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Victor Villanueva is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Washington State University, where he also teaches rhetoric and composition studies.  He is the winner of two national awards on research and scholarship for Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, and the editor of Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader.  A popular speaker and writer whose many published works have appeared in scholarly journals and anthologies, he was named Rhetorician of the Year in 1999.  He is the former chair of The Conference on College Composition and Communication and has twice co-chaired the organization's Winter Workshop.  His concern is always with racism and with the political more generally—all as embodied in rhetoric and literacy.

We envision this conference as an inquiry, an exploration into the many kinds of borders we face as teachers and members of our respective communities:  the physical and the cultural, the real and figurative.  Some borders may be necessary; others may simply get in the way.  Together we’ll raise questions, and then struggle with those questions as we work to arrive at some tentative, provisional answers.

Writing instruction begins in kindergarten and continues on through college.  What is the place of the two-year college English instructor in that sequence?  How can we best serve our students' needs, building on what's come before to prepare them for  the university and/or the workplace?  After a panel of instructors from early grades through the university presents their approaches to writing instruction, we'll discuss these and other questions as a way to situate ourselves in the writing instruction sequence.

Saturday Sessions 

Regional, state, and even international borders have been crossed this year on the list of the facilitators/moderators of Saturday’s sessions.  Most of the sessions are collaborations that include a variation of community college instructors, university instructors, graduate students, and two-year college students. There will be 4 time periods, each of which includes a choice of 4 or 5 sessions; altogether 18 sessions are scheduled, with lunch and coffee breaks along the way. Presenters are coming from as far north as Alaska and Calgary, Alberta, as far south as Eugene, OR, as far east as Spokane, WA, and La Grande, OR, and many points in between.

Updated November, 2002.  Site editor: beth.camp@linnbenton.edu