Favorites?
While everyone agreed that there were excellent sessions held each day of the conference, we all had our personal favorites. Some chose a favorite based on the interesting content presented, and others chose a favorite based on its pedagogical implications. To view a schedule for the conference, we invite you to visit the ECCTYC website.
posted by Emalsam | 9:05 AM
5 Comments:
I was inspired by the panel called "Research: Collaborative, Engaging, and Significant." Georgia Pierce Williams from CSU Fresno has developed a really interesting group research project. She has her students pick a research topic related to auto-ethnographies that they write early in the semester, and then she puts them into research groups according to their area of research. As a group they develop their own research plan and assessment criteria so that all group members feel assured that the work they do will be recognized; she shared these with us and they were very interesting.
Listening to her and the others talk, I wrote down a bunch of ideas for my own research project. The ideas I had were different from but inspired by what they had to say. That is what I like about going to conferences…I like getting into the zone where teaching and academic ideas are circulating. While in my routine, I am so focused on maintaining organization and deadlines, that creativity can be elusive. Attending a conference like this one stirs up the regiment in my mind.
I really liked “Text-Based Analysis for Developmental Writing and Freshman Composition Courses,” an approach to the claim/quotation/comment formula, partly because of the practical nature of the session, partly because of the crowd-participation aspect of the presentation, and also because of the laid back attitude and camaraderie of the presenters.
I was with Deborah at the panel she mentioned called “Standards and Expectations for Freshman Composition,” and I found that session to be the most valuable and interesting overall. While the session did not provide the kinds of practical tips I usually appreciate the most, the session did deliver the kind of information that its title promises. Since this is my first year teaching freshman composition at a community college, the list of standards put out by TYCA’s committee (which Deborah mentioned) was interesting to me, and it turned out to be reassuring as well. I was glad to see that what I’ve been doing in my course is what’s expected in terms of the articulation between CCC, CSU and UC curricula. This was one of the things I found at a number of sessions: even when they didn’t introduce a new idea, they reaffirmed familiar ones, and that was comforting. What wasn’t comforting were the striking statistics offered with regard to expectations for freshman composition. I was struck by these statistics in particular: the projected growth for CCC for 2013 is 29.2% (or 478,009 students). Moreover, the report states that “30-40% of increased demand will not be met due to capacity limitations.” In contrast to this growth in students, the report points out how little funding CC receives. Under “30 year growth and increases,” it lists these numbers: “UC 23%, CSU 24%, CC 4%.”
I particularly enjoyed the session in which I was, unfortunately, one of the only attendees. The first presentation was interesting because the presented scholarship included information on how the presenter had applied for and received an NEH grant, something that I would be interested in applying for at a later date. The second presentation was where it really started to get interesting...the gentleman presenting used a program called NICENET, which I was previously unaware of, that helped to connect two classrooms, one in southern California and the other in Cairo, Egypt. The prospect of connecting two cultures, two perspectives, and two classrooms (across an ocean, nonetheless) is really exciting. For my purposes, it would be interesting to host a NICENET website and invite participation from outside sources: classrooms in outside disciplines, community members from various career paths, or I could target a specific group of people, for instance, while reading Haroun, I could search out scholars on MidEast politics, religions, philosophy, etc. Technology is an area that I often find myself gravitating; therefore, it was no surprise that this presentation ended up being my favorite.
I particularly enjoyed the session entitled "Improving Peer Evaluation: The Peer Analysis Essay." In fact, I liked this idea so much that I came home and revised my last English 50 essay assignment because I think this assignment will go a long way toward helping prepare them for English 101. The basic concept is that students, working in pairs, write an essay to their partner in which they evaluate one of their partner's already-graded essays. The peer evaluator does not see the graded copy of the essay he or she is evaluating, and the writer of the essay being evaluated does not see the comments his or her peer makes on the essay. Instead, the evaluator writes a review of the essay (usually in 3rd person), but the audience is the student writer. Having students write a peer review essay has many benefits, but perhaps the most valuable one is that it provides them the opportunity for much deeper interaction with the grading criteria.
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