The Undersea World of Clint Gardner

iPads in the Writing Center

2011-12-16T10:19:00.000-08:00

Over on the listserv WCENTER a few weeks ago there was a discussion of iPads and their uses in writing centers. I brazenly stated that I was going to keep a list of apps that people mentioned, so here goes:

From Neal Lerner of Northeastern University:

GoodReader:Used for reading and annotating files. Ultimately, we hope to have writingconferences in which writing consultant and student are reviewing the student'spaper on GoodReader, jointly annotating, and saving the file for the studentwriter to use when revising.

Box.net:Used for transferring and having access to files.

Dropbox:Also used for transferring and having access to files.

iThoughtsHD:A mind-mapping tool, useful for idea generation and breaking through thosewriting blocks.

iBrainstorm: Another tool for generatingideas and then organizing those ideas in ways that nicely lead to a writtenform.

PlainText: A texteditor, useful for taking notes during a consulting session, which can then besent to students.

Dragon:Voice recognition, ideally useful for recording tutoring sessions.

From me (Clint Gardner):

1) we’ve been playing with both Skype and TinyChat (www.skype.com/www.tinychat.com) for real time online tutoring.

2) iBooks has some free writing/language-related online books; there is also Google Books, Nook, and Kindle apps.

3) Wolfram Alpha has a cool app that can answer some pretty complex questions (not writing related)

4) We’ve also played around with voice recordings of sessions. And I’ve been intrigued by Dragon Dictation app.

5) Salt Lake Community College uses Citrix, a server layer that allows iPads and other devices access to office application suites like Microsoft Office. It is pretty slick.

6) Our home-brewed online reporting system is set up to recognize when a *Pad or smart phone visits it, and formats its output accordingly. I was inspired to update our system to recognize such devices when one of our Peer Writing Advisors showed me how she wrote her reports on her iPhone. Talk about not having a problem with software keyboard.

From Stephanie Lovelass of Illinois Central College

Weuse Pages, Dropbox, and various dictionary and translation apps the most.We recently launched Skype-based appointments using the iPads. The Skype apphas definitely come in handy! If you're interested, I would be happyto compile a list of apps!

That is all so far. If you have more useful apps, post them in a comment and I'll edit this post.

Mobile Poetry Collective: iPad Note Poem #2: September Morning by Clint Gardner

2011-09-07T14:39:00.001-07:00

Mobile Poetry Collective: "Round" by Dawn Mendoza

2011-04-23T09:26:00.001-07:00

Dawn Mendoza reads her poem "Round."

Mobile Poetry Collective: "Daffodils" by William Wordsworth

2011-04-13T07:44:00.000-07:00

Paula Michniewicz offers up William Wordsworth's "Daffodils" to the Mobile Poetry Collective:

Mobile Poetry Collective!

2011-04-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

A new Undersea World feature for you just in time for National Poetry Month: Mobile Poetry Revolutionary Collective! Join the revolution and call in the poem of your choice to 801-930-0674. It can be your own work or a favorite of yours. Be sure to state your name, identify the author (even if it is your own) and the title. I reserve the draconian right to exclude any submission I see fit. The submissions will be featured here on The Undersea World.

Here are some prototype samples from various folks:

Carrie de Azevedo-Poulsen gives us "Thanks" by W.S. Merwin

Cordelia Willgren offers up Naomi Shihab Nye's "At the Seven Mile Ranch, Comstock, Texas"

Ethan Millard give us Jaberwocky by Lewis Carroll

The Death of See by William Carlos Williams

WCENTER Survey

2011-02-25T11:20:00.000-08:00

Last week, I was talking with colleagues about a future super-secret project (stay tuned) and we got to wondering how many two-year college writing center folks were on WCENTER. WCENTER is the preeminent listserv for writing center folks. I've been a member since 1992, but I don't recall anyone trying to figure out who (demographically) was on the list. Rather than burdening list members with a huge demographic survey, however, I just decided to stick with the original question: what types of institutions are WCENTER users coming from. I only left it up for a few days, so I'm not saying that this survey has captured all potential WCENTER readers/respondents, by the way. My Survey Monkey professional account was expiring, however, and I wanted to download the data. (so much for self-funded research, eh?)

In any case, here we go:

I did suspect that four year plus universities and colleges would dominate the users of WCENTER, given the list's history and the development of the writing center movement. It is what it is. I think the number of two-year (associates) schools is pretty decent and no doubt is more now than it ever has been, but I don't have any direct evidence of any trends since this, as I said, is the first institutional demographic survey I am familiar with for WCENTER. It would seem that we in the two-year community might want to do some outreach to our colleagues to inform them about the list, however, given that two-year colleges represent a more significant portion of higher education these days.
I am a little disturbed by the lack of Secondary/Elementary school members of the list and that may reflect a divide in our community that is difficult to bridge. Secondary educators do have their own list, but it isn't nearly as active as WCENTER. Secondary writing center directors, of course, are extremely busy folks with much heavier teaching and directing roles. Again, it is what it is.

Since I am pretty heavily invested in the International Writing Centers Association, and the super-secret project I mentioned above (stay tuned) will be proposed to IWCA, I also wanted to see how many WCENTER members claimed membership in IWCA:

There are a couple of things that interest me about this chart. First, it is interesting that nearly 8% are uncertain of their status as members of IWCA. This, I think, goes hand-in-hand with the fact that I think the 75% membership claim is inflated. While IWCA does have over 700 members, I know from my experience in IWCA leadership that many people think they have a membership who don't. Many seem to think that subscribing to Writing Lab Newsletter makes them a member. I could, of course, be completely wrong in my bias, and perhaps the survey numbers are correct. There is really no way to verify that at this point.

Results of survey on new media tutoring

2011-02-16T17:58:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I queried both the WCENTER and WPA email lists to get their response to a rather unscientific study on tutoring and new media in writing centers. These are the charted-up results. ~~I hope to provide some commentary on them at some point when the (new)Jazz are not playing.~~ UPDATE: comments ahoy!

The number of respondents is 118 (n=118). The questions that allowed multiple answers are represented as area graphs to give a better sense of the overall spread of the response.

Most of the respondents were from higher education. This is no doubt due to posting the survey on WCENTER and WPA-L. I am uncertain of the demographics of either of those lists, but I have a well-informed hunch that not many non-higher education folks participate in them.

The purpose of my research is, ultimately, to write an article about tutoring in new media (for wont of a better term) at open access institutions. I was somewhat surprised by the nearly 20% of respondents who don't know if their institution is open access or not.

No surprises here. It was good to see tutors taking part in the survey, however.

Most institutions employ peer tutors. I am going to break this statistic down at some point to see how that plays out at institution type. I fear my sample size is not big enough to have any statistical relevance, however.

It would seem that traditional academic texts are the norm for all institutions. Multi-modal texts (which I didn't define in the survey, but I'm assuming people think means texts with images or graphics) are at about half the respondents, and web pages come in third. I won't make any claims about these results, but I do wonder if the responses mean that writing centers are not seeing students with such texts or they turn away students who are writing in these media. ~~I prefer to think the latter is true, not the former.~~ I would prefer to think that writing centers aren't seeing students with other types of texts because students aren't coming in with them, not that writing centers are turning such writers away.

The responses to this one are going to motivate the thesis of my web text, I think. I am interested in interviewing writing center directors to determine why such education is not included in the curricula.

Given the response to the above question, this one seems even more telling. If students are coming in with new media texts, how are tutors prepared to respond to them?

I wanted to see this statistic just to get a sense of what is going on as far as online tutoring. Once again, it would seem that students are submitting purely alphabetic texts to online tutoring (given the disparity between the type of tutoring offered and the results of this question.) It would be interesting to drill-down into this question to see if online tutoring is more new media-related than in-person tutoring.

As I said, these are just the rough results. I be updating this tomorrow, I hope with a bit more information and some statistical numbers.

Article Proposal or How to Fail at Getting Out of Writing!

2011-01-24T11:11:00.000-08:00

One of the "Upcoming topics" on the sidebar reads "How to beg-off writing/creating an article/web-thing even though you should be writing it really, but you are gasping for air." I fear I must announce, however, that I've been an utter failure in being able to beg-off anything and have been persuaded to write such an article for an upcoming issue Computers & Writing edited by Shelley Rodrigo and Matthew Kim. The overall subject matter for this issue is rhetorical media and open access institutions. In their call for papers, Rodrigo and Kim define rhetorical media as an almalgam of all sorts of new media--including web texts, audio, video, and other web 2.0 stuff. Here's my grandiose (and accepted!) proposal:

“New Media and the Twenty First Century Open Access Writing Tutor: How Writing Center Work Will Never be the Same Again”

The days where students came to writing centers with “papers” to be talked/worked over are pretty much gone, particularly at open access institutions that embrace a broader concept of writing than traditional academic contexts often do. In a traditional institution of higher learning, for example, students often practice only writing academic texts for academic purposes. Many other institutions—particularly those with open access—are broadening the scope of the type of writing that students create in so-called writing or composition classes and strive to provide students with a broader sense of the type of writing they will be doing in their lives, and not just the narrow scope of the academic research paper of the past.*

A broader sense of writing necessarily includes rhetorical media as defined in the call for papers. I would go so far to argue that we are doing a disservice to students when we don’t talk about writing in a broader context and include a variety of rhetorical practices in our instruction. With a larger scope of writing in mind, it becomes very important that writing center consultants/tutors be prepared to work with writers in a variety of circumstances and to give strong, effective feedback.

In this article, therefore, I propose to address the following issue:
establish the background of writing centers and the types of writing our research/literature presumes our students come to us with
establish the presence (and perhaps prevalence) of rhetorical media in the modern context
establish what the current state of practice is at open-access institution writing centers in responding to rhetorical media writers
explore potential action that writing center professionals can take to prepare their centers for responding to rhetorical media
* I realize that there are many open access institutions that favor traditionalist curriculum and eschew the modern (perhaps too many), but those institutions will be forced into change rather soon given the ubiquity of rhetorical media and the desire of students to learn about/from it.

After reflecting on the proposal for a while, I think that I will be happy to just cover the forth item on the bulleted list. I've already started a survey that is trying to suss out how much new media tutoring is going on in writing centers. I also hope to interview writing center folk who have implemented robust tutoring models in league with the variety of writing that modern-day students are doing.

It should be an interesting research project, to say the least.

On failure

2010-12-17T08:33:00.001-08:00

In this Free Thinking Festival lecture, Frank Cotrell Boyce talks about the importance of failure in culture and particularly for writers (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wbnxq). We as respondents to writers see students everyday who are paralyzed by a fear of failure. I rather like how Boyce in the lecture digs into the notion that fearing failure keeps a writer (or any one for that matter) from taking chances or from fully exploring the possibilities.

Sure no one likes to fail, but part of the problem is that we've made failure tantamount to the need to be expelled from a community. If we are to succeed as writers or, I think Boyce would argue, we need to allow for and expect failures and allow ourselves to learn lessons rather than just fearing failure and casting out those who fail among us.

Cheering on failure, of course, is easier said than done, but I think if we focus on the positive and figure out what our failures have taught us then we are in better shape than in some static paralysis of fearing failure.

The whole thing reminds me of Anne Lamott's essay from Bird by Bird on the need to write "Shitty First Drafts:"

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, "Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?," you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be some thing great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go--but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.

There is something essential to growing as a writer about allowing ourselves the freedom to make "childish" mistakes and to allow for such "childishness" in others. If you think about it, writing is a lot like playing. We play as children to, among other things, gain important life skills. If we think of writing only as a serious activity where we are not allowed to take chances with ideas or methods of expression, then I think we've shut down the creative side of ourselves that let's writing be fun and engaging, but at the same time innovative.

NCPTW/IWCA 2010 Conference Report

2010-11-09T10:33:00.000-08:00

Andrea Malouf & Rachel Meads-Jardine (on right)

Brandon Alva

Brandon Alva, Rachel Meads-Jardine, Andrea Malouf and I attended and presented at the 2010 National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing/International Writing Centers Association joint conference this past weekend. Andrea and Rachel presented “Teaching Writing in Communities” about the excellent work going on in the Community Writing Center. Brandon presented “From Peer Tutor to Writing Instructor: Taking a Collaborative Learning Approach” about how he uses his writing center background to influence his teaching. Brandon won an IWCA Travel Scholarship for this presentation and was recognized during the Thursday keynote address. I presented “The Effects of Working in a Community College Writing Center on Peer Writing Tutors” which is fairly self-explanatory. It is a presentation I've done at other conferences, but each time I prep for it, I learn something more and revise it to better reflect my evolving thoughts on the topic. Brandon & I also participated in a “Scholar to Scholar” poster session about this same topic. That was a very useful session, in that I could bounce ideas and thoughts off Brandon, and he gave me his interactive perspective as a former peer tutor who worked in the SLCC Student Writing Center. (He's now an professor in the English Department and is a Adjunct Faculty Writing Advisor in the Student Writing Center.)

Anti-Racism Special Interest Group

In more interactive sessions, I presented on the Council of Writing Program Administrators and what it can do for writing center folk. I also took an active role in the two-year college Special Interest Group (SIG), and was very excited to see peer writing tutors from two-year schools actually participate in the SIG this year. They had many great ideas and I’m developing an interesting multimedia project that may help us think about our own curriculum development (and perhaps influence curriculum development in the wide world.) Rachel, Andrea and I actively participated in the Anti-Racism SIG. That group is reaching a critical mass and is working on a variety of projects to fully integrate anti-racism work into all writing centers.

Andrea Malouf at the Visionary Arts Museum

We attended many fine sessions too. Over all it was one of the best IWCA/NCPTW joint conferences I’ve had the opportunity to attend. I was particularly pleased with the number of sessions that focussed on writing and social justice issues, and exploring how writing centers can work as sites of social change.

We wrapped up a fine weekend by visiting the Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore. The museum is all about outsider art and different ways of seeing the world. Ultimately that fits rather nicely in with my view of what education is about as well as how writing centers should work. We should challenge students and offer alternative means of considering their writing and their view of the world. Learning is all about change and challenge, right?

Brandon Pokes Mr. Wiggle right in the eye

English 1810: Writing Center Theory & Practice/Writing Centers as Agents of Social Change

2010-10-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

English 1810 is a service learning course in which students engage in service in a writing center context. Right now our writing centers are limited to the SLCC Student and Community Writing Centers (q.v.) but I suppose that could change in the future if enough student were involved. I have a feeling, however, that most students will chose to work on-campus, given the convenience of that. This assumption is borne out by the students taking the class this term have opted to do their service in the Student Writing Center.

The nature of their service is fairly broad. Initially, when fellow co-planners Tiffany Rousculp & Melissa Helquist were working on this class, we assumed that most students would want to work with writers one-to-one. This year's students, however, are about 60/40 split with 60% doing projects other than one-to-one work. These projects include conducting workshops ranging from orientations for new or high school students to those on specific aspects of writing. The students in the class have taken on some very challenging topics.

Those committing their service to one-to-one work, have been engaging in some pretty thoughtful reflection on that process and have given a great deal to the Student Writing Center. They have also reflected upon what they have learned from the experience. I hope that they will share that learning at PeerCentered. So far the students in 1810 have only posted their thoughts on what it is to be a tutor. I'm not going to require them to post any more, but have told them that it would do them well to do so, particularly since there have been some thoughtful responses from others in the peer tutoring community to their responses.

You can look at the syllabus for the class somewhere below, so I will not bore you with a blow-by-blow account of it, but aside from introducing students to responding to writers, the course also talks thoroughly about composition pedagogy and practice. I've also taken the opportunity to discuss writing centers as sights of social change. We're using chapters from The Everyday Writing Center ("Everyday Racism") and Facing the Center ("Facing Class in the Writing Center"). The discussion is going well, and I am interested to hear the students experiences and what role they think that writing centers have in teaching social justice/social change.

All of this discussion of writing centers as sites of social change is wrapped up in a complicated discussion of education in general as a human endeavor that is complicated by the fact that it is both challenging tradition and enforcing it at the same time. Education is both a progressive and conservative institution, in other words. We are talking about how some social traditions (such as racism) are so repugnant that they must needs be exposed and discussed openly in any educational context. The same can be (and has been) said of writing centers.

I am suggesting a "pay it forward" model of response to the students in 1810 in talking about such difficult and charged issues such as racism/sexism/genderism/classism but I realize that is tough in and of itself. By the "pay it forward" model, I mean that rather than being reactionary and caustic towards someone expressing regressive and harmful ideas that we treat the matter openly without shaming the person to discuss why the ideas being expressed by the writer are harmful to other human beings. While some may believe that a writer expressing racist ideas should be shamed, I believe that shaming only exacerbates the problem. I think, as well, we can talk about how the writer can reflect on her or his own expression and experience to overcome debilitating ideas such as racism. In other words, I think individual racism/prejudice can be and should be overcome through positive methods.

Next time we're going to dig a bit into white privilege and systemic racism in order to understand why racism in people who seem powerless (such as poor white people who have little political influence or cache) is extremely harmful to minorities subject to it and to society as a whole, and how we can address the inequity that white privilege creates. (This is why I've brought in Harry Denny's piece on social class at this point.)

I'll keep you posted on how the class ends up. I'm really interested in how the students shape their final online portfolios of their work in the course.

Plans or an addendum to busyness

2010-10-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

Excuses, excuses!

Actually I have tons of stuff I should have been blogging about.

To quote Bugs Bunny, "I've been sick." Ok, I was ill for 2 days.

Anyway, I promise to blog harder from now on out.

Upcoming topics:

English 1810: "Writing Center Theory & Practice!"
Writing Centers as places of social change!
TYCA Midwest & TYCA Pacific Northwest report!
The great work of community college students!
How SLCC English Department faculty members Lisa Bickmore & Jen Courtney kick ass!
The contradictions and complications of a Writing & Social Justice *Conference when your guest speaker charges mondo (i.g. $KKs) cash to speak.
How to actually keep a blog going when everything seems to be falling apart by promising way too much on facebook.
NCPTW(IWCA) 2011 report!
How to beg-off writing/creating an article/web-thing even though you should be writing it really, but you are gasping for air.
NCTE 2010 report!
Big old shout out to Across the Discipline's special issue on community college WAC initiatives authors!
Writing center spaces & their discontents!
How to cook a good curry when you have every plate on the stove occupied.

Ok, Ok...enough is enough. I posted this facebook share thing of the excellent Student Writing Center picture posted just below.

Another blogging vow.

I promise to live up to this one!

Blogging harder!

Busy Days!

2010-10-21T19:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I will be the first to admit that being busy does not for consistent blogging make, but not blogging since summer? That's scandalous. Scandalous, I tell you.

To wit, I give you an image of the SLCC Student Writing Center running on all cylinders:

SLCC Student Writing Center is a fully operational Writing Center!

Using the Garden to Promote Reflective Writing

2010-07-16T10:28:00.001-07:00

Squash 1
Originally uploaded by Clint Gardner

As I mentioned in the previous post, during the initial sessions of the Thayne Center for Service & Learning Garden Parties (held every Tuesday at 9:00 am at the SLCC Community Garden and open to all), I distributed "gardening journals" to those who were present. The purpose of these journals is to allow space for Community Garden participants to reflect on not only gardening, but also what involvement in the garden means to them, or the impact that work in the garden is having on them.

My own journal has charted a growing commitment to the garden and its purpose: "I am really stunned at how involved/committed I've become to this project. I think it is because the garden so clearly shows the fruits of our labors, and how working as a group we've done something so significant," I recently wrote.

I am excited to get more students involved in the project once they return in the fall. I am currently planning some projects that I want to suggest to the Thayne Center folks to take place during the garden parties.

How does our garden grow?

2010-07-13T10:33:00.001-07:00

Bell pepper
Originally uploaded by Clint Gardner

At Salt Lake Community College, where I teach, I've had the honor of first volunteering with our new Community Garden, and now being the advisor for the Slow Food/Community Garden student group. For a few years now, I've wanted to do something like this, but kept putting it off because of professional commitments. I'm happy that SLCC students got on the stick and pushed this project forward.

The Community Garden involves various departments and clubs on campus such as the Thayne Center for Service & Learning, the Disability Resource Center, the Nursing Department, the Environment Club, and Distance Education (to name the groups I know of.) There are other groups involved, so forgive me for skipping your group.

The ultimate purpose of the Community Garden is to educate SLCC students and community members about where our food comes from, learn about our mutual environmental impact, and to provide some of our produce to our new campus food co-op and to other local charitable groups. As far as the Student Writing Center goes, our goal was to promote thoughtful writing about environmental concerns, so we provided free gardening journals to early attendees. The Student Writing Center also hopes to conduct readings from those journals as well as other nature/environmental readings during the Thayne Center for Service & Learning weekly garden parties head each Tuesday from 9 until 10 am.

Given our wet and cold spring and a weird case of tomato leaf curl (that doesn't seem to have hurt the tomato plants) I wasn't certain there would be enough produce. The garden, however, kicked in last week and the various garden plots are bursting with produce. The various group plots have produced everything from broccoli to zucchini. I'm looking forward to an abundant harvest to give back to the community.

SLCC colleague Paula Michniewicz is blogging her garden experience at Watch My Garden Grow.

Notes on "We Compositionists" and Class Conciousness

2010-06-22T13:36:00.000-07:00

-1-

Chris Gallagher, in a 2005 article in JAC titled "We Compositionists: Toward Engaged Professionalism" offers various suggestions on how the field of composition can, for wont of better terms, remain relevant. The term relevant appears to bother Gallagher, however, given that he throws relevant in (mildly ironic) quotation marks in his discussion that compositionists seem to be bereft of an audience other than themselves and seem to be constantly worrying that what they are doing is irrelevant: "And it's consisten with a whole range of efforts to make composition and rehtoric more 'relevant,' including various calls for 'public intellectuals'...the study of 'everday literacies...' and service learning....What is behind this fear of not mattering?" (76)

All of this worry about relevance seems to come from a certain worry that what we are doing as compositionists just doesn't matter; that it is unimportant; that it is a waste of time. No one, of course, wants to see what they do as a waste of time nor unimportant:

"what compositionist, striving for tenure, has not wondered if her talents might do more good in the world outside the academy? What compositionist, upon earning tenure, has not felt some guilt--and perhaps more than a touch of depression--as a result of being rewarded by a system that is demonstrably corrupt? What compositionist has not looked upon his publications and wondered, Do these make a difference? How else could I have spent my time?" (79-80)

Gallagher then goes on to quote Barbara Ehrenreich about the dangers of a hedonistic, soft, cushy middle class Babbittesque existence that seems to befall all professionals at one time or another. Gallagher states early in the piece that all this self-referential discussion of disciplinarity is a "middle-class psychodrama" (75) that the field seems to be stuck in: "Whether we are looking 'down' at the 'mere teachers' or 'up' to our colleagues in literature and critical theory, we are plagued by self-doubt" (80). All this self-conscious worrying about worrying about worrying is best summed up by Gallagher in one like "Isn't there more important work I should be doing" (77)?

-2-

A friend and colleague of mine, Jason Pickavance, and I have from time-to-time discussed the ins-and-outs of teaching at a community college with its teaching load that is at least two and a half times the load of a research university teaching load. Community college classes usually also have greater enrollment caps. It isn't uncommon for a community college compositionist to take home (and I do mean take home) over a hundred portfolios every few weeks. Added on top of that, as well, is committee work and other institutional activities as well as community service obligations*. Most CC compositionists, as well, strive to stay abreast of the field and to engage the field, whenever possible. At the same time, some CC compositionists are uneasy at even calling themselves "compositionalists" or actively engaging in a field where they may feel "looked down upon" by the gentry of our field (the researchers and not the 'mere' teachers.) Many CC compositionalists, too, bristle at being thought of as burned out drudges working a menial job.

"At least I don't have to work in a coal mine," Pickavance once said in response to a complaint about how bad CC compositionists have it. I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that some CC compositionists also ask themselves "Isn't there more important work I could be doing?" They often don't say this aloud, however, but actions, which I won't go into here, often show evidence of the desire to take on other kinds of work

*I'm not making this blog entry a complaint against community college working conditions, mind you. This is just a simple reality of our existence.

-3-

Now, dear reader, I suppose you would like me to find some neat reconciliation between these two sections. Frankly, my dear, I don't know that there can be reconciliation. As long as the working conditions are what they are and being a researcher is valued monetarily more than being a teacher or an active agent in the classroom, there is going to be a very distinct class divide.

What can happen, however, is that we apply something that Gallagher offers up in the final part of his piece:

Redefine traditional categories of academic work....Research and teaching should be defined as two forms of the collaborative discovery and sharing of knowledge. "Service" should be done away with as a category of academic work, but academic professionals should be expected to demonstrate how their research and teaching both involved and affect others within and beyond their immediate institution. So instead of ticking off how many committees faculty sit on or how much administrative work they do, personnel committees might instead consider how professionals contribute to the collaborative discovery and sharing of knowledge in multiple sties--including, of course, on committees and in academic programs.

In other words we can take our field--our discpline--and activate it. Our field does something in other words, and doesn't just sit and navel gaze and worry about its relevance.

I will say that I am just a bit bothered by this call for action. While I heartily agree we should be engaging in praxis (I am a writing center person, after all), I am a bit flummoxed about how a CC compositionist takes on this call, or even if we are included in it. Rather than navel-gazing, CC compositionists seem to be preoccupied by their position in academia and inundated with work. Again, I don't want to make CC work out to be like some Mike Leigh movie where the beset working class can never escape. Worrying about position seems to be just as disabling as navel gazing.

What's the answer? I think the only way we can find that out is by actually applying the ideas we believe in and taking action through them.

Work cited

Gallagher, Chris. "We Compositionists: Toward Engaged Professionalism." JAC. 25.1 (2005). 75-99. Print.

All of our yesterdays

2010-06-17T15:14:00.001-07:00

Here's what I wrote over on the old College server I've been using for my WordPress blog for years now:

While my academic blog has not been the most active creature in the sea, I still wish to maintain it. The server on which the blog currently sits is getting fairly old, however, and there are no plans to replace it with a new one. Given that it holds our record-keeping database for the SLCC Student Writing Center, I think I would prefer to free up some space on the server and move my blog off site to a blogger.com blog. At least in moving to blogger, I won’t be forced into upgrading WordPress ever week or so (I’m not kidding.) Maintaining PeerCentered on blogger.com has been relatively worry-free, after all.
The new spot is clintgardner.blogspot.com. Eventually I will auto-forward from this page to it. I’m still contemplating being all ego-maniacal and buying up clintgardner.org while it is up for grabs.

Long may she wave.

And yes, I do notice there is some WP code artifacts that didn't convert. I doubt that I will ever be inspired enough by the blog to go back and clean it up.

Writing Center Mission Statement Wordle

2010-03-10T01:23:00.000-08:00

I am curious to have community comments on this Wordle constructed from approximately 33 mission statements freely provided to me by WC administrators from various institutions. If you aren't familiar with Wordle (http://www.wordle.net), it crunches texts and represents the most prevalent terms appearing in the text by size. I don't believe color or position has any statistical significance, and is mostly chosen by the person who creates the Wordle based on her or his aesthetic sensibilities. In the following Worldle, I have removed "writing" and "center" as terms. I did this simply because those terms, quite expectantly, were ubiquitous in all the mission statements and, therefore, took up a lot of Wordle screen real estate:

Available from http://www.wordle.net. (Corrected version.)

While I am drawing my own nefarious conclusions from this smash-up for my CCCC presentation, I just wanted to hear what the WC community thinks; that is why I haven't really shaped perception with questions, but I suppose if you are stuck in commenting on it, you might want to consider the significance of the prevalence of certain terms.

Update: I noticed an error in my text file where "writing" was not always removed. I corrected that (3/10/2010; 9:48 am). I apologize for the error.

"Sapping the Strength of the State" or notes on reading Berube

2010-03-01T06:06:00.000-08:00

While I was away attending the TYCA Southeast Conference in Chattanooga, the faculty/staff discussion group for the 2010 Writing and Social Justice Conference met to discuss Michael Berube's Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. I've been told that the discussion went quite well, and I had a few moments this morning to discuss Berube's ideas with one of the Student Writing Center tutors, Lori. As she is a person with a disability herself, I found her insights into the book profound, and useful in helping me to understand the broader cultural ramifications that Berube discusses in the book in the context of individual experience.

1) It would seem that many of the things that become so problematic about the treatment of the mentally disabled since the late 19th century is that such treatment were often "for the best" or had "good intentions" and were based on progressive thinking. In other words, the manner in which all disabled were treated previously (seen as somehow tainted by evil or corruption a la Richard III or the more sympathetic, and even more tragic Quasimodo) was, at least, set aside during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and many of the disabled were institutionalized "for their own good." They were sent to "hospitals" where the implication was that they would be "cured" of their "disease." While such institutionalization was no doubt better than being treated as a social pariah or a demon-besotted creature, mal-treatment was still the norm for the disabled. As Berube notes, drawing from Foucault, the institution of treated the disabled inhumanely never died, but transformed into a more "modern" system where the disabled (and most particularly the mentally disabled) were institutionalized "for their own good" and for the "benefit of society." In essence the "system" justified the inhumane treatment because it was supposedly benefiting the disabled, just as, perhaps, an exorcism would benefit a medieval disabled person because it would drive the demons that were causing the disability out. In either case, you end up with the same result: someone being treated inhumanely and that treatment being justified because the ends were supposedly beneficial to the individual and to society.

2) On a further note, I am also interested in the generally accepted metaphor of disability as disease, rather than just another way of being. Berube doesn't seem to be getting into that too much (I'm only half-way through), but Lori in the Student Writing Center certainly was interested in talking about it, and I am curious about the adoption of metaphors as means of defining ourselves. That doesn't mean, of course, that a disability doesn't magically disappear just because one and others accept it as one's normal state of being. If any thing, disability highlights the impossibility for us to escape our physical bodies, and how those bodies shape our identity.

3) Berube is quite adept at spotting American foibles. We, it would seem, are a patently anti-social who mistrust big groups that we aren't members of (and perhaps leaders of) and particularly of government. This distrust of society runs the gamut of American political beliefs from far left (fight the man) to the far right (damn gubmint!). Berube notes that these extremist notions of independence and individualism have a profound effect on the disabled, given that the disabled are often obviously dependent on others in order to sometimes lead their lives lives, but also for some, in order to sustain life at all. Lori was particularly interested in inter-dependence. I noted, as well, that the able-bodied ideas about independence are often just lies we tell ourselves to get along in the world. As Donne said, of course, "no man is an isle entire unto himself." Amercians, however, seem to feel that at least we are all peninsulas with really narrow causeways. I think the disabled throw our American notions of independence and autonomy right in our faces. Many people with disabilities cannot be fully independent (nor should they be.) They cannot be expected to fulfill the ultimate demand that some people put on American citizens to buckle down and "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." Sounds familiar, eh? Victor Villanueva discussed the same idea in his book Bootstraps.

I believe, as well, that the disabled prove the lie that charity is ennobling. Charity is only ennobling of the giver. It forces the recipient into the eternal groveling position as the dependent on some able-bodied benefactor, and are, therefore, a lesser being. All this individualism, for all its vaunted greatness, sure seems to have a great more to deal with social position than it really does with "freedom" now doesn't it?

2010 Writing & Social Justice Conference: (Dis)ability

2010-02-19T01:54:00.000-08:00

This year's Writing & Social Justice Conference's theme is (Dis)ability. Sponsored by the Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) English Department in partnership with the SLCC Disability Resrouce Center, Family & Human Studies Department, The Thayne Center for Service & Learning, the SLCC Community Writing Center, SLCC Student Services Art & Cultural Events Committee, Art Access Utah, and the SLCC Student Writing Center, the Conference is open to all undergraduates in the state of Utah (USA). The deadline for submissions is March 12, 2010. The conference will be held on April 10, 2010.

WSJC2010DisabilityverSPRING

Visitors

2010-02-02T07:33:00.000-08:00

This morning as I was reading my morning email and settling into the Student Writing Center, I heard quite the squawking outside my office window:

The geese would call out to their friends as they flew by, but decided to stay put and disturb the class that is in the publication center next door where a class was going on:

I am not certain if there is a moral to this story or not, but generally we just have geese fly over campus. They, however, like the 5,000 or so thousand new students this semester decided to drop in and stay awhile.

Complestist N/IWCA

2009-07-30T01:33:00.000-07:00

Since I'm cycling off the Executive Board of the International Writing Centers Association this coming November, I've come to be a bit nostalgic about it. My involvement in the Executive Board first started back when Eric Hobson was President and he gave me the opportunity to engage in committee work. I then took on the role of the first Wed Editor of writingcenters.org, and then was elected to be Community College Representative. I threw my hat in the ring for Vice President (the leadership track in IWCA is V.P. to President to Past President--a six year stint!) and was stunned to actually be elected. My "platform" (it seems a bit pretentious to call it that) was to build on IWCA's excellent history of outreach by allowing for more opportunities for people to be involved in the organization.

That's the nice thing about the IWCA Executive Board and IWCA itself--we try to involve our membership as much as we can in official committees and other activities of the organization. I think it is a great way to grow the organization and give others leadership opportunities. It also makes IWCA truly a member-driven organization. I'll probably write more about my experiences as November approaches and I grow more nostalgic.

In any case, I started out this post intending to write about a completist project I want to take on: getting all the minutes of N/IWCA in one place on writingcenters.org (in cooperation with the current IWCA Web Editor Chris Ervin) as well as getting all our official documents (like IWCA Update) there as well.

I know that official IWCA minutes were published in Writing Center Journal but I can't check it due to a server move on the part of its archive. I don't know, however, if all the minutes were published there. I am very interested in our history as an organization, and think our members need to be more aware of our past. It may be interesting to propose to the Board that we appoint an official historian. I don't think that position need be elected by the membership and shouldn't have term limits.

Sexism & the writing center

2009-07-23T01:52:00.000-07:00

I've been prepping for our regular before-the-semester staff meeting/discussion and was thinking of using "You Fix it For me: A Lesson in Women's Work and Cultural Misunderstandings" by Kim Zabel in the latest Writing Lab Newsletter. In the article, Zabel describes a tutorial session in which she was the subject of sexist behavior in the writing center, and how she was verbally attacked by a male client for "shaming him" by not doing the work that he was demanding from her. Zabel then goes on to explore the cultural ramifications, as the student was a recent refugee to the United States from a culture that demands women take on certain roles and always defer to men.

Given that I've witnessed sexist behavior in the writing center before, and how tutors who are women deal with it, I thought this would be a good article to spur a beneficial conversation. I think it is important to discuss this matter, as well, since the majority of the tutors who work in the Student Writing Center are women and I believe they face challenges with sexist behavior from male students that our male tutors don't necessarily face. (I might point out that sexist behavior knows no cultural bounds.)

With that, I started to dig around on Google scholar to find other articles to build a bibliography for the tutors should they wish to pursue the topic. I was actually a bit surprised by the lack of attention to the area. I know there are pieces in the Writing Center Resource Manual and a few others that I can think of (but can't remember the titles of) in Writing Center Journal. I'm pretty sure if I keep digging around I will find a wealth of articles on the subject (perhaps not specifically related to writing center work, but tangentially so through subjects like sexist behavior in the classroom with female teachers).

In any case, this spurred an idea that I don't think has been approached before in writing centers: a survey of tutors who work in writing centers about sexist behavior they've been subject to. I'm no sociologist, so I'd like to collaborate someone in gender studies or sociology to construct a suitable survey.

I'll keep you posted.

Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference--an appreciation

2009-03-05T06:19:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow a couple of tutors and I are headed down to Cedar City, Utah, to attend the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference. This small conference is dedicated to peer tutoring and has been a boon to the struggling Rocky Mountain Regional.

This years, as with years in the past, we will start with a director session on Friday afternoon. After our Regional Board meeting (lead by the fantastic Claire Hughes from Weber State University), we will have two presentations from directors. The first by Jonathan Balzotti of the University of Utah is intriguingly entitled “Tracking Discourse: How Tutors Can Teach Writing Centers." The verb's object is what intrigues me most. Writing centers in this becomes a concept to be taught to students at larg...interesting. Next we'll hear from Star Coulbrooke and Susan Andersen of Utah State University with a presentation titled “How Collaborative Programs Redefine and Support Writing on the University Campus and Ripple Out to the surrounding Community.”

Following that, we directors go out to dinner while in the mean time the peer tutors we've brought have a chance to socialize on their own and meet their colleagues from around the region. I think it is a good idea for peer tutors to get away from their directors at such conferences. There is a tendency to stick to close to home, I think.

In any case, the conference starts full swing on Saturday morning. I'm still studying the program to see what I want to join in on. I am hoping to record some sessions as I've done in the past for PeerCentered podcasts. That reminds me--I still need to ask Neal if I can podcast his keynote address from last year's excellent conference hosted by Boise State.

Oh and I'll be tweeting the conference. Tweet on!

WAC/WID in the Community College: Call for proposals

2009-02-20T02:20:00.000-08:00

Here's the call I mentioned yesterday: WAC/WID in the Community College--Call for Proposals

I'm excited to be involved in this project!

WAC/WID in the Community College & National Day on Writing

2009-02-19T01:24:00.000-08:00

Michael Pemberton editor of Across the Disciplines has honored me in asking me to take on the role of guest editor for a special edition of the journal about Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing In the Disciplines in community colleges. I've got a pretty solid call for papers which I will post here in the Undersea World when Michael gives the go-ahead. I'm excited by the opportunity to guest-edit a journal. It is something I've aspired to do, but never been given the chance.

In other news (sorry to be such a bad blogger), I was also honored by current CCCC Chair Chuck Bazerman to be chosen as the CCCC National Day on Writing (NDoW) chair. NDoW (Oct. 20, 2009) is a NCTE campaign to bring wider awareness to writing. I worked with an stellar crew of folks--Eric Bateman, Michael Day, Neal Lerner, Jon Olson, Michael Pemberton, and Bonnie Sunstein. We came up with a strong list of existing online resources and suggested activities. We'll probably keep working for the time being too, as more resources will be developed. Kent Williamson (NCTE Chair) emphasized the need to make certain the NDoW is not just an academic activity, but includes everyone. One thing our committee emphasized is that if the event takes place in an institution or a community that has a writing center, that the writing center become the locus of NDoW activities.

Stay tuned!

Bad blogger! Bad blogger!

2009-01-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

I have sadly neglected The Undersea World for far too long. I promise to update soon, as I have many updates and many ideas to post.

I will say, however, that I'm honored now to serve as Secretary of TYCA. TYCA is a great organization and it will be great working with everyone for the next three years.

I am also am honored to be giving the keynote address at the upcoming Arizona Writing Centers Symposium sponsored by Arizona State University in February. I'm going to be talking about the benefits of peer tutoring.

TYCA-West

2008-10-11T02:00:00.000-07:00

I've been attending the annual TYCA-West at Clarkdale, Arizona campus of Yavapai College. Yesterday I attended various sessions on assessment of composition classes. The first one focussed on retention of students and the reasons why students drop. I shall be exploring the findings more later, I think. I also attended a session on student anxiety with the same course. I am particularly interested in this because we in the writing center world seem particularly obsessed with student comfort and their has been a great deal of scholarly work on the implications of being "comfortable" in the center.

To be succint, the WC discussion centers around whether or not it is the writing centers place to make students comfortable, particularly since learning can be an uncomfortable thing. I won't be writing on that issue further today, as I am currently in a session on RSS, and it seems quite rude to be writing this and listening to the presenter.

More later, plus pictures!

More on assessment

2008-10-07T01:58:00.000-07:00

Jill Pennington, Neal Lerner, and Jason Mayland discuss writing center assessment on the University of Wisconsin-Madison podcast. I'll be presenting with Jill, Neal, and Jason at the IWCA conference in 3 weeks.

Service Learning in the Writing Center

2008-10-01T01:09:00.000-07:00

My colleagues Tiffany Rousculp, Melissa Helquist and I have been working on a new writing-center related course here at SLCC--English 1810: Writing Center Theory and Practice. We struggled for some time with the name of the course, given that we wanted to emphasize the notion of pedagogy and that tutoring work is not only a great lead-in to a teaching carreer, but also is a different way to work with students. The influence that one-to-one writing center work can have on instructors is profound. Just the other day, a colleague asked it if would be possible to have adjunct faculty take our Student Writing Center education program (aka training) and to work as consultants in the Center. Although our budget wouldn't allow for that, it is an intriguing idea. I can see that it would have positive influence on the teaching of adjunct faculty.

In any case, the biggest difference in 1810 and our regular staff education program is that the students enrolled in it will not be employed by either the Student Writing Center or the Community Writing Center. They will, in fact, be Service Learning students, required to work for 20 hours in either Center during the semester. I'm interested to see how such a volunteer program will work.

UPDATE (10/11/2008): Our proposal seems to have cause problems with Internet Explorer. I shall post it back when I get a change.

Safety first!

2008-09-24T01:21:00.000-07:00

Just wrote a long post over on PeerCentered about safety and the writing center and share governance:

I've been reading Mike Mattison's new book Centered: A Year in the Life of a Writing Center Director (available from www.lulu.com) and came across the following passage:

"My first year here [Boise State], we had a student come in, demand for us to read a paper, and then say "I'll shoot someone" if it doesn't happen. Incredibly poor choice of words, and the student was immediately brought before the conduct officer (fortunately, the conduct officer and I knew one another from a committee, so we had a good rapport). The student wrote letters of apology to the consultants and was also barred from the Center. (25)"

Perhaps it is because of Phil's post below about mental illness and the writing centers or just the mayhem generally busy-ness of our writing center here at SLCC, but I've been thinking a lot about writing center safety of late.

Like most writing centers out there, we've had our scrapes with people who misbehave, but have only had to call the campus police once in our entire 18 year history. In that case, the student wasn't physically violent, but when a tutor attempted to end a session for what she perceived as an ethical violation (the student demanded, loudly I might add, that the tutor write a passage for her instead of the writer doing it herself), the writer became verbally abusive. When I intervened the writer turned on me and then everyone in the room. At that point, I asked her to leave the Center immediately. She refused, so I informed her that if she didn't leave, I would call campus police to remove her. She apparently thought I was bluffing, and continued to harrangue us. I then walked over to the phone and started to dial. She beat a hasty retreat out of the Center.
Later she accosted me as I was walking to class. No doubt I probably should have reported her for that incident as well, but I let it drop, figuring that she must have had enough problems with her mental health than to be hassled by the campus police. I later found that she had been thrown out of every institution of higher learning in Northern Utah for inappropriate behavior.

There have, of course, been other less disruptive events in the Center, and sometimes some rather scary situations that take place not in the Center but in the classrooms/halls around us. (A student wandering the halls with a machete looking for his teacher is not a nice way to start the day, and hearing of a colleague assaulted by an angry student while in class with a skateboard does make one slightly paranoid about the skater punks who wander into the Center with their long boards in tow, worked up about a teacher and how "unfair" he or she is.) Ultimately we do have emergency procedures to fall back on. Eric Hobson has an excellent primer for developing such procedures in the Writing Center Resource Manual ("Safety in the Writing Center."

In all this may seem like an issue for directors, and you may ask why am I posting it to PeerCentered? I think everyone who works in a writing center should participate in discussions of safety. In the spirit of shared governance, and in the belief that the writing center really is a student place, we all need to figure out ways to best respond to disturbances, of whatever level of danger they might be.

Two steadfast rules that we developed early on here at the SLCC Student Writing Center are

If you perceive a threat or are uncomfortable in any way, it is your right to end a session with a student writer immediately.

and

You and other people are much more important than anything else in the room. If you are in danger leave the situation.

These, of course, are not our only emergency procedures since we adhere diligently to our College's comprehensive Emergency Procedures Manual, but they do express concisely the purpose of such emergency procedures. They also fit rather nicely with our College's Student Code of Conduct. The first policy mentioned covers quite a range: from an angry or abusive student writer to one who is, as it were, becoming over-affectionate. In all they've served us quite well over the years and were developed by the peer tutors and I way back in 1992.

I am curious what safety policies other centers have.

"Someone to Watch Over Me"

2008-09-18T02:14:00.000-07:00

Given that the new SLCC Student Writing Center(SWC) Peer Writing Advisors have been attending staff education classes for about a month now; have completed their observations and tag-team tutoring; and have started to work on their own with student writers; it has come the time when I stick my big nose into their tutoring reports for assessment purposes. Ok, I'm casting this "intrusion" rather negatively, but that is simply to flip the notion around on you and explain why this is not intrusion but instruction.

We have a handy-dandy online reporting system here that allows writing advisors to not only collect data about student writers, but also to reflect upon the sessions they conduct. To me that is the most important element in the report system. Writing advisors have the opportunity to reflect on their work and to improve upon it. It is so much ingrained in my notion of writing center work, in fact, that I kind of get the willies when I think about a writing center that wouldn't have its tutors reflect on their work, and/or such reports are only aimed at an external audience (such as instructors.) To me the reflection is essential to writing center work. It helps us grow as tutors and respondents to other's writing.

As the supervisor of the reporting system, I can go into any report in the system and read it. Very rarely am I required to review a report in order to settle some issue that has arisen because of a session gone wrong. Mostly I stay out of the reports and only look at the broad data--unless I am conducting evaluations of the writing advisors' work. In general I believe the reports are the tutors' and she or he should feel comfortable reflecting on in peace, as it were. We cannot, however, fool ourselves into thinking these reports are private. They are not. They are very much a document of the SWC and should be treated as such.

Ultimately, I don't see this as a huge conflict of interest for me: yes, indeed, a tutor should have her space to reflect on her work, but she should also be open for feedback from someone else. This is why I don't see such evaluative/instructive work as "spying on someone." It is no more spying on a tutor than giving feedback on writing is spying on a student writer. The new tutors need such feedback, and need develop the sense that they are a part of a community that takes practice seriously and carries on a discussion about it, either in-person or online.

Mike Mattison wrote about this issue in his article "Someone to Watch Over me: Reflection and Authority in the Writing Center" (Writing Center Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1). Although Mike's situation was different (his new staff members were actively in the the Boise State Writing Center taking notes about sessions, which, apparently was seen as "spying" by some veteran members of the staff), the notion is the same: we learn by reflecting on our work and getting feed back on it.

In any case, my concerns about this issue are a tempest in my own teapot, as it were. The new tutors enjoy getting my feedback, and like talking about what I observe. They will, in fact, ask why I didn't happen to comment on a particular session they conducted.

Alternative assessment

2008-09-11T02:12:00.000-07:00

I am helping to conduct a workshop for the upcoming International Writing Centers Association Conference in Las Vegas (woo hoo!) along with WC megastars Jill Pennington and Neal Lerner. While we haven't worked out the session completely yet, I'd really like to pursue alternative assessment models/methods. I'm thinking of methods such as recorded exit interviews, focus groups, recorded discussions with students etc. I've done quite a lot of this assessment over the past few years with peer tutors in particular, and I would like to expand it to talking with student writers. Basically it would allow the student writer to speak out on her writing center work, and provide our writing center with valuable feedback. The questions I would ask them, of course, would have a purpose in mind.

As I have started to think about this, however, I begin to wonder if this is really assessment at all. I suppose I am informally coding the responses when I analyze them and put them together to build a "report" video. It isn't, however, a quantitative thing. I'm not putting stats to it. I realize, of course, that assessment doesn't necessarily have to be quantitative, but in order to find some respect as a "real study" it seems it has to be.

For example, there was a recent post on WCENTER asking about studies that explore faculty in two-year college writing centers. Since I've written on the subject and presented at various conferences, I was initially keen to write a response on the subject. The word "quantitative study" appeared (I believe, I can't seem to find the post right now) so I backed away from the keyboard. Yeah, my work was in no way a quantitative study. It was observational. My perception of their work as well as feedback that I've received from students, peer writing tutors, and the faculty themselves. Is that quantitative? Does that meet muster?

So here I sit, for the moment, wondering if the assessment work I entertain talking to others about is really even assessment work at all. What are the parameters that define assessment? Is it what we do with the outcome and not the outcome itself?

TYCA Secretary

2008-09-09T02:06:00.000-07:00

So as I mentioned in my last post, I threw my hat in the ring for TYCA (Two-Year Colleague Association of the National Council of Teachers of English) Secretary. I was honored to actually win the election, even though I know my colleague Jeffrey Andelora of Mesa Community College would have been a fine selection as well. I know I will probably take guff on the matter, but I actually voted for Jeffrey. Now that is not because I don't believe in myself, but simply because it seems extremely self-centered to vote for oneself in any election, and abstaining isn't much better unless you know, for certain, that the other candidate would be harmful to the job. Jeffrey has some great ideas for the job, and has, in fact, inspired me to think about other things I could be doing as TYCA Secretary, by working on recruitment etc.

Ultimately, I want to "leverage" my position as TYCA Secretary to bring to the fore writing center issues, and to make more contact with writing center professionals at two-year colleges. I think that two-year writing center folks can benefit a lot by talking to each other and by being more aware of organizations such as IWCA that actively address their concerns. I also hope to make more folks in TYCA aware of writing centers and our perspective on things.

It should be a good three years!

Prescient?

2008-09-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

Well the summer certain was interesting. Not only did I find out I was elected as TYCA National Secretary, but the building the SLCC Student Writing Center was subject to a reverse flood. In other words, the roof leaked. A leaky roof, however, sounds rather benign, like throwing now a few pans to catch errant drips. The flood we suffered, however, was more like the house in movie version of Fight Club.

Suffice it to say, I was rather busy with physical things to post any update here. Talk about an Undersea World! Perhaps I am prescient?

I'll write more about the TYCA job later.

IWCA Summer Institute Special Webcast

2008-07-21T00:37:00.000-07:00

The IWCA Summer Institute (an annual gathering of writing center professionals from around the world which focuses on writing centers and writing center development) will conduct a live webcast this year:

How Did We Get Here? Finding and Mapping Writing Center Literature
Presenter(s): Neal Lerner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, Southwestern University
Status: Not Started

During this interactive webcast session, originating from the 2008 IWCA Writing Center Summer Institute, we'll survey the field of writing center literature, identifying and discussing key texts and ideas that helped define and continue to shape the field. We'll do this, in part, with game playing to examine participants' knowledge of writing center literature. Next, we'll move beyond surveys and games to take a critical look at writing center literature and consider such questions as, have some of our founding texts become codifying and limiting, and how can our scholarship reach wider audiences? Finally, we'll walk-through the process of using search engines to locate relevant literature that you'll need either to support the claims you make to colleagues about your work or to pursue your own research. For more information about the 2008 IWCA Writing Center Summer Institute, please visit http://www.wisc.edu/writing/institute/.

Here's a link to the webcast: How Did We Get Here? Finding and Mapping Writing Center Literature.

The Engaged Campus

2008-07-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

I've been a member of the SLCC's Thayne Center for Service & Learning Service Learning Advisory Board (SLAB) for several years now. It is a great place and offers SLCC students and faculty many opportunities to engage in service, and learn from those experiences. In order to engage more faculty, the Thayne Center is starting up a new blog: The Engaged Campus. I'm looking forward to helping them out with getting the blog set up and contributing ideas and posts. It should be a good opportunity for faculty to share ideas. Each month it will have a theme. This is to spur commentary from faculty and drive the blog forward. I suppose contributors could write on what they like, but the theme does keep it focussed.

The long silence

2008-04-10T02:45:00.000-07:00

Pardon my silence, but this has been a rather busy semester. It is sad when I can't even make time to write.

I recently returned from CCCC at New Orleans. The conference was excellent, and I was lucky to attend some very good sessions. I also had the opportunity to be at the IWCA booth with Michele Eodice, as well as to attend the IWCA SIG on Friday evening. I did break away from the conference a couple of times to indulge my passion for photography. I did record a session with Andrea Lunsford, Lisa Ede, Michele Eodice, Kami Day, Michael Spooner, and Kathy Yancey about collaborative writing. It was one of those sessions that gets you thinking, and I've been thinking about what it is we mean by "collaboration" in writing. The idea behind the session was to hear what authors who write together think about collaboration, but, of course, this quickly branched into the notion of what collaborative learning and writing are for our students. I'm hoping to do some writing on the topic (yeah right!) In any case, I recorded the session. I don't think, however, that I'll ask permission to post it on PeerCentered since it doesn't really relate to peer tutoring--or maybe it does.

Hmm.

This weekend, some of the SLCC Peer Writing Advisors and I are headed off to Boise State University for the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference. We are taking our iPod recorders, so we will be recording various sessions for PeerCentered.

Hackers be damned!

2008-02-29T14:40:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, my old and beautiful Undersea template was vunerable to hacking. I've found a new one which allows me to post my own images in the header image. It is a functionally stylish template, but my goldfish image does not convey the breadth that the other one did.

Oh well, at least it conveys the limitations that I often feel.

Start of the semester

2008-02-26T01:46:00.000-08:00

It seems proper to bookend my rather sporadic blogging by posting a binary title for you. In any case, as you might imagine, I've been rather busy this first month-and-a-half of spring semester 2008. Mostly I've been dealing a great deal with class stuff. I've been out of the classroom for nearly two years due to professional, campus, and Student Writing Center commitments, save working with tutor education, and I was feeling a bit rusty at first. It wasn't that I didn't know what I was doing--I am pretty diligent, some might say obsessive about class planning, but I did feel a bit out-of-sorts since it seemed all new to me again. In all I was a bit nervous about that feeling, but then I fell into enjoying it again. I also realized I needed to review my teaching style to reach this particular group of students. They are a bright group who have an interesting perspective on things.

In any case, that's why the long silence.

In other news, I've gone all out, and in true fashion, completely contradicted myself about the facebook.com issue. I've found that there are literally thousands of SLCC students active on facebook, and many, many peer writing tutors in writing centers. I have, therefore, created a facebook group for PeerCentered. It already has quite a few members, although there is not much activity. We'll see. It is, however, the most interest the PeerCentered concept has ever received in its many permutations.

I don't feel too badly in taking this thing to facebook: if that is where people are, then so be it.

End of the semester

2007-12-06T04:18:00.000-08:00

Well I feel compelled to write something, given that it is the end of the semester. I will, therefore, make notes:

One can tell the student who has been working on her or his paper for a long time by the state of their attire. Sweats and bad-hair-day beanies mean the student is pulling an all-nighter to hopefully get the paper done. The well-dressed student who does not have that desperate look in her or his eye is the one who took more time or (I hope this is not the case) such students just don't care.

Something or someone must be trying to hack WordPress, as my administrator account was deleted. Time to upgrade, I suppose.

The end of the semester is notoriously unpredictable. Our rush days came early this week. Now it is relatively quiet.

I am looking forward to getting back into the classroom next semester.

I feel scatter-shot at the moment.

I have a peer review to write that I thought I had finished. I understand why the editors want more now, but at the time I was under the happy delusion that my enthusiastic acceptance of the piece in question was enough.

Random notes on a random day.

Mission

2007-11-06T10:27:00.000-08:00

The International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) of which I have the honor of being president for a week and 3 days has adopted the following mission statement:

The International Writing Centers Association, an NCTE affiliate founded in 1983, fosters the development of writing center directors, tutors, and staff by sponsoring meetings, publications, and other professional activities; by encouraging scholarship connected to writing center-related fields; and by providing an international forum for writing center concerns.

It was the work of a very productive committee lead by Nita Meola. While IWCA's focus has always been on the issues stated, it is nice to have it put down so concisely.

Room for interpretation

2007-10-31T00:49:00.000-07:00

In Profession 2005, a publication of the Modern Language Association, Harvard English professor Louis Menand writes the following in response to an article about string theory that conotates the universe to a bank card:

If you say that the meaning of a poem is indeterminate, you are accused of posing a threat to Western values--often by people who never read poetry. But if you say that the universe is like an ATM card, you get the Nobel Prize. How did humanists get painted into a cultural corner such that everything that a social or natural scientist says that is counterintuitive receives public genuflection, but literature professors are expected to do nothing but reaffirm common sense? ("Dangers Within and Without" 10-11)

and

Faculty members in science and in social science departments tend to regard humanists as reflexively oppositional to what they do and, therefore, as easy to discount. This perception is founded mainly on ignorance. The summaries of the state of ideas in the humanities in books like E.O. Wilson's Consilence and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate are appallingly misinformed, but the ignorance is depressing, since it indicates that humanists have almost completely failed at explaining what they do and why it offers as good a return on social investment as genetics or economics. Humanists feed this perception by reciting predicatable critiques of the claims of science and social science. Our response to anything is, "It's more complicated." They assert X, and we say, "But it's overdetermined." They assert Y, and we say, "But there's a contradiction." They assert Z, and we say, "But the concept is socially constructed or historically contested." Humanities departments have turned into the little boy who cries, "Difference!" Humanities professors are right: there is difference, it always is more complicated, concepts are constructed. But the role of the humanities cannot be that of problematizing this and calling into question that. Humanities professors need to construct alternative paradigms, and if those paradigms are built merely from some notion of the literary, they will blow right over. (13-14)

and

The humanities are the study of life in its cultural dimension, which happens to be the dimension in which every human being actually operates. You can study life in its biological and in its social scientific dimension--that is, you can look at the genetic causes of behavior or at the mehtods by which individuals calculate their political and economic interests--only if you hold culture constant. Culture is no an add-on to the biological and sociological conditions of existence; it is constitutive of species identity. Culture is the medium in which we act, and it is, from a purely rational point of view, always a distorting medium. Culture is why paradigms of social and scientific theory don't work, why people tend never to do what social theory predicts they will do. Kant once said that humanity is a crooked timber from which nothing straight can be cut. That's what humanists study. We study warp. (14-15.)

In the end evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins consider human culture as simply and outgrowth of evolutionary needs. Religion for Dawkins (as he states in the God Delusion) is simply an aberration of some behavior that allows for the species to procreate. He is uncertain what that behavior is, but that's how he sees the world. It is not a far stretch to extend his interpretation of religion to all things cultural. They are all aberrations of, to be blunt, getting laid and having lots of babies. This reductive approach to the world, is what turns people off to science, as we can see in Menand's remarks. Ultimately people, when put under the microscope, squirm and say "but that's not me."

Perhaps that is the heart of the conflict between Humanities and Science: one field wishes to explore the rich complexity of human existence and the other wants to reduce it to data with little chance for misinterpretation in hard and fast theory.

Ah, if it were really that easy. Whoops--there we humanities dupes go again!

Menand, Louis. "Dangers Within and Without." Profession 2005. Ed. Rosemary G. Feal. New York: Modern Language Association, 2005.

Two articles

2007-10-26T03:47:00.000-07:00

I need to remind myself to reflect upon the following articles here at UWCG:

Shor, Ira. "Why Teach about Social Class." Teaching English in the Two-year College. 32:2 (December 2005). 161-170.

Lerner, Neal. "Rejecting the Remedial Brand: The Rise and Fall of the Dartmouth Writing Clinic." CCC. 59:1 (September 2007) 13-35

I found both compelling and highly relevant to my work at a community college.

More later.

Non-native speakers of English survey

2007-10-25T01:41:00.000-07:00

Given that a whopping 47% of our sessions here at the SLCC Student Writing Center are with non-native speakers of English, I decided to conduct a survey of writing center folks on the listserv WCENTER to see how we compare to others around the world. Initial results indicate that the majority of respondents have similar non-native speaker statistics as SLCC. The few community college respondents seem to have even more. I am working with overall numbers from the last 2.5 years, however. Last year's usage was a whopping 61%. I think it has been up considerably over the last couple of years.

PeerCentered podcast season 2

2007-10-23T10:42:00.000-07:00

The second "season" of the PeerCentered podcast begins with where we started, at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW). NCPTW 2007 was held at Penn State and was hosted by the Penn State Center for Excellence in Writing.

I hope that this season will feature more contributors. Harry Denny from St. John's University Writing Center in New York expressed interest in the podcast, and perhaps some of the people now contributing to the PeerCentered blog from the Boise State Writing Center will want to participate.

There is a lot of potential for PeerCentered either as a blog or a podcast. I think I am going to make it my priority after I finish up as IWCA President this November.

"Handouts" wiki

2007-10-23T01:03:00.000-07:00

Recently on WCENTER (the email list for people interested in writing center work) the topic of "handouts" has come up again. This discussion has occurred previously and IWCA established a "handouts" web site committee to develop a web site that would house resources for the writing center community. I rather liked that idea, but felt that the usefulness of the web site would be considerably constrained if it were bottle-necked through an overworked web master or site editor.

Given my role as IWCA Web Editor at that time, I proposed the use of a wiki to solve the bottle-necking problem. Almost immediately, however, a disagreement arose about the academic rigor of such a site if it were left completely open to anyone and (perhaps) everyone editing it. I believe that this concern is valid, but I also think that constraining the wiki to a select group of editors has stifled the project.

This morning, therefore, I took it upon myself to try to revamp the IWCA Handouts Resource wiki by placing a very specific disclaimer on the page that states that IWCA does not vouch for the content for authenticity or endorse any particular method described. I also noted very specifically that the site is open to anyone to edit, not just a select few. I think this is the only way that the resource is going to develop. No doubt there will be bad information provided and approaches that others don't endorse. I believe, however, that such conflict will work itself out collaboratively. If we have to flag pages as problematic, then that decision will be made collaboratively.

Boise State Booyah!

2007-09-26T01:05:00.000-07:00

The new writing tutors at the Boise State University Writing Center are carrying on quite the dialog over at PeerCentered. It has been a few years since PeerCentered has been as active as this, and I'm not sure it ever had such a cogent discussion of peer tutoring before. I hope that it will keep up for the whole academic year and that more folks get involved.

"Navigating the Cultures of Campus: Academic Writing and the ESL Student"

2007-09-07T01:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a conference concerning ESL issues (I've appropriated the title as the title of this post) sponsored by the University of Utah University Writing Program. Unfortunately due to prior commitments I could not attend the entire day, and will be unable to attend the sessions at all today. Diane Belcher was the keynote speaker, and gave a fine, practical, yet theoretically-based presentation on common ESL issues. Her presentation inspired me to talk to the chair of the English department here at SLCC in perhaps having English or the Writing Program Council invite her to SLCC to carry forward the work we've been doing for that last few years in having our colleagues from across the campus in non-writing fields to understand that we are all, indeed, teachers of language, and we all have a responsibility to respond adequately and fairly to those less-experienced in the English language than native speakers.

I was also very impressed at the conference with the panel of L2 graduate students who spoke about their experiences in American academia as non-native speakers/writers of English. I think I took them off-guard a bit with this question: "What kind of feedback on your writing do you find useful, and what kind do you find useless or even harmful." Their answers were quite revealing. One stated that a lack of cultural sensitivity on the part of an instructor was harmful. Another stated that he found general comments useless, and liked it when someone pointed out a pattern of error, and explained what was going on. Another pointed out that she liked to receive possible options for recasting sentence-level issues. Finally they all agreed that they found comments that caused them to think more to be the most useful.

Overall I was struck by the important point that Belcher and the panel of students made by echoing Bruffee: all students (even if they are non-native speakers) are new to academic uses of language. It is our job to bring them into that language group. I would go further to say that it is our job and it is also important to encourage students to explore and expand that discourse community.

Starting up

2007-08-22T02:57:00.000-07:00

Ah beginnings. I wrote this on PeerCentered moments ago:

It has always struck me as ironic that fall is the time when school traditionally starts given that fall is the time for crops to be harvested, the hard freeze to hit, and the squaring away of everything for a long winter. Even if late August feels nothing like fall, I still sense the hint of autumn in the way the light plays out over the land and the distinct chill in the early morning air as I hurry off to the bus stop to start up yet another school year.

Fall is, of course, spring for education. It is when students start anew and hope abounds.

It would be interesting to explore the opposition that academia (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) creates between itself and nature. Beginnings for academia, as I noted above, are traditionally in the fall and endings are in the spring. One could argue, of course, that traditional academia is quite in tune with nature in that it takes inside activities at a time when nature is least hospitable to being outside or growing things.

Anyway, just wandering around my mind on this fine pre-fall morning, full of new students looking for their classes.

One busy summer

2007-08-11T05:16:00.000-07:00

I've been a particular slacker in my blogging this summer. That is unfortunate, because I think I do have a great deal to report.

I shall summarize it, however in an ordered list, and will get back to it when I am not on vacation:

We completed our Student Writing Center advertising video. It is a bit stilted at times, but that gives it a bit of charm or perhaps just reality. The Peer Writing Advisers (from now on to be called PWAs) collaborated on it quite effectively, I think.

We have hired 6 new PWAs. Staff education begins in earnest the first week of the semester.

The Student Writing Center was the lucky recipient of two iMacs, two iPods, and a new video camera to create useful online resources for student writers and writing advisers.

We wrapped up a successful summer of tutoring.

We conducted a workshop on self-reflective writing in order to improve how students make use of it for their portfolios. It was the first thing recorded with the iPod technology and is currently distributed to the PWAs and Faculty Writing Advisers (FWAs) via passworded podcast. I apologize that I cannot make it open to the whole world, but I don't think that is fair to the participants.

I had the honor to be the outside reviewer of Lansing Community College's (LCC) Capital Writing Institute last week. I also conducted a program review for the LCC Writing Center. It was great to get work with Jill Pennington, LCC WC director, for more than just the few days I normally see her at various conferences.

Keeping track

2007-07-09T04:30:00.000-07:00

After a moderately slow June, the Student Writing Center is hopping now. June gave me a chance to map out several projects I want to engage in over the next year:

participate in SLCC's push to join iTunes you by creating audio and video podcasts that would be useful for student writers

coordinate a new push to have faculty develop new resources for the Student Writing Center

create a video orientation (in cahoots with number 1 above) for both our online and in-person response services

the writing center movie project I discussed early on the UWofCG
consider methods to record and distribute advising sessions to student writers via mp3/iPod

I've also been discussing with my IWCA colleagues various issues that have come up about publications as well as our fall agenda. We went into recess just a few short weeks ago, so it has slowed down considerably on the IWCA front.

Now, of course, what interest might a reader find in this? Probably nothing. As I mentioned in the first post, the UWofCG is a tool that I want to make use of to keep track of things. I think, in fact, I've missed a couple of projects I'm thinking of above. That's a shame.

Writing Center Videos

2007-05-21T06:38:00.000-07:00

Given that I'm working on a couple of video projects (one currently in production with my colleague Tiffany Rousculp and one in pre-planning stage), I've been interested in what others have done related to writing centers. Most of the videos found on Youtube are advertisements for writing center work. There are a couple of humorous ones out there (1, and 2) but one serious one stands out in that it seems to define writing center work quite well is from Evergreeen State:

.

I like how they've taken the voice and integrated it with the image.

The small conference & IWCA

2007-05-09T02:01:00.000-07:00

English Department colleague Jason Pickavance recently had an article published on insidehighered.com where he explores the benefits of smaller conferences:

Here’s what you won’t find at TYCA-West or most other smaller, regional conferences. You won’t be subjected to the name-badge-glance-and-turn, a move I’ve always for some reason viewed as akin to a basketball player’s expert pivot. (If only the Utah Jazz center could pivot like that.) Instead, you will encounter colleagues at peer institutions genuinely interested to meet you and hear what you have to say.

I've found that this is true of the International Writing Centers Association Conference as well (to an extent.) When I first stated attending IWCA, I was pleased that there were folks there whom I had known online or (and this increased the gulp factor) people I admired for their published work. I had the opportunity to become a part of a community (or to use more academic parliance--a discourse community.) By allowing for such access, I believe we make our field stronger and more diverse, with scholars exploring a variety of matters from differeing perspectives.

Of course one must be careful not to confuse building a community with molly-coddling. Ideas must be callenged and tested in order to bear out. We must challenge each other in a community in order to grow (to use a over-used analogy.) Of course we also must consider old paradigms and how the dialectical model of confrontation might not necessarily be the best method for a field to grow. What I'm getting at, I guess, is that while we don't have to always just affirm each other's ideas (that can be damaging in the long run) I also don't think we need to be constantly tearing each other's ideas apart at the seams. Is there a third path?

In any case, I certainly hope that as IWCA grows we maintain the small conference feel that Pickavance mentions above.

Rubber tree plant

2007-05-09T01:52:00.000-07:00

SLCC President Cynthia Bioteau and SLCC Developmental Education Division Chair discussed the roll of a community college in general and the role of SLCC in particular yesterday on KCPW. (Click on the bottom link.) This was in response to the PBS/Learning Matters documentary Discounted Dreams: High Hopes and Harsh Realities at America's Community Colleges. I haven't had the opporunity to see the documentary yet, and will not comment directly on it at this time.

Summer movies

2007-05-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

My colleague Tiffany Rousculp (of the SLCC Community Writing Center) and I are making a short video of our tutor alumni. We got it down to the 5 minutes we're seeking today and I'm quite pleased with the results. The movie will be shown to the SLCC Board of Trustees because we want to show them that the work that goes on in a writing center has a broader impact than just on the student or community writers who go to our respective centers. Our purpose is to demonstrate that peer writing consultants learn a great deal and are, indeed, shaped by their writing center experiences.

I will probably post the final version of the video on PeerCentered, since it is about peer tutoring.

Summer in the center

2007-05-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

Summer is a great season in the Student Writing Center, but not because it is a "less busy" time of the year. While there are proportionally fewer students taking summer classes, and SLCC is only open 4 days a week, we have a considerably smaller staff of writing advisers and student writers are often working fast and furious to complete their assignments on the compressed 11 or 8 week syllabus. One could argue (and I could research this statistically) that we are busier than a normal semester in the Student Writing Center.

The fact that we're busy, however, doesn't deter from the fact that we get more non-tutoring work (thinking about the Center, developing programs, creating advertising, etc.) done in the summer time than any other. Part of me wants to attribute this productivity to peer writing advisers being so busy that the energy from that work spills over into a desire to do more. I believe that may be the case for some of the work, but I must admit that I think the real cause of this productivity is that usually none of the staff are taking classes during the summer. The lack-of-class thing includes me as well, since I rarely teach during the summer (although I've been known to do it.) What I'm getting to is that taking classes and teaching them does take away from the work that one can give to a Center.

There is a discussion going on about teaching, load, and community college writing center directors on WCENTER. I am surprised at the loads that some folk's carry. For example, one person stated that she teaches something like 15 hours instead of the normal 18 hour load. 18 hours! Oy vey!

I hold firm in the belief that load can make or break a writing center and a writing center director. While I don't hold that a writing center should orbit around a director, I do assert that the type of collaborative leadership a writing center director should provide is severely hampered by being overloaded with traditional classes. A writing center is an alternative learning environment from the classroom. It is also a place where peer tutors can and do learn. Writing center work should be counted as teaching load for the director, not just some side-line (but necessary) administrative duty like doing the scheduling for a department. Directing a writing center is teaching.

Load is probably just as important a concern for peer tutors given that they are uber productive on other projects in the summer simply because they are no mired in their own course work, but I'll save that meditation for another time.

Yet another side project? or "Aye Calypso we sing to your spirit!"

2007-05-02T04:06:00.000-07:00

"How many side projects to I really need?" I thought to myself while riding the train in to campus today. " I mean my hell! Do you really need another blog?" I've been wanting to fiddle around with WordPress more lately, given that it is the system that is currently in use on writingcenters.org. And I needed an index for my account on the Student Writing Center's web server, Bessie (there is a history behind that name that I will explore at some point on UWCG.) I've been meaning to develop my account on that server given that all my previous professional work was removed from our old Student Writing Center web site because of a change over in how the web server works and general Community College policies. I find that people ask me questions that could easily be answer by a site like this, and I want to organize my work in ways that help me to understand it and, more importantly, remember it!

I am anticipating that any reader who would stumble upon this fine corner of sheer academic egoism is going to ask "why the title?" Here's the story: when I was setting up WordPress, I got to the point when it asked for what I wanted to call the site. Initially I typed in "Clint Gardner" and immediately erased it as it kind of meant the page was me or I was the page. I then typed in "About Clint Gardner" and hit the backspace key immediately upon hitting the final "r" in my name. That was even worse and perhaps misleading since a text such as this site isn't just about me. I want the site to work for me.

So at that point I was really stumped. I started running through all the clever quotations I could think of from writing center research, comp/rhet studies etc. I pulled out Beth Boquet's Noise from the Writing Center and flipped through the pages. It then struck me that it would be awfully brazen to pull a catch phrase or a quotation from a fellow writing center colleague and use it as my own, so I put aside that idea, although Noise from the Writing Center would be a great name for a blog. (I would really love to see Beth create a blog with that title!)

Finally I turned to where I always turn for inspiration and ideas: poetry. Garcia Lorca came to mind as did De Cervantes. Nothing. I flipped through Larkin, Frost, Levin, Pinsky, h.d., Bishop and more but nothing struck me and it all just started to seem pretty pretentious and, frankly, stupid.

I was stuck, and just about to scrap the whole idea of using a blog to manage my academic affairs/projects when suddenly the opening sequence of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau popped into my head. Don't ask me why, but I saw the bright yellow credits in that odd blocky type that Wes Anderson imitated so well in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

That random thought made me laugh and then I said it out loud: "The Undersea World of Clint Gardner: Nothing to do with oceanography in the slightest." I laughed again and decided that had to be it--I mean one can only take one's work so seriously, after all. Levity is a great leveler and a check upon one's vanity and ego. Analogically, I suppose it does reflect my desire to find adventure in my work, as well as to explore ideas that are un- or under-explored.

So that's the official launch, I guess. I don't have a champagne bottle to smash on my fancy new WordPress Calypso, however.