Category: Conferences

MITESOL 2016: Radical Tolerance

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This conference was one of my most memorable. Jolene Jaquays did an incredible job organizing this year. Everywhere I turned I heard people remarking on her attention to detail and the way things came together. The theme, The Changing Faces of Diversity, was so timely and challenging. I was happy to see how so many in our membership were able to think critically about our field through this lens. Diane Larsen-Freeman was the keynote speaker and her talk was fabulous. She planned her presentation especially for our conference theme and collected evidence for diversity as it benefits those within an organization (or complex system). As expected, she spoke well and captivated the audience, but what struck me most was how personable and kind she was throughout the reset of the conference. Diane attended all of the sessions. She was even present during mine!

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My presentation was on a topic I have long hoped to discuss at a TESOL conference: feminist pedagogy. I started my academic career with a women’s studies focus, so the move to teaching English language learners felt like a step away from that path. I assumed that in TESOL I would have to depoliticize my teaching and that I would never be able to tie together all of my teaching and research interests. Fortunately, I was quite wrong.

Presentation Slides

Handout

Thank you to everyone who attended my session. You were all so engaged and wonderful to talk with. Here are the results of our post-presentation survey:

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I hope to see you at TESOL 2017 where I will be speaking on the IC/ITA/ILGBT Intersection panel about radical acceptance. Our panel title is How to Manage, Facilitate, and Teach about Culturally Sensitive Issues. 

2014 Quarter Report

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Some student, Jason, and I at our Origami Conversation Hour.
Some students, Jason, and I at our Origami Conversation Hour.

Wowza. This has been some year. To keep this manageable, I’ll just list some of the major events.

Conferences:

  • Accepted to Michigan Academy of Arts, Science, and Letters to present my work on the Green Golden Age of spinsters in American regionalist fiction in March (couldn’t attend due to scheduling conflicts).
  • Accepted to present a chapter of my thesis at the International Virginia Woolf Conference in Chicago this June.
  • Accepted to present on the use of contact zones to facilitate reading/writing instruction at the Great Lakes Conference on Teaching and Learning here at CMU in May.
  • Although technically not a conference, I presented some work on L2 writing feedback at a faculty meeting that my co-presenters and I plan to adapt into a conference presentation for MITESOL and TESOL next year.

Travel:

  • I’ve seen a good chunk of the mitten this year. Traverse City for my birthday, several trips to Grand Rapids for records/yarn, and many planned trips to the beach this summer.
  • Going home for a bit in April. I’ll get the chance to see friends and family and reconnect with the people I care about the most.
  • Chicago in June for the Woolf conference. This trip is extremely exciting for me. I’m going to spend the time attending the conference, touring museums, visiting sites I haven’t seen during my other trips to Chicago, and taking in the more intellectual side of the city.
  • My family is taking a trip to England and Wales this summer. My grandmother has kindly decided to fund this trip so we can enjoy some quality time together. She has spent very little time outside of Laclede county, so my grandmother is more excited about this trip than anything else in her life. I’m so happy for her. We’re touring the Raglan castle in Wales which is said to be where my Grandmother’s family came from.

Professional:

  • I’m now working on my M.A. TESOL at CMU. I’m trying to take two courses a semester until I graduate. I’m moving a little slower, but I think Clint and I should graduate at the same time.
  • Taking these classes is a little bit of a challenge, however, because I’m also working full-time in the ELI. I can balance the two, but it’s not a walk in the park. I keep telling myself, “You can do anything, even the most awful, unimaginable, stressful craziness for two years. It’s just two years.” I hope I’m right!
  • This is hard to categorize, but this year I feel like I’ve become exponentially better at teaching. I’m creating a large portion of my materials myself, I’m juggling three different levels successfully, and I’m experimenting with methods to find what works for me. I think my students are benefiting from my dedication, and I’m doing a much better job maintaining the standards my department holds. Language teaching is infinitely different from teaching composition or literature to native speakers. I’ve had to reinvent the wheel, but now it’s rolling smoothly.
  • This might seem silly, but I’m finally financially stable enough to buy a Macbook Pro. I used to be a strict Linux fangirl, but I’ve changed my ways (due to certain software restrictions and the ease of grading) and want something reliable that just works. I knew the iPhone would be a gateway drug!

Whew! I wonder what other incredible things will happen this year?

 

The Home Stretch

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Compulsory Space Needle image.

Today I signed up for my last semester of classes as a master’s student. I am taking a course entitled Regionalism, Race, and Nationalism in Late 19th and Early 20th c. American Fiction taught by Dr. Donna Campbell. I am looking forward to this class as well as an opportunity to shadow Dr. Leeann Hunter‘s Women Writers course. What an exciting spring!

Earlier this fall I presented at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association‘s conference in Seattle. I had a fantastic time exploring the city and presenting my paper. My presentation employed Judith Halberstam’s theory of Queer Temporality on the Victorian prostitute and explored the ways in which women of the time could have used prostitution as a means to agency. My paper was very well-received. I was lucky enough to present on one of three Women and Work panels, led by Dr. Susanne Weil. I love presenting my work and this was perhaps the most supportive and fun conference I’ve attended. The keynote was Sandra Cisneros who put on a spectacular reading of some of her poems and her most recent work Have You Seen Marie? Her spirit and energy had the whole crowd in tears and was personally moving and inspirational.

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In our hotel before my presentation at PAMLA.

The primary theme of this semester has been self-motivation. I have started waking up around 6AM every morning in order to take full advantage of each and every day. Through this I have been able to integrate a daily writing regime, better time management skills, and a more self-reliant and affordable daily routine (making my own breakfast, lunch, coffee, and tea.) This leaves me with more time in the evenings to do the things I love like knitting, baking, and mindlessly watching television with my partner.

The primary motivation for this new schedule is my thesis. I am two chapters in at this point and I feel confident that I will finish by my self-imposed February 1st deadline. My committee is made up of three wonderful WSU faculty members and I am excited to hear more feedback as my writing progresses. My thesis is about Virginia Woolf’s use of  écriture féminine mecanique, my thoroughly modernist reinvention of Cixous and Kristeva’s paramount theory of bodily women’s writing. I am tentatively using To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Orlando as my textual foundations. I’ll keep the blog up to date with further developments!

Conferences, Composition, and Conversation, oh my!

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What a whirlwind of a semester!

Daniela, Me, Aree, Sarah, and Owen after our presentation at LSU’s Mardi Gras Conference.

Since my last update I presented at LSU’s Mardi Gras Conference with several of my colleagues. We formed a panel entitled BAM! POW! CRASH!: The Under-Appreciated Power of Comics as Social Texts. My paper was on David B.’s Epileptic and discussed his work as applied to disability studies. My paper title was “Seizures, Samurai, and Saving the Family: Epileptic’s Reappropriation of Disability Stereotypes” and I feel like the panel was well-received. I enjoyed attending this graduate level conference, but look forward to pursuing larger and more prominent conferences in the upcoming semesters.

My ENGL 101 course is going well. I have been struggling to keep up with my grading, but that pain is self-inflicted. Seven writing assignments in a semester? Never again! The students seem to have enjoyed the format of the course otherwise, so I will be integrating some of my original ideas into my next syllabus with much more sensible applications. I have loved teaching Composition this semester and cannot wait to be able to focus my energies exclusively on teaching.

I received word today that I was accepted to a position at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, ID this summer working for their Institute of Intensive English where I will be tutoring and monitoring the language lab as well as teaching a Conversation course. This will be a fantastic opportunity to work with international students and experience an ELL classroom. Wonderful professional development and well worth the hour commute.

Additionally, I will be participating in the grading positions the university offers to 101 instructors. In this position I will be reading entrance exams and placing the students into an introductory composition course. This job will be sporadic and I will only be able to attend about a session a week due to conflicts with my IIE job, but it seems like a great way to experience the testing side of college composition.

I have submitted proposals to a few semi-local conferences for next semester including but not limited to PAMLA and Sirens.

I’ll try to keep the blog updated more frequently in the future.