Where are their heads at?

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is a professional organization dedicated to composition, pedagogy, and rhetoric in higher education. Its mission statement underscores knowledge, professional development for teachers, and literacy in the United States. These are traditional, straightforward aims, but when you examine the balance of attention paid at the main event of CCCC, the annual convention, several other concerns emerge.

Here is a listing of the 2006 conference, with a breakdown of sessions by topic. Some of the titles are surprising, but more so is the relative distribution of sessions. One might think that the topic “Basic Writing” would attract the largest number of sessions, but the Topic Index lists only six of them (“What to Do Next: Strategies for Helping Underprepared Students,” “Mainstreaming Basic Writing: Addressing Institutional Goals and Students’ Needs,” etc.). The next category is “Disabilities,” and it gathers twice as many (“Inventing [DIS]topia: Rhetorics of Un[DIS]iplined Agency,” “Not by Accident: Doing Something About Suffering,” etc.).

“ESL and Generation 1.5” also collects 12 sessions (“American Academic Writing for ESL Graduate Students in Technical Fields,” etc.). But “Feminism, Gender, Sexual Orientation” dwarfs it with 30 entries (“Alternative Rhetorics: Postcolonial, Race, Womanist,” “Queering the Composition Classroom”; etc.).

“Activist Rhetorics” lists 30 sessions as well, including “McCarthyism, Scapegoating, and Progressive Resistance: New Tensions, New Visions,” “Creating the Radical Center: Addressing Politics, Publics, and Pedagogies,” and “Wars With Words: Rhetorical Strategies for the Justification of War.” But what wins the attention race, with 71 entries, is “Race, Ethnicity, and Culture.” Among the titles: “Confronting Racism and Classism,” “Allying Against Institutional Racism: Teaching About Whiteness in Predominantly White Institutions,” and “Disturbing the Peace: Hip-Hop as Theory, Politics, and Pedagogy.”

Some of the entries receive duplicate listings because of their mixed content, but the balance of focus is clear. At the 4Cs, identity and politics are hot, the technical aspects of language and writing cool. I have no doubt that while many of these panel sessions were interesting and informative, many also ended up as tendentious exercises. But that’s another issue.

From the perspective of people outside the composition establishment, the tilt away from basic writing matters looks troubling not because of problems with bias or politicization or personalization (the heavy racial and sexual identity focus), but because of legitimacy. Do composition/rhetoric experts really wish to ground their place on campus with disquisitions about racial and sexual identity? Do they really believe that people across the disciplines will take them seriously when they deliver talks on “Labor Power: Reclaiming Marxism as a Guide to (Rhetorical) Action”?

Image from Flickr user Ross Angus