Last week, I attended the Conference on College Composition and Communication (more colloquially known as the 4Cs), the largest and most overwhelming conference for scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition. I’ve gone to 4Cs every other year since 2012 (my first 4Cs conference was in Las Vegas which, admittedly, was a weird place for a first major academic conference of my graduate school career), and I’ve always had some mixed feelings about it as a conference.
I tend not to prefer large, bustling conferences because I get overwhelmed by the big crowds and the overabundance of options for events to attend. I feel like I get a lot of everything, which does not feel as satisfying to me as digging deeply into a few smaller topics. But to that end, I feel like 4Cs is really the place where I get to take the discipline’s pulse. It’s where I get a sense of what conversations interest the community, what questions intrigue the community, and what victories or findings the community celebrates. Plus, at this point in my career – where many of my friends are now far flung in lots of different kinds of jobs across the country – it’s a really delightful reunion.
I recognize that I am lucky enough to still have the chance to attend 4Cs. After all, I’m not a faculty member, a full-time instructor, or a graduate student: I am part of that squishy in-between category of faculty developer/instructional designer/technology specialist/part-time instructor/”alternative academic.” Some may argue that I don’t need to attend a conference like 4Cs because my full time job is not committed to research in writing studies. In fact, many faculty development and instructional design jobs basically eschew any involvement in disciplinary conversations at all as they may not appear directly relevant to the labor of teaching and learning work.
Here’s my take: maintaining engagement in disciplinary conversations benefits faculty developers and instructional designers alike. A huge portion of the job of any form of professional development is to have a deep understanding of how the people you’re supporting think about their work and their identities. What better way to cultivate that understanding than remaining in conversations with those people in the first place?
Several quick caveats here before I take this conversation a step further: not everyone trained in faculty development and instructional design has a doctorate degree in a particular subject area that differs from the work of faculty development or instructional design as fields (many in these roles have master’s degrees or doctoral degrees in instructional design, higher ed pedagogy, etc.). For folks in this situation, I can see how this post may not necessarily resonate with you. However, anyone coming into this work has had some intellectual training in a field that may not be directly relevant to the work that you do on a daily basis; what I’m advocating for is the maintenance of intellectual interests beyond that day-to-day work (as part and parcel of the workday) to continue to understand the kinds of questions and conversations faculty that you support may have.
Even if your questions are not identical to your faculty members’ questions, academic discourse communities have a lot of common ways of talking, thinking, and working. The more that we can stay in touch with this culture, the better we can reach out to them and respond to their needs.
There are several benefits that I see to maintaining engagement in disciplinary conversations as faculty developers and instructional designers:
- We can avoid the “us vs. them” divide in “faculty vs. staff.” I went to a few sessions at 4Cs this year where I heard participants lamenting the lack of knowledge their instructional designers in particular had about teaching writing in particular. I can understand where that complaint comes from and, to me, it speaks to a real need to have instructional designers tuned into and curious about disciplinary conversations. I think the perception that some faculty members may have about instructional designers/faculty developers is that instructional designers want to impose learning frameworks upon their courses that faculty recognize as not being the best fit for their particular disciplinary conversations and goals. While it is not possible for faculty developers and instructional designers to know about all disciplines and conversations, insights into even just one can afford instructional designers with language to relate to the faculty member they are supporting. In so doing, and recognizing my optimism here, I think we can chip away at the very common “us vs. them” divide I often see between faculty and staff on university campuses.
- We can better develop our empathy for faculty pain points. It’s one thing to sympathize with faculty’s heavy course loads and the tensions between their multiple identities as researchers, teachers, and administrators. But it’s another thing to empathize by really working to feel for ourselves what that tension might feel like. I think many of us may experience these tensions between multiple identities ourselves, but if we get to listen in on and participate in conversations from particular research-based disciplines, we can develop an even more acute understanding of what it feels like to be navigating what our faculty navigate: a desire to do many things at once in the institution. The more that we can put ourselves in faculty members’ shoes, the more that we can see the potential pain points for ourselves and figure out how to respond to those pain points more proactively.
- We can stay abreast of evolving conventions around disciplinary communication. Anyone who works in a faculty development/instructional design capacity knows that communication is a key component of our jobs. It is important to have some grounding in how scholars talk to each other; even if we don’t communicate in those ways ourselves, we can draw upon examples from other disciplines in our communications with faculty to remind them that we have some familiarity with the dialogues that may be more part of their daily lives. Communication is not a monolithic category, of course, so our attentiveness to multiple scholarly conversations also makes us more flexible and, I think, consequently, more effective communicators.
When I first started my job at Stanford, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to see myself in any scholarly community. That has certainly not been true, and I would say that the many intellectual communities of which I’ve now find myself a part overlap in some pretty interesting and fruitful ways. I’ve been to a lot (OK, yes, TOO MANY) conferences this year, and have been pleasantly surprised that I’ve found a feeling of belonging at all of them, despite how disparate their foci may initially seem.