Recollections from an Uncommon Time: 4c20 Documentarian Tales

A collection of essays and personal narratives about living, writing, teaching, and learning in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are real stories from the field of writing and rhetoric, as told by the stories of individuals working within it.

This particular collection of essays was occasioned first by the Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC) 2020 Conference, and then, later, by the cancellation of it. In its original conception, it was intended to document a conference experience; in its current expression, it has become a means for Documentarians to share a common experience in this uncommon time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This volume is a collection of accounts of the shared experience of disruption in our work lives--which, as it turns out, also teaches us how deeply the terms of our work are implicated in our experiences of home, family, and everyday routines.

Julie Lindquist is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing and Director of First-Year Writing at Michigan State University. At MSU, she has taught courses in first-year and professional writing, and graduate courses in cultural rhetoric, research methods, and pedagogy. She is author of A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar (Oxford) and, with David Seitz, Elements of Literacy (Pearson). Her writings on rhetoric, class, literacy, and writing pedagogy have appeared in College Composition and Communication, College English, JAC, and Pedagogy, as well as in edited collections, including Keywords in Writing Studies. She has coauthored several articles on literacy research, writing pedagogy, and reflective learning with Bump Halbritter, her colleague at MSU. Her article, coauthored with Bump ("Time, Lives, and Videotape: Operationalizing Discovery in Scenes of Literacy Sponsorship,"), received the Richard Ohmann Award for Outstanding Article in College English in 2013. Julie was elected in 2018 to serve as Assistant Chair for the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and as Program Chair for the 2020 Convention in Milwaukee, WI; she currently serves as the Immediate Past Chair of CCCC.

Bree Straayer graduated in 2020 with her PhD in Rhetoric and Writing with a Cultural Rhetorics Emphasis and a Specialization in Women and Gender. Her dissertation, Once I Believed: Critical Thinking and the Process of Change focuses on the intersections of religion, sexuality, and education. Bree has also conducted research on language acquisition and writing program administration. Her research on international student experience is included in a collection which came out in January 2022 entitled International Students' Multilingual Literacy Practices. Bree works in the non-profit sector with English language and adult basic education learners as a Family Literacy Program Director at The Literacy Center of West Michigan.

Bump Halbritter is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing and former Director of First-Year Writing (FYW) at Michigan State University. His research attends to teaching and learning in FYW and to the integration of audio-visual writing into scenes of college writing and scholarly research and production. Bump's long-term collaboration with Julie Lindquist has yielded many articles and chapters, including their 2013 article, "Time, Lives, and Videotape: Operationalizing Discovery in Scenes of Literacy Sponsorship," which received The Richard Ohmann Award for Outstanding Article in College English. Bump's book, Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio-Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, received the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award for 2013. Bump has served on the CCCC Executive Committee and many CCCC working groups.