Archive for April 23rd, 2008
CCCC 2008 New Orleans
April 23rd, 2008
One of the great perks of my sabbatical is that I got to attend the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New Orleans a few weeks ago. The knock against CCCC in community college circles is this; it’s a bunch of grad students and windy PhDs just reading papers with post-modern titles like “(Re)Charting the (Dis)Courses of Faith and Politics.” That’s a fair criticism.
Call me strange, but I like those po-mo titles. I’m thinking of collecting some and creating a po-mo poem at some point. As a grad student, I presented twice at CCCC, and I felt like I was part of an important conversation, something that I don’t feel very often when I’m in the thick of teaching. Therefore, I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, appreciated the efforts of those dewy eyed grad students and windy PhDs, and came away with some new energy. I attended more sessions than ought to be legal, so MnSCU got it’s money’s worth, too.
I’ll include links to my full conference notes below, but first let me briefly note three ideas that have stuck with me.
- The Believing Game. Peter Elbow, Pat Bizzell, and some others presented around this idea that Elbow apparently coined several year ago. The believing game is essentially the neglected ugly sister of critical thinking. Academia has essentially honed the doubting game to a highly developed skill. We train our students to study everything looking for weakness. For this we have Descartes to blame, since he swore to question everything. The doubting game, of course, offers something important, but the believing game offers something of equal importance. It allows us a way to understand things that really seem wrong. As Elbow said, “That really sounds wrong to me. Help me think about it some more so that I can understand what you see as valuable about it.” Basically, we ignore the believing game, jump straight to the doubting game, and are worse critical thinkers for it, resulting in polarized discussions at all levels of discourse.
- Institutionalized Service Learning. I attended a Service Learning Special Interest Group meeting where I met a lot of great people doing interesting things in service learning. What was interesting, though, was what someone brought up about the dangers of institutions co-opting the SL train for their own purposes. Until hearing this, I had only considered that institutional support must be a good thing. However, when institutions start using it in their PR, then we lose that edgy, Freirean, grassroots element and our students just become showcase tools. It’s not all bad, but it’s something to think about.
- Community Publishing. There’s a whole grassroots movement that would be exciting to get involved in where people from primarily low-end socio-economic neighborhoods are writing and publishing their own stories - self ethnographies, so to speak. My favorite is New Orleans’ own Neighborhood Story Project. I’m thinking about somehow getting LSC students involved with places in Duluth like CHUM and Damiano Center, working similarly to help those people tell their stories.
That’s the short scoop. If you want to read all of my voluminous notes (you really don’t want to, but my deep respect for you, oh reader, tells me that making them available to you is the right thing), follow the links below.
