CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: 2005 Research Network Forum Plenary Addresses The 2005 Conference on College Composition and Communication hosted the eighteenth annual Research Network Forum (RNF). The 2005 RNF brought together more than 115 participants at different stages and in different roles in the careers as researchers. This all day, pre-conference meeting offered a combination of plenary addresses from nationally known researchers, roundtables joining both new and experienced researchers in composition to discuss work-in-progress, and a roundtable of editors representing many of the journals in composition and communication. After brief opening remarks from RNF Co-Chairs Risa Gorelick and Ollie Oviedo, Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe delivered the morning plenary addresses--“Global Considerations of Literacy in the 21st Century, Part I & II” Hawisher’s and Selfe’s plenary addresses focused on the current iteration of their more than two-plus decades of work on digital literacy. As Hawisher noted in her opening remarks, she and Selfe have worked during this time to gather information and stories about the literacy processes of those who grew up in the digital age, and to examine the effects of these processes on their literate lives. Now focusing their work on stories of digital literacies from around the world, Hawisher and Selfe discussed their current research on the digital literacies of two women academics whose histories and literacies are rooted in other parts of the globe—a Taiwanese student and a Chinese student who both received their primary and secondary educations in their home countries and then completed their undergraduate and graduate work in universities in England and the United States. In their educational experiences away from their home countries, these two students acquired more advanced digital literacies, and the stories of their literacy acquisition seem to be at the core of Hawisher’s and Selfe’s current study. Hawisher’s address, “Global Considerations of Literacy in the 21st Century, Part I,” focused on the story of Yi-Huey Guo. Hawisher discussed Yi-Huey’s middle class family history and her educational background as a Taiwanese student whose parents placed a high value on education and learning English. Hawisher noted that Yi-Huey first came to computer technology during her bachelor’s degree work in the mid-1990s and that Yi-Huey’s proficiencies with technology and English expanded in 1996, as she completed a master’s degree in language arts. Though indicating the Yi-Huey next completed a doctoral degree at the University of Illinois, Hawisher paused to emphasize that Yi-Huey continues to believe that she has yet to acquire a full sense of digital literacy. Yi-Huey now works as a college English instructor in Taiwan. Hawisher claims that Yi-Huey does not see her current struggles with digital literacy as one influenced by issues of gender (another long-standing focus of the work of Hawisher and Selfe) in either the Taiwanese or American educational systems. Hawisher then concluded by connecting Yi-Huey’s story to the scholarship of Brandt and others on “sponsorship.” Hawisher believes that sponsorship provided the gateways to digital literacies for both students that were the focus of their RNF presentation. However, Hawisher expressed her concern that such sponsorship is now in decline due to their current political climate that limits the opportunities for students to explore the global features of digital literacy in the United States. In the transition between the two parts of the plenary, Cindy Selfe noted how their research on the digital literacies of Yi-Huey and Liu Lu exhibits the forum’s emphasis on works in progress, and she encouraged RNF participants to provide her and Hawisher with feedback. Selfe then detailed Lu’s traditional Chinese family history (that of the poor, hard-working family unit) and educational background in a communist state with a climate of tremendous political unrest due to the infusion of Western democratic culture and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Despite the conditions, Lu’s family, like Yi-Huey’s family, placed a significant emphasis on literacy practices and the commitment to education in English. Despite what Selfe labeled tremendously adverse life situations, Lu’s family line maintained its commitment to reading and writing, from saving money for picture books to making the most of other tools of literacy. Lu’s first exposure to technology came in 1989 (at the University of London where she completed her master’s degree) which necessitated her continuing learning of English since the technologies themselves relied on an understanding of the English language. Lu later completed her doctoral degree in rhetoric and composition in 2001 at Purdue University where she was strongly influenced by her advances with digital literacy. Selfe noted how Lu, like Yi-Huey, found her acquisitions of English and digital literacy to be one process of literacy acquisition. Selfe added closure to the plenary when she stated that to understand one’s literacy practices and values is to understand one’s ecology of literacy—one’s story, history, educational background, social contexts, etc.. Selfe and Hawisher are succeeding in putting a human face to theories of digital literacy. All of these issues, Selfe maintained, come together for each individual in unique ways. Selfe indicated that this ecology of literacy is never monocultural. Despite the multicultural layer of digital literacy, Hawisher and Selfe emphasized just how significant the role of English is in the acquisition of digital literacies for people around the globe. After the two morning plenary presentations, the discussion drifted to issues of continuing cultural hegemony, diminishing import and export of American education, and the growth of “Englishes” in the United States and their impact on the globalization of cyberspace. From the perspective of one new to the field, it is inspiring to see researchers as established as Gail Hawisher and Cindy Selfe talk openly about their work in progress and invite dialogue from those of us who have been reading their distinguished work. The plenary addresses touched on many of the critical issues in computers and writing today while at the same time they extened the research of this field to places that it really needs to go. In the afternoon plenary discussions, former chair of the CCCC, Keith Gilyard, used his plenary address, “Buried in the Archives: Re-Examining Scholarship in English Studies,” to discuss his current archival research with his graduate students at Penn State University. He emphasized how he uses this research in order to examine the historical efficacies and intersections of many his research interests. Much like Hawisher and Selfe, Gilyard emphasized the need to understand the histories of ideas, texts, and forms of scholarship. Currently, Gilyard is concerned with what he sees as the very small base of primary research that has created a “composition overlap index,” or what he terms “COI,” an overlap problem that has the many areas of composition research now standing on a base that Gilyard believes is too small to maintain the continuing growth of research in the field. Therefore, Gilyard believes that the archives of composition and rhetoric can provide a stronger and broader foundation for continuing scholarship in the field. Buried in the archives, according to Gilyard, is a central place for expanding the field. Though noting such research is a time-consuming activity, especially for graduate students, Gilyard continually returned to his central idea that archival research allows contemporary scholars the opportunities to write more complete and more accurate histories for their research projects. Gilyard suggested that this archival work adds to the collective narrative that sustains the field. Full of wit, enthusiasm, and honesty, Gilyard showed how research can be engaging for us all and how his life continues to be engaged by research, and is now focused on expanding the archival research on composition and rhetoric. Much different from the extemporaneous style of Gilyard, Eleanor Kutz meticulously presented “Studying Discourse in Communities and Classrooms” which was about her continuing work on discourse analysis and the socially imbedded nature of language. Kutz paused first, however, to lament that the term “discourse community” has now become a common pedagogy that has lost its momentum as an important area of research in composition studies. Working from the well-known critique of discourse community made by Joseph Harris, Kutz attempted to reclaim the value of discourse communities and literacy practices. While Kutz argued that the current naïve and oversimplified view of discourse communities has affected, limited, and devalued the studies of various discourse communities, Kutz argued convincingly that research on discourse communities needs to remain a primary area of investigation and discussion in our scholarly journals and conferences. In her words, Kutz suggested that the field continue to “value the diversity of students’ worlds.” In addition, Kutz argued that students must be invited to participate in such ethnographic research. Kutz then concluded her address by presenting the three main lessons that she has learned in her decades of work in language and literacy. One lesson is, according to Kutz, that things are more complicated than the language researchers use to describe them. Another lesson that Kutz has learned through her work in research on discourse communities is that researchers are limited by the interpretive frameworks of the communities with which they identify themselves. For her own work though, Kutz continues to set her research agenda based on the perspectives of first-year students and the discourse communities that shape their lives. This agenda set up Kutz’s third lesson. She believes that the multiple and varied perspectives of discourse communities provide for profound realizations on the nature of discourse, and these realizations still have relevance for the field. Despite making different claims for future work in composition studies, both Gilyard and Kutz show us that composition research has a strong future, even as that research reaches back to leap forward and reclaims texts and methods that remain part of the collective history of our field. Much like the lost notes that fill the margins of our composition programs, it is sometimes true that our field forgets to look in the rearview mirror, and that valuable research may be the “re”search of work already completed. |
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