TYCA 2010 Conference

"The Imagined __________"

October 8-9 2010
Whatcom Community College, Bellingham, Washington

Program Information | Registration Form |Online Registration|Featured Speakers and Guests| Hotel and Travel Information|

Proposals no longer being accepted

Recently, Western Washington University’s library hosted an art exhibit that caught our attention: “Books that Don’t (Yet) Exist.” Children’s book illustrators from around the world were asked to imagine their “dream book,” their book that did not yet exist. The exhibit displays the astounding results: seventy paintings and story summaries, stories still just beginning to be imagined.

We began to think about this concept as it might apply to our classrooms, programs, careers: How do our imagined __________ shape and affect our teaching, our scholarship, and our professional and material lives? We strive to incorporate new pedagogical theories based on our imagined “perfect” classroom, the classroom that “doesn’t (yet) exist.” We make changes to the way we respond to student writers based on our imagined ideal student-teacher relation. We read student work against our imagined ideal paper. We assess our classes and programs against imagined ideal classes and programs. We conduct research to fill gaps between the real and the imagined whole. How much else is driven by these imagined _________ that is just beyond or at the edges of our conscious awareness? How might we rethink these imagined _________? How might we reshape these imagined _________ to better our professional lives, our teaching, our students’ experiences?

This conference invites you to explore “The Imagined ____” in all its connotations and all its richness.

We encourage multi-media presentations, interactive sessions, as well as traditional conference presentations. We invite you to imagine the possibilities—inform, entertain and surprise us and yourselves!

We are pleased to announce that Nancy Sommers will be presenting a workshop on Friday; that the nationally touring Improv group DK and Morgan will be leading a featured session Saturday morning; and nationally recognized literary scholar Charles Altieri will be a guest speaker Saturday afternoon. See "Featured Speakers and Guests" above.
See the Online Submission Form above.


Possible topics:

  • Student-teacher relations
  • Multi-media classrooms and writing
  • Retention, persistence, and success
  • Elearning
  • The “professionalization” of comp/rhet
  • Media culture, technoculture, and writing/reading
  • Ideas of writing programs
  • Classroom, program, and college-wide assessment
  • Visual media, rhetoric, and writing
  • Hypertext (fiction and poetry)
  • Labor and pedagogy
  • Graduate school preparation
  • Theories/theorists on writing and literature
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