Cataloging Community in CCC

Defining Our Terms, Defining Our Commitments: Cataloging the Uses of Community in CCC
Kaitlin Clinnin, The Ohio State University

kmclinnin@gmail.com, Twitter: @kclinnin, www.kaitlinclinnin.org
Introduction
In his 1989 article The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing, Joseph Harris
writes, in the past few years, a number of teachers and theorists of writing began to talk
about the idea of community as somehow central to our work, I was drawn to what was
said. Over 20 years later, I find myself in the same position as Harris. As a graduate
student, I have read the conversations amongst scholars like Harris, Bizzell,
Bartholomae, Pratt, and countless others as they struggle with the term community, its
potential and its perils. As a graduate student, I have also read the vital work of scholars
like Flower, Peck, and Higgins, Cushman, Moss, Grabill, and so many others who
explicitly define their work in terms of community, whether its the location, literacies, or
infrastructure. And so, like Harris, I find myself drawn to the idea of community and its
different manifestations in writing studies, but also the functions, structures, values, and
practices of community in our discipline and in higher education generally.
Community is a term and concept with tremendous power, not just within writing
studies, but in higher education and the United States more broadly. Community
appears in writing studies scholarship and pedagogical practice of the field ranging from
conference themes, presentation titles and abstracts, research articles, teaching
philosophies, and course syllabi. But community is not limited to writing studies. Higher
education institutions have adopted the idea of community to describe the mission,
value, and experience of postsecondary education. My current university, Ohio State,
recently spent $396 million on residence hall renovations to increase the sense of the
Ohio State community. This almost $400 million represented an investment in the
student experience of a college community, which has been positively linked to the allimportant retention and graduation rates. My Masters institution, Virginia Tech, proudly
emphasizes its Principles of Community, a philosophical code of conduct and ethics
that explains the expected behavior of community members from students to alumni.
These are large initiatives of 2 large universities, but they showcase the presence of
community in higher educations understanding of what it does and what it should do.
This presentation is a move to begin again the conversation initiated by Joseph Harris in
the late 1980s and to ask those of us involved in writing studies and higher education to
consider what we mean when we use (or do not use) the term community. Specifically,
I am interested in historically tracking the disciplinary usages of community and
contextualizing these trends in the broader setting of higher education. This type of
work, to assess our definition of a term with such power, is vitally important. It requires
us to reflect on the assumptions and values that underlie our use of the term
community, and which undoubtedly impact our theory and practice as teachers,
scholars, and administrators in the discipline, the university, and the surrounding
setting.
Study Explanation
This presentation is part of a much larger study of community in writing studies
scholarship that is my dissertation, but in the interest of time, Ill point out some of the
most interesting features or moments from my analysis that help to contextualize the
work that has been shared here over the past 2 days and continues to be shared. For
this study, I conducted a full-text search for the term community in CCC. This search
of the term community produced a total of 1,791 article sources from 1950 to 2013.
871 met the study criteria and became the source material for the coding process. I
divided these articles into decades beginning with the 1950s and ending with 2010 to
analyze trends over a consistent time period. As I coded the set of 871 articles from
CCC, I generated in vivo codes (Gasson) that were representative of the terminology
and language used within the articles. This process resulted in 467 codes divided into
16 coding categories and a total of 4,792 code instances.
An Overview of Community from 1950 to 2013
Id like to begin with a short overview of community over the run of CCC from 1950 to
2013 and contextualize these trends within higher education and writing studies broadly.
In this 60 year time period, higher education has experienced significant changes
including:
The rapid growth of enrollments (from 2.3 million enrolled students in 1950 to
20.6 million in 2012)
Increased diversity (including gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and ability)
of students enrolled at college
Rapid growth, rapid decline, and periods of stagnation for funding, construction,
hires, regulation, admissions etc.
Likewise, writing studies has also experienced shifts. Writing studies has moved from a
location of remedial instruction supported by teaching lore to a new identity as a
research discipline that exists beyond its role as a service course. There have also been
theoretical paradigm shifts in writing studies from current traditional rhetoric to
expressivism, process, and social epistemic theories. These shifts in higher education
and writing studies specifically have influenced the use of community as a term in
CCC.
As I mentioned previously, out of 871 articles from 1950 to 2013 that met the study
criteria, there were 4,792 instances of the term community in the following code
frequencies:
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
#10
Total
Most Frequent Codes from 1950-2013

Non-specified community (1060)
Community College (490)
Discourse Community (264)
Academic or Scholarly Community (184)
Racial Community Nonacademic (130)
Geographic or Local Community (97)
Community Figure or Member (92)
College Campus/University Community (86)
Community Space or Location (78)
Community Group (73)
4792 occurrences in 871 articles
Fig. 1 Most frequent occurrences of term community in CCC from 1950-2013
The most frequent uses of community from CCC can be roughly divided into three
groups: Non-specified community, academic community, and characteristics of nonacademic community.
Fig. 2 Categories of Most Frequent Codes
The academic community grouping includes community college, academic or scholarly

community, and college campus/university community. Characteristics of non-academic
community contains discourse community, racial community nonacademic, geographic
or local community, community figure or member, community space or location, and
community group.
In some ways, this macro-level analysis of CCCs erases some of the detail and nuance
of how community usage has changed over time. So lets take a look at what the 1950s
CCCs looks like:
#1
#2
#3
#4
#7
#9
Total

Nonspecified Community (42)
College Campus or University Community (4)
Community Resources (4)
Community as object of academic research
(3)
Community Service Nonspecified (3)
College Serves Community (2)
Community Language Customs (2)
Community Space or location (2)
National Community (2)
Fig. 3 Most frequent occurrences of community from 1950-1959
Some initial thoughts: community only appears 106 times in 55 articles. Community
in the 1950s CCC articles primarily uses the term to refer a specific concrete grouping
like the academic or geographically defined community, and community is also used to
refer to the characteristics or resources of the community (like language customs,
space, resources). Ill get to an analysis of non-specified community in a moment.
So lets contrast the 1950s catalog of community to 1990-1999. There are several key
articles on community that come out during this time. Harris The Idea of Community in
the Study of Writing was published in 1989, Flower, Higgins, and Pecks article
Community Literacy was published in 1995, and Cushmans The Rhetorician as an
Agent of Social Change came out in 1996:
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
Total

Non-specified Community (359)
Idea of Community (47)
Community Literacy (37)
Community Space or Location (35)
Community as a term (30)
Community as a Feeling or Sense (22)
Fig. 4 Most frequent occurrences of the term community from 1990 to 1999
Only non-specified community, community college, academic/scholarly community, and

community space/location are present in the 1950s and 1990s. In the 1990s, new terms
like discourse community and community literacy appear, and theres also attention
on the affective nature of community in community as a feeling or sense. Additionally,
theres a conversation taking place about community evidenced by idea of community
and community as a term. The disciplinary usage of community is more complicated in
the 1990s; community is questioned and contested, and writing studies researchers are
interested in new types of communities and aspects of these communities.
Lets just take a quick look at 2010-2013, the very last set that I coded:
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
#10
Total

Community college (89)
Non-specified community (86)
Native/indigenous/tribal community (29)
Racial Community Nonacademic (19)
Professional Community (13)
Community Group (12)
Fig. 9 Most frequent occurrences of term community from 2010 to 2013
Obviously this is a much smaller and incomplete data set, but 97 articles in this 3 year
period used community 623 times. Again, more articles use the term community, and
the use it more frequently. This is a trend that persisted from 1950 to present day. In the
2010s, there are a few newly popular codes including native/indigenous/tribal
community and professional community. Unlike the 1990s, there is no meta-analysis of
community here, and most of the codes refer to a type of community that is the subject
of a researchers inquiry.
This historical analysis is interesting and revealing, but what exactly does it show:
Community, like all terms, is rooted within a particular historical, social, and cultural
context that is continually shifting. Community in 1950 does not refer to the same
community as in 1990, 2000, or even 2010. There are certain uses of community that
are consistently used like community college and academic or scholarly community.
Other uses appear and disappear depending on the historical context. For example,
Discourse community appears for the first time in the 1980s and remains in the top 10
most frequent codes to present day. Another code, Racial community nonacademic
appears for the first time in the 1960s, disappears in the 1980s, and reappears in the
2000s.
Community is a popular term throughout the 60 years of CCCs, but as evidenced by the
467 codes I generated, scholars mean or refer to at least 467 different things when they
use community. So although community is a term that we continue to use, and there
maybe be more popular or accepted meanings/implications within a particular period,
when we examine the discipline as a whole there is not a clear singular meaning.
Except for non-specified community, and even then, this is somewhat the absence of
meaning. Non-specified community is the most frequent code throughout all of the
decades of CCC. I used this code to refer to uses of community that were intended to
be general or when I could not categorize the use of community based on contextual
reading. For example, I coded for non-specified community in the following: Standard
English is that usage which is recognized and accepted as customary in any particular
community (Hartung 60, emphasis mine). In this case, Hartung (1957) is using
community generically; he is not discussing a specific type of community or a
characteristic of it, instead he is employing community to refer to a general collective.
Non-specified community also applied in the following instance: she contributes to
her schools Web site and designs visual PowerPoint texts like Honduras 2001, about
a social action project she undertook with members of her community (Hawisher et al.
661, emphasis mine). Here community refers to a specific community that the student
belongs to, but it is not clear what community this is. Is it an academic, religious,
linguistic, or racial community? Here the non-specified community code category might
be considered a positive aspect; the scholars are not presuming to identify the type of
community that the student is part of and instead choose to leave it a relatively open
understanding of community.
1
I bring attention to the non-specified community coding because it is overwhelmingly the

most frequent use of community within all of CCC. On its own, the non-specified
category of community is not negative or a code to be avoided. Often it is used to stand
in for a general community experience or characteristic. And in the case of the Hawisher
article, community refers to a community experienced by the student but that remains
unnamed, possibly so the student can define her own community. But the presence of
non-specified community still underscores a reliance on the concept of community in
composition studies. Why do writing studies scholars utilize community as a metaphor
or a descriptor to refer to a group? What does it mean that writing studies scholars
choose overwhelmingly to use community in a general sense? What values or
assumptions are present about community or the subject of inquiry when a writing
studies scholar employs the term?
What is absent in this catalog of community, or what counts as community? For
example, I went into this project specifically interested in classroom community and
what a historical analysis would reveal about how the classroom community has
changed. But classroom community doesnt appear until the 1980s, and there are only
24 articles and 33 instances of the term classroom community in all of CCCs.
What does this mean for our discipline? Our attention to community is always located
within a historical, social, and cultural context, and its vitally important for our research,
service, and teaching that we consider what ideologies of community form the
foundation of our practices. We need to question our use of the term, as well as others
usage of community. For example, when Ohio State spends $396 million dollars to
renovate residence halls to create more campus community, what understanding of
community are they operating from? In writing classes, what understanding of
community is at play when instructors engage in community building activities such as

collaborative group work or peer review? In both cases, who is this experience of
community designed by and designed for, and what purpose does community serve?
The findings from the catalog of community offered here have implications for current
and future administration, engagement, research, and teaching for composition studies
and higher education more generally. It is time to renew the conversation begun by
Joseph Harris and to extend it beyond writing studies to include higher education. It is
time to think critically about our attachment to community as individual scholar-teachers
and as participants within a larger disciplinary and academic collective. Although this
catalog offers a general map of where writing studies scholarship has been with regards
to community, where we go next remains up to us.
Works Cited
Gasson, Susan. Rigor in Grounded Theory Research: An Interpretative Perspective on
Generating Theory From Qualitative Field Studies. The Handbook of Information
Systems Research. Ed. Michael Whitman and Amy Wosycynski. Hershey, PA: Idea
Group Publishing, 2004. 79-102. Print.
Harris, Joseph. The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing. College Composition
and Communication 40.1 (1989): 11-22. Print.
Hartung, Charles V. Doctrines of English Usage. College Composition and
Communication 8.1 (1957): 5563. Print.
Hawisher, Gail E. et al. Becoming Literate in the Information Age: Cultural Ecologies
and the Literacies of Technology. College Composition and Communication 55.4
(2004): 642692. Print.

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Defining Our Terms, Defining Our Commitments: Cataloging the Uses of Community in CCC

Kaitlin Clinnin, The Ohio State University

Most Frequent Codes from 1950-2013

Fig. 1 Most frequent occurrences of term community in CCC from 1950-2013

Fig. 2 Categories of Most Frequent Codes

The academic community grouping includes community college, academic or scholarly

Most Frequent Codes from 1950-1959

Fig. 3 Most frequent occurrences of community from 1950-1959

Most Frequent Codes from 1990-1999

Only non-specified community, community college, academic/scholarly community, and

Most Frequent Codes from 2010-2013

Fig. 9 Most frequent occurrences of term community from 2010 to 2013

I bring attention to the non-specified community coding because it is overwhelmingly the

community is at play when instructors engage in community building activities such as

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