Scott Campbell, University of Connecticut
February 25, 2026
As the English faculty coordinator of my university’s dual enrollment program, my role is almost entirely about fostering two-way communication between high school teachers and the on-campus first-year writing program. And, because our DE/CE composition program is so large (almost 200 teachers and over 5,000 students each year), we have a considerably scaled up operation. The in-person workshops and conferences we run with and for teachers throughout the year (at least two annually) are then crucial “rubber meets road” events. After all, there’s only so much that emails, a website, and some shared folders of program materials can accomplish. As with teaching itself, it’s always the real-time interactions that have the most impact. But, as a team of just me and a graduate assistant, it’s just not feasible to have deep, ongoing interactions with all these teachers. In this post, I sort through some thoughts about what it means to build community in DE/CE contexts.
Jim Webber’s first post in this series called attention to the ways that what gets called “professional development” might be better understood as enactments of reflective practice. And I especially liked Jim’s attention to not only the theories and practices of the field of composition but to the fragile, imperfect performance of these theories and practices within a social context and critical framework. Jim puts it this way: “We're trying to show our own process of inquiry, or our own thought process of how to draw on our repertoires to respond to unique situations. This means we need to acknowledge our confusion, vulnerability, and uncertainty.” For me, Jim voices a necessary caution about what, quite, “the field” has shored up with certainty about teaching writing. This isn’t (to me, at least ) a proving field. It is more a persuading field, which I suppose is fitting. And with not only roots in but ongoing attachments to literary studies, education, and, really, most every field that uses and/or teaches writing, composition is nearly always operating in translation across contexts with very little negotiating capital. In the DE/CE context, I like to use the word “concurrency” to mark this overlapping, never fully sorted contest of knowledges. Like students in DE/CE courses, we are always more than just college composition, and we, therefore, benefit from time spent in consideration of these differences and variables.
And so, “professional development” cannot have the force or clarity it has in other sectors. My hesitation to use the term is a hesitation about overvaluing “the profession” or professionalization at the expense of building multivalent communities that include voices, terms, and frameworks from beyond our professional boundaries. In her 2020 book, Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing, Rosanne Carlo writes against professionalization, suggesting that the impact of writing courses goes well beyond that of achieving legibility within academic disciplines. She describes her “place-based, embodied, and affective pedagogy” as a pedagogical alternative that frames “rhetoric as a discipline for the purpose of learning to live and inquire together” (138). For Carlo, attending to variables of place, context, and experience, writing oneself into understanding, is itself a transformative act and an act of community building. And, especially in fraught times with vulnerable populations, “Writing can be about economic survival, reckoning with demons, escaping our realities, praise and blame and prayer. I need not reiterate the many instances we use writing to continue living.”
Without suggesting we get to all that in our full-day workshops, I do want to share a couple of thoughts about how this ethos of “learning to live and enquire together” works its way into our events. To prepare and facilitate our workshops, we have an advisory board made up of about ten teachers from a range of high schools from around our small state. Despite our relatively close proximity, we meet virtually, and, quite often, a teacher logging in will say something like, “oh, flashback to pandemic” or “I never use Zoom; I hate Zoom.” This hits me in a strange way because I regularly teach online (not entirely by choice), and nearly every aspect of my university life other than in-person teaching has remained online since 2020. Higher ed puts its focus on relationships beyond the local, and many in higher ed see their “work” as the things they do away from campus and for other colleagues and readers beyond the local. This isn’t necessarily bad, and, in important ways, all writing is meant for someone beyond the immediate context of here and now. Writing is a technology for exporting ideas to new contexts, new times and places.
But I admire and learn from how present writing is in high school contexts, where most writers have deep knowledge of each other and a shared immersion in local issues, vocabularies, events. Writing doesn’t have to be impersonal and directed outward (like a blog post). It can also be a tool for more immediate negotiation in a shared place. And, of course, most writing does a little bit of both things. Still, this more improvisational and negotiated notion of writing can become a strength DE/CE composition course, especially when the on-campus and high school partners are mutually supportive about exploring the diverse genres of this more ready-to-hand and often “embodied and affective” pedagogy.
When we get DE/CE teachers together for professional development activity, we design these workshops and conferences as places of encounter and exchange, as places to learn together. In our most recent workshop, in November, we had participation of about twenty teachers in various roles, from workshop facilitator to session assistant, and most shared at least some piece of a current in-process course. The resulting assemblage becomes the thing we think about and work with. The conference theme was “Speaking Together: Discourse (Talk) as Literacy.” We wanted to feature our talk that day—in our classes, in our writing, in our feedback. For our upcoming March event, we’re building a series of small group workshops (10-12 people) that enable teachers to workshop current assignments, read student work together, and share some concrete “Things That Work.” Yes, there are some program goals in the mix, too, such as my own interest in putting more attention on cross-disciplinary readings that can work in DE/CE composition courses. But most of what we “develop, professionally” on these days is emergent and in tune with whatever songs are playing in the lives and workspaces of our teachers. Most of my work for the workshops, then, is helping build whatever platforms, physical and digital, we’ll need to move these materials about and document what happens. I’m still getting used to the more chaotic and winding path we take in inviting so many voices into the conversation (and my upcoming CCCC presentation speaks to these concerns), but I always find the energy and activity of these events, which teachers say is “nothing like PD,” exhilarating.
Work Cited
Carlo, Rosanne. Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing. Utah State University Press, 2020.