Rebekah Shultz and Richard Colby's Panel Summaries

A.01 Sixty Years of CCCC History: Some Pivotal Moments
There were six speakers in Sixty Years of CCCC History: Some Pivotal Moments, a retrospective of how far rhetoric and composition has come as a field in 60 years and how CCCCs has represented that progress or, in some cases, lack of progress.

Jeffrey Sommers in Writing Placement: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? talked about some issues we still have with placing students. For instance, we still dont know definitively what makes a piece of writing college level. Writing standards shift from institution to institution, and there is rarely complete agreement on what college-level writing standards should be even within the same institution. We should be able to identify with precision when a students writing is no longer basic, yet we still cant do that either. To make the matter even more complex, students often revert to pre-college writing strategies when faced with more challenging writing tasks even if they have learned how to use more complex writing strategies for simpler writing tasks.

In The Matter of Multimodal Composition, Cynthia Selfe described how as a profession we have made rapid progress toward better understanding a fuller range of semiotic texts and the communicative practices they entail. However, English departments still dont value these same multimodal texts for tenure and promotion. Fully 62% of Research I institutions require the publication of a print monograph and progress toward a second book. In other words, as Edward Tufte might say, we are limited to flatland in our scholarship. This is particularly unfortunate because multimodal texts are more complex and can more fully embody a wider range of meanings and purposes. They also take more time, thought, planning, expertise, and effort to produce.

Charles Schuster, in an argument entitled An Argument on Behalf of Aesthetics, lamented how the field has lost the teaching of style and aesthetics in writing.

The CCCs editor, Deborah Holdstein, described the career of a largely unknown, mid-century rhetoric and composition scholar named Wallace Douglas in The Flagship Journal: CCC. Douglas is largely unknown because he saw CCCs as preaching to the choir, so he instead published in other venues often outside of the field. This illustrated Holdsteins point that to be published in CCC means that the writer has something to say to the entire profession.

In Students Right, Keith Gilyard discussed the 1974 manifesto, Students Right to their Own Language, which was published in a special issue of CCCs. Since then, no liberal-minded academic has dared to speak too harshly against Students Right to their Own Language, but they only embrace it in theory and not in practice. However, Gilyard pointed out that even in theory, Students Right to their Own Language is not clear. CCCCs made a statement that Students Right to their Own Language is not affirming the student right to write poorly. However, this has meant that instead of affirming a variety of student dialects such as African American Vernacular English, as a profession, we instead have embraced a pedagogy of code-switching.

Patricia Bizzell discussed the Bartholomae-Elbow debate in ways that were humorous yet insightful. She exclaimed that her talk had to be humorous because she counts both Bartholomae and Elbow as friends. She noted how they both graciously conceded to each other and pointed out areas of commonality in their debate; however, they were never particularly interested in exploring these areas of agreement or concession further. She also noted places in the debate where Bartholomae was more Elbow-esque and giving towards students and places where Elbow was more like Bartholomae, more concerned about upholding writing standards than being a compassionate and caring teacher.

Featured Session B. Acquiring Advanced Writing Skills: A View from Cognitive Science
Ron Kellogg offered a brief overview of the study of cognitive science and described the paradigm as a way of studying writing. After updating the audience on trends in research since Flower and Hayes and Bereiter and Scardamalia, Kellogg focused on studies of executive or working memory (WM) in writing processes. When someone is writing, the limited capacity of WM is saturated with the processes of planning, translating, and reviewing. In studies where tasks were interrupted, writers and chess players were shown to exert the most cognitive effort in working memory and reading the least amount of effort Kellogg used these studies as evidence that processes of recursive planning, translating, and reviewing of a given task need to be routinely practiced so as to make them more routine (why the reading task showed such little effort was a result of our immense amount of practice with this activity). However, the interesting moment in Kelloggs talk came when he discussed the importance of imitation of expert practices rather than practice in and of itself watching writings effect on readers or watching chess has a greater impact than practicing either in isolation. Imitation of expert practice can help to internalize and lessen the impact on WM.

Session C.15: Riding Writing Assessments Fourth Wave: Examining the Efficacy of FYC as Writing Studies Pedagogy
Elizabeth Wardle, David Slomp and Andrew Moss, with Kathy Yancey as chair, discussed the Writing about Writing (WaW) movement and how it can be most effective in practice. Wardle split WaW into three approaches: the study of literacy and discourse (i.e., community membership), the study of writing studies and rhetorical theory itself, and the study of writing and writers practicing. In any case, she mentioned the importance in metaknowledge in each approach and discussed how any approach could lead to transfer throughout the curriculum. It was argued that transfer occurs if such practices were replicated throughout that curriculum as later argued by Slomp, Moss, and Yancey. Slomp and Moss both emphasized that, in assessing the impact and effectiveness of WaW approaches, what became most important to learning was a vertical curriculum one which was throughout the students academic career; they covered WaW at a metalevel. If we want writing transfer, Wardle, Slomp, and later Moss discussed that vertical approaches also allow writing studies a surer footing in its disciplinary relationship with other departments.

Session D.09 From Validity to Validation
Michael Williamson, Norbert Elliot, Les Perelman, Doug Baldwin, Nancy Glazer, and Ed White offered an interesting discussion of writing assessment, namely, the use of the five-paragraph essay. Baldwin, who works for ETS, offered a defense of the five-paragraph essay as a well-practiced form and thus useful as a means of assessment because students can focus on evidence in argument and content and not arranging or other writing processes. Williamson, Elliot, Perelman, and Glazer all followed with admonitions that the five-paragraph essay misrepresents writing to students (Williamson), that it was used in testing because it could be easily quantified (Elliot) or used to phase out human readers in favor of machines (Perelman), and that it offers very little data for any sort of assessment (Glazer). White followed with a more nuanced approach, arguing that the five-paragraph essay was, in fact, very useful for students who didnt know how to write an essay, much less a sentence, and that it was a teaching tool (and a very useful one at that). He clarified that an essay he wrote for an Interchange in CCCs was more satire than parody, in that he was an expert writer, and yet got there by learning the five- paragraph essay at one time in his life as both writer and teacher. However, as an assessment tool for college-level writing, the five-paragraph essay is not sophisticated enough to showcase the writing strategies that college-level writers must have in order to succeed in college.

Featured Session G. Walking the Talk: Teacher Response and Best Practices
Andrea Lunsford, Patrick Ewing, Dana Ferris, Chris Anson, and Paul Prior offered updates on large-scale studies of teacher response to student writing. Patrick Ewing, using the Lunsford and Lunsford Archive of College Writing, found that the majority of the 5,400 comments that he studied were sentence-level direct/indirect comments, that is to say, focused on grammar and syntax. Given the emphasis in previous studies and teacher training, this finding was interesting as the Lunsford and Lunsford study of the corpus was focused on errors originally. Thus, we focus a great deal of our time and energy on error as teachers and scholars. Ferris followed by talking about comments on ESL writers, finding in her study that even though 42% of her study population were ESL writers, the teachers of those writers claimed very few of their students were ESL or had ESL errors. More interesting in her study was that in many ESL writing cases, teachers would refer students to somebody else or claim they werent ESL classes. Ferris argued that teachers shouldnt overlook ESL errors and that these students do need to be told basic and more advanced grammatical rules in the teacher comments. Anson followed by discussing how the most recent National Study of Student Engagement (NSSE) has included questions about writing for the first time and shared some findings, one of which was that students seek their peers feedback on writing more than the professor, and only a very small percentage actually went to the writing center. Prior completed the talk by interrogating Freedmans early studies on teacher commenting. Prior found it interesting that, in Freedman and other cases, such studies are referred to as grading even though in most cases, teachers were only responding or commenting on drafts.

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