2008 Call to Convention - Charles Bazerman, Program Chair

As we gather in New Orleans, we do well to contemplate the role of writing in documenting and changing realities. New Orleans is a city of historically fabulous realities but a city torn by realities hidden, ignored, not acted on; a city whose present reality is mightily contested, and whose future reality is at stake; a city whose past and emergent realities provide troubling accounts of the realities of our country.

As teachers of writing we spread the means of describing reality, evaluating what exists, exploring remedies for life’s ills, and asserting persuasive terms for new realities. Writing inscribes realities, turning them into shared facts and contested divisions. In scripted speeches our leaders present for us the realities they wish us to support. In newspapers journalists represent the events of the day making them available for public deliberations. Historians through writing turn events into history. Scientists by writing turn observations into data and theories. Through writing students represent the realities of their lives and get drawn into the realities offered them by disciplines and professions.

But every reality we represent has its responsibilities. The first responsibility is that what we represent is accountable to experience—that we do not lie, but even more that we pursue facts and evidence to the greatest extent possible, given the standards of the various disciplines of knowledge. Further, we have a responsibility to inscribe the realities we experience, making them available publicly for all to ponder and react to—that is the responsibility of a free press and intellectual inquiry, of academic pursuit and democratic action. This is why we insist on detail and evidence; library work and investigation; evidence and documentation for the claims in student writing. And this is why we have the responsibility to pursue research through the most rigorous methods available to us about what writing is, how it works, how people develop in writing, and how we can best teach and support writing.

Further each reality we write, each one we read and accept, places a burden on us to act—for these realities represent our world, the world we live in, the world we are responsible for. If we look into our lives and diagnose a contradiction in our thinking and actions, that creates a responsibility. If our students reveal to us an intimate confidence or a personal struggle, that also creates a responsibility. If suffering and difficulties and mistreatment of peoples are made evident in our newspapers, that creates a responsibility. If science or other investigation make evident impending disaster we have a responsibility to seek means to avert it. If the historical record reveals misdeeds, malfeasance, and corruption we have a responsibility to hold those responsible to account. Closer to home, as teachers of writing, we have a responsibility in our pedagogy to heed what research has found.

 Finally we have a responsibility to create the realities of the future through the plans, visions, and goals we inscribe. Our plans build and rebuild cities, build and rebuild communities and organizations, build and rebuild professions and institutions, build and rebuild schools and universities, build and rebuild the learning activities of each classroom. These objects of our future, responsibly grounded on our past experiences and current facts, need to go beyond the past and present to make a world more habitable and sustainable. The work of writing helps us live together better, more happily, in a world filled with all the richness we can support and sustain.

I call on the participants of the 2008 meeting of CCCC convening in New Orleans in their presentations

• to inquire how writing reveals our histories, inscribes facts, and makes realities available for thought and deliberation;
• to examine how writing creates accountability for truth and evidence, establishes responsibilities to act on what we find, and develops our communal responses to those realities;
• to consider writing in relation to the complex realities of contemporary society;
• to attend to the realities of teaching and learning writing in our changing world;
• to contemplate our role as teachers of writing in preparing citizens who can responsibly represent, reflect on, and act in the worlds they inhabit and rebuild;
• to propose actions by which writing and our profession may make and sustain this world as a more habitable place.

Charles Bazerman
University of California, Santa Barbara
2008 Program Chair