[Lucas:] I’d like to talk a little bit about your work with CCCC. You just joined the executive committee this past year.

[Vandenberg:] NCTE last November was my first CCCC executive committee meeting. The initial meeting, then the discussion and preparation leading up to it, was quite an education. I’m really excited and kind of humbled to be engaged at that level.

There is a tremendous number of really smart people involved. The perspective is much different than it is when you’re operating as a scholar, trying to address a scholarly audience—much different than it is when you’re working at an institution, trying to figure out how you fit in locally. And, you know, I have to say that some of the issues that the executive committee takes up are matters that I have thought about in the past, like how to keep folks connected to the discipline, how to keep people in the organization, how to struggle with where the conference should be held from year to year.

I’ve thought about these issues in the past but never been hailed by them—not with the same sense of exigency, you know. I think a lot of people see discussion about these issues on listservs, as I have, and you follow them and make judgments based on your own perspective.

For the most recent CCCC, for example, there was a lot of discussion about how expensive New York was. New York is expensive. But that means one thing if you’re on the West Coast, or even somewhere in the Midwest. It means something different if you’re on the East Coast. Yet, once again, it was one of the best attended conferences ever because such a concentration of population there in the Northeast that can go to a conference there. For some folks who can drive in day to day, it’s actually less expensive. So there’s an interesting kind of balancing act when you’re trying to figure out how to address a national audience and respond to everybody’s concerns with kind of delicate matters. That’s been really fascinating to me so far.

How is this different from other kinds of committee work? Are the stakes higher? What has the experience been, compared to what your expectations were before November?

Well, frankly it was more work than I anticipated, and I don’t mean to sound unwelcome about that in any way. In my opinion, that sense comes from the perception of responsibilities that you have. It seemed like extra work because I suddenly felt responsible to people in a much different kind of way.

For one thing, it’s just the business of looking around the executive committee table and seeing these folks that you have always looked up to as not only disciplinary experts, but real leaders. Then, you realize that when they’re heading up subcommittees and that sort of thing that you’re at the cusp of building a new kind of reputation at the national level, so you want to be responsive to those folks in that way.

But you’re also thinking about the real gravity of the decisions that you’re making. You suddenly feel like you’re caretaker of this organization that’s been around for almost sixty years now, and we hope it’ll go on for another sixty years. You know, it can be kind of a big, unwieldy thing. I think it’s in the organization’s best interest to be responsive to folks in mainline composition studies, rhetoric, and professional and technical writing, but figuring out how to do that is difficult. So the work seems more pressing, more onerous in some ways, just because those responsibilities are so much greater than they are at the local level—where things are still important, but in some ways more concentrated.

I’ve also gotten an orientation in the real rigors of parliamentarian order. It’s been surprising in the sense of the rigor with which the meetings are carried out. I’m getting kind of a baptism in Roberts Rules of Order, you know. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a committee so carefully run. People really have input, and there’s broad discussion that goes into these issues. And I think the organization is looking for a way to make the interactions between the officers and the broader executive committee. I think everybody is really committed to strengthening that relationship. I know I am, and I think everybody’s working on that.

What you have there is a big group of really committed people, each one wanting to do the best that they can for the organization. And that leads to some real productive disagreements. Maybe not everyone would agree, but I think one big issue that the organization faces right now is stronger connections between the officers and the executive committee at large, which is really important to getting kind of a broad base of interest on the table.

What sort of things are you working on for CCCC 2008 in New Orleans?

With New Orleans right now, folks are trying to make sure that we are very respectful of what has happened there—respectful of what the city was, and respectful of the individuals who made it up and are no longer there. We want to be responsive to the challenges that the city is facing. We very definitely want to go there, and we want to deposit money from all parts of the country into the economy there, but we want to take care that we’re not just going in and taking advantage of the situation or coming to New Orleans exclusively as kind of an exciting party destination or something like that.

So working with CCCC now, and after having served as Editor of Composition Studies for several years, along with this other work, let me ask you some broad questions: Where do you see the field heading? Where do you see your own work heading?

I don’t know—those questions are really intimidating, I think, because I’ve done a number of different things over the years. I’ve published, I’ve edited a journal, I’ve written articles and edited books, and all those things feel like different parts of the big picture, but the big picture keeps changing all of the time. It’s kind of impossible to say that the aggregate of your experience leads you to a privileged kind of perspective. I mean, now that I’ve been focused more intently on New Media issues over the last two or three years, I wonder about the discussions that I’ve fallen out of. I wonder in what way some of these other discussions have evolved.

I think you tend to see the big picture from where you’re standing, of course, but I think we have to find ways to continue to address writing in digital environments. And I think one of the biggest challenges that we face there is the fact that most writing is taught by adjuncts. In some ways it’s fair to say that our adjunct population has not been trained to do this kind of work. Whether that’s because they’re more senior folks who didn’t have opportunities as they were going through school, or whether it’s because institutions aren’t interested or able to help remediate adjuncts to do this kind of work, or whether it’s because so many first-year students across the country are being taught by teaching assistants who don’t have access to the training and resources to do this kind of work. There are a lot of different reasons for this challenge that we face. But I think that’s the biggest challenge facing writing instruction now, in terms of digital media. It’s not what to do, because we have that pretty well in hand.

I’ve done a number of different variations on a class that I taught called “The Rhetoric of Graffiti,” connecting the semiotics of graffiti to service learning. I’ve shot just hours and hours of video on location, in different parts of Chicago, interviewing graffiti writers and community groups. I’m starting an independent study when I get back to Chicago with a student on that work, trying to begin to put together a webtext that will include HTML and video and a lot of PhotoShop work. So that’s a project that I will be working on while I’m doing this administrative work.

We have a proposal in for CCCC next year to talk about the process of developing the new unit, and we’re hopeful that will get accepted because we’re interested in continuing to talk about that. But I think the other things that I had in motion will probably go on the back burner while we’re getting the department up and running.

I’m working with two graduate students on a webtext on audio-visual conferencing. At DePaul we’re not able to get tutors out to our suburban campuses. Over the last two years we’ve been connecting our tutors with students at those campuses, connecting them by webcam and voice. It’s a way to offer full face-to-face tutorial sessions to these suburban students, and we’re working on a webtext on that right now that we think theorizes the value of audio-visual conferencing over e-mail conferencing. Our general argument there is that it best approximates the value of face-to-face. We did a presentation on this at the National Writing Centers Association’s conference in Houston this spring, and we hope to have that webtext finished over the summer, and we’re going to look for a good online journal to submit that to.

What I’m facing now personally is this task of trying to imagine a continuing scholarly agenda in the face of all this administrative work that I have coming down the pike.  I’m hoping to continue working on some of these multi-media projects that I’ve started. I’ve got a couple of things that I have to work on to finish, but I think what we’ve started here with the new unit is really going to require a lot of my attention over the next year and beyond.