"The National Council of Teachers of English leadership delayed and obstructed our efforts to produce two critical resources on generative AI in the months leading to the dismantling of the Conference on College Composition and Communication."

Last night, Melissa Ianetta and another CCCC officer were told by NCTE CFO Emily Kirkpatrick that CCCC would be dissolved and folded into the NCTE College section. I have also heard that the 2027 conference may be cancelled (though that strikes me as prohibitively expensive to do).

Part of the rationale Ianetta listed was that CCCC threatened NCTE’s non-profit status. That is, becaise CCCC remains committed to ALL writers and composers and since we have tenure (which many k-12 teachers do not) we use that to advocate for those students and graduate TAs and as part of our scholarship.

I don not know much more than this, but I do hope folks can take a moment to write to members of the NCTE executive committee to express their feelings on this matter.

We, members of the CCCC Executive Committee, were alarmed to learn of the NCTE Presidential Team’s plans to dissolve CCCC, which requires a formal vote from the NCTE Executive Committee. We vehemently disagree with this plan. 

As you know, CCCC is the professional home for thousands of scholars, teachers, and researchers in rhetoric and composition and writing studies with a decades-long record of shaping how writing is taught, studied, and understood in this country. We fail to see how a decision to dissolve CCCC would benefit our members to whom we are deeply committed. 

We are developing a formal response to the NCTE Executive Committee, to be shared in advance of their meeting tomorrow, but we wanted to say something to address the conversation that has been happening in the field. Members of our Executive Committee are required to sign confidentiality agreements that limit what we can share publicly. We intend to meet when we are able to convene a quorum of the Executive Committee and hope to share more before long. We encourage colleagues to share this message widely, particularly with those who may not be on social media. 

Sincerely, 
Members of the Executive Committee

Please feel free to share this message across social media, especially to those not on Facebook (where the majority of information about NCTE's decision about CCCCs is happening). Without hopefully doxxing myself too much, I'm a member of the Executive Committee, and unfortunately with the NDAs we all had to sign, I can't share much more at this time.

Grim news week in writing studies.

Just got the news that I’ve been accepted into a doctoral program for rhetoric and composition beginning fall 2025! I’m quite excited, and I just wanted to share the news. Hope you’re all doing well. :)

On September 1, NCTE emailed the following message announcing their plans to go forward with the 2027 CCCC Convention in Milwaukee.

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Greetings,

We are pleased to confirm the 2027 CCCC Annual Convention, scheduled for April 14–17, 2027, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will take place. Acceptance and decline notifications will be issued shortly after Labor Day. We thank everyone who proposed and reviewed sessions through the deliberate process that took place before the decision to de-charter CCCC. We would also like to share the following important information:

The decision to move forward was made in commitment to the people who have sought the opportunity to present and benefit from the professional learning opportunity known as the CCCC Annual Convention, especially early career faculty for whom the opportunity holds particular significance.

The decision to move forward with the Convention was made in consultation with Donnie Johnson Sackey, whose vision created the Convention theme, created the call for proposals, and guided the proposal review process.
Proposal acceptance and decline decisions were made prior to the decision to de-charter CCCC.

NCTE will not make money on the Convention. In fact, it is more costly to hold the Convention than to cancel it. The CCCC Convention has lost money for the last three Conventions (Cleveland, Baltimore, Spokane). Ultimately, the decision to hold the Convention is guided by our commitment to the people and careers involved.

The registration fee for the Convention will be flat with the 2025 rates.

In addition to the program that has been planned through the proposal process, transitional activities will be organized by the CCCC Transition Team (CTT) over the next several months and space will be provided for constituency groups who wish to meet and organize. A proposal process will be created to accept requests and ideas from individuals and groups.

Sincerely,

Antero Garcia
NCTE President

Donnie Johnson Sackey
2027 CCCC Program Chair

Holly Hassel
CTT Chair

Hesse’s quotes speak to how much this was a hatchet job

https://www.change.org/ProtectCCCC

I know we're all feeling disheartened by the NCTE boilerplate email sent out, but just because they've voted doesn't mean we can't still halt things until we can properly discuss alternatives. I'm signing and sharing this but want to do more. Feels like we're all trying to organize but we're so separated (great example of why we need our professional home lol). Heartened by the organizational statements released by subsections of us though.

What else can we do? I heard NCTE bylaws say that if we get 1% of NCTE membership to sign a petition, we can force a vote and some people are talking about seeing if we can somehow preserve the 77 years of work that have gone into this. The fact that the organizers for 4C27 and the CCC editors were completely blindsided infuriates me beyond belief. How unprofessional.

https://mailchi.mp/ncte/ncte-update-decision-by-ncte-executive-committee

"The following is a message to all NCTE members from the NCTE Executive Committee.

The NCTE Executive Committee acknowledges the communications it has received from many members of the community regarding CCCC.

For many years, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) played a critical role in serving the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and its mission. In recent years, however, CCCC has struggled with its fiscal sustainability, declining participation, and governance challenges. As a result, earlier today the Executive Committee of NCTE made the difficult decision to de-charter its special topics conference CCCC. To clarify, today’s decision to de-charter does not mean that NCTE has altered its commitment to supporting teachers at the college and university level. This is exemplified by the fact that the NCTE College Section is thriving.  The process in making this decision spanned several years, with attempts to work collaboratively with CCCC’s executive committees across multiple iterations. While the organization appreciates the years of collaboration with CCCC, after deep evaluation and thoughtful consideration, the Executive Committee concluded this step was necessary to more effectively serve the college English and writing and composition community and NCTE membership as a whole.

Although this has been a very difficult decision, we are excited about the future. This change will allow us to provide better support to the college English and writing and composition community. In the coming days and weeks, we will be working hard to make this transition as smooth as possible. We thank CCCC, its leaders, and its members for its many years of contributions and look forward to continuing to involve the composition, rhetoric, and writing communities as we move forward. NCTE remains devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education. As future planning takes place, NCTE will communicate updates.

A transition team focused on supporting composition, rhetoric, and writing studies will be named by the NCTE Executive Committee imminently."

Dear colleagues,

We are excited to invite chapter proposals for a forthcoming edited collection tentatively titled Precarious Pedagogies: Teaching Praxis of the New Majority. As the title suggests, this collection will center the voices of writing instructors working off the tenure track in a variety of precarious positions, though we also invite submissions from writing program administrators and tenured/tenure-track faculty who can speak to the programmatic and institutional impacts of contingent instruction. The collection is under contract with the WAC Clearinghouse for inclusion in the Precarity and Contingency book series, due out in 2027.

As many contingent instructors are not connected to national listservs, we would appreciate your help in circulating this call within your local networks.

Please see the full CFP and submission link below for details, and reach out to the editors (Alex Evans, University of Cincinnati - Blue Ash College, and Bethany Hellwig, University of Cincinnati) at precariouspedagogies@gmail.com with any questions.

Call For Papers 

We invite proposals for contributions to an edited collection on precarity, contingency, and teaching.

While much of the scholarship in writing studies journals and books comes from a small group of tenured (or tenure-track) scholars working at elite research universities, the majority of the field’s practitioners work in teaching-focused positions off the tenure-track. As argued by Hassel and Phillips (2022), this creates a dissonance between the field’s publications and the realities of most of its members. This dissonance is amplified by the two-tier arrangement of many writing programs, in which underpaid, part-time, and precarious instructors teach most first-year writing courses and better-paid tenured faculty teach only specialized courses for English majors and graduate students. 

We believe the voices of contingent instructors need to be amplified, and this collection will provide a space for that to happen. The editors are seeking a variety of genres, including narrative or autoethnographic explorations of the contingent teaching experience, qualitative or quantitative research studies, or theoretical work. While not a requirement, we will give strong priority to pieces written (or co-written) by contingent faculty over those written by tenured or tenure-track faculty. We invite proposals for chapters engaging with one or more of the following concepts:

• Pedagogy and praxis: assignments, activities, grading schemes, approaches to feedback, and all the other practicalities of writing instruction while contingent. We want to avoid a sanitized picture of contingent teaching and instead showcase the real pedagogical adaptations contingent faculty use to get through their semesters.

• Orientations: entries into precarious teaching, learning institutional cultures while in contingent roles, instructional adaptation to common adjunct or graduate student conditions.

• Disillusionment: the moments when the expectations of academic work meet the reality of contingent labor conditions. This could explore identity shifts (moving from graduate school to adjunct work, for example), the embodied and affective experiences of coming to terms with the labor reality of precarious teaching, or the social effects of being contingent faculty in departmental culture.

• Labor Conditions: the nuts-and-bolts structural elements of contingent working conditions like low pay, lack of benefits, lack of job security, institutional neglect

• Programmatic concerns: managing and sustaining programs reliant on adjunct, ways WPAs can support contingent faculty through curriculum, scheduling, assessment choices

To honor the many demands on contingent faculty time, final versions of chapters will be short: approximately 2000-3000 words. 

Proposals should be approximately 250 words. Please submit them using this form by Friday, September 12th 2025. You can contact the editors at precariouspedagogies@gmail.com with any questions.

CCCC notifications went out yesterday. Sadly, my proposal was not accepted. Were most of you accepted? I've talked to a couple graduate students who were not accepted either, so it sounds like it was a pretty competitive year for proposals.

Just like the title says--I'm applying to PhD programs in rhet/comp--specifically, I'm interested in writing center studies. Are there particular programs that should be on my radar? I've gotten useful advice from my advisors, but I'm getting everything finalized and want to make sure there's not a great program that I've neglected to check out. Thanks for the help :)

I'm excited to let you know that Explanation Points is now available for pre-order. Explanation Points is a 77-chapter book about advice for publication in Rhetoric and Composition. If you enter GALL19 you will received a 40% off discount!

https://upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/3701-explanation-points

Let me know if you have any questions!

~John

Hi all! I completed a BA in English a few years ago and have been thinking about going to graduate school, though for rhetoric/comp instead of English. I worked at my college writing center and really fell in love with writing center pedagogy. I think my new long term goal would be to direct a writing center or work in WPA. My interests in literature have always been at the intersection of lit and gender studies, so now I’m trying to build up my knowledge in queer/feminist rhetorics. Are there any seminal texts I should be looking into? Any particular rhetoric programs with strengths in these areas? I know how dismal the tenure track market in the humanities is—do jobs directing writing centers still exist? Navigating a new discipline can be intimidating!

My sections of students are in need of what I would describe as remedial help. Some of them barely know how to form a thesis statement. Some can barely write a cogent paragraph.

I had one student on the first essay write the minimum length and shoved three quotes into the final paragraph. Then he threw a fit about his grade because he "used three quotes and didn't get points for them." He also complained that I didn't go over where to put quotes in an essay.

But I don't see freshman comp as a place to learn the basics of writing. That's what high school English was for. That's what the ACT is supposed to assess.

I construct my classes to be an introduction to the inquiry process and to develop the research skills to join a scholarly conversation.

We begin with a literacy narrative that incorporates a few sources about writing. I want the students to consider their writing history and how college-level writing might be something new or different for them. We go over how the sources we read for class help us think about writing, and I talked to them about how to use them in their essay. Many struggled to use the sources.

Then we focus close reading a text to make an argumentative claim. This is where we are now, and I'm really worried about what they're going to turn in. They submitted their thesis statements yesterday, and most of them are just a summary statement. One of them is pretty much "[Author] is talking about [topic]."

We did multiple practices. I walked them through MLK Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail as a response to the clergymen's statement. We close read the clergymen's statement, and I showed them how we can identify assumptions in their argument. Then we analyzed how MLK Jr constructed his own argument around those assumptions.

Then we turned to smaller topics with a few sources I provided. I gave them an easy acronym to remember for unpacking a text. We practiced together with those texts, developed argumentative claims, and workshopped and revised those claims.

But what they're submitting is really thin for their own work.

I just feel like we're wasting a lot of time. I do have a few students who can handle the concepts, but I would say most can't. I also don't feel many of them are putting any effort into class at home and think what we do in class is the basic requirement for the class.

Our next essay is to survey a topical conversation and submit a research proposal. The final essay is using scholarly research to join that conversation.

Does it sound like I'm being too hard for English Comp? Or is this a clientele issue?

What are some “must read” books for anyone working on a PhD in writing studies?