TYCA-PNW.ORG

Here we are, once again. Another fabulous conference has come and gone, and we are all looking forward to the newest issue of Pacific View. There are many topics to consider and there is much to share as our conference sessions stimulated conversations about often difficult subjects. We request that all TYCA-PNW members and conference goers submit a paragraph or two, focusing on what they saw as the conference highlights.

If you have colleagues who would like to submit an article, session highlight, or something they think regional two-year college faculty, or graduate students should be aware of, please forward our submission guidelines: Submit an attached 200-500 word Word document to Lori Monnastes, lorimATspokanefallsDOTedu or Laura Read, laurarATspokanefallsDOTedu. The deadline is November 26th.

I'll be blogging the conference, so head over to my blog at bleckblog.org if you want to read about what I'm taking in.

For anyone interested, I'll be blogging the sessions I attend while in NY at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. You can read them here: bleckblog.org. I'd be happy to field any questions folks have, along with appreciating any comments you have if you're here. If you are here, email me at bradbATspokanefallsDOTedu and maybe we can hook up! If there are sessions you've heard about pertinent to community college's and you'd like a report, let me know and I'll try to get there.

Will Banks (East Carolina U), Martha Marinara (U of Central Florida), Samantha Blackmon (Purdue), and Jonathan Alexander (U of Cincinnati) would like to invite you to participate in a quick survey related to issues of diversity in first-year writing classrooms and programs.

While investigations into cultural and ethnic diversity continue to transform teaching practices in college writing courses, there remains a significant gap in our knowledge about whether or not lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (LGBT) topics, concerns, or issues have become part of college curricula. Although a few scholar-teachers have told stories of their personal experiences of integrating LGBT content into classes, there has been no systematic, large-scale inquiry into the representation of LGBT topics, concerns, or issues in first-year writing classes. To gain insight into what kinds of exposure, if any, students in their first year of college have to LGBT issues and concerns, we are asking you to take 10 – 15 minutes to respond to the following survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=531123206826

Our one and only, not just President of TYCA National, but TYCA-PNW member, Sharon Mitchler(see her blog! has a nice overview of some research on responding to student writing. In short, it's often more art than science, but it's always nice to have the discipline's scholarship bear that out. I wish I brought Teaching English in the Two-Year College (May 2006 edition) with me so I could accurately quote what she said, but here's the gist of things that resonated with me. If you are a TETYC subscriber, you can get it online by following the preceeding link.

Deductive, open-ended comments and questions as well as inductive, more directed questions, tend to work well alone and in tandem. The deductive (and I hope I'm using these terms as she did) led to slower progress initially, but solid long term student progress. The more directed comments led to quicker progress, but it too was sustained over the long haul, but maybe not so well as the inductive comments.

I tend to use both sorts of comments, scribbling notes in the margins, sometimes directions as well, along with some mechanical and grammatical markings, but I don't even try to find all the "errors" since most student work needs a focus on big picture rhetorical concerns. I also write an end note, type actually, so they can read it (unlike my marginal comments, by which I mean in the marginal, but we might also speculate to their marginal value--har, har). I limit my end note, most of the time, to the three most pertinent global concenrs, such as the need to make a worthwhile point, provide specific evidence, and to tie it all together. Sound familiar?

Kudos to all the folks at Yakima Valley CC for the great job they did putting on the conference. Kathleen Blake Yancey as a keynoter was powerful and impressive, as was sitting in on her roundtable session. The facilities were great, the food was great (I ate at Tequila's while passing through town earlier this past summer, and was happy to eat their food a second time), and the sessions were thought provoking. If you want to see my brief thoughts, you can check them out. Nicely done Carolyn, Mark, and Gordon. I only wish I had been there Friday night to take advantage of Bedford-St. Martin's genorosity at dinner time.

I recently sent an email to folks on the Regional Executive Committee (REC) about the rationale behind using Drupal as our content management system (CMS) for this site. If you'd like to read the essay I pointed folks to, here's a link: http://kairosnews.org/cwonline05/blog

Scroll down to "It's about the Community Plumbing: The Social Aspects of Content Management Systems."