TYCA-PNW.ORG

We are pleased to continue the conversation started at the TYCA 2009 conference here on our website. Through the generous contributions of presenters, we have accumulated handouts and presentations for the larger community. If it's in blue, there's a file attached.

Many thanks to the presenters who brought their ideas and energy to the conference. We would also like to thank all who attended for making the TYCA 2009 Conference a great success.

Plenary Session: MAHB, Room 104
I, Me, You: Traveling Through the Self and the Profession
This plenary session will focus on sustaining the individual, staying vibrant, engaged, and passionate about teaching and learning while confronting the changing self and the changing conditions in the profession.

Keynote Speaker: Derek Owens

A Bored Student Walked into a Writing Class: Using Humor for Renewal and Engagement
Eric Bateman, San Juan College

In this presentation, activities and assignments that incorporate humor into writing classes will be shared as well as the reasons for using humor to illustrate concepts that are important to writing. Additionally humorous texts are used as a means of helping students write their own funny stuff. Through classroom activities and demonstrations and examples of student writing, the integration of and reason for incorporation of humor into the composition classroom will be examined.

Some first steps to lifelong learning: Library and Writing Faculty Partnerships & Information Literacy Assignments.
Kate Sullivan, Lane Community College, Michele Burke, Chemeketa Community College

Powerpoint Slides
Handout 1
Handout 2

We will teach ways to incorporate micro-information literacy assignments into existing curriculum. We couch the discussion in terms of consciousness-raising around information literacy and the need for librarians to work with faculty in all disciplines, not just writing.

Contemplative Practices: Renewing the Spirit and Sustaining the Mind, SC 302
Dr. Manette Berlinger, Dr. Judith Barbanel, Dr. Helene Dunkelblau, Queensborough Community College

Contemplative practices such as silence, meditation, visualization and journaling are enhancing learning for college students and faculty. By calming the mind and eliminating the clutter of daily concerns, these practices foster mindful concentration and deepen reflection, thus strengthening student engagement. They also provide a necessary balance to the excessive emphasis on testing and grades. In this session, faculty share these benefits, often discovering deeper meanings in their subject matter which enrich their intellectual growth and creativity as teachers. Presenters will provide an overview of contemplative practices and describe how they integrate them into their classes including a demonstration and follow-up discussion.

Nurturing Diversity: Ideas for Self-Sponsored Activities to Help Students and Instructors Thrive
Susan Meyers & Sara Jameson, Oregon State University

Drawing on ethnographic field work with Mexican immigrant students in the U.S., as well as corresponding culturally-integrated curriculum initiatives at Oregon State University, this panel seeks to answer two overlapping questions. First, how can minority and first generation college students strike a sustainable balance between their home cultures and the Anglo-academic context of U.S. higher education? Second, how can we as teachers sustain increased self-sponsored multicultural awareness in order to better support our minority, immigrant, and international students? Core ideas include contrasting cultural understandings of literacy, the implications of linguistic diversity in classes, service learning projects, and community-based learning. Hands-on activities and round-table discussion will help participants take home some practical activities to enact.

Strategies to Sustain Student Engagement
Julie Swedin, Yakima Valley Community College

How has the extrinsic end product of the grade become more hallowed than the actual learning process? It is a question that often plagues today's educators. So what is the answer? This interactive roundtable session ponders the seemingly intentional disconnect of students. Through dynamic student seminars and discussions examine how students can reconnect to their own voices, their own words of wisdom as they discover they do have something pertinent to say. This session will present effective teaching ideas to propel and sustain passionate student discourse and learning.

Making Talk: Sustaining Discourse
Kathleen Horton, Lane Community College

If it is a reasonable assumption that the classroom as discourse community is a positive context for learning—a place where a group of human beings with shared concerns can discuss those concerns with an attitude of respect and a spirit of generous attentiveness to others’ points of view—what methods can we use to create such a community, and what are the challenges we confront when doing so? In this talk students and situations that both assist and distract from the construction of successful discourse communities will be profiled. Students profiles considered will include non-speakers, chatterers, and dominators.

Starving the Hand that Feeds You: Stale Curriculum & The Community College Instructor
Bryan Hull, Portland Community College

Low pay, institutional alienation and a crushing course load all help contribute to our teaching the same texts, assignments and curriculum year after year. We're bored with what we do, and thus the students, while generous, are not as engaged as they might be. It's a nasty cycle where facing burn-out, we don't make changes to our classes, which only helps to perpetuate our burnout. To fight the sludge of time, this presentation will focus on practical ways we can make changes to our courses, even as we live already full lives. This session promises to be substantial, realistic and honest in its assessment of what we need in order to grow as readers, thinkers and teachers.

Retaining and Renewing the Fragile Student
Jeannie Isern, Spokane Community College

English instructors have the opportunity to teach fragile students. Often saddled with an inexorable amount of academic challenges and emotional burdens, they are a courageous group who has taken that first, difficult step to enter college and change their lives. Two-year college instructors have an enormous responsibility and play a critical role in this process; most of us have taught fragile students and know that our challenge to retain them has at times left us perplexed. With a positive, consistent, and conscientious effort, we can guide them through their journey. This presentation will consist of the following: Identifying the fragile student, providing an accessible classroom environment, maintaining course integrity and academic standards, and renewing successful pedagogy.

A Partnership for Societal Change: Faculty and Students Employ Teaching and Learning Methods that Promote Social Responsibility in Stopping Violence Against Women
Sharon Hopkins, Sandra Schroeder, Yakima Valley Community College

In these disturbing times, teachers must use innovation to encourage civic responsibility in partnership with our students and to view the current collapse of old traditions optimistically, as an opportunity for instituting more egalitarian traditions. As feminists, we envision the positive potential of a changing world. Drawing on the works of Kathleen Weiler and Freire, we posit that one old tradition that requires self-critique is the world-wide acceptance of violence against women. In this session three faculty members will discuss their collaboration on a curriculum that included cross-class reading and writing, and that addressed violence as a gender issue that crosses classes, cultures, and continents. By the end of the course, students became more civic-minded as they participated in various cross-campus events, which culminated in performances of activist and playwright Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues.

Selling Grizzly Bears: Civic Engagement and Service Learning in Introductory Technical Communication
Erika Bronson, Jeff Holmes, Eastern Washington University

Past qualitative research guiding the study suggests that students exhibiting increased civic engagement during and after service-learning projects demonstrate the ability to understand other cultures and beliefs and to show moral and critical social consciousness. Using this framework, the presenters analyze qualitative and quantitative findings of a campus-community partnership teaming students with a local environmental group to educate a resistant rural audience about endangered species and the group’s efforts to protect habitat while supporting local economies and community values. The presentation reveals insight into how service-learning in technical communication can fulfill pragmatic and civic objectives.

Reawakening Writing Exploration: Observing Environment, Examining Culture, Experiencing Personal Visualization, and Encouraging Community Stewardship
Carrie E Steltz, Clark College Adjunct Instructor

This session focuses on reworking tired pedagogies, creating student renewal through relevant and stimulating education, and introducing acts of ethics and responsibility into composition classes. Exercises to share include using scavenger hunts to foster a sense of place; cultural exercises which discuss values, norms, institutions, and artifacts; celebrating a one hundredth birthday party which highlights living a deliberate life, forward thinking and visualizing your future from a loved one’s perspective; and the use of Volunteer Work Writing with a focus on urban farm work with PPS kids, from growing food to cooking healthy food.

Tracking the Changes
Robyn Ferret, Natalie Serianni, Walter Hudsick, Cascadia Community College

The tenure track can be seen as full of hurdles to get over, hoops to jump though, and barriers to cross, or as a series of opportunities to re-assess pedagogies, revise syllabi, and re-invigorate classes. Join in a discussion with three tenure-track instructors in composition and developmental English as they explore how institutional service, professional development, and required portfolio reflections resulted in major changes to the way they teach. From student conferencing to choice of texts, from online classes to learning communities, the demands of “filling the book” turned into real renewal and growth.

Improv[ing] the Composition Class
Rhonda Daniels, Whatcom Community College

We often see in our composition students the desire to avoid writing situations at all costs. This frequently illustrates animosity, fear, and lack of confidence. How are we to excite and engage our students in this environment while retaining our own excitement and confidence as instructors? In this workshop we will explore ways of bringing fun into the classroom through improv. Beyond comedy, improv has shown itself as a wonderful tool for close reading, brainstorming connections, and critical thinking. Through ready-to-use games and improv exercises, inspiring our students to discover fun and excitement in writing becomes simple and rewarding.

Where Learning Happens: Creating Autonomous Writers through a Portfolio-Based Classroom
Jaime R. Wood, Eastern Washington University

This session examines the development of a system of sustainable grading/commenting that incorporates portfolios, in-class peer reviews, one-on-one conferences, and mini-lessons focused around errors from student writing which successfully replaces or supplements grades and/or written comments for most students. Through this system, instructors can save valuable time and teach more effectively by providing students with multiple styles of feedback and eliminating grades until the very end of the course.

While Necessity may be the Mother of Invention, Partnerships can be Catalysts of Innovation: One College's Efforts to Address Necessity and Innovation
Gretchen Coulter, Whatcom Community College

In challenging economic times, invention and creation of the "new" can frequently be overlooked. Administrative and instructional emphasis is often centered on reduction, loss, and a "tightening of the belt" mentality. However, as history demonstrates, challenging times can also spur innovation in unexpected ways. This speaker will take up how efforts to spearhead a remix or hybrid WAC/WID program in the face of reduction, is opening new partnerships between local/regional institutions and resources. Instead of innovation being relegated to better times, "new" relationships can be forged—with opportunities to innovate programs during challenging times.

InSync: A Learning Community for Developmental Education Students
Deb Kyle, Spokane Community College

This panel session offers a follow up of the Fall 2007 conference topic of “InSync: A Learning Community for Developmental Education Students.” The InSync program consists of classes that combine two courses in our below-100 curriculum (generally reading + writing or study skills + writing) with two instructors and a tutor meeting for two hours a day. We have implemented this concept for two years now and have some very exciting results, especially regarding long-term retention and success. We are also in the process of coming up with modifications that would allow the program to continue in economic hard times.

Adjunct Faculty and the Sustainability of Writing Programs
Jeffrey Klausman, Whatcom Community College

In this session, results from research on adjunct faculty working in writing programs will be presented including data from a 2007-08 nationwide survey on adjunct faculty attitudes toward and expectations of writing program directors and 2008-09 follow-up interviews with adjunct faculty. The implications of reliance upon adjunct faculty, who usually work with insufficient support, benefits, and salaries, are presented with special relation to the sustainability of writing programs staffed by active, engaged professionals. Significant audience discussion of these results and ideas about the current labor situation will follow the presentation.

Student Retention 101: Keeping Them on The Edge of Their Seats at All Times!
Tara Foster, Portland Community College
This session discusses ways to integrate successful classroom strategies including investing in your students the first day of class, setting the bar higher each week, integrating multimedia resources during lecture, establishing the importance of small group work as well as open forum discussion, creating an atmosphere conducive to a learning community, fostering a sense of responsibility in our students, actively engaging 99% of the students in every class meeting, and integrating community current events studies in the composition classroom through challenging and entertaining coursework.

If You Build It, They Will Come…and Stay!
Linda Streb Gannon, College of Southern Nevada
This interactive session will provide faculty with ten strategies to build community among students to increase motivation, participation, and retention. The techniques and activities discussed will address group-building in both the online and traditional classroom setting. Attendees will leave this workshop with several ideas they can implement immediately as well as ways to integrate service learning projects into future course plans.

Hemispheric American Literature: How I Learned to Integrate Transnational American Literature in My Class and Keep My Sanity

Sharon Mitchler, Centralia College
American Literature, over the past fifty years, has focused exclusively on works written in the United States by authors who were born in or live within U.S. borders. But what about works written by U.S. citizens who have lived a significant portion of their outside the U.S., or have immigrants as their protagonists or which are situated both in the United States and elsewhere? This session will provide a forum for discussion of these newer works, as well as when and how they might be integrated into the American literature curriculum. Participants will receive several short stories and a bibliographic list of novels.

Comics in the Classroom

Walter Hudsick, Cascadia Community College
Graphic novels comprise a growing dimension of both high and low culture and have a place in our classrooms alongside other new media. In this hands-on workshop, a composition instructor and part-time comics scholar will show you ways to incorporate comics into your praxis. Topics covered will include using graphic novels as readings in literature and other disciplines, the study of comic books as social history, the use of comics for delivery of instructional materials, and fundamentals of formalist analysis of comics as an area of study.