Two-Year College English Association (TYCA)

TYCA folks @ NCTE 2008 Conference

2008-11-09T22:03:00.003-06:00

I'm headed off to NCTE in San Antonio Texas week after next. I'm looking forward to sitting in on a few great panels that I can share with you all; however, I'm also there on a "mission." I'm on one of the elected members of the College Section Nominating Committee. We need names to nominate for the College Section Steering Committee and candidates for the next year's College Section Nominating Committee. So if you are going to be at the conference, please stop by and share some names of colleagues and friends who might be good folks to serve on one of these two NCTE committees:

Friday, Nov. 21, 5:30–7:00 p.m.: Table set up for nominations (Marriott Rivercenter, Salon F, 3rd Floor).
Saturday, Nov. 22, 12:00-12:45 p.m.: Open for nominations (Marriott, Rivercenter, Salon A, 3rd Floor).
Sunday, Nov. 23, 8:00–9:00 a.m.: Open for nominations (Convention Center, Room 205).

The Jilting of Professor Creel

2008-05-15T12:20:00.003-05:00

You may or may not remember Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" and its final commentary on expectations, but let's just say my tale here reveals how my expectations of students' lives have been affected by teaching in the two-year college.

In the last weeks of this recent semester, one of my better students in an online class went MIA. He/she missed a deadline for a major assignment, didn't respond to email or discussion postings on the course website about missing the deadline, then missed the next assignment, all within an 8 day period. With my emails and discussions unanswered, I searched the student's online information for a phone number or alternate email address.

Finding an alternate email, I began to compose a message, and as I composed I imagined that I was in fact writing this email to a family member of the student who would open the email at some future date because the student had been hospitalized or had even died. Yes, honestly, that is what I thought.

Now, before you assume that I am a naturally morbid individual and am prone to extremes, consider this: in one semester I have lost students to the death of a girlfriend/baby's momma, a debilitating car accident, a hospitalized mother who speaks no English, and a miscarriage. I only recently overheard-- to my entertainment I must admit-- a rookie colleague dealing with the "I missed the test because I was locked up" treatment for the first time, which almost everyone in our department has heard at least once. And it is always true.

Why then would my mind not stray to death, dismemberment, and trauma when a good student suddenly disappears? This has become part of my reality as a teacher in an urban two-year college. I won't say it's an uplifting reality. It tugs at, and sometimes mauls, the generally hopeful demeanor that I bring to my work-- that I think all good teachers bring to their work. But it does ground me and remind me that school is one small, fragile part of my students' lives. It puts me in my place, which is not at the top. It reminds me of the multiple ways that I am tied to these people-- not just intellectually, but emotionally as well.

My story ends with an uplift of those emotions, a renewal of my hope. I crafted my email message tenderly for the imagined family member, but within minutes of receiving my message the student called on the phone. All was well, a mere technical glitch and a missed cue on the discussion board. Here were the assignments popping into my inbox; here was the student back from the dead, prison, or the hospital. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

I never told the student about his/her brush with death. It's probably best to keep that to myself.

2008-04-22T10:35:00.002-05:00

Recently, I decided to revisit my teaching philosophy. I recognized that my ideas about teaching had been changing radically because of my interests in the intersection of technology and composing, but I hadn't taken time to put those thoughts into writing. So, here goes: a rough draft, if you will, of my attempt to update my teaching philosophy for the early 21st century.

Composition scholar Peter Elbow says “College is short and life is long.” I hope to create a learning environment that recognizes this reality in multiple ways.

My teaching is driven currently by three intersecting interests:

1) The explosion of information access on the internet in the late 20th century has thrown us—or at least me—into a time of epistemological confusion. Ways of creating, managing, and distributing knowledge are changing rapidly and radically from those developed over the last 500 years of print culture. Knowledge is being created in new ways and with new immediacy. The Internet provides everyday, fast-forwarded examples of the social construction of knowledge. Individuals can create their own networks of information pulling from scholars, bloggers, traditional news sources, and whoever happens to be on their Twitter or IM accounts. And mobile technology allows this knowledge to flow from almost anywhere to almost everywhere. In education, this means we have to alter our approaches. The relatively static repositories for knowledge, such as the library and professor, are now merely nodes in expansive networks of information and ideas. We are content experts still, but we are also cruise directors in a swirling ocean of content.

2) For writing courses, this means new forms and genres of writing, a whole new physical place of writing, the screen rather than the page. The classic academic essay, with its now arbitrary print conventions and limited reach, grows less and less engaging in this context. The academic research paper begins to look like a stiffening corpse in a world of dynamic linking, podcasting, and embedded video. The activities of analysis and research are still vital and learning to deal with polyvocal texts (which are exploding at the moment) has become even more important, but at the same time the forms and genres in which these classic academic writing skills are practiced will be new. Somehow I must try to prepare students to compose in this new environment—and to expand the very notion of composition (see Geoff Sirc’s English Composition as a Happening for examples).

3) At the same time, I remain wedded to many of the goals of critical literacy for democratic citizenship as informed by Ira Shor’s translation of Paulo Freire for the US educational setting. These goals can be updated and combined with the multimodality and multiliteracy concerns of the New London Group given this new technology context. Technology literacy is critical literacy now. While helping students develop skills to communicate, manage, and critically engage in this new context, I also want to help students follow their interests, or “follow the fun” as my colleague Michael Kuhne has said. Following the fun enlivens the learning, enlivens the composing, and ultimately empowers students in their lives as students and as active citizens in the world and in the future.

If I can begin to respond to these concerns and accomplish these tasks, I will consider my teaching successful-- if not for college, at least for life.

2008-04-07T07:12:00.001-05:00

CC Image posted by jasontho @ Flickr.

2008 TYCA- West Annual Conference

Reaching Across Communities: Service in and out of the Classroom

Friday, October 10 and Saturday, October 11
Prescott, Arizona Campus of Yavapai College

Call for Proposals: The theme for TYCA-West’s 2008 conference centers on service—within classrooms and faculty groups, among widening circles of the community and profession, as well as across nationalities and other discourse communities.

How do we

promote “giving” and “giving back” through curriculum design, assignments and teaching strategies, collaborations and assessments?
Foster collegiality within our departments?
Mentor new faculty?
Encourage professional affiliations?

Deadline for Submissions: June 15, 2008

*Submit Proposals to: Shelley Rodrigo
Mesa Community College
1833 W. Southern Ave.
Mesa, AZ 85202
shelley.rodrigo@gmail.com

*You may either mail or email proposals

CCCC offline

2008-03-26T10:32:00.004-05:00

I have been trying to let this one go, but I just can't do it.

Several colleagues and I are giving a presentation on our college's basic writing course at 4Cs in New Orleans in April. I requested an LCD projector and Internet access for our presentation. I began creating a webpage to provide an outline of the presentation and link to useful documents.

Then, the fateful day arrives; I receive an email from 4Cs. This email tells me I will have neither an LCD projector nor Internet access . . . but I will have an overhead projector.

An overhead projector?

A bleepin' overhead projector!!

Will I have a stone tablet and a chisel as well ?!

When I respond with my disappointment-- in much more measured tones than the above-- I am informed that I can rent an LCD projector and Internet access for . . . oh, about a bazillion dollars. Okay, okay, it wasn't a bazillion dollars; it was only $800 as I recall. $800 . . . hm, let me check my change jar. Nope, no extra $800 there. Maybe some R1 shop has that kind of money, but where the hell is a community college teacher supposed to get an additional $800 (over what he/she has already scrounged for registration, airfare, and hotel) for a conference presentation? It might as well be a bazillion.

So, the premiere gathering of college composition teachers in the country is reduced to using mid-20th century technology to share the work of its best and brightest in 2008. That suggests a great deal about just how far behind the technology curve we are as a field-- both practically and theoretically.

A coda: I seriously considered cancelling my trip to New Orleans, but I wanted to see my alma mater (Tulane University) again and I didn't want to disappointment the colleagues with whom I have been collaborating on this presentation.

Now, where did I put those transparencies and that overhead pen?

Oh, I remember; I left them next to the mimeograph machine.

See you in New Orleans.

Negotiating Information Overload

2008-03-12T13:13:00.003-05:00

Image posted by Orbitgal @ Flickr under (cc)
If we are to believe the “independent ‘state of the search’ survey” quoted in this article about suffering from information overload, then 72% of consumers are frustrated with their online searching. What does this mean to us as writing and research teachers? Although our students say they’ll just “Google” it, they realize they are not finding the “right” information and are possibly giving up in exhaustion.

Obviously it is our job to help students learn to negotiate resources available through academic libraries; however, now that there is so much legitimate information (as well as junk) available on the web, is it our job to teach them the information management skills to more efficiently and effectively navigate the web?

Is anyone teaching the following types of things in their research based writing courses:

Google Search Tricks
Use Alternative Search Engines
Make your own Search Engine with something like Rollyo

I confess, at this point I’m only pushing the fact that Google Scholar exists, but I’m seriously considering incorporating some of the above. Your experiences & ideas?

21st Century Literacy and Committee Speak: Hooray in a Way for NCTE

2008-02-26T14:00:00.005-06:00

Just because it's buried on the NCTE website and because the last few postings in this blog have been all about using the web, multi-modal, multi-media, the-research-paper-is-dead-what-are-we-gonna-do-next, and such, I thought I'd cross-post this little gem from NCTE's Executive Committee.

The wheels creak slowly forward and "what rough beast, its hour come round at last . . . "?

Laziness and Wikipedia

2008-02-17T12:14:00.001-06:00

I have this listing of blog posts and other stuff that I eventually want to reply to, and I figured our TYCA blog definitely would be interested in an article titled “Wikipedia is #1 : What Are You Going to Do About It?” In this blog posting Kelly discusses why he refers to Wikipedia as a blog author; he gives five reasons:

Short URLs
No Parameters/No Numbers
Penalty FUD (lower ranking in Google because of linking to “spammy sites”)
Momentum
Laziness

He then says there is nothing to do about momentum and laziness and moves on to discuss the others with suggestions for people who want to be linked to. As writing teachers I think we can learn from the explicit acknowledgment of using Wikipedia to keep writing momentum going as well as being too lazy to look for other resources. It makes me think then that I need to understand that continually telling my students why “scholarly” resources are better is not going to do it! I need to demonstrate ways that they can engage with scholarly resources in a quick and easy way that doesn’t lose momentum while they are working. Let’s be honest, because we are more practiced researchers, we know how to locate scholarly resources in a more quick and efficient manner. We also know that there is nothing quite as fast as just Googling something and seeing Wikipedia in the top listing is oh-so-tempting. So how might we teach quick scholarly researching, recognizing that is what our students will be doing anyhow?

Some Ideas:

Emphasize the various specialized Google Search Engines like Book Search, News, Finance, Scholar, and Government.
Provide links to WWW resources that are not password protected. Things like: RefDesk, ERIC, and WorldCat.
Demonstrating how to have multiple windows or tabs open in the browser so to easily cross reference results from Google Scholar with Library Databases.

Some Questions:

Should we acknowledge the momentum and laziness reasons for using sources like Wikipedia and adapt are curriculum accordingly? Why or why not?
What are some other ideas for teaching students how to speed up their “scholarly” research processes?

Rock You Zude, gnomz @ VUVOX

2008-02-09T08:12:00.000-06:00

One of my part-time colleagues, who teaches full time at one of the local high schools, and I are currently working on constructing an online multimodal ENG101, first semester of first year composition, ala New London Group and Kress; more importantly, ala CogDog’s 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. Alan’s listing of web-based composition technologies like Rock You, Zude, gnomz, and VUVOX, among 46 other tools, demonstrates that the technology to teach multimodal composition is easily accessible, relatively usable, and mostly free.

Gill’s last post is dead on...Not only is it our fault for the continued zombie-esque trampling of academic writing into FYC, it is also still so entrenched in the textbooks. Although many of the textbooks are slowly incorporating multimodality, it’s an uphill battle and they are not there yet. I’m also realizing, however, that I really couldn’t start to really build or teach a composition class that emphasizes multimodality without first having tenure. And you can bet that it will be my tenured position that will also protect my part-time colleague. However, it will be his tenured position in the high school that will protect his status when he teaches the course to his dual-enrolled seniors.

As I’m designing the class for next fall, I’m also starting to prepare my arguments for when fellow faculty, administrators, and even students (or their parents) start asking “what the #$!!?” I’m doing in this class. The first set of examples that I plan to point to is the increasing amount of amateur journalism that is being welcomed by news agencies with requests for web/blog submissions (especially via replies) as well as video submissions (especially during breaking events). Don’t we want civic participation to not only think and say something important, but to compose it in an appropriate and meaningful manner as well…and these are not your daddy’s letter to the editor compositions.

Are you teaching multimodal composition in your FYC classes? If so, how are you justifying it to yourself, your students, and your colleagues?

a heaping helping of comp theory

2008-01-29T12:30:00.000-06:00

I just finished reading for the 1-1/2th time Geoff Sirc's English Composition as a Happening (Utah State University Press, 2002). Yeah, I didn't make it through the first time, but I grunted it out this time because I was intrigued.

The book is alternately compelling, fascinating, maddening, and annoying. And I don't think Sirc would mind any of those adjectives. In 294 pages, he basically trashes the development of the field of Composition since 1968. We are a bunch of heartless, soulless, unimaginative, sniveling, corporate lap dogs who flail the life out of students with our stultifying academic jargon and stiff, prescriptive prose formalism and have "an incredible propensity for turning something-- a good idea, compelling material, an interesting medium, a student's life-- into nothing" (245).

The whole book boils down to a play-by-play of a fistfight between David Bartholomae and Marcel Duchamp with a soundtrack by the Sex Pistols. In Sirc's world, Duchamp wins with a knockout, but, alas, in the hopelessly entrenched Modernist project that masquerades as contemporary Composition, Bartholomae is crowned champ on a technicality.

And if you don't find all of that maddening and annoying-- and, actually, I don't--well, there's always the untranslated French text thrown in to let you know you aren't part of Sirc's club anyway (unless your high school French is much better than mine).

All that being said, Sirc has a point (or several), and it's one that I've been circling for a while now. The traditional conventions of academic writing are dead; and the only reason they don't know they are dead is because we conjure them like zombies into our classrooms over and over again and they eat all of our brains. To behead the zombies, we have to change our classroom practice because we've changed the writing that we want to encourage, to teach, to expect.

Our new heroes are not the gods of professionalized Composition as a discipline, but compositionists like Jackson Pollock and Tupac Shakur.

So, put that in your pipe and smoke it . . .

OMG, have you seen this?

2008-01-08T15:46:00.000-06:00

Maybe I am the next-to-last person to hear about Zotero, but none of my colleagues seem to know about it, so I thought there might be a few others with whom I could share it who are even behind me.

I watched this, and it made my head hurt. I was actually rubbing my temples trying to digest what this means for research in our field-- for us and our students. I'm still not sure.

I haven't even begun using the software yet, so I can't report on the various bugs and difficulties, but it looks so stunning I had to share.

And it's free. Will wonders never cease?

Feed Your Read

2008-01-06T14:28:00.000-06:00

How many of you subscribe to this blog via the email link (and you already have swamped email inboxes)?
Even worse, how many of you only come to this blog when you remember to visit the page?

At this point in time many of you have probably heard the term Web2.0. And I know that most of you have heard all of the “social”-ness of the internet, especially with social networking sights like MySpace and Facebook. What you probably do not realize that it is primarily RSS technology (Really Simple Syndication) that pulls all this socialness together. So what IS RSS?

Over the past two years I have tried explaining RSS to folks, students and faculty alike. Just recently I found the following video…watch it NOW!

Hopefully what this video helped you realize is that you can be reading about lots of information and still saving time. So go get a Google Reader account (it is probably easier to have a Gmail account first) and start feeding your read. Start by subscribing to this blog…and check out that you can subscribe to a few other NCTE blogs listed in the right hand column of the page as well. And to keep your read on, I will start introducing RSS feeds I think all the folks at reading the TYCA blog will find hip, fun, and possibly useful!

holiday reading

2007-12-17T13:10:00.000-06:00

Class has been out for a few days now, at least for me and my immediate colleagues. Sometimes I try to use this time for recreational reading, but so far that hasn't happened. However, since I have the good fortune to be teaching Shakespeare next term, my reading is both prepping me for class and quite enjoyable. I do, however, hope to read Ian McEwan's Atonement, if only because it's on the bookshelf. I didn't enjoy Amsterdam all that much, not so much as I enjoyed Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but that's another concern altogether. So, what have I been reading? As of late, it's been the following:

Plays read in the last week or so:

1 Henry IV
2 Henry IV
Henry V

I'll be assigning 1 Henry IV and Henry V. I wanted to read the bridge play to be sure I didn't want to assign it, and I don't. These are the two history plays we'll read and study.

Play I'm reading now: Merchant of Venice. I'm through the first two acts and will probably finish by later today. I'm hoping to generate a lot of discussion about Antisemitism and it's historical roots while tying it into contemporary concerns such as race, politics and gender as appropriate. We'll see how that goes.

Plays to read: I'm not sure yet. I have to chose one more comedy but I don't have a favorite jumping out at me. All I know is it won't be A Midsummer's Night Dream as I have never cared much for that one. Maybe As You Like It, Measure for Measure, or The Taming of the Shrew. Perhaps I'll read all three of these and then decide which I most enjoy and will also enjoy reading once or twice more in the coming months, one that students will enjoy as well, so I hope.

When it comes to the tragedies, i won't be reading ahead over the holidays. I've decided on Hamlet and King Lear, both of which I've read numerous times and always enjoy reading again.

We'll be starting the class with a couple weeks of sonnets and I've been reading quite a few of them, though not all of them. I still have to read and choose some of them though. I'll leave that up in the air and just say that I'll be reading quite a few sonnets in the coming weeks as well, making decisions once I have to create a reading schedule, probably on new year's day or January 2nd.

On top of this all, I'll be reading some scholarship on the plays. I have the Longman Critical Readers for Shakespeare's Comedies and History Plays, both of which are informative. I don't have access to a huge body of scholarship to inform my readings and teachings except what I can find online through our library via ProQuest. I'll be reading as many articles as I can work in. So, lots of reading to do, most of it in direct support of my Shakespeare class, but if I can squeeze in Atonement, that will be good for me.

You can see what I'll be reading and why for the most part. What about you? What are you reading, and why?

The Classless 21st Century?

2007-11-26T16:32:00.000-06:00

The November issue of Council Chronicle has a couple of big spreads on "21st-Century Literacies," and I'm all about the 21st-century literacies, but I have a beef with one thing I'm constantly being told by writers and scholars discussing technology and teaching: as Lorna Collier writes twice in her piece "The Shift to 21st-Century Literacies" (once in the text and again as a picture caption), "Students today typically arrive in the classroom fluent in the languages of text-messaging, instant-messaging and blogging, often to a far greater degree than their teachers." The part that bugs me is the "typically." This here is a class-based assumption about what is typical. My students don't typically arrive with these skills. Maybe they text message, but that is often the extent of it. Blogging is typically something with which they have little experience as readers or writers.

Fortunately for my blood pressure, Collier admits later in the piece that "not all students have technological knowledge" and begins to address the digital divide. So, why the "typically"? That one word damns my students as atypical, as anomalies, once again as deficits, before they even reach my classroom. Upper and middle class students may typically do these things, but lower class students do not.

We need to take every opportunity to highlight 21st-century disparities as we embrace 21st-century literacies.

And speaking of 21st-century literacies, I don't know TYCA blogger Shelley Rodrigo from Adam, but her blog at Confessions of a Committed Technofile has some really interesting links on it. Go Shelley!

Partners in Scholarly Crime

2007-11-18T08:06:00.000-06:00

Ever since I got my full-time faculty position at Mesa CC six years I’ve tried to figure out how the heck I’m going to “do” scholarship while teaching a 5/5 load. I’ve come to the point where I admit it…I can’t! Once I came to this epiphany, I asked myself the timeless professional development guiding question WWDD*?

He collaborates, of course!

Over time I’ve started to build my cadre of scholarly compadres that I work on various projects with. Collaborating keeps doing scholarly projects manageable, social, and fun. I have also found that collaboration has made my scholarship richer since I get a spectrum of voices from across different types of institutions (both higher education as well as public high schools). I also find that many of my scholarly relationships have started to identify strengths and weaknesses that help us produce the best project working to the best of all of our abilities.

I’m presenting here at NCTE, and of course it’s a project that I’m collaborating on! One thing I like about collaborating with Susan Miller-Cochran is that we’ve worked together for a long time, so we know one another’s quirks. Now that she is a WPA at North Carolina State University, we are able to think about our projects from a variety of student and faculty perspectives. For this particular project we were even able to take advantage of our home institutions. Susan’s college had a poster printer that we were able to use (for a lot less than what we would pay at Kinko’s).

How many of you have used collaborations as a way to conduct scholarly projects? What were the advantages and disadvantages of working in this way? Reply below!

*WWDD? stands for What Would Duane Do? Duane Roen is my dissertation chairperson and general, all around, great faculty member. Whenever I, along with a bunch of my colleagues who went to graduate school together, have a professional dilemma, we ask ourselves…WWDD?

Introducing…Shelley

2007-11-18T07:41:00.000-06:00

I thought I would “kick-off” my participation in NCTE’s TYCA blog while I was attending the annual NCTE conference in the big apple.

As a quick introduction to myself, and the topics you are likely to see me blog about…My name is Shelley Rodrigo and I teach at Mesa Community College in Mesa, Arizona. At Mesa I teaching writing, media studies, and the occasional early American literature survey course. However, during the 2007-8 academic year I’m serving as the campus’s instructional technologist. My scholarly interests all fall under the general umbrella of the interface between humanity and technology. I also keep a professional blog.

At this point in time I think I will focus on two themes/trends/issues in the NCTE TYCA blog: scholarship and teaching technologies.

Scholarship @ the TYC

While we have groups like the 7Cs and New Media Consortium, as well as publications like Computers & Writing and Kairos, discussing how technology has impacted how/why/what of scholarship in the 21^st century, I’m finding that these same technologies are also impacting scholarship done at the two-year college (TYC). The increasing popularity of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) also impacts the viability and authority of the scholarly work done at TYCs. Questions that these postings will consider include:

What does scholarship @ the TYC mean?
What does scholarship @ the TYC look like?
Where is scholarship from the TYC published?

Any specific topics or issues related to doing scholarship at the TYC that you would like to see blogged about? Reply below!

Technologies to Teach @ the TYC

In this area you all become another outlet for my preaching about various technologies I find being used by faculty at the TYC (including myself of course). Questions that these posting will consider include:

What is the technology?
How does the technology work?
How/why might this technology be important to students and/or faculty @ the TYC?

If you are ever out their playing with some new technology that you’ve found, especially one on the web, if you find an account name of either “rrodrigo” or “puptoes74”…most likely you have found me!

Any specific topics or issues or technologies that you would like to see blogged about? Reply below!

I look forward to blogging for the NCTE TYCA blog and hope to engage in discussion with all of the readers.

more on writing

2007-11-09T16:17:00.000-06:00

November is National Novel Writing Month, and that means writers from around the world are doing what they can to churn, and I do mean churn, out 50,000 words of a novel before December rolls around. With 30 days to make it happen, that means nearly 1700 words a day to be a "winner" who reaches the 50k mark. Hemingway is reputed to have said, write a page a day, and in a year, you'll have a novel. Well, with NaNoWriMo, it's write 1700 words a day and you'll have a novel. If only that were the case for me.

As of today, November 9, I've written a little over 12,000 words. However, most of it, is to put it charitably, junk. It's not until the last day or two, after I reached and crested the 10k word plateau, that a sense of story has begun to emerge. I'm, not going to get into my story here, but if you really want to read what's emerged (I wish I had a better verb) so far, you can visit my blog: bleckblog. Each day's heading is something along the lines of "nanowrimo day nine" or whatever day it is. Some entries are sprinkled with some observations. Some entries are whatever I've been able to come up with for that day.

What trying to write a novel in a month shows me, or reminds me, is that writing is not easy, and making time to write is not easy either. I don't have the heaviest set of work and family obligations in the world, but I have them. Making the time to write is a challenge, particularly when, as of late, I prefer to do my writing on a laptop in our living room, where I sit right beside our piano, where my son has to do his practice each evening. Supervising piano practice and writing at the same time doesn't work well for me. I prefer focus, and peace and quiet. I don't mind a cat trying to get on my lap, or the dog nuzzling me for some love, mostly because I can take care of them. But paying attention to dynamics, pacing and anything else that has to do with Tobias's piano practice, that makes it hard, too hard. But it's not like our students don't have to write with distractions of this sort. I make do.

Coming up with something worthwhile to write about, which is a problem faced by our students, is something I struggle with each day. Thankfully I've been taking my own advice, advice I give my students, to keep track of good ideas. Yesterday's material came from an idea that came to me the night before. That was the idea, that after 10,000-plus words of rambling with only a minor hint of focus, I came upon an idea that could well lead to a decent story. After I finished last night's session, I came up with an idea on how to further develop the ideas/strands. Both times I wrote those ideas down on a sheet of paper laying on the bureau beside my bed. I'm hoping each day brings some new inspiration of this sort, but I'll have to wait and see.

I'm doing this writing with little hope that it will amount to much. While a fair number of students think they do good work, I know I'm not doing good work, at least not in this draft, and this "novel" may never be worth the time I'm putting into it, at least as a product. But it's the process that matters, that I am writing, even though my students are not writing novels (none of them took me up on the offer). That they can see I write and lay it out there, that I don't just teach, that I do, however successfully, I hope shows them that I have the same problems with writing they do--development, organization, details, you name it. I hope they can appreciate that. Even if they don't appreciate my writing, writing helps me appreciate the ways they struggle and feel like quitting, because I've felt like quitting and I'm not even a third of the way through the month.

I've nothing profound to say here as I wrap up this entry, other than, if nothing else, when I'm writing I feel better able to teach writing. When I don't write, I start feeling like I'm living the "those who can do, those who can't, teach" maxim, which I hate. For November anyway, I'll keep that maxim at bay.

From Presenting to Publishing?

2007-10-28T08:57:00.000-05:00

I'm back from attending two TYCA regionals: TYCA Midwest in Chicago at the beginning of the month and TYCA Northeast in Philadelphia a week ago. They were both exciting and stimulating conferences with lots of energetic and interesting presentations.

But I attend all conferences now differently than I did in the past: as editor of TETYC I'm there in a role I can only describe as "talent scout." I arrive with a bunch of sample issues and a ton of my business cards, and then I try to "sign up" presenters to convert their presentations into article submissions to the journal.

And here's what I'm interested in hearing more about: I sense a reluctance to take the plunge and submit an article. Why? I know how busy two-year campus English faculty are, but these are folks who have carved out the spare hour before the sun comes up (or after the kids go down in the evening) and have created a conference presentation. One more step, and it's an article. So I don't think it's the time element.

At both conferences, I chaired panels called "How to Publish in TETYC (Or at least enhance your chances)." I borrowed a great panel idea that Sharon Mitchler created for last year's 4Cs when she, I, Greg Shafer (Michigan), and Alexis Nelson (Washington) spoke on the same subject. Not to bore you with the details, but Martine Courant Rife, in Chicago, and Barbara Morris, in Philadelphia, both on the panels as recent first-time authors in the journal, made the same point: they had submitted manuscripts in order to put themselves on the line, to experience the evaluation process just as their composition students were doing in their own writing classes. Both Martine and Barbara received feedback, revised, and ultimately published, but their message was that the experience paid off in their teaching. They could empathize anew with anxious students, and, better yet, they could share their own ups and downs as writers with their students.

That's what initially got me into submitting my own work --the desire to gain legitimacy in discussing writing with my classes. Sort of a "been there, done that" which I could share with them. And students do listen to those stories of anxiety and success and, yes, rejection. Martine and Barbara urged the participants at our sessions to give it a try. Sounds about right to me.

Birthday Present

2007-10-19T16:01:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was my birthday, and I was surprised to get a birthday present from a former student. It was a great present, and the best thing about it is that he doesn’t know he gave it to me.

This was a student in a writing class a year ago. I’m sure you’ve had students like him. He’s a young guy, just out of high school when I met him. Unfortunately, he wasn't very engaged in the class. He seemed more interested in his car, girlfriend, sports, and his iPod than in the class. He didn’t participate well, was absent too much, and was frequently late. On computer lab days, he spent a lot of time surfing the Internet rather than doing his assignments. You get the picture.

At midterm, he was failing my class, so I had a conference with him to talk about it. I reviewed his assignments and explained what he needed to do to bring his grade up, but it was a one-sided conversation. The most he would say was “yeah” or “uh huh,” but he didn’t seem to care about the class or what I had to say. As always, he seemed ill-at-ease and acted like he’d rather be somewhere else. I decided he probably wouldn’t last the rest of the semester, and probably wouldn’t stay in college for very long.

To his credit, he did last the semester, in a way. He did start working harder on assignments. He moved to the front of the classroom and sometimes would even take notes. But he undermined his own efforts, continuing to waste time in the lab and not spending as much time on assignments as he needed to. He acted like he didn't want anyone to catch him being a “good student.” The changes he did make were too little, too late. He had trouble getting a final portfolio together, and didn’t pass the class.

He has surprised me, however, by staying in college. I see him around campus regularly, most often at a student support program offered at my college. He’s there working in the computer lab or doing his math homework. When I see him, I’ll say hello or wave. He will usually meet my gaze and nod (barely). If he can avoid me, or pretend he didn’t notice me, he will (and I’ve observed him behave in similar ways with other teachers). He's not being shy when he does this; he seems to choose to keep distance between himself and teachers.

Yesterday, on my way to a class, I saw him in the hallway. He surprised me by smiling and waving. It was an honest-to-god smile, with the eye muscles and everything. And he waved at me first, before I could initiate the greeting. I did a double-take, thinking this must be some other student. I was so dumbfounded I almost forgot to greet him in return.

Did he decide to be cheerful because he knew it was my birthday? Surely not. Something has changed though, and I've been lucky to see it gradually happen: he seems to have accepted and adjusted to college. He appears more comfortable and confident here, and has reached a point where I'm not someone to avoid.

I've seen other students go through this kind of process, but I still wonder about it. Attending college often requires a revision of identity, which is profoundly difficult for many students. What makes the difference between those students who successfully make the transition and those who don't? And what can I do that more effectively helps them through that period? I've studied that a great deal, but, nevertheless, these are interesting, complex problems.

Attending regional conferences

2007-10-12T16:16:00.000-05:00

Today and tomorrow, October 12 and 13, marks the annual TYCA Pacific Northwest conference, one of the regional TYCA conferences that are held to support faculty teaching English in two-year colleges around the nation. Along with the Pacific NW, conferences are held by TYCA West, Southwest, Northeast, Southeast, Pacific Coast (which means California) and Midwest. If you want to see where your conference is this year, click this link. The Pacific Northwest conference is one of three taking place this weekend, along with those for TYCA West in Las Vegas and TYCA Pacific Coast taking place in Burlingame, California.

The theme at TYCA-PNW is "Pedagogy and Politics" and the conference will feature sessions such as "Eradicating Heterocentrism in the Classroom," "Citizenship in the Classroom," "The Politics of Empathy," "Race, Class and Privilege in the Composition Classroom" and "Politicizing Basic Skills." Faculty presenting come from colleges in Oregon, Idaho and New York (we're guessing they have a more generous travel budget than we're used to or they really think of Spokane as living up to its chamber of commerce slogan of "Near Nature, Near Perfect"), from both sides of what those in the region often refer to as "The Cascade Curtain," a mountain range that divides the relatively wet and prosperous west, wet, urban and generally more liberal sides of each state from the eastern, drier, rural and generally more conservative sides of each state. Along with teaching faculty from a variety of colleges, graduate students from the region are also presenting.

Lest anyone think these conferences are tedious, there's no fear of that. Not only does all work and no play make for a boring life and profession, but it makes for a less engaging conference. Rather than going out on "team building" exercises, engaging in trust drops (that's where you close your eyes, lean over backwards and start to fall until your colleague catches you, keeping you from cracking your skull on the floor) TYCA-PNW is featuring karaoke for the first time, along with several sit down meals, beer and wine tastings and other social events that enable faculty to establish and enhance relationships with colleagues they may get to see only once or twice a year, maybe at the regional conference or the CCCC or NCTE conferences. We're talking collegiality building, baby!

None of these conferences just happens, though it seems that way when you show up. If you have ever worked on a conference at any level, you know how much work they take. If you just show up and take part, and it seems effortless, it's not. The lead organizers for TYCA-PNW this year are Ann Ciasullo from Spokane Falls CC (my college! Yea Ann!), Betsy Lawrence and Angela Rasmussen from Spokane CC, our cross town sister college. They have been working behind the scenes since the close of last year's conference, meeting to discuss the theme, to round up presenters, put out a call for proposals, cajole publishers to provide, find out how to feed people and so much more.

Breakthrough?

2007-09-17T14:31:00.000-05:00

I've been threatening to do it for years, but all the usual excuses of the two-year college teacher have kept me from it-- until this semester.

Actually, I have two "its" in mind. The first is that I have designed my research essay writing course this year with no textbook. Yep, no textbook, not a one. Not even a handbook. It could prove to be madness, but I just couldn't resist. It's an online course, and the biggest textbook in the world is already at the fingertips of these students, so why have them buy another one? Granted, it is also probably the textbook with the most errors, but this is how we learn, right.

And I haven't cut the students loose completely. I've seeded the course website with links to nifty OWLs across the web (my current favorite is the University of North Carolina), and I did tell them that a handbook might be helpful if they already had one. Additionally, with the help of our Minneapolis Community and Technical College library staff, and my colleague Michael Kuhne, I have a research portal that points the students in useful directions across the Internet and the databases to which MCTC subscribes.

So far everyone seems to be surviving, but we are only in the fourth week of classes.

The second "it" I'm attempting this semester is integrating a wiki into my online course. I know, I know, this is not cutting edge pedagogy, but it is for me this semester. And in fact, it seems to be for the students as well.

I'm using Pbwiki (it's free) because our college doesn't host its own wikis and because Pbwiki has one of the easiest interfaces I've seen for free wikis. Nonetheless, the first few weeks of wikidom have been something of a creative disaster (to put it kindly). Lost drafts, lost comments on drafts, and formatting snafus that would make a webmaster apoplectic are par for the course. However, again, because of the Pbwiki interface (okay, and a little html tweaking on my part), most of these problems are easily remedied. We are forging ahead, and I'll learn more as the semester progresses, and I hope the students will too. If you'd like to view our experiment/disaster, have a look at http://engl1111.pbwiki.com/FrontPage

I just keep reminding myself of the admonition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Don't Panic."

The Clifton StrengthsFinder and Me

2007-09-14T14:03:00.000-05:00

To kick off this semester, the new English Program Chair at San Juan College asked all of us in the department to take the Clifton StrengthsFinder profile. This instrument, developed by psychologist Donald Clifton and the Gallup Organization, is designed to identify a person’s strengths.

When you take the test, which takes about 30 minutes, you are given 180 paired statements, and you choose which one best describes yourself. You can choose “neutral” if neither statement applies. In order to encourage “first reaction” answers, each pair has a time limit. Many of the pairs are challenging, because they aren’t necessarily either/or choices. When I took the test, I often found it difficult to choose because both statements described me.

I was skeptical about taking StrengthsFinder. Partly this was due to my aversion to standardized testing. My skepticism was also due to my initial reaction to the book Now, Discover Your Strengths, written by Gallup’s Marcus Buckingham and Clifton. The department purchased us copies so that we could learn about StrengthsFinder and receive our ID code to take the test online. The book is aimed at business leaders and managers, so at the first hint of management jargon I began to wonder what level of corporate hell I had descended to. After studying the book, though, I found that it gives a concise, clear explanation of the underlying assumptions and objectives of StrengthsFinder. I could skip over the examples of Warren Buffet and Tiger Woods.

It turned out that the StrengthsFinder instrument has its own jargon to decode. The instrument is designed to find a person’s top five potential strengths out of 34 “themes.” When you look at the list of 34 themes, some of them seem self-explanatory (communication, fairness, self-assurance) while others are enigmatic at best and puzzling at worst (ideation, woo).

Although I was skeptical, taking the test turned out to be fascinating. First, I learned some things about myself. The test identified my top five talents as: input, learner, intellection, includer, and ideation. None of this meant that much to me until I read through Buckingham and Clifton’s explanations. Some of what I learned didn’t surprise me, because I already felt competent in those areas. However, according to StrengthsFinder, a key quality of “input” is collecting things. When I saw this, I thought it was wrong, because I don’t consider myself a collector. But as I thought about it more, I realized that I do systematically and perhaps even obsessively collect a number of things, and, curiously, much of that activity is connected with my teaching. What do you know: StrengthsFinder has justified my collections of science fiction novels, editorial cartoons, and editorial cartoons about science fiction.

The test also showed some interesting patterns about the entire department (there are 15 full-time instructors in the SJC English department). We compiled everyone’s results into what Buckingham and Clifton call a “strengths inventory.” This showed that, as a department, our strengths are concentrated in about a half-dozen of the 34 areas: input, learner, intellection, connectedness, strategic, empathy, and achiever. Knowing these skill concentrations can help us plan and organize new projects, as well as revise ongoing work. Besides that, we had a lot of fun just talking about the test. It was fun to try and predict what the test would show about colleagues, and then find out the results.

Finally, and, for me, most importantly, taking the test taught me something about pedagogy. Clifton is a leader in the field of “positive psychology” (more information here), which studies the characteristics of human achievement and productivity. Buckingham and Clifton argue that people spend too much time identifying and trying to eliminate their flaws. A better assumption, they claim, is that a person’s “greatest room for growth is the areas of his or her greatest strength” (Now, Discover Your Strengths, p.8). Since taking the test, I’ve certainly been thinking about how I might become better at things I do well. But I’ve also been thinking about this in relation to students. Organizing a class so that students can work on what they do best and continue to develop those skills is a good approach. It’s tempting to pounce on errors right away, but, if the positive psychologists are right, that may only make the errors worse and actually prevent the student from doing better.

If you have the chance to take StrengthsFinder, I recommend it.

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I hope you are planning to attend a TYCA regional conference this fall (unless you're in the TYCA Southeast region, which has its conference in February). For more information about attending a regional conference, mouse here.

batemane@sanjuancollege.edu

I stayed and stayed awake

2007-07-10T13:35:00.000-05:00

I generally avoid keynote speakers. Especially when they gear up after one of those rubber chicken conference lunches. Maybe it's the steroids in the chicken or maybe I just don't do well with keynote speakers. Call it a personal failing.

However, this guy gave this presentation at this conference today, and I not only stayed, I sat up and paid attention.

The idea that caught my attention the most is "we don't own the content, and we need to stop thinking that we do" (that's a paraphrase-- but a close one). Which content was he referencing? He was speaking about the content of our courses in the context of students being able to access the information that our courses teach, and even entire courses, on the Internet.

But our course content is, ultimately, all content. Kiss current concepts of intellectual property goodbye. And all of a sudden, we are back to new ways of thinking about ideas and the sharing and creation of ideas (and more new ways) . . . and writing about ideas.

Didn't I mention in my last post that the traditional academic research paper and traditional methods of citation are dead? So, what are we going to do about it?

Embracing the Blur

2007-06-07T16:42:00.000-05:00

Here at the beginning of summer, two disparate recent readings have me thinking outlandish thoughts about text and how our students read it.

The readings in question are Moby-Dick and Ingrid Daemmrich’s “Novices Encounter a Novice Literature” in the May 2007 TETYC. What do these writings have in common? They both ask us to consider texts in ways that are often anathema to standard academic writing.

The way students think about text, the production of text, and the producers of text is changing. (I’m not going to support that statement; I’m going to let it hang out there as fact.) They and we are influenced by music, by the web, by cut and paste technology in all media, by the flattening of text-- written texts flattened into all screen text all the time and the flattening of audio, video, and writing onto the computer screen. In this screen world, most of us are novice readers, like Daemmrich’s novice readers of web-based literary texts, because of the very newness of the medium. As novice readers we are prone to make mistakes about what we are reading, but we are also able to see with new eyes.

In this medium, many students do not delineate between a print newspaper (should we call them legacy newspapers like legacy airlines?) offered online or a web-only publication such as Salon.com or a blog such as this one. As Daemmrich notes, “the Internet can blur the difference between digital and nondigital literature to such an extent that confusion between the two occurs." Daemmrich and others suggest this means the students need more "training in reading hypertext," but I'm not so sure (425). Do we fight the blur or embrace the blur with our new eyes (there's a lovely mixed metaphor)?

Tradition seems to tell me to fight the blur—a newspaper is a newspaper, a book is a book, an academic journal is an academic journal, and they have important contextual and production differences that must be considered when making meaning from their texts.

But Moby-Dick and many other texts suggests this is only a recent fabrication. Melville filched whole chunks of text from tomes on cetology (that’s right, the study of whales). Like the glowing screen, he flattened it all into one narrative. This is a fine literary tradition. To cite only one other example, John Smith “borrows” from others even more flagrantly in his General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles.

So, maybe all this nicety around what exactly we are seeing on the screen can be viewed as the aberration more than the tradition. I'm no longer completely sure why I should make so many distinctions between types of texts. Is the academy's delineation of types of texts always driven by intellectual motivations and academic concerns or is it just as often motivated by "intellectual property" and profits-- and should we view all of these motivations as equally valid and useful? As the concepts of copyleft and open source ideas blossom along with open source software, embracing the blur begins to look compelling.

And as I consider embracing the blur, let me back up and say this:

Staring at the blur, pondering the blur-- pondering this very screen on which I am currently writing-- only feeds a suspicion that keeps repeating in my head: the traditional undergraduate academic research essay is dying a slow and agonizing death.

And I don’t think I want to save it.

That was the real subject of this post, but I’ll save that for another time.

TETYC Call for papers

2007-05-21T14:28:00.001-05:00

I'm going to use my new blog to announce a themed issue: Teaching English in the Two-Year College in a Time of War. This Call for Papers will appear in the September TETYC, so here's an advance look at it:

We are now teaching students who are veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first Gulf War, Panama, Somalia, Vietnam. Many students have parents, siblings, spouses, grandparents, even children who have served or are currently serving in wars of the past forty years. How is teaching English to these students influenced by our current war-time standing? What is the effect on classroom dynamics? teacher-student relationships? student-student relationships? pedagogical decisions about assigned reading and writing?

There’s an illustrious canon of literature about war that we often teach, with new works continually appearing. How do we/how should we teach such works in this time of active warfare? How is revisiting a previously -taught text changed by the current situation? How is student response influenced?

Composition courses have long engaged in cultural studies and examined issues related to gender, social class, and race. How are those studies influenced by a war-time environment?

Articles, instructional notes, What Works for Me, poems are all solicited.

Deadline: September 30, 2008.
Submit an electronic file (MS Word format) to Jeff Sommers, Editor, TETYC, at tetyc@muohio.edu.

The accompanying email must include contact information (mailing address, phone number) and a statement that the submission has not been previously published and is not currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.

TYCA Research Initiative Committee

2006-09-22T21:41:00.000-05:00

The TYCA Research Initiative Survey launched their first survey to gather data to support the creation of a national database for Two-Year College English faculty that will include resources for "Best Practices." The database will ultimately provide colleges with information regarding national practices and further two-year college research and advocacy efforts. Within the survey, we have allowed space for comments and recommendations of "Best Practices." Our hope is that the results of this survey will provide valuable insights regarding the complex and varied pedagogical and professional responsibilities for two-year college faculty.

We are still taking responses; if you teach at a two-year college and have not completed the survey, follow the link below:
http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB224BA4DG3EZ

The survey must be completed in one sitting and takes 40-60 minutes to complete.
Please feel free to forward this survey to colleagues at other campuses.

The information we have received thus far is very interesting, and we are committed to sharing it. What we learn here can help us affirm our successes, identify our challenges, and provide us with useful data as we advocate for students and faculty on the local, state, and national levels.