Hi!
Just a reminder that proposals for the TYCA National Conference are due on August 18, 2025 @ 9AM — also known as Monday. We would love to see you there! Call below.
All best,
Kris
Shelter and Place: Grounding Action in Uncertain Times
Date: March 4, 2026
Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Offered in connection with the CCCC Annual Convention
Proposal Deadline: Monday, August 18, 2025, 9:00 a.m. ET
CCCCevents.
Call for Proposals: The Two-Year College English Association of NCTE invites proposals for our 2026 National Conference, “Shelter and Place: Grounding Action in Uncertain Times.”
Our words and ideas enable us to find and create shelters, shaping the places we inhabit—their interactions forming our skylines—for better or for worse. We construct our shelters of identity, of commerce, of education—hewing them together sometimes roughly, with force or eloquence—not only to shelter us from the elements around us, but to create the patterns, terms, and structures of our lived realities. The shelters we create can give us safety, keep us ignorant, make us targets.
Our words also place us. They ground us where we are. They connect us with others. They are how we are construed and how we construe. When the words we need go missing, are stolen, redacted, or escape us, we can fall silent or we can seek other ways to get the message out there. As we choose to continue toward communication, we not only repurpose old structures but find new ways to build, taking necessary action to transform the lived conditions of the places we inhabit and the people in them.
In the open-access classrooms we serve, writing, thinking, and textual encounters form shelter; they are the tools people take up to carve out their own ways of understanding the world, placing their own visions in relation to each other to make the places around us better.
This work will continue no matter how unfamiliar the place we find ourselves. Our coming together serves as an opportunity to share our ways of continuing to build shelter and value the places we come from, as well as to shape the ones we go to. We have room to ask each other: How can we use our practices/tools to offer a shelter from which we can create change in classrooms and communities? How can practices that remind us of our place in the world help us to make change? How do we return to familiar practices and reshape them for new times? What new ways of doing, communicating, being, and acting have we found in this new place? What can we do within our existent (and remaining) structures to support students and the communities we inhabit? How can we rebuild? How do we keep going with what needs to be done?
Potential issue/ideas that proposals might address:
- Community engagement in curriculum and in practice
- Using practices in new ways to respond to the world
- New ideas for communicating and connecting in programs and in classrooms
- Collaborations and partnerships across curricular and support structures
- Creative and strategic ways to move forward
- Reading, writing, and literacy in a new era
- Emerging/new models of support
- Systemic practices and their influence and impact in shaping student experience
- Audience awareness and context
- Local political/economic influences on curriculum
- Any other topic related to teaching English in the first two college years or open-access literacy education.
Focus for Presentations: Presentations do not need to explicitly discuss the Conference theme, but they should address issues that are relevant to English studies professionals who support diverse college students in their first two college years. Participants do not need to be affiliated with a two-year college but must focus proposals on research and practices that are clearly relevant to TYCA members. Potential areas of exploration include (but are not limited to) first-year writing, developmental education, college reading, teaching English to speakers of other languages, inclusive teaching, evidence-based pedagogy, literature, creative writing, writing centers and other learning assistance programs, intermediate composition, communications, linguistics, technical writing, business writing, professional development, teacher-scholar activism, community engagement, program administration and innovation, preparing to teach at a two-year college, and the role of contingent faculty.
For Questions about the Conference: Contact the TYCA Conference Program Chair, Kris Messer.
For Questions about Submitting a Proposal: CCCC Events Team CCCCevents
https://ncte.org/groups/tyca/tyca-conference
Kris Messer, MFA, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
The Community College of Baltimore
Service-Learning Coordinator
Essex Campus, AHUM 238
kmesser@ccbcmd.edu
"…at the heart of any education that matters is a central question: how can you imagine a future much different than the present…"
– Henry Giroux