San Fran

Well, for the second year in a row I have been rejected by CCCC. It's kind of a crappy feeling. It doesn't sting so much if you just kind of whip something together and send it off. But the proposal that I/we sent in was a considerable investment in time. We think it is (or thought it was) a creative attempt to do at least two pretty cool things: 1. It was an attempt to share with members of the field the fruits of longitudinal studies on the reading and writing practices of collegiate student-athletes; 2. It was a direct response to a call for mentoring more rigorous research in the field. Below I have posted the 900 word proposal, so you can read at your leisure if you'd like to see what the world will miss out on.

In my mind, in our mind (as a panel), we thought we were going to be able to do a couple of important things (we're all doing important things, so perhaps that's unfair to try to make some implicit claim of superiority - which I hope I'm not doing). I have to be honest, the rejection feels a little bit like a slap in the face in the sense that the conference halls are often filled with complaints that too many presentations are of an airplane-composition-quality. These presentations would have been quite thoroughly "vetted" (what can I say, too much politics lately) through both dissertation committees as well as the senior scholars within the field who had volunteered to respond to and "mentor" these presentations. In other words, the proposal demonstrates the high degree of likelihood that the presentations would have been of a respectable quality.

In retrospect, I think the proposal may have billed itself as more than it needed to be. I think that if my fellow ph.d. candidate and I had simply proposed a panel on the merits of our own work that we would have been better off. That, of course, is hindsight. But if we wanted to do that, we would have. We wanted to try to do more. And, of course, the two of us were really looking forward to the extended dialogues and fresh perspectives to our work that these outside readers would have contributed. It would have been a great opportunity not just for us, but potentially for others. My co-presenter and I (or maybe I should just say "I") were moved by the idea of creating a model for mentoring that would be more in-depth than the RNF or QRN. Not to take anything away from those two, b/c they're fantastic. But, well, anyway.

I guess I'll conclude with two final thoughts. First, my co-panelists did an wonderful job of either composing their portion of the proposal. Second, this really sucks. (Oh, and in other rejection news, I found out I was turned down for a grant that I was really hoping for. Ugh.)

Here's the proposal:

At the 2008 CCCC several challenges for “Strengthening the Research Culture within CCCCS” was put forth by a panel of distinguished scholars within our field. The 2009 panel responds most specifically to the challenge set forth by Davida Charney and David Russell to create more mentoring opportunities for junior scholars and graduate students by demonstrating the possibility of providing mentoring opportunities within the confines of a regular Cs session.

The value of this panel for the graduate student/junior scholars consists of mentoring through prolonged engagement and dialogue with senior scholars in the field about their projects. By exchanging papers and project materials before the beginning of the conference and by starting their conversations in advance this panel will facilitate sustained mentoring moments that are more in-depth than some of the great, one-time opportunities currently available (e.g. RNF). As well, the format of the panel will allow the Speakers to present their work and receive immediate critique from the senior scholar mentors as well as have the benefit of continuing the mentorship in face-to-face exchange. The value for the immediate audience and the CCCCs organization will be, among other residual effects for those present, a model for providing such opportunities for other young researchers.

Speakers One and Two will be presenting their research on the literacy practices of student-athletes and alternative pedagogical practices with underprepared student-athletes respectively. Unlike many other sub-groups that come through our composition classrooms, within our field student-athletes have received very little scholarly attention as a demographic. Many of us who live a life of the mind on one side of campus have little understanding about the physically-oriented lives our student-athletes experience in and out of the classrooms. By presenting data from their ethnographies, Speaker One and Two share data-driven stories that shed light on perceptions and misperceptions. Broadly, these projects are imperative for the insights they offer about student-athletes. More narrowly, these projects help paint a picture of how student-athletes inhabit, move through and respond to our classrooms and our pedagogies. They demonstrate how student-athletes reconcile the sometime conflicting values, norms and pedagogies of the culture of their sport with the values, norms and pedagogies of the culture of academica.

Speaker One does this by examining what student-athletes do with texts on a daily basis both inside the classroom and out: how they read, write and talk around literacy. He focuses on the physical and material elements of what David Barton calls “literacy events” as an approach for better understanding the “literacy practices” that often cross-pollinate the domains of athletics and academics. Speaker Two does this by examining how student-athletes respond to specific writing pedagogies over the course of three years.

Therefore, this panel proposes to fulfill at least two objectives: One, respond to one of the challenges of the 2008 I.10 panel and, two, allow two Ph.D. candidates to experience mentoring opportunities that will show them how to extend and apply their research beyond the dissertation as they continue to make their way in the field as growing researchers.

The panel will begin with a brief introduction explaining the intent, values and format of the panel. Then Speaker One will report on an ethnography that responds to questions about “How the physical learning and material conditions of scholarship athletes influence literacy practices.” He will first describe the rationale for the project by reviewing Vygotsky’s and Merleau-Ponty’s theories of the primacy of bodily learning in language development; he will explain how this project learns about literacy through a study of bodies. From there Speaker One will describe the design and execution of the year-long ethnography of student-athletes: He will provide an overview of the subjects, the setting, the methods for data collection, the data, his methods and tools for analysis, and briefly describe the findings. To give the respondents and the audience a starting point for discussion he will conclude with some comments about his current progress and end with questions that are of concern to him and the project at that moment.

Speaker Two will present findings from a three-year ethnographic study on the alternative pedagogical practices used with academically underprepared student-athletes and the students’ responses to those pedagogical decisions. For three consecutive years, Speaker Two taught a one-year version of first-year composition, the stretch course, to underprepared students. The majority of these students were student-athletes in the revenue-producing sports of men’s basketball and football. Through this study, Speaker Two found that alternative pedagogies and programs can (1) teach students the writing skills they need to matriculate through the institution, (2) mirror the pedagogy of the court or the field, and (3) reframe writing experiences for students who have not been successful in their previous classes.

Respondent One, who will have already been in dialogue with Speaker One about his paper, will then respond to Speaker One’s presentation. She will focus her responses on the questions posed by Speaker One and then open up the discussion with the audience.

Respondent Two, who, like Respondent One, will have already read Speaker Two’s paper. In similar fashion, Respondent Two will focus the majority of her responses on the questions posed by Speaker Two at the end of her presentation. Both Respondent One and Two will take the lead and focus the responses to the presentations, but they will also prime the audience and assist in facilitating a conversation about the presentations on the reading and writing of student-athletes.