Hi again,
I tried to send this at the end of my last message, but the list
rejected it for being too long. I thought I'd save some of you a bit of
time if you're thinking of submitting a proposal. I don't think it's
essential to have a comprehensive theme for our session, but knowing the
conference theme is usually handy for proposal writing.
Janice
Re-writing "Theme for English B": Transforming
Possibilities
Theme
In 1949, as the CCCC was being founded, Langston
Hughes
published Theme for English B — a narrative poem set
in
New York City that describes and juxtaposes multiple
texts:
the text of his assignment; the text of his response;
the texts
of classroom, country, and life. Assigned “a theme” to
write,
he’s told, “let that page come out of you— /then it
will be true.”
As Hughes wisely explains, however, “It’s not easy to
know
what is true”:
So will my page be colored that I
write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of
you.
Hughes suggests how complex our knowing and our
relationships are; how implicated within each other
instructor
and student are; and how in order to learn, we must
learn
together, from and with each other.
One theme sounded by Hughes is evoked by the word
“theme,” a genre that may seem anachronistic today,
but that
was the very stuff of composition classrooms not so
long
ago. How/have our writing assignments and genres and
texts
changed, and why? More generally, what does it mean,
in this
day and age, to write? A second theme is located in
the
relationship of students to teacher. How/have our
classes
changed — demographically, culturally, textually,
technologically, and ideologically? In Bitzer’s terms,
how/has
the rhetorical situation of the classroom changed? And
what
is the significance of such changes? A third theme of
Hughes’s poem speaks to the nature of learning, what
we
have come to know as a Bakhtinian exchange: “As I
learn
from you,/I guess you learn from me . . . .” How do we
—
students and teachers — learn together? More
specifically,
what is it that we help students learn? And what is it
that we
have learned from our students?
Embedded within these themes is the hope that through
language and relationship, we can transform what is.
The
possibility of such transformation is peculiarly
American: “You
are white— /yet a part of me, as I am a part of you./
That’s
American.” As compositionists and rhetoricians, as
citizens
of our local institutions, and as participants in
American
democracy, what difference do our own learning, our
teaching
to others, our theory, and our practice make? How do
we
evoke and realize transforming possibilities?
I encourage proposals that address these questions and
others related to practice, theory, and research in
composition and rhetorical studies—including
assessment,
classroom climate, histories of composition,
disciplinary
issues, professional communication, visual design and
its
role in composition studies, the (appropriate) roles
of
technology in composition, and writing centers and
writing
across the curriculum programs.
Do join us in New York City in 2003, a city with new
meaning
to us all. Come together with colleagues, to meet new
ones
and to renew friendships, and to initiate new
relationships
and renew others — with the materials of our
profession, with
our past and our future, with each other and with our
students, so that we can continue transforming
possibilities.
http://www.ncte.org/convention/cccc2003/theme.shtml
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