The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has presented Charles Bazerman from UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, its 2020 CCCC Exemplar Award. The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is a constituent organization within the NCTE.
The CCCC Executive Committee presents, as occasion demands, the CCCC Exemplar Award to a person whose years of service as an exemplar for our organization represents the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession. The Exemplar Award seeks to recognize individuals whose record is national and international in scope, and who set the best examples for the CCCC membership.
Bazerman will be announced as a recipient of the CCCC Exemplar Award on March 26, during the 2020 CCCC Annual Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Charles Bazerman is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Education. His commitment to literacy and the teaching of writing started over forty years ago when he was teaching first and third grade in inner-city Brooklyn. Then he saw concretely how learning to read and write changed the dispositions and bearing of individual children, made possible a successful relationship to schooling, and improved life chances. He also saw the effects of children on entering the world of literacy. A few years later, when he began teaching at City University of New York during the early years of open admissions, he found professional satisfaction in helping students enter into the literate discussion of the university. His research and pedagogic interests started from the teaching of writing to encompass the ways we make use of reading in our writing and then the ways in which academic writing is organized around the literatures of the several disciplines.
His book Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science examines the history and current forms of scientific research writing. In The Languages of Edison’s Light he examines how technical discourses and projects intersect with many other discourses of civic, economic, and cultural life. His recent volumes A Rhetoric of Literate Action and A Theory of Literate Action put together his understanding of writing developed over the last forty years. Other books and articles consider aspects of academic and professional writing, writing across the curriculum, the role of writing in social organization, the lifespan development of writing skills, and the relation between writing and cognitive development.
He has also written many textbooks for teaching university reading and writing and the relation between them. He has edited the Handbook of Research on Writing and numerous other research collections and series. He has been Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and is founder and chair of the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research.
The Conference on College Composition and Communication, with more than 4,500 members and subscribers, supports and promotes the teaching and study of composition, rhetoric, and communication skills at the college level, both in undergraduate and graduate programs. College Composition and Communication is the group’s journal.
The National Council of Teachers of English, with 25,000 individual and institutional members worldwide, is dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education.