CCCC will be offering childcare for the first time at the convention in San Francisco. The deadline for registration for childcare is January 1st, and at this point nobody has registered yet.
The CCCC officers are concerned that if we don’t have much registration then we will have to withdraw childcare for the convention (and CCCC would still have to pay the down payment to the provider). Please spread the word to folks you think might be interested in this service. The Executive Committee is offering childcare on a pilot basis for this convention, and we’d like to make it as much of a success as possible. Our goal is to have about 20 children registered for each of the 3 days of the convention.

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for how to advertise this service best, and I’d be happy to pass these along to the EC.

Here is the information from the CCCC website:

“This year we are offering an on-site activity center for childcare, Camp CCCC, during the convention from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday through Saturday right in the Hilton Hotel. Children ages 6 months to 12 years old are welcome. The center, staffed by experienced CPR and Pediatric First Aid certified professionals, will provide age-appropriate entertaining and educational activities, including storytelling, hands-on crafts, games, the “Build It Zone,” and the “Boogie It Zone.” Infant care stations, rest areas, and “SecurChild®” photo check-in and check-out will ensure a safe, secure environment.”

You can register for half-day or full-day care.  Registration deadline is January 1, 2009.  To get more information about facilities and to register for childcare, go to www.accentoca.com/campcccc09

A few folks have written to me asking how to join the Second Language Writing listserv for CCCC (which also includes others interested in L2 writing who are not part of CCCC). If you’d like to join the list, here are the instructions:

1. Send a message to: mj2@lists.ncsu.edu

2. In the text of the message, type: subscribe slw_cccc

3. Note: Do not type anything in the subject line

4. You will receive a message back from the listserv asking you to confirm your subscription to the list

5. When you want to send a message to the list, send it to slw_cccc@lists.ncsu.edu

I just got back from CCCC in New Orleans, and it was a fabulous conference–and a great location! Some of the highlights of the conference for me were:

• Chairing a terrific panel on plagiarism for my colleagues, whose talks were featured in Inside Higher Ed the following Monday
• Presenting on a panel with Dana Ferris and Gail Shuck, who shared some great strategies for working with L2 writers
• Facilitating a workshop on plagiarism and L2 writers with Rebecca Moore Howard
• Celebrating Sharon Crowley’s book award and (well-deserved!) retirement
• Sharing the plane to and from New Orleans and the taxi from the airport with a crazy bunch of folks from East Carolina
• Dinner at Broussard’s
• The view from the top floor of the Loews Hotel
• Realizing that I really only need to travel with my Blackberry…and I’m annoyingly addicted to checking it

Can’t wait until next year in San Francisco!

In my graduate seminar on Technology and Pedagogy last week, we read the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments. Although it was just adopted 3 1/2 years ago (in February 2004), I found myself questioning some of the assumptions and statements in the document. And I also found myself thinking about position statements more generally.

When I taught at Mesa Community College, my colleague Richard Felnagle used to adamantly resist any attempts to write mission or position statements of any kind. I’m sure that on several levels his concerns were justified–in an English department we could go round and round for months about whether to place a comma in the opening clause of the mission statement without ever accomplishing anything. The writing of mission statements can sometimes get in the way of actually doing. But there can be a purpose in clarifying the position of a group, especially when the group is as large and diverse as CCCC.

Another potential frustration of mission statements, though, is that they are often read as acontextual, even though they are, of course, written in a particular context. A statement is representative of the circumstance in which it was written–the time and place of its writing and the people who drafted it–yet position statements can be read as somewhat “timeless” documents. They do, after all, represent the positions of their respective organizations unless they are changed or repealed.

As I read the position statement on digital environments for class last Tuesday, I found myself questioning the need for such a statement. Maybe circumstances have shifted so much in the past 3-4 years that such statements are no longer necessary. Or, maybe more precisely, I’m beginning to think that the positions that we take on teaching in digital environments are also positions that we should take on teaching in general–regardless of the medium of instruction.

The CCCC position statement has some wonderful stuff to say about teaching writing, especially in the section that articulates “Assumptions” about writing digitally:

Assumptions

Courses that engage students in writing digitally may have many features, but all of them should

(a) introduce students to the epistemic (knowledge-constructing) characteristics of information technology, some of which are generic to information technology and some of which are specific to the fields in which the information technology is used;

(b) provide students with opportunities to apply digital technologies to solve substantial problems common to the academic, professional, civic, and/or personal realm of their lives;

(c) include much hands-on use of technologies;

(d) engage students in the critical evaluation of information (see American Library Association, “Information Literacy”); and

(e) prepare students to be reflective practitioners.

As I read these assumptions, though, I realized that I could consistently substitute the word “writing” for “technology/information technology/digital technologies,” and the assumptions would still ring true. The last two assumptions don’t even mention technology at all. Do we still need to separate discussions about teaching writing in general from discussions about teaching writing with technology? Can we begin to assume that writing should be taught in a technology-rich environment because that’s where writing happens? Has our focus shifted too much to the technology itself?

Just before the section on assumptions, the position statement articulates a distinction between “two literacies: a literacy of print and a literacy of the screen.” I’m not sure I agree with this clear-cut distinction. Are these literacies really so easily distinguishable? Don’t they overlap and intersect with each other (or can we even separate these literacies at all)?

Perhaps this distinction is representative of how we thought of and talked about teaching (digital) writing before, but maybe it’s time for CCCC to take another look at this position statement and rethink our stated position and assumptions.