Birds in The Land: CCCC 2026 Recap

Crow researchers recently gathered in Cleveland for CCCC 2026, attending sessions, dodging raindrops, and getting together for conversation. Here are some of the highlights.

Enhancing First-Year Writing Instruction at Hispanic-Serving Institutions with Corpus-Informed Pedagogy

From left: Anh Dang, Weena McKenzie, Meghan Moran Wilson, and Shelley Staples. Not pictured: Cynthia Martinez.

Thursday, March 5, 12:15–1:30p

Speakers: Anh T. Dang, Cynthia Martinez, Weena McKenzie, & Meghan Moran Wilson | Respondent: Shelley Staples

This was a wonderful session! Anh Dang moderated, going into depth about Crow collaborations with the Fellows and how we’ve helped them learn to put our corpus into teaching. Shelley Staples described some of the results of our Crow Fellows program. It was great to hear directly from Crow Fellows Cynthia Martinez, Weena McKenzie, & Meghan Moran Wilson and see real life examples of the ways they’ve used the Crow corpus in their classrooms. Audience questions were awesome — we had a few folks sign up to use the Crow corpus & repository right afterward!

Interview Craft: Qualitative Research Network, poster session

Bradley Dilger (left) and Neil Baird (right).

Wednesday, March 4, 1:30–5:00p, and Thursday, March 5, 1:45–3:00p

Speakers: Neil Baird & Bradley Dilger

Interview Craft is my second research project — a methodological resource that grew out of writing transfer research. With Neil Baird, we participated in the Qualitative Research Network (QRN), spending a few minutes sharing InterviewCraft with everyone, then working with three early career researchers to learn about their projects and offer suggestions for future work. The projects were diverse and the researchers were at different stages in development, so we had three very different and very engaging conversations. We’ll probably return to QRN next year!

The next day, we shared Interview Craft via a poster that described our framework for understanding tacit knowledge, then laid out our project and invited participation. We had great talks with over 50 people, and about a half dozen signed up to talk after the conference.

Crow Reunion and Purdue Reunion

A group of people standing and sitting around tables with brewery equipment in the background.

Thursday, March 5, 5:00p

Crowbirds present at CCCC joined for snacks, drinks, and conversation at Masthead Brewing. Anh, Hadi Banat, Ji-young Shin, Shelton Weech, Shelley, Ola Swatek (with Konrad and Robert), and I caught up in person. We had so much fun we forgot to take a photo!

Then, Purdue Rhetoric & Composition folks started joining us for their reunion at 6:00p. Great turnout — about 50 folks, alumni, families and friends. We heard some of the good news about alumni and celebrated books, tenure milestones, and more.

Masthead is great, btw — highly recommended! Good food and great beer.

Understanding Community College Instructors’ Perceptions of Corpus-Informed Writing Instruction

Friday, March 6, 12:30–1:00p

Speakers: Shelley Staples (for Jessica Ketcham, Robyn Ferret, & Randi Reppen)

Shelley shared more specifics about our Crow Fellows work at Cascadia College, explaining how she worked with Randi Reppen and Robyn Ferret, Crow Fellow, over a multi-year period, to help instructors at Cascadia learn to integrate corpus-informed instruction in composition, ESL reading, and writing center embedded tutors. Shelley described the trajectory of workshops and training, including how instructor feedback helped shape the curriculum, then played a video from Cascadia professor and Crow Fellow Jessica Ketcham and tutor Lola McPherren, offering a first-hand take on the success of the corpus-informed approach.

Presenter Staples with collaborators Ketcham, Ferret, & Reppen. Research supported by Cascadia College Bothell and a CCCC Research Initiative grant.

Slide from Shelley Staples’s presentation.

A Human-Centered Approach to Teaching AI Competency in the Technical Editing Classroom

Holly Baker (left) and Shelton Weech (right, presenting).

Friday, March 6, 1:15–1:45p

Presenters: Shelton Weech & Holly Baker

As is always the case, Dr. Weech and Dr. Baker brought their A game, with both substance and style — an amazing framework for thinking about teaching technical editing. Super work: it shifts the conversation about learning the craft of editing from a strict focus on skills — how do we use Track Changes or build style sheets? — to a broader approach accounting for editing’s complexities.

Bonus: their work also integrates a Levels of Edit approach, giving that valuable but venerable scholarship a much needed update. Double bonus: funny as always. Go read the TCQ article to see the framework itself.

Awards

Adrianna Deptula receiving her award.

Anuj Gupta receiving his award.

Friday, March 6, 7:00p.

We were delighted to see Crow alum Anuj Gupta won the Berlin Memorial Dissertation Award. Several friends of Crow from Purdue won awards as well — Adrianna Deptula won the CCCC Outstanding Dissertation in Technical Communication, and Marisa Yerace, Kailyn Shartel Rogers, and Allegra Smith were awarded a CCCC Research Initiative grant, “Deciphering a ‘dappled’ job market: Investigating strategies of success for job-seeking English PhDs,” for Jobs in English & Transdisciplinary Studies (JETS) — which is next!

Jobs in English and Transdisciplinary Studies: A Conversation on Distributed Mentoring Frameworks for Job Market Preparation

Kailyn Shartel Rogers (left) introducing the JETS team (seated, from left): Marisa Yerace, Bradley Dilger, Allegra Smith, and Nasiba Norova.

Saturday, March 7, 11:00a–12:15p

Presenters: Marisa Yerace, Kailyn Shartel Rogers, Allegra Smith, Nasiba Norova, & Bradley Dilger

I was able to participate in this panel describing Jobs in English & Transdisciplinary Studies (JETS), a free summer workshop series hosted by Yerace, Rogers, and Smith. We described the purpose of the series — supporting recent PhDs on the job market, especially those whose mentors are unable to keep up with recent trends in the market. A highlight was hearing from Nasiba Norova, who was a participant in the 2024 series, then was able to find a position at Metropolitan State University. As noted above, this team now has funding to extend their research into current market conditions and improve materials and workshops based upon it.

Data-Driven Learning and Attention to Language in the WAC Classroom

Tyler Carter (left) describing their methodology, starting from attention, with Ola Swatek.

Saturday, March 7, 1:15–1:45p

Presenters: Tyler Carter & Ola Swatek

My CCCC experience closed (literally — I speed-walked to my van right after the talk before event parking restrictions kicked in and got me towed) with this great talk from Ola Swatek and fellow Purdue Rhetoric & Composition alum Tyler Carter. They described how students at the University of Virginia built small corpora of disciplinary writing, then used AntConc to analyze their own mini-corpora, helping them to recognize the moves in academic writing across various disciplines directly.