Shannon Carter Associate Professor of English Department of Literature and Languages 3409 Sugar Pine Dr.

McKinney, Texas 75070 Hunter Hayes, Head Department of Literature and Languages Texas A&M University-Commerce PO Box 3011 Commerce, Texas 75429-3011 Dear Professor Hayes: I am writing to apply for promotion to Full Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages. I have met the criteria for promotion outlined by the Department of Literature and Languages: Departmental Standards fo r Tenure and Promotion, and the evidence presented supports my candidacy. The application materials presented are divided into three sections: Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activities (RSCA), Teaching, and Service. RSCA (Volumes 1-3) According to published Departmental Standards for Tenure and Promotion, [p]romotion to Full Professor requires one significant book-length work, or equivalent work, and notability in ones field. My research, scholarship, and creative activities since promotion and tenure in 2007 include one significant book-length manuscript (The Way Literacy Lives, SUNY P, 2008), multiple publications in our fields top journals, invited presentations and papers, servi[ce] on dissertation committees at other institutions, refereeing for national/international publications and other indicators of notability in ones field as outlined in these departmental standards. Since earning tenure and being promoted to Associate Professor in 2007, I have published one scholarly manuscript, ten articles and review essays in top-tier journals (2007-2013), and four issues of major journals (Kairos Fall 2011; Community Literacy Journal Fall 2012; BWe: Basic Writing e-Journal 2008, 2009/2010); founded and served as co-editor for Spotlight on First-Year Writing, a now recurring feature of another national journal (Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric 2008, 2009); presented one keynote address (Florida Writing Symposium 2012) and more than 30 panel and individual presentations at national conferences; organized five national conferences and workshops (Council on Basic Writing, March 2008, April 2009, March 2010; Writing Democracy, March 2012, March 2013) organized five area and regional conferences (North Texas Writing Centers Association, 2006 and 2007; Rhetoric Symposium, 2005, 2009, and 2011) been invited to publish papers in edited collections; been awarded one national grant (National Endowment for the Humanities, 2011), one state-level grant (Texas Humanities Council, 2011), and a number of competitive internal grants; reviewed more than a dozen articles for top-tier journals (College English, College Composition and Communication, Pedagogy, Journal of Basic Writing, Composition Forum) and proposals for our fields most competitive conferences (including Conference on College Composition and Communication); served a variety of leadership roles in national organizations, and

served on multiple dissertation committees, including two outside this department and one at another institution.

In addition to the publications already in print, the following are scheduled for publication within the next year: one article, invited by guest editors for the November 2013 issue of College English (Special Issue: Rhetorical Historiography and the Digital Humanities); one chapter, invited by editors for a collection under contract with University of Chicago Press (Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities).

Both of these forthcoming publications focus on our NEH-funded digital humanities project Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts (RRT). They also demonstrate my commitment to the discipline, to digital innovations for humanities research, to civic engagement, to the recovery and preservation of forgotten or contested stories from historically marginalized populations, and to providing meaningful research and professional development opportunities for students. To illustrate that last point, I draw your attention to the individuals listed as co-authors on these invited essays about Remixing Rural Texas, all graduate students on the research team for this project (see vita). Of course, RRTs development process began long before I had assembled this research team. When I submitted my application materials to NEH in February 2011, I knew what I wanted RRT to do and why I felt such a visualization tool was necessary for humanities research. The proposal included a plan for what the prototype I hoped to build would look like, and I had even determined the open source software we would use to build it (Mozilla Labs Popcornjs). When I brought the Graduate Research Assistants (GARs) on board in September 2011, I had already outlined what I needed each of them to do in order to build, test, and deliver RRT to NEH before our May 2013 deadline. Even so, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the contributions these graduate students made to RRT or the overall impact that they have had on the visualization tool RRT would eventually become.1 In a number of fundamental ways, RRT is as much a product of their research, scholarly, and creative activities (RSCA) as my own. Thus in December 2011, as soon as I decided to accept the editors invitations to contribute to their collections, I invited Kelly Dent (MA student, Political Science) to co-author the College English article and Sunchai Hamcumpai and Jennifer Jones (PhD students, English) to co-author the book chapter for University of Chicago Press. They each worked closely with me throughout the process, from developing the initial proposal (January 2012) to drafting the essays to responding to editors feedback then the publishers feedback and, eventually, copyedits an d proofs in anticipation of publication many months later. Their roles as co-authors provides an excellent line for their vitas, but it also gives them meaningful experiences as scholars writing for publication. Before we began working together, none of them had published anything before. I can imagine no better way to prepare for this important aspect of professional life than alongside a faculty member working toward a common goal: the publication of insights gleaned from a common research project. In the sciences, of course, this is quite common. Graduate students might spend the majority of their program as part of a research team working in their mentors lab. As a result of that work, journals publishing their findings regularly list multiple members of the research team as co-authors. In the humanities, of course, this is far less common. Humanists usually work alone, and single-authored publications are often considered of greater value than those written collaboratively. However as you will see from my materials, like many in my Department, I am committed to providing meaningful research and professional development opportunities for students at every level. In other words, part of my performance as a researcher and scholar might be productively understood in terms of my work to support and guide student researchers.

Within the RSCA section of these materials, I have included three documents that offer the clearest illustration of RRT and its potential: the RRT White Paper (RSCA, Civic Engagement/Community-Based Research) and the two forthcoming publications cited above (RSCA, Publications).

During the period under review, I have also made considerable progress on my second book project (Coming Together: Rhetorical Agency in a Rural University Town across the Long Civil Rights Movement). To support my work on this project, I have received extensive internal support, including Faculty Development Leave (Fall 2010) and a Faculty Enhancement Grant (Fall 2011). Articles from this study have appeared in College Composition and Communication (September 2012) and Community Literacy Journal (Fall 2012). Likewise, the extensive archival research and related interviews I have conducted for this book project yielded the vast majority of the content and insights we used to build and demonstrate the Remixing Rural Texas prototype described above. Thus, demonstrated interest in this study can also be determined by the forthcoming College English publication on RRT cited above, which is entitled East Texas Activism (1967-1968): Locating the Literacy Scene through the Digital Humanities. This summer, I submitted a proposal for this book-length manuscript to the Texas A&M University Press Sam Rayburn Series. Based on this informal proposal and related conversations with the Series Editor Hunter Hayes, I was invited to submit the complete manuscript for consideration by Texas A&M UP. I plan to do within the next year, likely in early 2014. I have also been invited to submit an application for the NEH Office of Digital Humanities Innovations program and a Humanities Texas Media Grant. Over the next year, I plan to submit proposals for both projects, each building upon the work I have done with RRT. The RSCA portfolio provides relevant evidence to support these claims, including abstracts, full text of all relevant publications and other, related materials.2 Perhaps even more important to understanding my research activities is the work I have done to establish and expand the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC), an interdisciplinary research center I helped create with Donna Dunbar-Odom in 2007 in order to promote a better understanding of how texts and related literacy practices may develop, sustain, or even erode civic engagement across local publics, especially among historically underrepresented groups (CLiC Mission Statement). The CLiC portion of the RSCA portfolio (Volume 3) includes white papers, videos, and other products resulting from CLiC activitiesespecially the digital humanities project Remixing Rural Texas and my work to launch the national Writing Democracy project, which began as a conference on our campus in March 2011. I will return to my work with CLiC at several key points throughout this letter, especially in the final section on Civic Engagement and Community-Based Research.

Teaching (Volumes 1-2) My primary teaching interests include new media, literacy studies, rhetorical historiography, and the intersections of community literacy and the digital humanities. To date, I have designed and taught a range of undergraduate and graduate courses that reflect these interests. I have also directed to completion three dissertations (Westmoreland, PhD 2010; Foreman, PhD 2007; Golden, PhD 2005), served on multiple dissertation and thesis committees within and beyond the department, and developed a variety of graduate seminars on topics ranging from Basic Writing and Writing Centers to Writing with New Media (2009, 2011) and English Studies and the Digital Humanities (2013). I am currently directing two dissertations, one of which is scheduled for final defense next month (Sunchai Hamcumpai). In 2008, I won the Paul Barrus Distinguished Teaching Award, a university-level honor. The course materials and sample assignments provided help illustrate many of the ways I work to create meaningful learning opportunities for my students at every level. This often includes developing meaningful opportunities for students to engage in original research projects that expand beyond both our classrooms walls and the duration of any given semester. To that end, I am delighted to report the following: In 2008, first-year student Eric Pleasant published his ethnography on the literacy practices of punk fans in 1980s Waco, Texas, in the national, referreed journal Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric. In 2011, four of my English 1302 students were invited to present their original research in St. Louis, Nevada, at the very first Conference College Composition and Communication Undergraduate Research Poster Session. Of the twenty undergraduate researchers selected from across the country to participate in

Information about acceptance rates is available in these introductory materials and Volume I of the RSCA portfolio (see Quality of Venues).

this event, these four Texas A&M-Commerce students were the only first-year students. The others were all within a year or two of graduation. Ultimately, only Megan Lambert was able to participate. However, the experience made quite an impact on her and she certainly made an impact on the many CCCC attendees with whom she had a chance to discuss her research. Its certainly an honor to be invited though perhaps an even greater honor to participate. Since 2007, more than fifteen of my English 1302 students have presented their original research at area conferences ranging from EGAD to the Federation Rhetoric Symposium. Over the years, dozens of our graduate students have been invited to present at local, regional, and national conferences based on original research that began in one or more of my courses. These include panels like Found in Translation: Forging Literate Identities in Marginalized Communities at CCCC 2011 (Allyson Jones, Sean Ferrier-Watson, Sunchai Hamcumpai, and Lami Adami) and The Persistence of Memory: Remapping the Future of Composition Studies by Charting Writing Histories at one Rural Texas University at the upcoming CCCC 2014 (Melissa Nivens, Geoff Clegg, Bill Lancaster, and Susan Warley).3 Many graduate students credit one or more of my courses as leading to their dissertation topics not only in our own PhD program (Nivens; Collier; Hamcumpai), but also in other departments across campus (Modisette, EdD 2012; Fisher, EdD 2009) and even other institutions (Grimley, Texas Womans University).

These are just a few of the many ways my students are disseminating their original research beyond the classroom. For additional details, please see the Teaching volume of these materials. In addition to course materials, relevant articles, and student responses, I have included student evaluations and other measures of proficien cy as determined by the College Equally important to understanding my performance as a teacher is my role as Director of First-Year Writing from 2006 to 2010. In that capacity, I accomplished the following: I. Established the Celebration of Student Writing, a now recurring feature of campus life.

Spring 2007, I established our campuss first Celebration of Student Writing (CSW), a campus-wide poster session where English 1302 students present their original research to the public. Before organizing this first CSW, I was already convinced our programs first-year students were producing research that was worthy of an audience beyond their fellow classmates and teachers. However, I could not have anticipated the incredible impact this event would have on the university community. Not only did the CSW garner a great deal of attention and praise from across the campus, some of which you can read in these materials (see Teaching, CSW), but it attracted significant attention across my discipline as well (see Rose 2010 and Downs 2010, for example, in Teaching, CSW). From that point on, the Celebration of Student Writing (CSW) has served as the culminating activity for English 1302. Over the years, the Converging Literacies Center has created several brief documentaries that effectively capture the CSW experience. For access to those materials, as well as a program including abstracts of student research from that May 2007 event, and student and administrator comments and related materials, refer to the CSW section of the Teaching portfolio (Volume 2). 4 II. Implemented a writing-about-writing approach (WAW) across our First-Year Writing program, which (a) expanded the WAW approach I had developed and implemented across our basic writing program in my previous role as Director of the Writing Center and Basic Writing Program from 20012007 (see Carter 2006, 2007, 2008) and (b) gained national recognition for our program, including extensive treatment in many of our fields key publication on WAW ( Roozen and Wardle 2012;

Complete proposals for these panels and individual presentations can be found in the Teaching section of my application materials. 4 In 2009, I began working with Dean Attardo to create new tools for assessment of our first-year writing program. We began assessing English 1302 through the Celebration of Writing, in addition to the other mechanisms used to determine student learning across the program. The Teaching materials include assessment instruments and other evidence of this innovative method (see also Teaching, Assessment).

Wardle and Downs 2011; Wardle 2008) and invitations to speak about our WAW curriculum and teacher training for WAW at national conferences (CCCC 2008; Florida Writing Symposium 2012). In Spring 2007, I began implementing a new program-wide emphasis on what the field would soon call writing about writing (WAW), a term coined by Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle to describe an approach to first-year writing that seeks to improve students understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and encouraging more realistic understandings of writing (553).5 Our program-wide implementation of this WAW approach began with English 1302 in January 2007, soon after I took over as director. The new curriculum I developed included scholarship about writing and rhetoric from our fields top journals and required an ethnographic study of literacies in context . For this course, I created a textbook (Literacies in Context, Fountainhead Press, 2007; 2008), a common syllabus, writing assignments, resources, and an extended guide for instructors new to this approach, all of which can be found among my application materials (see Teaching, Volume 2). The following year, I expanded WAW approach to include English 1301 with a new curriculum organized around the theme of literacy in our everyday lives. By Fall 2008, our program-wide implementation of WAW was complete. For English 1301, as with English 1302, I created a common syllabus, writing assignments, resources, and other supporting materials to provide extensive guidance and assistance to our TAs as they led students through this program. I have included examples of these among my Teaching materials as well. It is important to note that I built this WAW approach upon an already very solid foundation. As WPA for more than a decade, Donna Dunbar-Odom had established an innovative, widely celebrated first-year writing program that modeled the very best practices in our field. Under her direction, FYC instructors placed student experiences at the center of their classrooms with assignment sequences that complicated the students perspectives of relatively familiar issues and invited them to write meaningful, purposeful responses to these complexities. In Donnas course design and her associated textbooks like Working with Ideas (Houghton Mifflin 2000), students engaged with with difficult texts on topics ranging from Gender and Learning and Race and Education to Religion in the Classroom. For the final project, they conducted ethnographic research on the course theme as experienced in everyday lives. Similarly, the new WAW version of FYC that I introduced made extensive use of difficult texts and required students to conduct rigorous (usually ethnographic but often archival) research on a common theme: literacy in everyday contexts. That program history matters, I argue, because an administrators success is connected to that history. If I had inherited a weak program or even just one that wasnt so beautifully aligned with the way I aspired to approach writing instruction, then my accomplishments as an administrator might have looked very different. Similarly the program Tabetha Adkins inherited from me a few years later had a number of strengths, which she identified quickly and began building upon (the Celebration of Student Writing, for example). Of course I did not leave Tabetha a perfect program, either. Even so, she easily identified program needs and immediately began implementing solutions (including better systems for evaluating TAs, for example). This is the nature of program building. I argue that an awareness of our writing programs genealogy offers reviewers important insight into my strengths as a teacher, researcher, and program builder. Basically, I excel at (a) recognizing what is most valuable about any existing project I take on and (b) honing in on that value and recalibrating the program (rigorously, relentlessly, and from every angle) in order to ratchet that identified value up a level or two. That approach, I argue, has helped raise our writing programs profile in important ways. The most obvious evidence for this is the incredible response to the Celebration of Student Writing since I brought it to campus in 2007, as well as the growing number of scholarly publications in which our program, especially the WAW curriculum I developed and implemented, is not only cited and but regularly celebrated.

Downs, Douglas and Elizabeth Wardle "Teaching About Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning 'First Year Composition' as 'Introduction to Writing Studies' CCC (2007): 58 .4: 552584.

I believe the evidence presented demonstrates my effectiveness as a leader, both on our own campus and, perhaps more obviously, beyond our campus and within my discipline. However, I did not make this career by fixing neglected or otherwise mismanaged programs. Im not interested in that. A lot of my colleagues in rhetoric and composition have made careers out of building significant writing programs from the ruins left by previous administrators. Thankfully, the program I inherited in 2006 was in excellent shape, as was the one Tabetha inherited from me a few years later. Under her direction, however, our writing program has soared to levels I could only imagine: in quality and in profile, even as enrollment swelled to record numbers and funding diminished. 6 When a program is strong under one leader, we may credit that leader alone for her vision, talents, and hard work. However, that kind of strength is difficult to sustain because it is dependent upon individuals rather than institutions. Since each new version of our program seems to attract the attention of leaders across our discipline and the praise of administrators across our campus, it seems we are doing something right. I credit the evolution of our program to both the individuals involved and the sustainable program we have been able to help build together. In other words, we have each brought our own talents and research interests to take an already strong writing program to the next level. I suggest this, too, is important to understanding my performance during the period under review. I am committed to working closely with smart, dedicated colleagues like these to improve learning opportunities for everyone involved. Service The final section of my application materials includes information about my extensive service to the profession, university, department, and community. Highlights of my service activities since obtaining tenure and promotion include the following: From 2008-2011, I served as Co-Chair of the Council on Basic Writing, the national professional organization for basic writing. In that capacity, I helped advance this important organization in numerous ways, including extensive work on a new web presence for the organization and the relaunch of the

It is beyond the scope and purpose of this letter to describe the many ways our program has excelled under Tabethas leadership. However, there is one example that seems particularly relevant in this context , especially with respect to the continued evolution of this WAW approach. Early on, Tabetha began clarifying the programs vision and public identity by explicitly labeled it as a WAW approach. As WPA, she marked the programs public identity as WAW by utilizing textbooks like Wardle and Downs Writing about Writing: A College Reader (Bedford/St. Martins, 2010) and clearly building WAW terminology into course objectives and assigned readings. Under my leadership, our programs WAW identity may have clearly identified in our fields scholarship; however, from the perspective of students and instructors, that WAW identity wasnt nearly as clear on our campus and in our classrooms. As I would learn from Tabethas example, it really should have been. I would like to blame my oversight on the timing of my tenure as WPA. At that point, WAW was only beginning to establish itself as a recognized movement in the discipline. At that time, we had no clear label to point to, at least not in the forms available today. As a WPA committed to this approach, I found no appropriate textbook for this work. Like many implementing WAW at the time, I created a textbook for our program that clearly places writing at the center in ways a WAW approach advocates (see my Literacies in Context). I had also developed learning objectives for our program that clearly identified declarative knowledge about writing as fundamental to student learning, a fundamental principle of a WAW approach. I always saw my approach to FYC as a WAW approach. Even so, it had not occurred to me that making that WAW label immediately obvious to students would benefit students and their instructors. Instead, my goal was to create a solid program that helped students develop into more flexible, critical, and effective communicators and researchers. In doing so, I also hoped to draw the disciplines attention to our programs WAW identity, ideally as an exemplary model of this approach. I am proud to report that the field did, indeed, identify the program I developed in this way, with frequent citations in the literature on WAW. By itself, however, that scholarly identity for our profile is not enough. Tabetha was right: the WAW label and the clarity of purpose and vision that it represents has, indeed, made a significant difference, especially when combined with her many other excellent innovations. That clarity of vision matters, just as the program history matters.

organizations official journal (BWe: Basic Writing e-Journal), which had not been published for many years due to inadequate resources. Graduate students and CLiC GARs Sylwester Zabielski and JP Sloop were directly involved in these efforts. I helped produce BWes 2007 issue, more than five years after the previous issue went live. The following year, Sylwester created CBWs new website, redesigned BWes interface, and helped produce the 2008 issue where we officially unveiled the new look. JP served as production editor for the 2009/2010 issue. Both Sylwester and JP are credited as Publication Editor for the issue they helped bring to print. Professional experiences like these are of tremendous value for everyone involved. Since 2011, I have served on the Conference on College Composition and Communications Committee on Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric, which has led significant efforts to promote more meaningful, sustainable support for undergraduate researchers across the organization. From 2010-2011, I was also a member of the CCCC Task Force that led to the creation of this important committee. In this portfolio, I have included relevant committee reports that effectively describe our work in this capacity. Since 2011, I have also served on a Special Task Force created to produce on behalf of CCCC membership a Public Comment on the Department of Health and Human Services Proposed Changes to Human Subjects Research, a document that will have a significant impact on Institutional Review Boards at every level. The final statement we produced is available in this section. From 2007-2012, I served on the editorial board for Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing in Rhetoric (YSW), the premier journal in our field for original research by undergraduate scholars. In 2013, the journal celebrated its tenth anniversary. In 2012, I was invited to join the editorial board of a new, interdisciplinary journal called Undergraduate Journal of Service Learning and Community-Based Research. Whereas YSWs emphasis is undergraduate scholarship in our discipline, this new journal focuses on undergraduate research across the disciplines that address some aspect of civic engagement, service learning, or community-based research. The publication combines my interest in undergraduate research with my research agenda on community writing. From 2008-2011, I served the discipline as coordinator for the national Council of Writing Program Administrators project called the National Conversation on Writing (NCoW), an initiative designed to change the conversation about writing to one more directly informed by the way real writers approach their work in everyday contexts. To this end, we collected interviews with writers at every level and across the nation, creating multimedia projects that brought together these stories of writers and developing a formal archive of relevant materials on writing and writers, housed at Texas A&M-Commerces Digital Collections.

Professional service like the contributions I made to organizations like the Council on Basic Writing and the National Conversation on Writing strengthen our discipline by developing innovative resources for professionals and offering greater access to the fields best practices. They also benefit our university and our students. The materials included in this section provide evidence of my extensive service to the profession, university, college, department, and community. Civic Engagement and Community-Based Research In order to accurately depict my performance in all three categories (RSCA, Teaching, and Service), I must return to the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC). More than anything else I have done since earning tenure and promotion six years ago, CLiC has had the single greatest impact on my work. CLiC s mission statement, for example, comes directly from my research activities and these research activities, in turn, are directly informed by the work I have done to build CLiC: The mission of the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) is to promote a better understanding of how texts and related literacy practices may develop, sustain, or even erode civic engagement across local publics, especially among historically underrepresented groups. With a view toward promoting more robust public discussion, CLiC supports historical, theoretical, and empirical research on rhetoric and writing as manifested in everyday local contexts and over time. CLiC is highly attentive to new medias role in our increasingly literate lives, thus projects emerging from and informing CLiC often engage new media as

both object of inquiry and the form through which these findings are communicated. Likewise, CLiC develops educational and outreach initiatives designed to address relevant civic issues.7 My research agenda and the shape CLiC has taken over the past few years are both deeply informed by my commitment to civic engagement and community-based research. This is true of my teaching approach as well. Indeed civic engagement plays a significant role in everything I do as teacher and scholar. Through CLiC and my related work, I have spent the last few years working closely with community members and current students to recover critical race narratives from across the region especially those that tell us something about how African Americans garnered rhetorical agency throughout the 20th century. The products of these efforts include a series of public programming events (panel presentations, videos), preservation efforts (oral history/archive development), and recognition for African American leaders across our region whose extensive contributions over the last several decades are largely unfamiliar to our students and, of course, unknown to most anyone beyond our own campus as well. I am most proud of the community impact such work has made, though the impact across the larger scholarly community in my discipline is clear as well, including a series of scholarly publications and presentations in our fields top journals (see especially Carter and Conrad 2012; Carter 2012), a n NEH grant (see Carters Remixing Rural Texas), and a series of brief (15-25 minute) documentaries about racial justice efforts on this campus in 1968 (A Clear Channel) and 1973 (The Other Side) and the longer history of segregation on this campus (Still Searching). Until I began my second book project in 2009, much of this local history was unknown, forgotten, or even contested. Working in close partnership with archivists like Andrea Weddle (Director of Special Collections), this work has also resulted in a significant collection of oral histories and other archival materials from African Americans across the region. In 2009, CLiCs preservation efforts in partnership with Gee Library began with an exciting event of remembrance at East Caney Missionary Baptist Church, on the 152 celebration of the oldest African American church in Hopkins County. They activities continued with additional celebrations and related events at local institutions like Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church, in Commerce, Texas (for which we helped establish a Texas Historical Marker in 2011), and extensive oral history interviews with our universitys earliest African American students and area civil rights leaders. Perhaps most significantly, these collaborations have resulted in the acquisition of the Ivory and Lennie Moore Collection (April 2012). Ivory Moore, of course, is a significant figure for numerous reasons, not the least being his status as our campuss first African American administrator (1972 ). Sadly, less than one month after we completed this acquisition, Ivory Moore had a stroke and had to move from his home to assisted living. Moments like these remind us how precious and urgent preservation efforts can be.

Over the years, CLiC has hosted numerous presentations on this campus and throughout the community that bring together the areas African American leaders to remember the past and inspire current students--by historical example and direct object lessons--to address ongoing injustices they see even today. In almost every case, these recovery efforts have renewed connections with alumni and uncovered historic examples of exemplary models of civic engagement among many of our former students. The cover of the Community Literacy Journal issue included among my application materials is a great example of this. This issue brings together scholarly articles that emerged from the first conference on Writing Democracy, which we hosted on our campus in March 20118:
7

I developed this mission statement in 2011 for the most recent CLiC White Paper, Writing Democracy in the Engaged University, which you can find in Volume 3 of the RSCA portfolio. 8 In March 2011, we brought NCC members together for the first time in more than 35 years for a national conference we hosted on our campus called Writing Democracy (see writingdemocracy.org). Since that event, the Writing Democracy Project has gained national momentum, resulting in two additional workshops (March 2012 in

Norris Community Club (circa 1974), Commerce, Texas Source: Commerce Public Library, Local History Collection In 1973, the Norris Community Club (NCC) was established by university students in partnership with local citizens to provide what they called a clear channel of communication between residents o f Norris, the historically segregated neighborhood in town, and the City of Commerce. In a few short years, NCC ushered in unprecedented change. The cover image selected for this collection on Writing Democracy serves as a powerful reminder of the very real, very concrete impact university-community partnerships can have. Soon after this photograph was taken, founding members like MacArthur Evans, Larry Mathis, and Allen Hallmark graduated and moved on to their new lives in far East Texas, Colorado, and Oregon. They never forgot the experience, and community leaders in Norris never forgot them. The conference provided the opportunity to bring them together for the first time in nearly 35 years. For an extended discussion of NCC, please see Carters A Clear Channel in this volume (Front Matter). My work to recover forgotten or contested stories about civil rights efforts across the area has helped repair relationships with alumni, relationships often strained to the breaking point decades ago by the many complexities of Jim Crows legacy. John Carloss return to Commerce in 2011 offers another powerful example of this renewed connection. In 1965, Carlos arrived at ETSU from Harlem. My research reveals links between the civil rights activities he became involved in at ET and his part in the now iconic image of the Silent Protest from the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, less than one year after leaving our campus (see Carter and Dent, forthcoming; Carter and Conrad 2012; Carter 2012). My research on these and related stories led me to Washington, DC, in late September of 2011, where I would meet John Carlos face-to-face for the first time. Chance brought us together that evening, with assistance from a Google alert I had set to several key terms related to my second book project. I was in town for a meeting at NEH Headquarters and research at the Library of Congress. According to my Google Alert, John Carlos was in town to launch a national book tour for his brand new memoir The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment that Changed History, which he co-authored with The Nation sports editor Dave Zirin (Haymarket Press, 2011). That moment was a turning point in our universitys relationship with this internationally acclaimed figure. October 1, 2011: I officially triggered the process for Texas A&M-Commerce to award John Carlos an honorary doctorate9 with a nomination letter I sent to President Jones from my hotel room in Washington DC, just hours after our first meeting at Carloss book signing. Almost immediately thereafter, our campus became a scheduled stop on Carloss national book tour. November 2011: A little over a month after meeting Carlos in Washington, I was introducing him to more than 700 students, faculty, and administrators at Ferguson Auditorium. May 2012: A few months later, he was returning to our campus for the second time in more than 40 years to be presented the first honorary doctorate our university has ever awarded to an African American. That fall, Carlos was finally inducted in the A&M-C Sports Hall of Fame, long after being inducted into Halls of Fame across the nation. In March 2013, at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication, Carlos was a featured speaker, an honor I began working toward the moment I learned the 2013 conference theme: The Public Work of Composition. I could think of no one more fitting to speak on this subject than an

St. Louis, MO, and March 2013 in Las Vegas, NV). Fall 2012, articles emerging from the March 2011 conference in Commerce that featured NCC appeared in a special issue of Community Literacy Journal on Writing Democracy, for which I served as co-editor. The cover for this issue is a 1974 image of the Norris Community Club, which my co-editor and I insist serves as a concrete reminder of the very real, very concrete consequences of civic engagement (see Front Matter, CLJ). Writing Democracy is about civic engagement: recognizing it, promoting it, sustaining it.
9

The materials submitted included that nomination letter, which I sent from my hotel room in Washington DC on October 1, 2011, a few hours after meeting him at that lecture and book signing (see RSCA, Volume 3).

individual like John Carlos. For the extensive materials promoting this event, Carlos requested CCCC organizers use a photograph of him on stage in our universitys Fieldhouse in May 2012, in full regalia, holding his brand new honorary doctorate. This is not his first honorary doctorate. However, his renewed connections to our campus run very deep. At CCCC 2013, I had the honor of introducing Carlos in front of several hundred of my fellow writing specialists. The presentation was so well received that it has been developed into an episode for the podcast This Rhetorical Life (TRL), for which I was also asked to contribute based on my extensive work with Carlos and other activists with local ties. Access to that TRL episode, the CCCC program and other relevant materials, including the video I created with the CLiC team to help frame Carloss activism within our discipline and on our campus--can be found in the Civic Engagement/Community-Based Research section of the RSCA portfolio (Volume 3).10

Our efforts to recover, preserve, and widely circulate these forgotten, often contested stories could hardly come at a better time. In 2014, our campus celebrates two significant milestones: 125 years ago, Mayo established our university to provide the regions largely poor farmers with access to higher education; 50 years ago, our campus became one of the last two public colleges in Texas to remove White as a primary criterion for admission.

The work we have done to recover our campuss history of desegregation places CLiC in an excellent position to contribute to these remembrances. Indeed, we have recently been invited to do exactly that. Stories like these have much to teach us about community service and civic engagement. Remembering them and celebrating them has been a key goal of mine from the beginning. As historical examples of civic engagement, they have helped inspire and guide many others to get involved and make a difference. Of everything I have done as a teacher and a scholar, this, to me, is what matters most. Application Materials In bringing together materials to support my candidacy for promotion to Full Professor, I have attempted to organize them in ways that offer the clearest possible access to everything reviewers might need to make an informed decision based on the published criteria. My application materials are arranged as follows: Introductory Materials: Following this letter, you will find the latest version of my curriculum vita, teaching philosophy, administrative philosophy, and an annotated list of the major items I included in the RSCA, Teaching, and Service portfolios. As requested, I have also provided a list of ten names with current contact information of scholars capable of accessing my work. Finally, I requested that letters supporting my candidacy be sent directly to you. I understand that those letters will be added to my introductory materials before the review process begins. Letter of recommendation have been submitted by Kelly Ritter (University of Illinois), Elizabeth Wardle (University of Central Florida), and Deborah Mutnick (Long Island University-Brooklyn). Teaching, Volume 1: Course materials from the graduate and undergraduate courses I have taught during the review period (2006-2013). Also included are examples of research projects students began in one or more of my undergraduate or graduate-level courses and later developed into conference presentations, dissertations, or even scholarly publications. This volume begins with my statement of teaching philosophy, followed by an

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Also presenting alongside me at CCCC 2013 were two other local leaders: Joe Tave (ETSU 1966-1969) and Belford Page (ETSU 1969-1972). As an undergraduate on the night of Martin L uther King, Jr.s assignation, Tave rallied our grieving students to establish the Afro American Students Society of East Texas (ASSET) and organize a march across this campus to celebrate the life and legacy of MLK. Through ASSET, Tave helped usher in unprecedented changeincluding the first African American administrator (Ivory Moore, in 1972) and faculty (Talbot, 1968; Brewer, 1969). Again, these local stories were largely hidden before I began working with the local community to recover them. However, such recovery efforts are unsustainable without institutional support. For example, special, one-time funding from the Presidents Office enabled Mr. Tave and Mr. Page to travel to Vegas for these conference activities.

annotated table of contents for all major items, which includes an extended discussion of choices made in designing and revising the courses featured. Teaching, Volume 2: The second volume focuses on my work with our First-Year Writing program. I begin with my own English 1302 and 1301 course materials (as teacher of record), including relevant examples of student work. Next, I turn from my role as a teacher in the first-year program to my work as Director of FirstYear Writing (2007-2010): from the Celebration of Student Writing to training materials and resources designed for our TAs to help guide them through program-wide implementation of a WAW approach. The volume begins with an annotated table of contents for all major items. The section on my role as Director of FYW begins with my statement of administrative philosophy. Volume 2 also includes a section on Assessment, which features SLO reports and student evaluations. RSCA, Volume 1: This volume features my scholarly publications, beginning with an annotated table of contents with abstracts for all materials included. Next, I offer information about the acceptance rate for each publication venue (see Quality of Venue). In the sectio n on my book The Way Literacy Lives (SUNY P, 2008), I included the book reviews to which I had the most direct access. I can provide others if doing so seems useful to reviewers. RSCA, Volume 2: This volume features grants and conference activities. RSCA, Volume 3: This volume focuses on the research, scholarship, and creative activities emerging from my work with the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) and the Writing Democracy Project, a related, national effort. Service: This portfolio includes evidence of my professional, community, university, and departmental service activities during the review period. Additional materials: Copies of my book (The Way Literacy Lives, 2008), the second addition of my textbook (Literacies in Context, 2008), the Fall 2012 special issue of Community Literacy Journal on Writing Democracy (Carter and Mutnick, guest editors; Carter, A Clear Channel ), and the September 2012 issue of CCC (Carter and Conrad, In Possession of Community). On pages 28-29 of David Golds article in this same CCC issue, you will also find an extended discussion of my work with our local community as both a teacher and scholar, which Gold celebrates by suggesting readers can gain from Carters example in imagining ways we might turn to history to examine and enrich our own local context (29).

If I can provide any additional information, please do not hesitate to contact me by email at shannon.carter@tamuc.edu or by phone at 903-366-1767.

Yours, Shannon Carter Shannon Carter, PhD Associate Professor of English