This post on the topic To Read or Not To Read at College Composition and Communications Conference is part of an electronic conversation that is taking place on PRE/TEXT List and other sites. For the list of posts in the discussion, go to CCCC.

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Sender: Pre/Text issues discussion [PTISSUES@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU]
Subject: rl--rf--ch: To read, or not to read at CCCC
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Like Cynthia Haynes and Dick Fulkerson, I sometimes question the purpose of 4C's panels with lots of speakers. Like Dick says, I suppose those panels are created to get people there. The panels are there because of economic benifits, both for the Conference and the presenters on the panels. Yet Dick's summary rejection of "any [90 minute] session that has six or more 'speakers'" seems rash.

One of the purposes (I think) of these sessions is to show the vitality and the multiple ways to approach a topic, or to show the ways that we do this or that in classrooms across the globe. It is the accumulation of ways, the accretion of approaches to the topic of the panel, that adds depth and energy to what Dick calls "cramming." I suppose that some of us have come away from a few of these with a sense and appreciation of what hundreds of us are doing and thinking. I suppose that some of us have left a session with six speakesr or less thinking that we just listened to six speakers or less too many; that if there were a session with more than six speakers of national stature we would feel the room beyond the firecode.

I sense opposition to sessions with many participants (the audience is often a participant, too) stems from an idea of what a session should be: a few speakers with a lot of time to talk, where the speaker dominates the room, where the speaker is in control, where the process of the session is neat and ordered. Most sessions with numerous presenters (that's not the right word) are not so orderly. There is more of a physical nature to them, where indeed sometimes it seems the session is in chaos. What I mean to say is that the nature of the two sessions is drastically different, and I suppose that one's dislike for one or the other says more about the nature of the dislker than the value of the session.

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Richard Long
rlong@daemen.edu
http://www.daemen.edu/pages/rlong/
Writing Coordinator
Academic Computing
Daemen College (http://www.daemen.edu)
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