texas A&M-Commerce] to our roots” as an engaged institution (Kellogg Commission, “Returning to Our Roots,” 2001).

Established in 1889 in direct response to community need, A&M-C’s

122-year history of providing local citizens with rhetorical training for civic engagement (Gold 2005, 2009) make it an ideal site for a research center like CLiC. Extended studies of literacy practices and

rhetorical training in Northeast Texas throughout the 20th _{and 21}st

centuries have much to offer scholars, teachers, students, and policy makers across the nation: about rural literacies (Donehower et. al., 2007), about local literacies (Barton and Hamilton 1994, 1998; Heath 1983), about the “limits of the local” (Brandt and Clinton 2002), about rhetorical instruction for historically underrepresented groups at non-elite institutions (Gold; Hobbs), about community literacy (Long 2010; Parks 2010; Goldblatt 2009; Flowers).

“To understand writing,” Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior insist, “we need to

explore the practices that people engage in to produce texts as well as the ways that writing practices gain their meanings and functions as dynamic elements of specific cultural settings” (2). This is precisely what CLiC is attempting to do. The engaged institution—one

that is responsive, respectful of its partners’ needs, accessible and relatively neutral, while successfully integrating

institutional service into research and teaching and finding sufficient resources for the effort—does not create itself. Bringing it into being requires

leadership and focus.

--“Returning to Our Roots,” Kellogg

Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities, 2001

THE FIRST FOUR YEARS* 1. Scholarship Published

Two monographs (State University of New York Press)

16 articles in highly competitive, peer-reviewed journals

2. Scholarly Presentations

52 presentations at national conferences

31 presentations at regional and local conferences

3. Additional Publications

Five textbooks

Four issues of scholarly journal (national, senior editor)

Two Special Issues of scholarly journals (national, guest editor) 4. Public Scholarship

One documentary (complete)

One documentary (in progress)

One digital installation

One Historical Marker

One grant

14 video essays

11 websites and blogs 5. Grants Submitted (national)

One NSF grant (unfunded)

Two NEH grants (under review)

One NEH grant (unfunded)

One Spencer Foundation grant 6. Grants Funded and in process

One Humanities Texas (funded)

One NEH grant (in process) 7. Public Events (local)

14 “CLiC Talks”

One Commerce Week on Writing, including

Seven interdisciplinary events *abbreviated list

3. RATIONALE

CLiC works from the premise that literacy is “context-dependent, thus inextricably bound to everyday lives” (Carter, The Way Literacy Lives, SUNY P, 2008). That interdependence means that literacy changes over time. As Deborah Brandt explains in her award-winning study Literacy

in American Lives, “literacy abilities are nested in and sustained by

larger social and cultural activity” (Cambridge UP, 2001). In a very real sense, then, literacy itself may be understood as a cultural, “living,” socially mediated and reproduced activity with existing life spans. As the research has shown, literacy standards haven’t just risen; what it means to be literate actually changes over time, and life spans of particular literacy practices have become increasingly shorter amidst the incredible changes brought about by the rapid proliferation of

technology in the 21st _{century (Selfe and Hawisher 2004). In other}

words, literacy is more than a skill-set. Literacy may be productively understood as “living,” perhaps in an evolutionary sense. Literacy responds to societal needs, and those needs change as our environments change (Adkins 2011).

Shifts like these demand further study, and CLiC is appropriately

positioned to support and promote toward this

end relevant research,

teaching, and service activities.

Economic conditions impact writing practices and rhetorical agency as well, thus CLiC research

engages class politics (Dunbar-Odom, Defying the Odds, SUNY P,

2007). Nancy Welch has argued that when we “rhetoricize social class,” we “shift our definition of [working] class from a focus on cultural identity to a focus on one’s available means for exercising decision-making power within and against privatization’s strict limits on public rights and voice, including in the workplace” (Living Room 2008). For a case in point, consider Sam Rayburn (this institution’s most famous alumnus) and the US Congressional District this congressman represented between 1913 and 1961. Throughout much of the 20th century, rural conditions and poverty defined North Texas. Forever loyal to the (white) farmers and small business owners who were his

constituency, Rayburn was fond of saying: “I want my people out of the mud and I want my people out of the dark.” Rayburn’s advocacy for rural electrification helped bring power to the remote farms (Rural Electrification Act, 1936). His first-hand accounts of the harsh, muddy soils of the region helped justify the paving of multiple farm-to-market roads, vastly improving access and connectivity among farmers in remote areas businesses in town. Though Rayburn was himself a long-time segregationist serving a conservative southern district widely opposed to civil rights legislation, he was also a fiercely loyal democrat representing his constituency and his country in a rapidly changing world. As Speaker of the House, this mentor to LBJ was instrumental in passing the most significant civil rights legislation since the

Reconstruction: the Civil Rights Bill in 1957.

The Local Matters

What the academic offers to his or her local culture is the intellectual power of theoretical abstraction that derives from an academic discipline. The locality, in return, offers to the academic the particularity, the concreteness, of lived experience in time and place. The language and thought of each academic public life w[ill] both be recognized and changed in a civic conversation” (Bender, Intellect and Public Life, 145)

PARTNERS

In the last four years, CLiC has worked closely with numerous individuals and programs.*

CAMPUS

Gee Library (esp., Greg Mitchell,

Andrea Weddle, Adam Northam, Craig Wheeler)

Instructional Technology (esp., Joe

Shipman and Michael Lewandowski)

Media Services (esp., Mike Smith and

Jeremy Gomez)

Technology Services (esp., Mike Cagle,

Chris Jones, and Jeff Faunce)

Art (esp., Vaughn Wascovich and

Josie Durkin)

RTV (John Mark Dempsey and Tony

DeMars)

KETR (Jerrod Knight) Writing Center Writing Programs COMMUNITY

Commerce Public Library Norris Community Center Norris Community Club

Mt. Moriah Temple Baptist Church (Commerce)

Norris School

Commerce Office of Cultural Affairs (COCA)

Corporation for Cultural Diversity(CCD), Greenville, TX Hunt County Historical Association (Greenville, TX)

North Texas History Center Collin County Historical Association (McKinney, TX) Plano African American Museum NATIONAL

National Consortium for Writing Across Communities (NWAC) Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) Council of Basic Writing (CBW)

*abbreviated list

It is in this sense that local rhetoric both connects—at time literally— and separates us to/from one another and the rest of the nation/world. In this respect, as well, CLiC is uniquely positioned to make significant

contributions to campus, community, national, and scholarly

conversations about rhetoric and writing in a participatory

democracy. Models

CLiC builds upon a long and expansive tradition of research centers in rhetoric and writing studies, the vast majority of which “include both quantitative and qualitative research methods, initiate collaborations across disciplines, stud[y] diverse groups of writers, and examine writing in both academic and nonacademic settings” (Gogan et. al., 340). Modeled after well-established research centers like the Writing in

Digital Environments (WIDE) Initiative at Michigan State University

and the Center for Writing Studies at University of Illinois, our proposed Center is concerned with supporting literacy learning and research into how such literacy development occurs. As A&M-Commerce differs from MSU and UIUC in both size and student population, the research opportunities available at our proposed center necessarily differ as well. Indeed, other established research centers in rhetoric and writing studies, including the Digital Writing and

Research Lab at the University of Texas-Austin (established in 1980),

draw their research opportunities from student populations most typical of these far more selective institutions and communities often far more urban than the ones A&M-Commerce serves.

Conversely, CLiC draws upon the region and its many strengths to

extend our understanding of local literacies, “the diverse, daily forms

of reading and writing used by working class people” (Flower 18). Increasingly, aspects of CLiC research are being recognized as even more relevant to the national conversation about writing and writers than research on local publics at these more selective institutions. As Richard Selfe explains in his external review of CLiC in 2008, “research on

your student population (diverse, mobile, slightly older than average,

often non-traditional, and one that frequently includes first-generation college students) will resonate with a majority of colleges across the

country” (See “Appendix: External Review”). After all, these are the

students served by the vast majority of America’s community colleges and other institutions of higher learning. Richard Selfe directs another key model for CLiC, the Center for the Study and Teaching of

Writing at the Ohio State University.

In his external review, Selfe continues: “Judging from their past

publications and my read of the national conversations around this topic, the research that emanates from CLiC has the potential to make

important national contributions” (“External Review,” 2008). In fact, it already has.

CLiC’s research focus is literacy as it “lives” in the lives of

individuals and communities in the region Texas A&M-Commerce serves (see Carter’s The Way Literacy Lives, SUNY P, 2008). In fact,

CLiC research has already yielded multiple presentations and

publications in highly competitive, national, peer-reviewed venues like

College Composition and Communication (Carter, September 2009), College English (Carter, July 2007), Kairos (Carter and Dunbar-Odom,

CLiC has been interdisciplinary, community-based, and technology-driven since it was established in 2007.

PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP:MEDIA

2009-2011: research, script, film,

produce, and screen CLiC’s first documentary, The Other Side

Summary: A short history of one rural,

university town (Commerce, Texas) as experienced by long-time residents of the Norris Community, the historically segregated neighborhood located “on the other side of the tracks.” What is most unique about the documentary and the lives it chronicles is the levels of civic engagement these individuals reveal and, by example, encourage in the film’s audience. Residents featured helped establish the Norris Community Club, an activist group established in 1973 in partnership with several university students to create a “direct line of communication” between the Commerce City Council and African American citizens. Over the next 20 years, NCC helped bring about significant change across the city, including millions of dollars in grants to rebuilt the Norris Community’s physical plant, long neglected by city officials.

“Membership Card, Norris Community Club,” circa 1975. Northeast Texas Digital Collections. Gee Library, Texas A&M-Commerce. In partnership with CLiC and through Gee Library’s three-year grant (HeirLoom Project), university archives concerning minority populations in region have exploded in both size and recurrent use.

Fall 2009), Computers and Composition Online (Carter, Adkins, and Dunbar-Odom, Fall 2010), Issues in Writing (Adkins, Fall 2010; Dunbar-Odom, Forthcoming), Community Literacy Journal (Adkins, Fall 2010; Carter, Spring 2008) and the Journal of Basic Writing (Carter, Fall 2006). Carter and Dunbar-Odom have also published two scholarly monographs directly informing and informed by CLiC (Carter’s The

Way Literacy Lives, SUNY P, 2008, and Dunbar-Odom’s Defying the Odds, SUNY P, 2007). As Regional universities like

A&M-Commerce serve a large percentage of the US college population, CLiC research is directly applicable to contexts beyond A&M-Commerce.

4. IMPACT

The First Five Years

In a systematic review of more than 50 past and present research centers in writing studies, the authors conclude that “[m]ost successful centers take at least five years to establish themselves as viable parts of their institutional cultures” (Gogan et. al., 341). At the beginning of its fifth year, it seems CLiC done just that--becoming a “viable part of [the] university culture,” despite any reliable funding source or reassigned

time for participating faculty.

In that time, more than 16 scholarly articles, two scholarly books, and 52

national conference presentations have emerged from CLiC research. CLiC-affiliated faculty have submitted more than 20 external and internal grants totaling more than four million dollars and developed significant partnerships across the disciplines, the community, and the nation.

IMPACT: Public Scholarship

CLiC “brings academics into public space and public relationships in order to facilitate knowledge, discovery, learning, and action relevant to civic issues and problems” (76), which is how SJ Peters defines public scholarship. Indeed, CLiC research, teaching, and outreach activities inspire, sustain, and support public scholarship, which Peters insists “embraces a democratic politics that is highly interactive, reciprocal, and developmental (“Reconstructing Civic Professionalism,” 2003).

For the

documentary The

Other Side of the Tracks, PhD students Laura Di Ferrante and Luca Morazzano (Texas A&M-Commerce), film local activist and current president of the Commerce chapter of NAACP speaking on the complexity of race relations in this southern university town (Commerce, Texas). Luca Morazzano is the

documentary’s director and creative lead and a CLiC research assistant.

The Other Side of the Tracks (25

minutes). Luca Morazzano, Dir. Shannon Carter, Project Supervisor. Produced by CLiC. Texas A&M-Commerce, 2011.

PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP:EVENTS

CLiC has organized multiple public events, bringing together local publics to explore together historical agency among historically underrepresented groups.

October 2009*: “Coming Together: On the History and the Future of the Norris Community” (Gee Library)

February 2010*: “Celebrating Black History Month” (Commerce Public Library) May 2010*:

“Commerce Writes: the Norris Community” (Hall of Languages)

February 21, 2011*: “Premiere, Norris Community Screening and Panel” (Part of the monthly “CLiC Talks” series)

February 18, 2011: “Rural Activism,” Waco, Texas (Part of a panel presentation for the East Texas Historical Society)

March 7-11, 2011: The Other Side of the

Tracks airs on KETV, twice each day

(proceeded by interview with Luca Morazzano)

March 10, 2011*: Scott Harvey Show, KETR (documentary)

March 11, 2011*: Panel, Norris Community Club student and local activists (Writing Democracy conference, March 9-11)

March 11, 2011*: Award ceremony, Ivory Moore receives Writing Democracy Award, followed by screening of documentary (March 11, 2011) *Event featured local African American leadership and drew audiences from across the campus and community.

Harry Turner, Norris Community, Commerce, Texas (2/11)

In this excerpt from the documentary The Other Side of the Tracks, local historian, leader, and long-time Norris Community resident illustrates the persistance of segregation through a variety of public spaces.

CLiC provides research and creative opportunities for faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students across the disciplines, largely through projects that support and engage the surrounding community in public scholarship. CLiC graduate students have worked with CLiC faculty to leverage existing campus resources to support research and relevant outreach.

Activities have included researching, scripting, filming, producing, and screening CLiC’s first major documentary and beginning research on a second; producing more than 14 video essays for national audiences; securing a grant from Humanities Texas that brought four Humanities Texas exhibitions to the area; creating and

maintaining more than 10 websites and blogs; and coordinating and promoting countless public events.

The First Documentary (2009-2011)

Public scholarship “brings

academics into public space and public relationships in order to facilitate knowledge, discovery, learning, and action relevant to civic issues and problems. [. . .] It

embraces a democratic politics that is highly interactive, reciprocal, and developmental.”

--Peters, “Reconstructing Civic Professionalism” (2003)

PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP:OUTREACH

CLiC coordinated efforts toward the first

Texas Historical Marker to be installed at an African American church in Hunt County.

Mt. Moriah Temple Baptist Church, Dedication Ceremony (4/26/2011) Video at http://vimeo.com/23179511

CLiC graduate research assistant (and PhD student) JP Sloop worked closely with Mt. Moriah Church historian Harry Turner and CLiC director Dr. Shannon Carter to generate the historical narrative required by the Texas Historical Commission. Hunt County Historical Commission Chair and regular collaborator Dr. Jim Conrad guided the research and writing team through THC requirements and Carter worked closely with Turner to ensure the desires of church leadership and community were addressed throughout the process. Carter has begun working with Turner, Ivory Moore, and other leaders in the Norris Community to install a second Texas Historical Marker in the Norris Community, this time at the Norris School.

Norris Community Club membership is also working closely with Carter and others to obtain grants in support of local training center.

For CLiC’s first documentary (The Other Side of the Track), CLiC research assistant and PhD student Luca Morazzano served as creative lead, working closely with Project Supervisor Shannon Carter and regular collaborator Jim Conrad (PhD, History) to communicate to the general public a narrative unfolding in Carter and Conrad’s oral history interviews and the archival research most directly related to Carter’s book project on activist rhetoric and rhetorical constructions of race in Northeast Texas immediately following integration.

The documentary that emerged is a 25-minute portrait of one rural, university town (Commerce, Texas) as experienced by long-time residents of the Norris Community, the historically segregated neighborhood located “on the other side of the tracks.” What is most

unique about the documentary and the lives it chronicles is the levels of civic engagement these individuals reveal and, by example, encourage in the film’s audience. This is the “public scholarship” CLiC has

attempted to create by making Carter’s research findings and conclusions widely available and drawing local attention to the key narratives emerging from her research. For this documentary,

Morazzano and Carter spent more than 18 months meeting together in the Norris Community-- Morazzano dragging across town a bulky camera borrowed from Media Services to take part in countless follow-up interviews with locals and collect footage from tours of the Norris School (empty for some years), the oldest African-American church in town, the Norris Community Club (established in 1973), and the original, segregated cemetery. To create the script and plan follow-up interviews, Morazzano also reviewed hours and hours of oral histories Carter had collected with historian and archivist Jim Conrad in research for her current book project described above.

Recognitions for The Other Side of the Tracks: Selected, Texas Black

PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP:MEDIA

2011-2013: research, script, film,

produce, and screen CLiC’s second documentary, Welcome to

Greenville: Signs of Change Summary: Brings together rigorous

archival research with historic photographs and contemporary interviews to tell a story of race relations in one rural Texas town with a troubled past. If the humanities are the stories, ideas, and language we use to make sense of our lives and the word we share, “Welcome to Greenville” is most certainly rich in humanities content.

The documentary begins and ends with the installation of two signs, both at the railroad station flanking the main entrance to Downtown Greenville.

The first, “Welcome to Greenville:

The Blackest Land. The Whitest People,” was installed in 1921 and removed nearly half a century later. The second sign was installed in 2008, at the same site where the previous sign had hung for much of the previous century.

The new sign reads “Welcome to

Greenville: We are Building an Inclusive Community” and represents a series of lobbying and other educational efforts by the Greenville’s Corporation for Cultural

Diversity.

Video documentary will explore the complex ebb and flow of critical race narratives at local levels, offering the complex interplay of local and national rhetoric surrounding this controversial sign as a case in point.

Public scholarship has been defined as “scholarship that addresses important civic issues while simultaneously producing knowledge that meets high academic standards” (Bridger and Alter, “The

Engaged University,” 2006). It is just this sort of “public scholarship” that CLiC hopes to encourage, support, and promote, especially as it

informs our understanding of writing and writers in a participatory democracy.

New knowledge emerging from Carter’s research and related

collaborations is thus disseminated as both “public scholarship” (in the form of CLiC documentaries, for example) and more traditional academic scholarship.

Morazzano’s work with The Other Side of the Tracks reveals extreme competence as filmmaker and storyteller, offering a technically slick and visually compelling portrait that community members, students, faculty, and researchers have all responded to with great enthusiasm.

Our experience with this documentary also underscores the crucial role research, preservation activities, and relationship building must play in the development of any public scholarship. These

factors were crucial throughout and have yielded many additional opportunities for faculty, students, and researchers across a broad spectrum of stakeholders.

Once funding is confirmed, CLiC will begin filming our second documentary, Welcome to Greenville: Signs of Change. Texas A&M-Commerce President Dan Jones and Provost Larry Lemanski have already expressed their commitment to support this project with two full-time research assistantships and funding for post-production

The Second Documentary (2011-2013)

“Welcome to Greenville: The Blackest Land. The Whitest People.” Controversial sign that hung at main entrance to Downtown Greenville from 1921 until its high-profile removal nearly half a century later. For CLiC’s first documentary, we brought to local, regional, and national audiences a narrative local and campus press have described as “forgotten” and “invisible” (East Texan, 3/2009, 2/2011; KETR, 3/2011). For CLiC’s second documentary, we have a unique

opportunity to feature an aspect of this region that is far from forgotten or invisible: Greenville’s world famous and highly

IMPACT

In less than five years, with little infrastructure and no reassigned time for affiliated faculty or budget for supplies or travel, CLiC has grown into a campus and, indeed, a national leader for interdisciplinary, university-community partnerships embracing the affordances of the digital humanities.

• Articles about CLiC are frequently cited

• Presentations about CLiC are well attended

• Public events organized by CLiC faculty and graduate students are well received and increasingly well attended

SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS

Books

Carter, Shannon. The Way Literacy

Lives. Albany, NY: State University of

New York Press, 2008.

Dunbar-Odom, Donna. Defying the

Odds. Albany, NY: State University of

New York Press, 2007.

controversial sign, “Welcome to Greenville: The Blackest Land. The Whitest People.”

What is missing from the public memory, however are the day-to-day lives surrounding that sign and, especially, local and progressive efforts like those of the Corporation for Cultural Diversity.

CLiC has been invited to join the Corporation for Cultural Diversity in these efforts by educating the general public about the sign’s legacy and local efforts to, as the new sign explains, “build an inclusive community.”

The documentary CLiC proposes brings together rigorous archival research with historic photographs and contemporary interviews to tell a story of race relations in one rural Texas town with a troubled past. If the humanities are the stories, ideas, and language we use to make sense of our lives and the word we share, “Welcome to Greenville” is most certainly rich in humanities content.

The narrative begins and ends with the installation of two signs, both at the railroad station flanking the main entrance to Downtown Greenville. The first, “Welcome to Greenville: Blackest Land. Whitest People,” was installed in 1921 and removed nearly half a century later. Conversations about the sign, its legacy, and its intent remain charged more than forty years later, even after the installation of a very different sign, in 2008, the result of extensive lobbying and fundraising by city leadership through the Corporation for Cultural Diversity: “Welcome to

Greenville. We are Building an Inclusive Community.” The same

year, the portion of the major interstate running through Greenville was renamed “MLK Freeway.” Both signal formal connections with a national project to improve race relations at local levels. Video

documentary will explore the complex ebb and flow of critical race narratives at local levels, offering the complex interplay of local and national rhetoric surrounding this controversial sign as a case in point.

Both documentaries draw directly from research, preservation, and teaching activities CLiC promotes and supports, most clearly and extensively from Gee Library’s HeirLoom Project (digitizing Northeast Texas History), Jim Conrad’s decades-long commitment to preserving and promoting local history, and Carter’s multi-year study concerning activist rhetoric across rural, Northeast Texas, and the critical race narratives local literacies enabled, sustained, and eventually began to disrupt at the turn of the 21st century.

As a research center with a mission that includes extensive community outreach, CLiC has sponsored many opportunities to bring together local, regional, and even national audiences to discuss the issues informing projects. The first documentary was, therefore, the result of extensive collaboration among faculty researchers (Carter) and university archivists (Conrad and Weddle) with founding members of the Norris Community Club, an activist group established in 1973 in to create a “direct line of communication” between the Commerce City Council and African American citizens. Over the next 20 years, NCC helped bring about significant change across the city, including millions of dollars in grants to rebuilt the neighborhood’s physical plant, long neglected by city officials.

SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS*

2012 (Forthcoming)

Shannon Carter and Jim Conrad, “’In Possession of the Author’: Ethical Implications for Archival Research Beyond Formal Archives”

Composition, Communication, and Communication (September 2012).

Forthcoming. Print. Carter, Shannon and Deborah

Mutnick, Guest Editors. “Writing Democracy.” Community Literacy

Journal (Special Issue). 7.1 (Fall

2012). Forthcoming. Print. Donna Dunbar-Odom, “Local and

Global: The Writing Class’s Vital Role in Composing Citizens.” Issues in

Writing. Forthcoming. Print.

Adkins, Tabetha. “Popular Culture as a Sponsor of Literacy: Confronting the CLASH! BOOM! POW! in the Basic Writing Classroom.” CLASH!:

Superheroic Yet Sensible Strategies for Teaching Students the New Literacies Despite the Status Quo. Eds. Sharon

Spencer and Sandra Vavra. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers. Forthcoming. Print.

2011 (Forthcoming)

Carter, Shannon and Bump Halbritter, Guest Editors. “(Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric.”

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (Special Issue). 11.3

(2011). Forthcoming. Web. Adkins, Tabetha. “The

(Un)Importance of a Preposition: How We Define and Defend Writing Center Work.” The Writing Lab

Newsletter. Spring 2011. Forthcoming.

Print.

---. “’The English Effect’ on Amish Language and Literacy

Practices.” Community Literacy Journal 5.2, Spring 2011. Forthcoming. Print.

The Norris Community Club (Commerce, Texas), established in 1973 in partnership with several university students to create a “direct line of communication” between the Commerce City Council and African American citizens. Founding members and core activities are featured in

The Other Side of the Tracks, as well as Carter’s academic and additional

public scholarship activities.

The second documentary, we hope, will likewise extend connections across local publics in partnership with an established activist

organization—this time, through the Corporation for Cultural Diversity representing local leadership across the City of Greenville.

The Corporation for Cultural Diversity (Greenville, Texas), established in 2000, “as part of the National League of Cities’ (NLC) Campaign to Promote Racial Justice” (CCD brochure). CCD Chair is Dan Perkins, a long-time resident, lawyer, and city official (Greenville City Council)

CLiC has been invited to submit a Humanities Texas media grant to help support the asset collection phase of this project, and we have thus far participated in local meetings of the Corporation for Cultural Diversity and, most recently, a two-year workshop offered by CCD in partnership with the Anti-Racism Team of North Texas entitled “The Realization of Racism” (May 5, 2011). We expect the local, regional, and perhaps even national impact of this short documentary will be significant.

SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS*

2010

Carter, Shannon, Tabetha Adkins, and Donna Dunbar-Odom. “The Activist Writing Center.” Computers and

Composition Online. Fall (2010). Web.

Carter, Shannon. “Writing About Writing in Basic Writing.” BWe: Basic

Writing e-Journal. (2009/2010):

151-169. Web.

Dunbar-Odom, Donna. “I Was Blind But Now I Read: Salvation Tropes in Literacy Narratives.” Reader. Winter (2010): 121-128. Print.

Adkins, Tabetha. “’To Everyone Out There in Budget Land’: The Narrative of Community in the International Amish Newspaper, The

Budget.” Issues in Writing 18.1.

Spring/Summer 2010. Print.

2009

Carter, Shannon and Donna Dunbar-Odom. “The Converging Literacies Center (CLiC): An Integrated Model for Writing Programs.” Kairos: A

Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Fall 2009. Web.

Carter, Shannon. “The Writing Center Paradox: Talk About Legitimacy and the Problem with Institutional Change.” College Composition and

Communication (CCC) 61.1 (September

2009). Print.

2008

Carter, Shannon. “Hope, ‘Repair,’ and the Complexities of Reciprocity: Inmates Tutoring Inmates in a Total Institution.” Community Literacy Journal 2.2 (Spring 2008): 87-112. Print. Adkins, Tabetha. “A Label Like Gucci,

Versace, or Birkenstock: Sex and the

City and Queer Identity” Televising Queer Women. Ed. Rebecca

Beirne. New York: Palgrave, 2008. 109-119. Print.

IMPACT: Academic Scholarship

The publication record emerging from CLiC is impressive by most any measure. In addition to the many research projects currently in progress, CLiC is directly affiliated with two published scholarly monographs (Carter’s The Way Literacy Lives in 2008 and Dunbar-Odom’s Defying

the Odds in 2007), multiple articles, and two special issues of

long-running, award-winning journals (Community Literacy Journal and

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy), and three

issues of the national, peer-reviewed journal BWe: Basic Writing

e-Journal, which is the official journal of the Council on Basic Writing,

the national organization for basic writing professionals.

Impact: Research Methods

A forthcoming article by Shannon Carter and Jim Conrad, for example, brings together a rhetorician with an archivist and cultural historian to explore issues in research ethics emerging from their multi-year project documenting activist rhetoric before and after integration in a rural, university community. Invited as part of College Composition and

Communication (CCC)’s upcoming special issue on research

methodologies, “’In Possession of the Author’: Ethical Implications

for Archival Research Beyond Formal Archives” offers a useful illustration of CLiC’s potential impact within the larger scholarly conversations in rhetoric and writing studies. Throughout this process, Carter’s focus has been rhetorical constructions of race and

“progress” as revealed through relevant texts and the life histories of their writers. Conrad’s focus has been preservation of local African American history, which certainly includes the data Carter’s research has collected--most of which was previously unavailable through formal archives. Thus, both collect relevant oral histories together, securing

relevant informal archives and the permissions of their owners to digitize these important materials and make them available to the public through the university’s Northeast Texas Digital Collections. This would not have been possible without extensive support through both Gee Library (especially their three-year grant, the HeirLoom Project) and a deep commitment to public scholarship. As their retrospective reveals, IRB protocol often urges researchers to destroy or otherwise secure data collected in the field, making it inaccessible to future researchers. Archivists and organizations like the Oral History Association, however, are committed to preserving data collected according to the highest ethical standards, making it available to future researchers and other interested parties. Using their local research and preservation project as a case in point, the authors discuss the important disciplinary implications for tending to the local, especially at sites where formal archives and other reliable documents are hard to come by, arguing that ethical engagement with the local demands greater attention to public programming and preservation methods.

This article is scheduled for publication in the September 2012 issue of

College Composition and Communication, the flagship journal in our

discipline.

Impact: Community Literacy

CLiC promotes, supports, and studies community writing, which Thomas Dean describes as particularly valuable because these projects “insist that writers get out into local communities to observe, listen,

SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS*

2008

Adkins, Tabetha, Christopher Alexander, Patrick Corbett, Debra Journet, and Ryan Trauman. “Digital Mirrors: Multimodal Reflection in the Composition Classroom.” Computers

and Composition Online. Spring 2008.

Web.

2007

Carter, Shannon. “Living Inside the Bible (Belt).” College English 69.6 (July 2007): 572-595. Print.

Carter, Shannon. “Redefining Literacy as a Social Practice.” Journal of Basic

Writing 25.2 (Fall 2006): 94-125. Print.

Editors’ Introductions

Carter, Shannon and Susan Bernstein. “Writing Back.” BWe (2008). Web. Carter, Shannon and Doug Downs,

“First-Year Feature: Year Two.” First-Year Feature in Young Scholars in

Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric. 7 (2008). Print.

and YSW, Issue 8 (2009). Print. Carter, Shannon and Scott Halbritter.

“Digital Scholarship by Undergraduate Researchers: (Re)mediating the Conversation.”

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (Summer 2011). Web. WRITING DEMOCRACY

Events

Conference: Writing Democracy: A Rhetoric of (T)here. Texas A&M-Commerce. March 9-11. Conference: Writing Democracy:

Federal Writers Project 2.0. CCCC 2012. St. Louis, Missouri. March 2012.

Scholarly Publications

Conference Proceedings: Community

Literacy Journal. Fall 2012. (Shannon

Carter and Deborah Mutnick, Guest Editors)

of CLiC’s public scholarship serves as an obvious example of CLiC’s role in community writing. Another example of the larger impact of research emerging from CLiC faculty may be the upcoming special issue of the Community Literacy Journal entitled Writing Democracy, which will feature essays emerging from the recent conference CLiC helped coordinate on our campus last March (9-11, 2011). The conference theme emerged from Carter’s extensive collaborations with Deborah Mutnick (Long-Island University) and will continue with a 2012 conference event in St. Louis, Missouri, and another in Brooklyn in 2013.

The first event in this series, however, took place in Commerce, Texas, in 2011. Over 150 scholars, students, and community members convened to explore existing and possible ways we can “write

democracy” in the United States. We heard from featured speakers John Duffy (Notre Dame University), Michelle Hall Kells (University of New Mexico), Nancy Welch (University of Vermont), David Alton Jolliffe (University of Arkansas at Fayetteville) Jerrold Hirsch (Truman State University), Elenore Long (Arizona

State University), and David Gold (University of Tennessee), as well as many others from across the country at concurrent sessions. Inspired by

the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s and calls for ethical discourse responsive to local conditions and global realities, conference participants looked at place, history, local publics, and popular movements in an attempt to understand and promote democracy through research, writing, and action. As part of the

project of writing a “new roadmap for the cultural rediscovery of America” as the Federal Writers did 75 years

ago during the Great Depression, Writing Democracy is committed to helping to create rhetorical space to combat what Welch terms “la lange de bois” (woolen language) of neoliberal policy. Together we decided that our first task is to explore, discuss, and debate what Writing Democracy looks like as we encounter the new realities of the 21st century, including the unfolding disaster in Japan that hit on the final day of our conference. As we sat in conference rooms in rural

Commerce, Texas, bringing together local stories of change spurred by an alliance of students and community members “writing against” racism in the 1970s (the Norris Community), the global news of the earthquake interceded through our smart phones and iPads. Confronted by an uncertain future threatened by environmental and economic crisis, we looked to our past, our present, and each other to imagine how we as scholars, students, and citizens can contribute to reinvigorating

democracy through research, writing, and local and global engagement. In 2011, in response to the conversations emerging from Writing Democracy and CLiC’s ongoing work with the community, Carter was invited to join the prestigious National Consortium of Writing Across

UNIQUE FEATURES*

Following his External Review of CLiC in October 2008, Richard Selfe (Ohio State University)

outlined the “unique features of the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) at Texas A&M-Commerce this way, suggesting “they would be valuable to any university and, in combination, offer a unique approach to literacy education and research for Texas A&M—Commerce.

The project is

- interdisciplinary and invites

participation from across institutional units.

- research based: it attends to external research and scholarship but also plans to build undergraduate, graduate, and faculty research into Center activities and curricula.

- committed to digital modalities: they are planning to integrate multiple modalities (starting with visual communication and photography) into a pedagogy (First-year Composition) that is already carefully grounded in rhetorical theory, argumentation, and alphabetic writing.

- interested in developing an outreach program and some service learning components as faculty are hired and the Center is developed.

The long-range, slow-growth model for a center with this unique set of characteristics is quite unusual, and to my knowledge, has been taken up only by large institutions like Ohio State University, Stanford, University of Illinois, Champaign, and University of Texas, Austin. Even in these elite institutions, only parts of this model are in operation. In addition, they are not focused on a student population like that of Texas A&M—Commerce. (Selfe, 2008)

In the years since Selfe’s highly favorable review, CLiC has

accomplished the vast majority of its core objectives.

*“External Report” available in Appendix

Consortium of Writing Across Communities represents a constellation of stakeholders locally and nationally centered around educational principles and cultural practices that promote the generative (creative and life-sustaining) ecological relationships of language and literacy to the maintenance and wellbeing of human communities” (Kells, “Statement and Goals,” April 2011).

Keynote Speakers, Writing Democracy conference, March 9-11, 2011, Commerce, Texas. (Left to right: Michelle Hall Kells, University of New Mexico; John Duffy, University of Notre Dame; David Jolliffe, University of Arkansas; Hugh Burns, Texas Woman’s University (Representative, Federation of North Texas Area Universities), David Gold, University of Tennessee; Nancy Welch, University of Vermont; Deborah Mutnick, Long Island University-Brooklyn (Co-Organizer); Jerrold Hirsch, Truman State University

CLiC, it seems, uniquely positioned to help lead these conversations, especially as they manifest themselves across this region and

throughout university communities hosting regional campuses like ours. The positive responses to the conversations taking place in

Commerce March 2011 have been overwhelming, widespread, and significant. Major scholars across the nation describe these events as representing a “seismic shift” (Parks) in the field; keynoter Jerrold Hirsch, a historian, described the conference as “the most stimulating” conference he’d ever attended. Indeed, the conference and the

conversations it encouraged helped put Commerce on the map. Recognizing the significance of the event some months before it took place, noted community literacy scholar Steve Parks described it . . .

. . . as a seminal moment in the creation of a disciplinary status of community-based work in the field. My own argument would be that the event could rival the importance of the Dartmouth Conference, which in the early 1960’s set a trajectory of issues [that] framed the field of Composition/Rhetoric for the next 50 years. At this moment, a similar seismic shift in the field seems to be emerging and by bringing together the primary researchers in community-based work, I believe the work resulting from this event will have [a] significant and long-lasting impact on the field. [. . . ] For the scholars fortunate enough to attend this event, I believe they will not only participate in discussion that will

UNIQUE PARNTERSHIPS*

National Consortium of Writing Across Communities

“National Consortium of Writing Across Communities represents a constellation of stakeholders locally and nationally centered around educational principles and cultural practices that promote the generative (creative and life-sustaining) ecological relationships of language and literacy to the maintenance and wellbeing of human communities. The NCWAC seeks to guide curriculum

development, stimulate resource-sharing, support multi-modal approaches to community arts, cultivate networking, and promote research in language practices and literacy education throughout the nation to support local colleges and universities working to serve the vulnerable communities within their spheres of influence” (Vision Statement, March 2011)

NCWAC membership:

University of New Mexico (Michelle Hall Kells) Founding Chapter of NCWAC; University of Notre Dame (John Duffy); Auburn University (Margaret Marshall & Kevin Roozen); Arizona State (Elenore Long); University of Washington (Anis Bawarshi & Juan Guerra); Temple University (Eli Goldblatt); Syracuse University (Steve Parks); Texas A&M University (Valerie Balester); TAMU-Commerce (Shannon Carter);

University of California, Santa Barbara (Linda Adler-Kassner); Carnegie Mellon (Linda Flower); Colorado State University (Tobi Jacobi); University of Arkansas (David Jolliffe); University of Texas, El Paso (Carlos Salinas & Kate Mangelsdorf); University of Oklahoma (Michelle Eodice); Georgia Tech (Jacqueline Jones Royster); Ohio State (Beverly Moss); Utah Community Literacy & Writing Consortium (Tiffany Rousculp); University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (Chuck Schuster); St. John’s University (New York, Anne Geller); New York University (Shondel Nero)

*“Vision Statement” available in Appendix

shape the field, but a program which will be studied by the field in the years to come.

Indeed, CLiC is ideally suited to provide regular opportunities for

conversations like these, if appropriately supported and funded. In

partnership with Gee Library and Media Service, for example, CLiC was able to make keynote addresses and other relevant conversations

available to future researchers through the university’s YouTube channel (LionsMedia) and, soon, within the Northeast Texas Digital Collections. As already noted, crucial to future conversations about this event will be the edited collection of scholarly essays drawn from presentations addressing the conference theme, to be published in September 2012 by the award-winning Community Literacy Journal. For this collection, co-editors Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick will draw together essays that explore tensions between rhetorical constructs like public and private (Welch, Living Room, 2008), local and global (Gold, Rhetoric at

the Margins, 2008), here and there, us and them (Duffy, Writing From These Roots, 2007). Articles for Writing Democracy: A Rhetoric of (T)here foreground the practical, theoretical, methodological,

pedagogical, and/or historical dimensions of our work at local levels--especially with respect to the shifting dimensions of the local rhetorical landscape in an increasingly global world.

The collection will be co-edited by Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick and published in the Fall 2012 issue of the Community

Literacy Journal.

Impact: Undergraduate Research

Since the beginning, CLiC has led campus and national efforts to promote, support, and guide undergraduate research, especially the scholarly publication of undergraduate research.

Publication opportunities for undergraduates emerge from research projects beginning in First-Year Writing (Eric Pleasant, Young Scholars

in Writing: Undergraduate Research and Writing and Rhetoric, 2007) to

digital scholarship composed by undergraduates (“(Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric, Kairos, forthcoming).

Writing, once relegated in the university to basic-skills courses, has developed over the past several decades into writing studies, a robust interdiscipline that fuels centers of study, graduate programs, and undergraduate majors. As part of this growth, undergraduate writing

courses—from first-year to advanced composition, professional writing to

rhetorical theory—are increasingly recognized as sites for launching

undergraduate research on the nature of writing and writers’ processes and practices.

--Downs and Feder, “Undergraduate Research on Writing” (CUR: Council on

Undergraduate Research Quarterly, 2010)

Last year, Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)--the primary professional organization in writing studies-- begun investigating ways it can “foster a culture of undergraduate research.” At this point, undergraduate research in the humanities is growing in prominence and frequency across the nation, and venues for

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Through CLiC, researchers work together across the disciplines and in partnership with local citizens and community groups to better understand and respond to questions like the following, especially as they inform our understanding of writing and writers in a participatory democracy: What are the lived experiences of writers across local publics like the region Texas A&M-Commerce serves?

How have local literacy practices shifted over time and among the region’s historically marginalized populations? How do everyday writers facilitate change in local contexts?

How have historically underrepresented groups garnered rhetorical agency among local publics?

How has rhetorical education developed in response to community literacy needs (formal and informal)?

How has rhetorical education responded to local and global needs, particularly when local and global forces seem in direct conflict?

How has rhetorical education fostered (or hindered) civic engagement across local publics?

What formal and informal sites of rhetorical instruction have impacted literacy practices across the region? What are the material realities limiting and shaping our student’s acquisition of new literacies?

What do these realities have to teach us about literacy learning and literacy education?

How do digital literacies inform (and challenge) traditional ones? How are print-based, alphabetic texts absorbed by multimodal ones? What can we learn from all this about writing and the teaching of writing?

the publication and circulation of undergraduate research are increasingly significant.

[B]y "undergraduate research," we refer to the educational, comprehensive curricular and extracurricular movement that involves undergraduates as apprentices, collaborators, and/or independent scholars in critical investigations that use fieldwork and other discipline-specific

methodologies under the sponsorship of one or more faculty mentors. –CCCC Task Force on Undergraduate Research, March 2011

In 2010, Shannon Carter was invited to join the CCCC Task Force on

Undergraduate Research, which offered to the CCCC Executive Board

several significant recommendations regarding undergraduate research in writing studies. In 2011, that task force was officially constituted as a

CCCC Committee on Undergraduate Research. Again, Carter was

invited to continue her work on that committee. Membership includes key figures in undergraduate research in our field, including Joyce

Kinkaid, a graduate of our doctoral program and major figure in the

Council for Undergraduate Research and, often with Laurie Grobman, Penn State-Berks, co-author of several key publications on

undergraduate research in the field, including Undergraduate Research

in English Studies (NCTE, 2010). Kinkaid is currently director of the

Center for Undergraduate Research at Utah State University. Additional members include Doug Downs, Montana State University, Jenn Fishman, Marquette University, and Jane Greer, University of Missouri-Kansas City.

In 2007, Shannon Carter joined the Editorial Board for the national, long-running, peer-reviewed publication Young Scholars in Writing:

Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric and began, along with

Doug Downs, a recurring feature dedicated to original research produced by first-year students that would later be called “Spotlight on First

Year Writing.” Texas A&M-Commerce is well represented in this key

scholarly venue for undergraduate research. Published in the first issue

of YSW’s “Spotlight on First Year Writing” (2008) is first-year student Eric Pleasant’s study of local literacies surrounding punk music in 1980s Waco, Texas. Indeed, CLiC has contributed to YSW

since that inaugural issue, and first-year students across Texas A&M-Commerce’s Writing Program have continued to submit their original research to YSW. In 2011, the “Spotlight on First-Year Writing” feature published its fourth set of exemplary, peer-reviewed essays by first-year researchers, within a journal that has been bringing exemplary research by undergraduates to an international audience for more than a decade. Undergraduate researchers in writing studies across our campus

regularly present their work at local and regional conferences like South Central Writing Centers Association, North Texas Writing Centers Association, the Federation Rhetoric Symposium, the Mesquite

Workshops, and EGAD. CLiC has worked hard to foster a culture of

undergraduate research across the disciplines, especially across the

First-Year Writing Program. The regular Celebrations of Student Writing are a key example of the significant research in which our undergraduates are regularly engaged.

Also important in this respect is the role research emerging from our Writing Programs has played, especially through their contributions to

TEXTBOOKS

Dunbar-Odom, Donna. Working with

Ideas. Reading, Writing, and Researching Experience. Houghton Mifflin

Company, 2000.

Foreman, Christy, Donna Dunbar-Odom, and Shannon Carter. Place

Matters. Southlake, TX:

Fountainhead P, 2008.

Carter, Shannon. Literacies in Context. Southlake, TX: Fountainhead P, 2007. (Second edition, 2008) Adkins, Tabetha. Ethnography Inquiries

in Writing. Fountainhead P, 2010.

---. The Writing Program at Texas

A&M-Commerce. Fountainhead P, 2011. CELEBRATION OF STUDENT

WRITING (ESTABLISHED 2007) In 2007, Texas A&M-Commerce began a tradition of campus-wide celebrations of undergraduate research in English 102, the second and final semester of the First-Year Writing sequence.

At the end of each term, researchers come together to share the findings from their field and archival research in literacy studies.

The CSW has turned into a significant event across the campus and surrounding community, drawing praise from administrators and faculty members from across the disciplines and enthusiasm from student participants.

the Writing About Writing (WAW) movement. A writing-about-writing approach, Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle explain, “seeks . . . to improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and encouraging more realistic understandings of writing” (CCC, 2007, 553). In the last few years, a WAW framework has developed into a dominant research strand and approach in our field’s top journals and classrooms across the country.

The Writing Programs at Texas A&M-Commerce have long been recognized as exemplars of the WAW approach, producing multiple textbooks and articles for a variety of scholarly contexts and

contributing to national workshops promoting this approach. Indeed, the version of WAW established at Texas A&M-Commerce has appeared in national publications ranging from the WPA-CompPile Research

Bibliographies (Rose’s “Campus Celebrations of Writing,” June 2010;

Down’s “Writing-About-Writing Curriculum,” September 2010), Laurie Grobman’s “The Student Scholar” (in CCC, September 2010), Elizabeth Wardle’s “Continuing the Dialogue” (in CCC, September 2008), and Doug Downs and Wardle’s “What Can a Novice Contribute?” (in

Undergraduate Research in English Studies, 2010). In a recent article

for the national journal BWe, Carter describes the version of WAW pedagogy that originated at A&M-Commerce in 2004, one oriented around students’ ethnographic studies of literacies (“Writing About Writing in Basic Writing,” 2010). In it, Carter suggests a “writing-about-writing approach (WAW) foregrounds research in writing and related studies by asking students to read and discuss key research in the discipline and contribute to the scholarly conversation themselves” (152). Indeed, this is a key reason WAW is a useful approach to a

program that values undergraduate research and why CLiC is appropriately situated to support, encourage, and guide that research.

Writing-about-writing (WAW) curricula have students study and sometimes perform disciplinary research in writing studies in order to build procedural and declarative knowledge about and experience with writing with an eye toward maximizing transfer of knowledge from writing courses to new writing situations. By helping students use writing studies scholarship to (re)construct knowledge about writing,

writers, writing processes, discourse, textuality, and literacy, WAW aligns a writingcourse’s objectof study—writing—with its read and written content, the research of the field of writing studies.

--Downs, “Writing-About-Writing” (2010)

In 2008, Carter was invited to join the initial Board of Consultants for the international Writing About Writing Network (WAWN) based at the University of Alberta, a term she will serve until 2012.

CLiC faculty have published five textbooks of direct consequence to the national Writing About Writing movement. The first, Donna

Dunbar-Odom’s Working with Ideas (Houghton-Mifflin, 2000), laid

the groundwork for a significant writing program that led first-year researchers through intellectually-rich and challenging assignment sequences and relevant qualitative research. Assignment sequences drawn from this important textbook and newer additions were subsequently published by Fountainhead Press as well. In 2007,

CELEBRATION OF STUDENT

WRITING (CSW)

“When integrated into writing programs, campus celebrations have the potential to serve multiple

pedagogical goals. Programs at schools like Eastern Michigan University and

Texas A&M-Commerce link their

celebrations of writing to their first-year composition curricula; WPAs at these universities recommend basing campus events on students’ original ethnographic research. [. . .] Many sources note that such celebrations enable diverse student and faculty constituencies to participate in a shared activity, [noting that ] planning and producing campus events and publications can foster programmatic or departmental cohesiveness as multiple faculty members and the students enrolled in their courses work toward a common end.”*

Worth Celebrating (Carter 2008)

“[T]his video documents Texas A&M-Commerce’s Celebration of Student Writing. As Carter’s narration describes, the celebration serves as the culminating event for the university’s two-semester composition sequence. The film begins with footage from the actual celebration, at which students display research findings gleaned from literacy ethnographies. Students’ projects feature multiple literacies, including faith-based literacies, workplace literacies, gaming literacies, and academic literacies. Carter

then provides an overview of the composition curriculum that informs the celebration, explaining that its emphasis on literacy ethnography allows students to pursue original inquiry-based research while also cultivating transferable rhetorical knowledge. (Rose 4).

Rose, Jeanne Marie. “Campus Celebrations of Student Writing”

WPA-CompPile Research Bibliographies,

June 2010. April 2011.

Shannon Carter developed a textbook entitled Literacies in Context

(Fountainhead Press, 2007; second edition 2008) that drew from this model yet more directly situated First-Year Composition at within the still-quite-new Writing About Writing framework. Tabetha Adkins significantly revamped that framework for greater attention to research methods and ethics in a 2010 textbook entitled Ethnographic Inquiries

in Writing (Fountainhead Press, 2010). In 2011, Adkins published The

Writing Program at Texas A&M-Commerce (Fountainhead, 2011). With

Donna Dunbar-Odom and Shannon Carter, Christy Foreman published the textbook Place Matters in 2008. In 2004, Shannon Carter developed a basic writing textbook that addresses multiple literacies in context of developmental writing. In 2008, Pearson Publishers approached Carter for the opportunity to pursue this textbook in a revision, Christy Foreman and Chandra Lewis-Qualls coauthored. Feedback throughout this three-year process was encouraging, and the authors hope to return to this project soon.

Impact: Writing withNew Media

The forthcoming special issue of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric,

Technology, and Pedagogy (Summer 2011) will bring together digital

scholarship produced by undergraduates composing with new media. Entitled “(Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric” and guest edited by Shannon Carter and Bump Halbritter (Michigan State University), this special issue invited undergraduates and their instructors to join the scholarly conversation in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies through their own digital

contributions.

The collection was co-edited by Carter and Halbritter and will appear August 2011, in the Summer 2011 issue of Kairos: A Journal

of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

Through CLiC, affiliated faculty have leveraged existing resources to

introduce multimedia writing into our first-year writing program—

first as a required photo essay embedded in the existing assignment sequence described above and later to include options for presenting findings as video, audio, and other multimedia options. In 2008, based on these successes and increasing energy surrounding new media composing on our campus, CLiC was able to secure funds to purchase equipment and, with the University Library and Writing Center, begin to establish more systematic support for multimedia writing across the university—including one-on-one support, equipment made available for checkout at the Library, and workshops. By building CLiC alongside our roles as administrators and status on the graduate faculty where we work primarily with MA and PhD students, we have been able to help shape

a departmental culture that embraces multimedia writing.

In 2009, Carter introduced into our program a graduate-level course

called “Writing with New Media,” which has since been established as

part of the regular course rotation and helped produce an exciting culture shift across our graduate program as greater numbers of our students gain increasingly sophisticated experiences with new media—from the tools for composing to creative methods to rhetorical constraints (and affordances) to creative rights. Student video created under Carter’s direction include Sylwester Zabielski’s “I Hate Writing,” a short film that has since found its way into the curricula of writing programs across