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
(shannon_carter@tamu-commerce.edu)
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 two-
day 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. M ISSION
2. O VERVIEW
3. R ATIONALE
4. I MPACT
5. F UNDING
6. G OVERNANCE
7. 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
1. MISSION
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 place-
based, 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 non-
elite 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 The Local Matters
further study, and CLiC What the academic offers to his or her
is appropriately local culture is the intellectual power of
positioned to support theoretical abstraction that derives from
an academic discipline. The locality, in
and promote toward this
return, offers to the academic the
end relevant research,
particularity, the concreteness, of lived
teaching, and service
experience in time and place. The
activities.
language and thought of each academic
public life w[ill] both be recognized and
Economic conditions
changed in a civic conversation”
impact writing practices
(Bender, Intellect and Public Life, 145)
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 decision-
making 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 long-
time 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&M-
Commerce 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 three-
year 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&M-
Commerce serve a large percentage of the US college population,
CLiC research is directly applicable to contexts beyond A&M-
Commerce.
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&M-
Commerce), film
local activist and
current president
of the Commerce
chapter of
NAACP speaking
Figure 1: Billy Reed, Norris Community (5/3/2010) on the complexity
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)
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
researching, scripting, Public scholarship “brings
academics into public space and
filming, producing, and
screening CLiC’s first public relationships in order to
major documentary and facilitate knowledge, discovery,
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)

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.
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.
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,

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.
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 follow-
up 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.
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.
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&M-
Commerce 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)
“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.
The Norris Community Club (Commerce, Texas), established in 1973 in
Donna Dunbar-Odom, “Local and partnership with several university students to create a “direct line of
Global: The Writing Class’s Vital communication” between the Commerce City Council and African
Role in Composing Citizens.” Issues in American citizens. Founding members and core activities are featured in
Writing. Forthcoming. Print. The Other Side of the Tracks, as well as Carter’s academic and additional
public scholarship activities.
Adkins, Tabetha. “Popular Culture as a
Sponsor of Literacy: Confronting the The second documentary, we hope, will likewise extend connections
CLASH! BOOM! POW! in the Basic across local publics in partnership with an established activist
Writing Classroom.” CLASH!: organization—this time, through the Corporation for Cultural Diversity
Superheroic Yet Sensible Strategies for representing local leadership across the City of Greenville.
Teaching Students the New Literacies
Despite the Status Quo. Eds. Sharon
Spencer and Sandra Vavra. Charlotte,
NC: Information Age Publishers.
Forthcoming. Print.

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 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)

---. “’The English Effect’ on Amish
Language and Literacy
Practices.” Community Literacy Journal
5.2, Spring 2011. Forthcoming. Print.
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): 151-
169. 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 Dunbar-
Odom. “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 long-
running, 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 e-
Journal, 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&M-
Commerce. 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 University-
Brooklyn (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 resource-
sharing, 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); TAMU-
Commerce (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, co-
editors 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:
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?
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
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 Missouri-
Kansas 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&M-
Commerce’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 Dunbar-
Odom, 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&M-
Commerce. 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 “writing-
about-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 first-
year 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)
“[T]his video documents Texas A&M-
Commerce’s Celebration of Student
Writing. As Carter’s narration
describes, the celebration serves as the
culminating event for the university’s two-
semester 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.
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.
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
News Release, Ashley Johnson,
Texas A&M-Commerce (9/29/2009)
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.”
new cultural and communicative situations.”
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 First-
Year 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.
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 co-
authored 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 African-
American 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&M-
Commerce 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)
*abbreviated list
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.
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)
October 2009: Michael Miller, Professor
of Art, Texas A&M-Commerce (“On
Being an Artist: Daily Affirmations and
Gang Violence”)
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).
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 Dunbar-
Odom, 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 Dunbar-

Odom. “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, graduate-
level 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
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 faculty-
sponsored 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 re-
alignment 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&M-
Commerce 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.