The CCCC Documentarian Exhibit

Directed by Adrienne Jankens and Jennifer Grouling

Since 2020, the CCCC Documentarian Project has engaged conference attendees from across the field in recording and reflecting on their conference experiences and sharing their stories. The role of the Documentarian was first added to the CCCC Annual Convention in 2020 as a way to collect stories and data to better understand just what a conference experience is like and how it varies from person to person. CCCC Documentarians participate in a series of anonymous, daily, reflective surveys to "preflect" and reflect on their conference days. Following the conference, project co-chairs create a call for papers and invite Documentarians to submit reflections or "tales" reflecting on their conference experiences and their engagement with the project data (Lindquist et al., Recollections from an Uncommon Time; Halbritter et al., Recollections from our Commonplaces).

Reflective writing is integral to the Documentarian project. As Halbritter and Lindquist describe in their presentation of the experiential learning documentary (ELD) approach, reflective writing, along with other artifact collection, can support writers (and in the case of the Documentarian project, conference attendees) in making meaning about both their past experiences and how they see those experiences as they consider them in the present (318). Further, the project has provided a venue for marginalized and minoritized voices to publish their reflections on their participation in composition studies.  In the reflective narratives developed for these tales, CCCC conference attendees have provided information about labor and about the nature of participation in the conference and in the broader discipline. This information is integral to helping CCCC and the broader discipline of composition studies understand the nuanced experiences of work, labor, community, professionalization, and other aspects of membership in the field.

In 2025, we (Adrienne Jankens and Jennifer Grouling) were asked to take on co-chairing the CCCC Documentarian Project and to identify a strategy for sharing participants' stories. We have maintained the procedures created by the original project co-chairs–including email communication and survey logistics–so that the data we collected in 2025 and subsequent years can be easily put into conversation with that from past conferences.

The CCCC Documentarian Exhibit on the WAC Repository supports Documentarians in sharing the tales of their conference experiences and the development of a publicly accessible archive of these tales. As we reflected in our co-authored chapter in the Documentarian collection Recollections from our Commonplaces: 4C21-23 Documentarian Tales, "the point [of a conference] should be giving younger scholars in the field an opportunity to talk about their ideas or talk with other people . . . And the only way that can happen is if the people who are reading their proposals are open to hearing new things and new ideas" (Jankens and Grouling 164). We intend for this exhibit to be a space that honors the voices and contributions of scholars from across the field.

This exhibit supports engagement and research into the conference experience and the broader discussion about participation and labor that surrounds it. The availability of the exhibit on the WAC Repository means that researchers can use the archived Documentarian materials as part of their research into key conversations in composition studies as well as in higher education generally.

Information about participating as a CCCC Documentarian can be found here on the CCCC website.

Works Cited

Halbritter, Bump, and Julie Lindquist. "It's Never about what It's About: Audio-Visual Writing, Experiential Learning Documentary, and the Forensic Art of Assessment." The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric, edited by Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes, Routledge, 2018, pp. 317-327.

Halbritter, Bump, Julie Lindquist, and Bree Straayer.  Recollections from our Commonplaces: 4C21-23 Documentarian Tales, NCTE/CCCC and The WAC Clearinghouse, 2026. https://wacclearinghouse.org/books/swr/recollections/

Jankens, Adrienne, and Jennifer Grouling. "Documenting a Documentarian Friendship." Recollections from our Commonplaces: 4C21-23 Documentarian Tales, edited by Bump Halbritter, Julie Lindquist, and Bree Straayer. NCTE/CCCC and The WAC Clearinghouse, 2026, pp. 153-164. https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/books/recollections/chapter15.pdf

Lindquist, Julie, Bree Straayer, and Bump Halbritter. Recollections from an Uncommon Time: 4C20 Documentarian Tales, NCTE/CCCC and The WAC Clearinghouse, 2023. https://wacclearinghouse.org/books/swr/documentarian/

Table of Contents

The 2025 Documentarian Collection

Welcome to the 2025 CCCC Documentarian Exhibit. In 2025, twenty-six CCCC attendees volunteered to serve as documentarians. In this introduction, we lay out the context for their participation, share demographic data, and reflect on key themes from surveys. We introduce nine documentarian tales below, but you may also navigate themes addressed in these tales by using the tags in the sidebar. In this way, we encourage you to connect this year’s conference to other years.

CCCC 2025 was held in Baltimore from April 9-12. Throughout the conference week, documentarians recorded their experiences and reflections and participated in the project’s daily “preflection” and reflection surveys. The number of participants completing these twice-daily surveys ranged from 21 (Thursday morning) to 10 (Saturday evening). Documentarians were sent a CFP for “Tales” in August 2025. We are happy to introduce nine tales this year that focus on a variety of themes, including community, food, friendship, academic identity, and the passage of time.