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 twoday 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.

CONTENTS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

1. MISSION

M ISSION O VERVIEW R ATIONALE I MPACT F UNDING G OVERNANCE M ECHANISMS FOR P ERIODIC REVIEW

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

H ISTORY * 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 Writing database (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

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 placebased, 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 21st 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 nonelite 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.

T HE F IRST F OUR Y EARS * 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.

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)

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 decisionmaking 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 longtime 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.

CLiC has been interdisciplinary, community-based, and technology-driven since it was established in 2007. P ARTNERS In the last four years, CLiC has worked closely with numerous individuals and programs.* C AMPUS 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) W riting Center W riting Programs C OMMUNITY 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 N ATIONAL 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&MCommerce 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,

P UBLIC S CHOLARSHIP : M EDIA 2009-2011: research, script, film, produce, and screen CLiC’s first documentary, The Other Side

The Other Side of the Tracks (25 minutes). Luca Morazzano, Dir. Shannon Carter, Project Supervisor. Produced by CLiC. Texas A&M-Commerce, 2011.

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

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&MCommerce), film local activist and current president of the Commerce chapter of NAACP speaking on the complexity Figure 1: Billy Reed, Norris Community (5/3/2010) 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.

P UBLIC S CHOLARSHIP : E VENTS 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 Public scholarship “brings researching, scripting, academics into public space and filming, producing, and public relationships in order to screening CLiC’s first facilitate knowledge, discovery, major documentary and learning, and action relevant to civic beginning research on a issues and problems. [. . .] It second; producing more embraces a democratic politics that is than 14 video essays for highly interactive, reciprocal, and national audiences; developmental.” securing a grant from --Peters, “Reconstructing Civic Humanities Texas that Professionalism” (2003) 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)

P UBLIC S CHOLARSHIP : O UTREACH 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.

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 followup 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.

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.

Recognitions for The Other Side of the Tracks: Selected, Texas Black Film Festival (Screened, Dallas, Texas, February 24, 2011).

P UBLIC S CHOLARSHIP : M EDIA 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.

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&MCommerce 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)

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.

“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

S CHOLARLY P UBLICATIONS 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.

S CHOLARLY P UBLICATIONS * 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.

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.

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 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.

S CHOLARLY P UBLICATIONS * 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): 151169. 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 DunbarOdom. “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 longrunning, 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 eJournal, 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, interview, inquire, and act” (Writing and Community 273). The impact

S CHOLARLY P UBLICATIONS * 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. W RITING D EMOCRACY Events Conference: Writing Democracy: A Rhetoric of (T)here. Texas A&MCommerce. 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 Communities. According to NCWAC’s Vision Statement, the “National

U NIQUE F EATURES * 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 UniversityBrooklyn (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

U NIQUE P ARNTERSHIPS * 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 resourcesharing, 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); TAMUCommerce (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, coeditors 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

R ESEARCH Q UESTIONS 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:

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

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?

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 MissouriKansas 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&MCommerce’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

T EXTBOOKS Dunbar-Odom, Donna. Working with Ideas. Reading, Writing, and Researching Experience. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. Foreman, Christy, Donna DunbarOdom, 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&MCommerce. Fountainhead P, 2011. C ELEBRATION OF S TUDENT W RITING ( 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 “writingabout-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 writing course’s object of 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,

C ELEBRATION OF S TUDENT W RITING (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 firstyear 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)

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 with New 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.

“[T]his video documents Texas A&MCommerce’s Celebration of Student Writing. As Carter’s narration describes, the celebration serves as the culminating event for the university’s twosemester 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.

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

C ELEBRATION OF S TUDENT W RITING : C OMMENTS Following the first Celebration of Student Writing in May 2007, project leaders received high praise from a broad range of faculty and administrators. From Hal Langford, Dean, College of Business and Technology: Please give my thanks to all who participated in today’s celebration! It was incredible! I think that is one of the best ideas and execution of idea that I have seen in writing and presentation. I would love for this to become the standard! Congratulations! From Paul Zelhart, Professor of Psychology and Former Department Head Yesterday’s Celebration of Student Writing was outstanding. I have been a professor for 40 years and I have never seen that kind of enthusiasm expressed over a writing assignment in a required class. Having 240 students proudly display their work is a phenomenon. Beyond excellent teaching and organization, I suspect your approach of using an ethnographic study of a topic chosen by the students is a major factor in the success of this event. From James Klein, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences: As I walked around the Celebration of Writing yesterday I was amazed at the engagement of the students in their topics . . . Great job - I haven’t seen that many students engaged in a project, ever! From Mary Hendrix, then Associate Vice-President for Academic and Student Affairs, sent to campus administrators a week before the CSW (emphasis mine): Too often, we focus on the problems we have and not on the good things…and then there is a ray of hope.

the country and, as of March 2, 2011, been viewed nearly 5,000 times. Sylwester created this video for the first iteration of Carter’s course. Others produced in response to this first course, including the video poetry series “American Faces,” were published at the National Conversation on Writing (“Spotlight On: New Media”). As project lead for much of the digital video featured at the National Conversation on Writing portal, Carter also served as project supervisor for the featured texts, including a video remix “Who Said, ‘Johnny Can’t Write’?” and the introductory video “Calling all Writers” (www.ncow.org). For each, Carter worked closely with CLiC research assistant, Luca Morazzano, the same graduate student who served as creative lead and director of CLiC’s first documentary film, The Other Side, discussed above. CLiC’s numerous achievements provide strong evidence of the participant’s enthusiastic willingness to work collaboratively with colleagues in the department and college. CLiC faculty and affiliated graduate students worked across the campus and in the community to produce and support multimedia writing through relevant curricula, student support, published scholarship and creative activities, and campus outreach (including video associated with our application for a Texas Historical Marker for the oldest African American church in Commerce, which was awarded in 2011 and installed April 26, 2011). CLiC has contributed substantially to our own department’s vertical writing curricula, from first-year writing to the graduate level. We do not have a writing major, but growing enthusiasm for multimedia writing means our undergraduates and graduate students now have opportunities to engage with new media across our department, from courses in our well established Children’s and Adolescent Literature program (graduate and undergraduate levels) to Film Studies (graduate program) to Speculative Fiction, Stylistics, and Creative Writing courses taught by a senior colleague and fan studies scholar who took Carter’s graduate-level course (Writing with New Media) in Spring 2009 and now incorporates multimedia writing in all her courses (Robin Reid). Impact: Digital Humanities CLiC’s research, teaching, and scholarly activities also bring together archival research materials and those gathered in the field with three traditions increasingly common in the Digital Humanities: remixing, aggregation, and geomapping tools. Carter’s current work as teacher and scholar combines remix culture and primary research in the humanities, a unique path previously unavailable to most scholars, community members, and students. Carter has pursued this path in undergraduate and graduate course design, in her own multimedia writing, and through several grant applications, both internal and external and in partnership with colleagues across the disciplines, for opportunities ranging from the National Science Foundation (CreativeIT) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (Digital Humanities grant) to media grants from Humanities Texas for a documentary in progress, CLiC’s second, full-length documentary project engaging local publics. In February, 2011, for example, Carter submitted an NEH Digital Humanities grant proposal to develop an interactive prototype that at once embraces remix culture and foregrounds the rigorous research and citation practices characteristic of traditional humanities scholarship.

The focus in the strategic plan on interdisciplinary instruction and what was learned from the System Federal Relations team on Friday make this event timely. [. . . ] From Rick Miller, then Director of the Student Center, describing the ongoing impact of CSW one week after event: I just keep smiling when I think about CSW – the energy and enthusiasm generated from faculty and students about learning…What really gets me, is the second and third wave of conversations about the day. People are referencing “factoids” and the observations they picked up at the event. Shannon – this is so cool for you and your folks – please book the space early for next year so we can get it all in one place. From Donna Dunbar-Odom, Director of English Graduate Studies: I want to second Shannon Carter's enthusiastic praise for the teaching assistants and our first-year students, but I also want to heartily congratulate her for conceiving and orchestrating such a wonderful event. It was refreshing to see student work celebrated rather than complained about, and the students I talked to were able to speak with real authority about the work they did. From Bill Bolin, Associate Professor of English: Please add my voice to the chorus of praise. The Celebration of Student Writing was outstanding. The students who participated were excited and eager to talk about their projects, and this event was a great venue for them to share their work with a live audience outside their classrooms. From Mildred Pryer, Professor of Management: Your wonderful work helps all of us as we teach our respective courses. We appreciate you and all the English professors who contributed to this effort.

Project Team for this recent grant includes a number of the collaborations described above, especially with Gee Library (Andrea Weddle), Instructional Technology (Michael Lewandowski), and Donna Dunbar-Odom. As described in the proposal for Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts: “This innovative approach to the problem of access to primary source materials when investigating isolated communities builds upon and extends current research, and includes use of a data source annotation tool developed for prototype, building from open source options like Popcornjs.” Indeed, CLiC’s work with our campus Instructional Technology Department and the Library, especially our Special Collections and the associated Northeast Texas Digital Collections, has emerged as among the most significant collaborations in which this research center has yet engaged. In Carter’s teaching, she now guides students in “remixing” local archives into digital media projects that begin in the Northeast Texas Digital Collections and engage rigorous research methods and responsible citation practices. In her advanced undergraduate course, for example, students begin with a photo essay (“Picturing Northeast Texas”) that uses as its core content artifacts derived from the Northeast Texas Digital Collections to develop a digital narrative appropriate to findings. Additional assignments include one informed by Scott McCloud that utilizes the popular software Comic Life (“Northeast Texas as Sequential Art”) and an audio essay utilizing Audacity (“Listening to Northeast Texas”). The Spring 2011 iteration of the graduate-level course Writing with New Media now combines remix culture with extensive training in archival research and additional guidance in negotiating creative rights. Digital media projects produced for this course organize themselves as digital scholarship in rhetoric and composition that likewise begins or ends in the Northeast Texas Digital Collections. Impact: Education and Training of Students “The developing curricula and intended research agenda of the CLiC allows students to conduct research on rapidly converging literacies in their culture and disciplines” (Selfe, CLiC Report, 2008) At its foundation, CLiC works from the assumption that appropriate literacy teaching in this new context should yield rhetorical dexterity, “the ability to effectively read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes of a new community of practice based on a relatively accurate assessment of another, more familiar one” (Carter, The Way Literacy Lives, 22). The research emerging from this framework has important implications for teachers and students across the nation. As Selfe describes “CLiC’s Unique Contributions” in his 2008 External Review, “Student and faculty research will be important contributors to a national effort to provide some “anticipatory momentum” (Selfe, forthcoming) for those trying to make sense of the bewildering array of new media literacies that seem to be influencing generations of “digital natives” and underserved populations alike. Research by your students and on your student population will help anticipate how higher education can innovate teaching and learning experiences with new communication technologies even as we re-apply long-held values to

C OMMERCE W EEK ON W RITING

new cultural and communicative situations.”

News Release, Ashley Johnson, Texas A&M-Commerce (9/29/2009)

Certainly, CLiC’s many service functions are obvious. That service is local and national. In the past four years, CLiC has worked hard to make writing visible on campus and in the community with recurring Celebrations of Student Writing (culminating activity for our FirstYear Writing program), Celebration of Writing with New Media (culminating activity for projects composed with new media), and the Commerce Week on Writing. CLiC brings the campus and the community together to explore and celebrate writing.

Community Prepares for National Day on Writing Commerce, TEXAS- The Commerce community will host a Week on Writing October 16-23, a celebration of writing in all its forms that will coincide with the National Day on Writing on October 20, and event sponsored by the National Council for Teachers of English. “People ask me, ‘why a week of writing instead of just a day?’” said Dr. Shannon Carter, associate professor of literature and languages and director of the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) at Texas A&M University-Commerce. “We decided to devote an entire week to writing because writing matters more now, than ever. It’s in everything we do from publishing memoirs and writing grocery lists, to texting friends and writing poetry.” The Week of Writing will kick off Friday Oct. 16, and will feature events including open mic nights, film showings, panel discussions, and writing seminars held on campus and throughout the community. According to Carter, the Week on Writing has already garnered interest throughout the Metroplex, including Garland ISD and the university’s satellite campuses in Mesquite, downtown Dallas, Midlothian, and Corsicana. “The Commerce Week on Writing isn’t about any single department or even A&M-Commerce,” Carter said. “It is about all of us, on campus and in the community. For this reason, CLiC isn’t organizing these events; we’re simply promoting them. I encourage everyone, from the campus to the community, to set up an event and spread the word.”

Our graduate students are regular presenters at regional and national conferences. A few have published articles from this work, and several more articles have been either accepted or in progress. Carter is working closely with graduate students on projects related to the grants proposals listed above and other opportunities likely to yield presentation and publication opportunities. Several are working to integrate video and audio interviews into their scholarship. Graduate student Sylwester Zabielski, for example, has had a video accepted for publication in the journal Kairos. The article is coauthored by the well-published scholar Joe Janangelo of Loyola University in Chicago and an undergraduate scholar at University of Missouri-Kansas City (“Anatomy of an Article,” Kairos Summer 2011). Our graduate students are regular presenters CCCC, a national, highly competitive conference. At CCCC 2010, for example, graduate students presented research emerging from Carter’s Spring 2010 course designed to prepare rhetoricians and literacy scholars to research writing and writers in local contexts, particularly among marginalized populations. To meet course goals, these MA and PhD students drew from a common research site located less than five miles from our classroom: the Norris Community (see also CLiC documentary and Carter’s research agenda described above). In Carter’s CCCC 2011 presentation entitled “Tensions Across Local Landscapes: Disciplinary Implications for Future Literacy Scholars and Rhetoricians,” she describes that course and relevant disciplinary implications. In a separate panel presentation entitled “Found in Translation: Forging Literate Identities in Marginalized Communities,” these MA and PhD students presented findings emerging from the “ethnographic and archival research methods” they used in that course “to investigate traditional and non-traditional literacy practices in the Norris Community” (Session Description, CCCC 2011). Research described “includes an investigation of textbooks used during segregation years at the Norris School” (Sean Watson, “Distorted Identities: Explicating Textbook Narratives in Segregated School in East Texas), “a look at the interactive literacy community of the oldest African-American church in town” (Allyson Jones’ “’The Word Became Flesh’: Communal Literacy Practices at an AfricanAmerican Church in East Texas”), “a life-history account of one church member’s acquisition and use of digital literacies” (Sunchai Hacumpai’s “Digitizing ‘the Word’: New Media Ministry at an East Texas Church”), and “a discussion of the McNair Scholars Program, which provides a route for students from marginalized communities, including the Norris Community, to pursue graduate studies” (Lami

C OMMERCE W EEK ON W RITING October 19, 2009 Halls of Poetry: A Reading of Creative Writers (Literature and Languages) October 20, 2009 Writing Local History: A Panel of Experts (Gee Library) NCoW Theater: A Festival of Films and Writing and Writers (CLiC) Writer Center Open House/ Memoir Writing Workshop (Literature and Languages, in Partnership with the Silver Leos Guild) October 21, 2009 Norris Community Project: Coming Together (CLiC, in Partnership with the Norris Community Club) The President’s Table (KETV Studio) Don’t Be Silent!, documentary, screening (CLiC)

October 22, 2009 “Literacy in the Lives of Three PhD Students” (Literature and Languages) “On Being an Artist: Daily Affirmations and Gang Violence (Art) Creative Writing Workshop (Sigma Tau Delta) “The Use of Video Making for Art Making, Documentation, and Writing Purposes” (Art) Commerce Public Library Presents, “Open Mic for Kids!” (Commerce Public Library) “No Experience Necessary: A 24-hour Short Play Competition and Festival, Workshop” (Theater) Open Mic (Mayo Review)

October 23, 2009 No Experience Necessary: A 24-hour Short Play Festival” (Theater) The Writing Center presents, Story Slam! (Literature and Languages)

Adami’s “Advancing Literacy: Graduate School Experiences Among Local Students and Graduates from Underrepresented Groups”). Graduate courses in our program have a long tradition of yielding student publications, conference presentations, and even dissertations. In 2008, for example, Brandi Davis-Westmoreland (PhD, 2010) joined a panel of graduate students presenting research resulting from their work in Donna Dunbar-Odom’s course on family “sponsors” of literacy. Westmoreland’s presentation served as the foundation for her dissertation on family literacy programs, especially the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy (Dissertation Director, Shannon Carter). JP Sloop also found his dissertation topic in that course and on that panel. At CCCC 2009, Shannon Carter co-presented with graduate student Melinda Bobbitt (PhD student) on a project emerging from a Spring 2008 course called “Theory and Practice of Argumentative Discourse.” That presentation explored conservative and evangelical rhetoric alongside colleagues Donna Dunbar-Odom and Anne Geller (St. John’s University) on a panel entitled “’But You Can’t Talk to Believers’: Dialogue and Dissent in Three Graduate Classrooms.’” That panel resulted in Dunbar-Odom’s 2010 publication in Reader (“I Was Blind But Now I Read”) and an invitation to Carter and Bobbitt to submit their collaborative presentation as well (revision in progress). We expect CCCC 2012 will include a large number of Texas A&MCommerce graduate students as well. Proposals include a panel emerging from Carter’s Spring 2011 graduate course (“Writing with New Media: Remixing the Past”), described in the “Digital Humanities” section of this White Paper. Entitled “New Media Technologies: Our Gateway to Remixing the Past,” this panel features multimodal texts remixed from local archival research that “begins or ends,” as the course insisted it must, “in the Northeast Texas Digital Collections.” Projects include Frank Alexander’s study of the literacy narratives “during the era of Jim Crow segregation by [students at the] St. Paul School of Neylandville, Texas-- a community of former slaves and descendants of slaves,” Christina Grimsley’s investigation of local literacy practices historical northeast Texas situated “within Deborah Brandt’s theoretical discussions of evolving literacy practices,” and Melissa Niven’s extended study of “domestic literacies” over time as illustrated across the lifespan of the Home Economics Department at a rural teacher’s college (our institution). As they explain in their proposal, “[t]his panel will discuss how remixing the archives led them into their communities and provided them access to the histories of underrepresented groups, and how these experiences can be extended to the first-year composition classroom” (CCCC 2011). Also emerging from this course is an individual proposal by Stephen Whitely entitled “Sundown Towns: The Living Rhetoric of Jim Crow.” Well aligned with the university’s Strategic Plan, CLiC “provide[s] innovative, relevant and quality academic programs that meet student needs.” No other school with the same student demographic and regional focus offers anything like CLiC; it is ready to serve as a “center of excellence . . . consistent with the University Mission and societal needs” (Strategic Plan 2007-2012).

CL IC T ALKS (S PEAKER S ERIES ) Established in 2009, “CLiC Talks” is a regular, interdisciplinary lecture series dedicated to research, teaching, outreach, and creative activities most consistent with CLiC’s mission: texts and writers in everyday contexts.* March 2009: Sergio Pizziconi, PhD, University of Siena, Italy (Linguist)

April 2009: Josephine Durkin, Assistant Professor of Art, Texas A&M-Commerce (“Excerpts and Conversations”)

November 2010: Sarah Dooley, Author, Young Adult Fiction (West Virginia)

5. FUNDING 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. The growth has relied open the generosity of individuals and programs across the campus and creative choices by CLiC affiliated faculty. In 2008, for example, CLiC leveraged existing resources and partnered with Texas A&M-Commerce’s Gee Library to establish their Digital Collections of Northeast Texas as the official archive for the National Conversation on Writing (NCoW), a Council of Writing Program Administrators-Network for Media Action initiative to collect, preserve, and archive oral histories and other artifacts documenting the literacy experiences of everyday writers. Through this and extensive, more local and community-based projects like the HeirLoom Project, rhetoric and composition specialists on our campus have worked closely with the library’s well-established archivists, oral historians, and growing digital collections to study, document, and preserve artifacts and oral histories informing text use and production in our participatory democracy. CLiC may have provided the intellectual frame and mechanisms through which participants have forged and sustained these important connections; but without progressive, creative, and altogether generous librarians and administrators like Gregg Mitchell, Andrea Weddle, Adam Northam, and Craig Wheeler this work would have been impossible. Likewise important to CLiC’s operations have been established partnerships with Instructional Technology. From the beginning, CLiC activities have required extensive involvement from the generous and talented IT staff members like Michael Lewandowski and Joe Shipman. Examples are numerous, including their guidance and technology support in the production of two scholarly webtexts for the national, peer-reviewed publications Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (Carter and Dunbar-Odom, Fall 2009) and Computers and Composition Online (Carter, Adkins, and Dunbar-Odom, Fall 2010). Lewandowski and Shipment helped us design, produce, test, and load the digital interfaces for both of these scholarly webtexts and countless, related projects. All of these accomplishments speak to the IT’s expertise and willingness to support CLiC’s technology needs, though we have thus far been unable to compensate them for their significant and time consuming contributions—at least beyond acknowledgements in our resulting publications and other multimedia services. No reliable funding source for CLiC has been made available, however. With the establishment of CLiC as an official research center within the Texas A&M University System, we are requesting a reliable funding source in order to continue to impact the campus, community, and national conversations about writing and writers.

*abbreviated list

Indeed, a reliable funding source is crucial, as External Reviewer Richard Selfe explained in his 2008 report. “The quickest way to undermine the energy and commitment of the project leaders is for

April 2010: Hugh Burns, Professor of Rhetoric, Texas Woman’s University, in Partnership with Gee Library (National Library Week)

them to perceive that they are primarily responsible for technology support and planning in addition to curriculum development, research and scholarship having to do with new literacies.” We are inspired to see additional projects across the campus that are now more directly contributing to new literacies across the curriculum, including the recent Digi-Fair. However, project leaders are also struggling to maintain “the energy and commitment” CLiC requires while likewise keeping up with other teaching, research, and service obligations. With no reliable funding source for travel, equipment, reassigned time, graduate research assistance, undergraduate research assistance, and other relevant activities, it will be impossible to maintain the current activity levels. Additional opportunities have presented themselves in recent months that seem ideally suited for CLiC, including the development of an interdisciplinary MA offered in partnership with the Department of Literature and Languages (Film Studies) and the Department of Mass Communications (Radio Television).

October 2009: Michael Miller, Professor of Art, Texas A&M-Commerce (“On Being an Artist: Daily Affirmations and Gang Violence”)

Gerald Duchovnay, Professor of English (pictured above), regularly teaches courses toward Texas A&M-Commerce graduate-level Certificate in Film Students. With CLiC co-founder and current Department Head Donna DunbarOdom, Duchovnay is working with representatives from the Department of Mass Communications (John Mark Dempsey, Head, and Tony DeMars, Associate Professor of RTV and Director of KETV Studio)

Similiarly, we have begun conversations with the Department of Political Science to establish a graduate-level Certificate in Writing Democracy, which would include 18-hours of graduate-level coursework in the Departments of Political Science and Literature and Languages.

G RANTS S UBMITTED D IGITAL H UMANITIES Carter, Shannon (PI). “Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts. “ National Endowment for the Humanities, Digital Humanities Grant. February 2011. Amount: $24,966 Status: Under Review Attardo, Salvatore, Shannon Carter, Donna Dunbar-Odom, and Sang Suh. “The Map is the Territory: An Integrated Platform for Archival Aggregation and Distribution.” National Science Foundation. CreativeIT grant. October 2009. Amount: $737,000 Status: Not Funded Carter, Shannon and Donna DunbarOdom. “Learning Through Composing with new Media: An Initiative to Establish the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC).” Federal Initiative for 2008 (FY 2009). Amount: $1,000,000 Status: Not Funded P UBLIC H UMANITIES Carter, Shannon, Project Director. Humanities Texas grant, bringing Humanities Texas Traveling Exhibitions to Commerce, Texas (“Jasper, Texas: The Healing of a Community in Crisis,” “’Behold the People: RC Hickman’s Photographs of Black Dallas, 1949-1961,” “Images of Valor: US Latinos in World War II,” and “Literary Texas: 25 East Texas Writers” (February 21-April 15, 2011) Amount: $1,500 Status: Funded

JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz, Department Head of Political Science, directs the Cambodia Project at Texas A&M University-Commerce, a service learning program that raises global and cultural awareness of Cambodia through its diverse activities. In addition to her outreach and teaching efforts associated with the Cambodia Project (including frequent student trips to Cambodia with undergraduate and graduate student researchers), DiGeorgio-Lutz investigates international policy relations most relevant to CLiC’s mission, including PLO’s Diaspora constituency, particularly Palestinian and Cambodian refugees. She is working with Shannon Carter, Professor of English, and Donna Dunbar-Odom, Head of the Department of Literature and Languages and Director of the Doctoral Program in English Studies, to establish an interdisciplinary, graduatelevel certificate consistent with CLiC’s mission and the Writing Democracy project.

Without a sustainable and consistent funding source, however, CLiC will be unable grow into the kind of research center we are poised to establish within the Texas A&M University System. Budgetary concerns External Reviewer Richard Selfe raised in his 2008 report are directly related to the current request for a reliable funding source: “Faculty collaborators in CLiC should . . . be involved (but not primarily responsible for) the development of new learning and work spaces for students and faculty, new online learning spaces, and the hiring of new support personnel who will help manage the 60%/40% split in resource allocation that should accompany the CLiC venture.”

G RANTS S UBMITTED * P UBLIC H UMANITIES Carter, Shannon, Deborah Mutnick, and Susan Stewart. “Writing Democracy: Towards a Translocal Consortium for Access, Preservation, and Exchange of Community-Based Discourses.” National Endowment for the Humanities. Bridging Cultures grant. June 2010. Amount: $241,683 Status: Not Funded Carter, Shannon. “Writing Democracy Across Local Publics: A Laboratory for the Public Humanities.” Federal Initiative for 2011 (FY 2012). September 2010. Amount: $750,000 Status: Under Review

I NDIVIDUAL R ESEARCH Carter, Shannon. “Writing for a Change: Race and Social Protest Rhetoric.” Spencer Foundation. February 2011. Amount: $40,000 Status: Under Review *Only external grant activities are listed here. CLiC faculty have also submitted and been awarded several internal grants, including four Faculty Development Leave grants for major book projects and a Faculty Research Enhancement Grant from the Graduate School. U NDER D EVELOPMENT Carter, Shannon and Deborah Mutnick. “Writing Democracy Institute.” National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, hosted jointly by Long Island University-Brooklyn and Texas A&M-Commerce Summer 2013. Application Deadline: March 2012.

Selfe describes the suggested “60%/40% split in resource allocation” this way: “the experience over the past 6 years in Humanities Information Systems at Ohio State University has confirmed the industry standard 60/40 split for project allocations. For any sustainable technology-intensive venture, 60% of planned expenditures will need to be spent on human resources. The other 40% is spent on the technical infrastructure. [. . .] Negotiations about what systems and purchases are most appropriate for the CLiC project should be ongoing and frequent.” Funding required for CLiC benefits the entire university and surrounding community, thus we are requesting support that will in no way replicate services and support already available to faculty, staff, and students across the disciplines. CLiC is committed to levering existing resources in support of recurring projects, thus regular meetings with CLiC’s advisory board will include requests for equipment and other items most directly relevant to stakeholders across the campus. For example, in developing CLiC’s first documentary (The Other Side of the Tracks), CLiC has made extensive use of the professional video camera owned by Media Services. We wish to continue making use of Media Services in providing professional-grade equipment necessary for CLiC’s second documentary and other, relevant media projects. Our request does not include a professional video camera for CLiC but instead a new camera for Media Services, to benefit the entire campus. In providing new media equipment like Flip Cameras, Easy Share Cameras, and audio recorders to student and community writers, CLiC has made extensive use of Gee Library’s circulation desk. In 2009, we placed the CLiC-owned equipment on reserve for the benefit of the entire campus, joining additional equipment Gee Library had purchased for student use, in direct consultation with CLiC faculty. Our request includes recurring requests to replace equipment for the benefit of the entire university, placing CLiC-owned equipment on reserve for checkout by students and faculty members across the campus. For these reasons, we are requesting an 70%/30% split in resource allocation, with 70% for human resources and 30% for technology resources. In providing support for research, teaching, and outreach activities consistent with the CLiC’s mission, we are requesting support for travel, graduate research assistants, undergraduate research assistance, and teaching incentives across the disciplines. CLiC’s General Operations Budget should include: • Two, full-time graduate research assistantships to support research, teaching, and outreach projects consistent with CLiC’s mission (including MA and PhD students in the Department of Literature and Languages) • One, full-time graduate research assistantship to support faculty-sponsored research, teaching, or outreach projects in disciplines beyond English Studies where they contribute to

FUNDING: 2007-2011 For the first four years, CLiC has been funded primarily through contributions by generous administrators for special projects, extensive in-kind contributions from units across campus, and the faculty involved. Since 2007, for example, Carter has spent, on average, $3,500-5,000 per year for (unreimbursed) travel and incidentals associated with CLiC. Though administrators across the campus have been extremely supportive of CLiC’s mission and goals, extremely limited travel funds have meant that only $450$1000 of the $3500-5,000 per year Carter has spent have been reimbursed by the university. No faculty member has received reassigned time for involvement with CLiC. We hope to remedy that soon. Generous administrators have funded several CLiC-related projects, however. 2007 Travel: $2200 Mary Hendrix, then VPAA, provided funding for Shannon Carter to attend the Digital Media and Composition Institute at OSU (May-June 2007) 2007-2008 Consultant Fee: $2000 James Klein, then Dean of Arts and Sciences, authorized CAS funding for site visit for External Review by Richard Selfe, OSU Travel: $2200 Funding for Donna Dunbar-Odom to attend the Digital Media and Composition Institute at OSU (May-June 2008) Equipment: $5000 HEAF request, portable media equipment (laptop, cameras, audio recorders) 2008-2009 Equipment: $5000 HEAF request, portable media equipment (PC, Mac, flip cameras, software) Travel: $800 Salvatore Attardo, then Head of the Department of Literature and Languages, authorized LL funding for keynote speakers Julie Lindquist and Scott Halbritter (Michigan State University) to speak at the Federation Rhetoric Symposium alongside Deborah Brandt

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CLiC’s mission or within English Studies if interdisciplinary concerns are foregrounded (applicants outside Literature and Languages will be given preference for this GAR opportunity) One undergraduate research assistantship to support facultysponsored research, teaching, or outreach projects across the disciplines as they contribute to CLiC’s mission Administrative Assistant (full-time) to coordinate application and review process for above, campus and community events (including the bimonthly speaker series “CLiC Talks), travel requests, and other budgetary and administrative matters. Technology budget to purchase software, equipment, and relevant technology necessary to facilitate research, teaching, and outreach efforts consistent with CLiC’s mission, especially those technologies that can be made available to students, faculty, and community members across the university and region through Gee Library’s Circulation Desk, Instructional Technology, Media Services, and the Writing Center. Supplies budget to purchase items necessary for printing, photocopying, and other activities necessary to facilitate research, teaching, and outreach efforts consistent with CLiC’s mission. Travel budget for participation in relevant research, training, and conference activities Adjunct Funds for Course Reassignment (CLiC Director, one course per long semester; up to two additional courses per academic year for CLiC-affiliated faculty to coordinate special projects, especially regular, external reviews) Incentive Funds to support interdisciplinary faculty involvement in research, teaching, and outreach activities consistent with CLiC’s mission Event Budget to fund recurring, local events like the bimonthly speaker series “CLiC Talks” Consultant Budget to fund visiting scholars as determined by the CLiC Advisory Board and, every five years, an External Review Team to evaluate CLiC, first in 2012, at the end of CLiC’s fifth year.

Selfe’s external review in 2008 indicated that CLiC project leaders needed, above all else, “time [. . . ] for planning and assigning responsibility . . . time-sensitive activities” like these. After his external review, Selfe concludes, “My impression, brief though it was, was that most of the key players in this project do not currently have a great deal of unallocated time to spend on this project (as important as it is) without new staff and faculty hires and the realignment of duties.” Above all else, we are requesting at least three new faculty hires take place within the next two academic years. We seek academic year, tenure system faculty to contribute to research, teaching, and outreach efforts consistent with CLiC’s mission, drawing from expertise in the following areas: Community Literacy Digital Humanities Multimedia Writing

(University of Wisconsin), February 2009 Event: $80 Attardo authorized LL funding to support promotional materials and other necessary expenditures for the National Conversation on Writing (NCoW): Digital Installation to be exhibited during Federation Rhetoric Symposium (February 2009) 2009-2010 Three CLiC GARs for special projects (BWe, NCoW, and documentary), authorized by Chris Evans, then Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and funded by CAS Event: $260 Attardo authorized LL funding to support promotional materials and other necessary expenditures for the coordination and promotion of Commerce Week on Writing events (October 2009) Event: $150 Attardo authorized LL funding to support promotional materials and other necessary expenditures for the coordination and promotion of CLiC Talks, including travel expenses for speaker Hugh Burns (Denton, Texas) 2010-2011 One CLiC GAR for special projects, authorized by Attardo, then Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and funded by CAS Consultants: $12,000 Funded by the Federation of North Texas Colleges and Universities (Federation Rhetoric Committee) and the College of Arts and Sciences (Dean Attardo) to bring seven leading scholars to A&MCommerce to deliver keynote addresses at the FRS (Writing Democracy conference, March 9-11, 2011) Additional funding for this event was generously provided by the Office of the Provost ($2300, authorized by Dr. Larry Lemanski), the Department of Literature and Languages ($1300, authorized by Dr. Donna Dunbar-Odom, English Graduates for Academic Development ($1500, authorized by faculty sponsor Dr. Susan Stewart), a grant from Humanities Texas ($1500), and contributions from publishers and other entities (including registration fees)

Candidates for the above positions are expected to hold a PhD or other terminal degree in rhetoric, writing, or a related field, contribute to the Texas A&M-Commerce graduate and undergraduate programs most relevant to CLiC’s overall mission, develop one or more graduate and undergraduate courses in area of specialization, and display an enthusiastic willingness to work collaboratively with colleagues in the department and college. In his 2008 External Review, Selfe’s recommendations include significant concerns regarding a “sustainable budget” that would underscore CLiC’s grant making activities. According to Selfe, “Administrators need time to set up a sustainable budget for the CLiC (based on lab fees? On Tuition? On an endowment?). Although grant seeking and grant writers are essential to CLiC, it is difficult to run the bulk of its human and technical infrastructure off of these highly focused and periodic funds. Administrators also need to bring their vision, assessment expectations, and institutional constraints to the planning table. This is also, typically, new work for department chairs, deans, and provosts. I’m sure that other stakeholders (vendors, donors, local industry and organizations, state-wide institutional colleagues, etc.) will also play important roles as the project goes forward, but the basic process will remain largely the same: Identify “new work” as stakeholders are included regularly in planning meetings and CLiC events and compensate them, as much as possible, for that work.” 6. GOVERNANCE and ADVISORY STRUCTURE As CLiC is, fundamentally, an interdisciplinary research center, it is recommended that the CLiC Director report directly to the Office of the Provost. Pursuant to Texas A&M University System Policy 11.02.4, “Faculty serving within a center shall report to the director.” For similar reasons, it is recommended that recurring budget allocations for CLiC come from outside the College of Humanities. CLiC’s Advisory Board includes internal and external membership, all of whom will meet on a recurring basis. CLiC’s Internal Advisory Board The role of the Center’s Internal Advisory Board is to provide ongoing feedback, direction and ideas regarding the mission, goals and objectives of the Center. IAB meets regularly to assess and evaluates Center Programs to ensure projects adhere to the objectives of the Center, reviews the use of Center resources and assists with identification and selection of key personnel for recruitment to the Center through the annual review of the Center membership. Internal Advisory Board Members currently include Shannon Carter (Chair), Associate Professor of English and Director of the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC); Donna Dunbar-Odom, Professor of English and Head, Department of Literature and Languages; Tabetha Adkins, Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing; Andrea Weddle, Director of Special Collections; Greg Mitchell, Director of Libraries. We are currently reconstituting our original Advisory Board, which included Vaughn Wascovich, Assistant Professor of Art, Leah Wickersham, Associate Professor of Education Technology, Bill Bolin, Associate Professor of English, and Greg Mitchell, Director of Libraries.

Our newly configured Internal Advisory Board will likely include representatives from the Political Science Department, History Department, the Art Department, the Sociology and Criminal Justice, Department, Computer Sciences, the Department of Educational Technology, Sam Rayburn College, Gee Library (i.e., Special Collections and Digital Collections), Media Services, Instructional Technology, Technology Services, the Center for Undergraduate Research, the Writing Center, and the Writing Program. CLiC’s Executive Advisory Board The Executive Advisory Board (EAB) consists of leaders from specializations most relevant to CLiC’s mission. The Board provides external expertise and connections to the scholarly and professional communities and is a potential source for External Reviews. CLiC’s IAB is currently pursuing potential members for EAB. 8. MECHANISMS FOR PERIODIC REVIEW Pursuant to Texas A&M University System Policy 11.02.1, “All centers and institutes shall be periodically reviewed at least every five years.” CLiC was reviewed in 2008 by External Reviewer Richard Selfe (Ohio State University). That report is available in Appendix B. In 2012, CLiC will be due again for an external review. External Review Team will be selected by the Internal Advisory Board from the Executive Advisory Board, ideally to include the original reviewer, Richard Selfe, and address progress since previous review. Internal Advisory Board will meet at least three times per academic year to provide ongoing feedback, direction and ideas regarding the mission, goals and objectives of the Center. IAB meets regularly to assess and evaluates Center Programs to ensure projects adhere to the objectives of the Center, reviews the use of Center resources and assists with identification and selection of key personnel for recruitment to the Center through the annual review of the Center membership. IAB will also review membership with respect to contributions to scholarly, teaching, and outreach activities contributing to CLiC’s mission and recommend changes across membership when necessary. Given the necessary contributions of IAB, it is recommended that they be given first priority to CLiC-affiliated resources. Twice yearly, CLiC Graduate and Undergraduate Assistants will submit to the IAB reports on their activities and accomplishments most relevant to CLiC’s mission and stated goals of research, scholarly, and creative activities associated with their assistantship. IAB will review GAR and UAR reports to determine continued appointments. Once yearly, IAB will request similar reports from CLiC-affiliated faculty to determine best use of existing resources. On a biannual basis (or at the request of administration or Texas A&M University System officials), CLiC Director(s) will submit a “CLiC Report” describing CLiC’s accomplishments and plans.