The CGC’s BEGINNINGS
History
“Dear Colleagues,” the message began. “We are excited to announce the creation of a new professional community of educators who work with (post-)graduate students, the Consortium on Graduate Communication. The Consortium will provide a venue for discussion and sharing of programs, strategies, and materials to support all graduate students, including international/ESL students. We would invite all who are interested in this growing area of research and practice to join.”
So began the CGC in the spring of 2013, the brainchild of Michelle Crowe (then at Dartmouth College, soon to move to Cornell University) and Nigel Caplan (University of Delaware). Crowe had approached Caplan after seeing him present in several sessions on graduate communication—often with Christine Feak of the University of Michigan—at the 2012 TESOL conference. She floated the idea of starting a consortium, and he invited her to join him in a roundtable at the next TESOL conference and discuss the idea then. In the meantime, Crowe began talking about it at other conferences to people such as Talinn Phillips (Ohio University) and Steve Simpson (New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology).
Part of Crowe’s impetus for suggesting the consortium grew out of her seeing other sessions at various conferences presenting graduate communications support with little to no knowledge of others also doing it elsewhere. And many in fact had been doing such work for a long time on their campuses but doing it alone. Thus, she and Caplan realized that people doing graduate communications support needed and would benefit greatly from a space where people doing this kind of work could gather and share resources.
At the 2013 TESOL conference, Crowe, Caplan, and others including Angelo Pitillo (University of Michigan) and Jim Tierney (Yale University) brainstormed and discussed such a consortium’s name, goals, and structure (i.e., as a non-profit). In order to ensure freedom and flexibility, they decided they wanted it to be independent of other organizations, and they determined to focus not primarily on research but more on building community and sharing ideas and resources. They also conceived of the consortium as concerning all graduate students—i.e., neither just native English speakers nor multi-lingual learners—and encompassing all forms of communication. They began drafting a survey for gathering information about the graduate communication community and for recruiting members, and from which to create a listserv (initially called the “Graduate Roundtable”). And a steering committee soon signed on comprising Feak, Phillips, and Simpson as well as Kathy Brenner (Harvard and Boston Universities), Katya Fairbanks (Claremont Graduate University), and Leo Schmitt (the New School).
The survey went out, along with a link by which to join, and the CGC was born.
A website was started, resources were gathered, and several survey respondents volunteered to take on roles setting up the organization. Jane Freeman (University of Toronto) volunteered to host an event, and Kyung-Hee Bae (Rice University) offered to create resources pages on the website for syllabi and other materials. The listserv quickly garnered over 500 members in some 25 countries, and by December of 2014, the first CGC event, the “CGC Colloquium” was being advertised with the theme of “A Professional Community on Graduate Communication.” An official board of directors was conceived, and recruitment was begun.
Meanwhile, the field itself continued to blossom, largely due to efforts by the same people. For example, Simpson and Phillips had started working on editing a book on graduate communications support and later invited Crowe and Caplan to be coeditors. By October of 2014, the latter had drafted their chapter for the collection.
The University of Michigan Press was also, says Caplan, “instrumental in the founding of the CGC,” sponsoring that first event at the University of Toronto and many others moving forward as well as publishing the collection on graduate communication support.