tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88872772992759797972024-03-10T12:49:00.442-05:00State of Mind:Adventures in Place-Conscious TeachingKaren Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.comBlogger150125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-44776686880690020462016-01-01T14:15:00.000-06:002016-06-25T14:16:03.946-05:00Blog on HiatusThanks for following us through the world of place-conscious teaching. The blog is on hiatus now, with no new posts planned.Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-22459170250746286832015-09-16T09:50:00.000-05:002015-09-16T10:14:25.229-05:00990/1200/1201: Literacy Narrative Rough DraftsMy student, S., writes upside down. Literally, she turns her paper upside down and forms her letters in a way I've never seen before.<br>
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My student, B., told me on the first day of class he had no intention of buying the book or reading it.<br>
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My student M. thinks this class is beneath him and keeps trying to trap me on loopholes.<br>
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J. can't come to class because her baby is sick.<br>
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A. has been homeless for most of his adolescence and may be the best natural poet I've ever encountered.<br>
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I have Liberian refugees in my classes, some brought over as children, some the children of refugees. Some have lived in north Minneapolis, a historically black and low-income area, for several generations. I have Hmong students whose parents are nervous that they're losing their language. My students are low-income, first-generation, some who take advantage of North Hennepin's food bank because they are hungry. Some think of community college as an easy alternative to classes taken elsewhere.<br>
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To say that my students are diverse is an understatement. To a one, however, their lives are focused elsewhere, away from where they come from. They may be escaping war, maybe poverty. Some are looking for a change in their lives. Every day, my pedagogy and I are being challenged--mostly in really good ways. I've been wanting to work with more diverse students since I taught in the W.H. Thompson Scholars program at UNL.<br>
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Primarily, I've noticed that the resistance I'm facing is largely fear-related. Many of my students are in my class (which is in the Baltimore model of composition, with developmental students in the same classroom as non-developmental students) have had terrible experiences with English classes and most of them believe that they cannot write, they hate to read, and to say reading and writing are boring is much easier than admitting that they struggle or that they're afraid to risk in their writing.<br>
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They're turning in the rough drafts of their first Writing Project, a literacy narrative, and seeing their work in the last four weeks, I know that many of them started off enjoying reading as children, but hated being told what to read in middle school and high school. Most of them have had bad experiences with writing, particularly high school teachers telling them that their grammar is bad or that they're not good at writing. (Which just makes my blood boil--who does that?!) And one bad experience turns them off writing and reading for life. I know that they're working an uphill battle in terms of content here.<br>
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I've noticed that the students most in need of my help are the ones who are most resistant, the ones who show up chronically unprepared, or don't show up at all. Retention is on my mind, but I want to keep them in the class because they need it on a broader level. I'm still struggling with the best way to do that.<div><br></div><div>One major change to my pedagogy is a much more committed effort to the scaffolding of assignments. A Think Piece leads directly into their rough draft. We do a worksheet-led activity on the Think Piece to help them expand into the rough draft. I've never used worksheets so prolifically before, but I learned early that with so many ELL students, they need a moment to think through the day's actity. My main strategy in rough draft workshops is for students to read aloud, but I'm needing to come up with a more effective strategy--and today, they're being guided by a worksheet. </div><div><br></div><div>My student, T., is nontraditional and emails me that she wants to be in another group, because her group spends their time talking about how much they don't want to be in the class.</div><div><br></div><div>My student R., is Hmong and a member of the active duty military.</div><div><br></div><div>I have seriously underestimated the emotional component to teaching seven classes at NHCC. The teaching part, the pedagogy, the ability to reform class activities in my head because of immediate needs--that I've got covered. It's my student who's food insecure, my student without health insurance for her sick baby, the ones coming out of war zones--that I am finding very difficult. Rewarding, as I'm working my way through each class and marveling at the unique perspectives they're finding more courage to share, but it's not without its toll.</div><div><br></div><div>Week 4, done. I'm really excited to see where the rest of the semester goes.</div>Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-83488968815932280252015-09-03T08:40:00.001-05:002015-09-03T08:53:14.582-05:00Mary Pipher: First Pages, Drowned Children, Trains and NumbersI'm starting this blog post before I go to campus to teach my second section of 990/1200/1201 because it feels important, because I'm on my second pot of tea and trying to clear cobwebs from my brain and an anvil on my chest.<br />
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Yesterday, we started talking about Mary Pipher's book <i>The Middle of Everywhere</i>, about refugees in Lincoln, Nebraska, and even though it came out nearly fifteen years ago, it still feels familiar, especially in my new Twin Cities home where refugees have also been rehomed. I've been watching discussions in my former home of Fargo/Moorhead, where officials are working to rehome 250-some refugees and F/M objecting, for reasons that are stupid and xenophobic. We're talking about literacy in my classes, how what we consider literacy changes from one context to the next, how we think of ourselves and what we know as important.<br />
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Yesterday, our discussion was relatively benign. We started with a free writing: <i>this book is now fairly old. Is it still relevant? How should we think about it?</i><br />
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We acknowledged current inflammatory rhetoric about immigration.<br />
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In our small group discussions, one of the questions I posed to one of the groups was <i>what is our responsibility to refugees? What is the responsibility of the government? What is the responsibility of charities</i>, like Lutheran Social Services, who are working so hard with refugees in Fargo/Moorhead? Years ago, my sister worked for The Advocates for Human Rights in Minneapolis, taking statements from Liberian refugees for the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.<br />
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Many of my students are Liberian.<br />
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Today, I'm about to repeat the same discussion over the same material with a different group of students, but the divide between yesterday and today is immense.<br />
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Yesterday, the photograph of the tiny Syrian boy named Aylan, drowned and washed up on a beach, splashed across all of my news sites and my social media. It achieved what it was meant to: I saw my nephew in that boy and I can't rid myself of that image. I don't consider myself to be overly emotional, but I don't even know if I can form vocalizations t<span style="font-family: inherit;">o talk about that in class today. And yet, I need to find a way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Yesterday, I saw <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/czech-police-haul-migrants-off-trains-to-germany-and-write-numbers-on-their-arms-in-ink-10482651.html" target="_blank">an article </a>about Czech police stopping trains of migrants: "Pictures in Czech media showed police officers writing registration numbers on the wrists and arms of migrants with permanent marker pens, while the refugees themselves told reporters they were travelling from Budapest, had purchased valid train tickets and were allowed to board by police in Hungary." </span><br />
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Yesterday, I saw a photograph of a boat filled with people and the caption: "If you want to stop refugees from Syria, Iran, and Iraq, quit bombing their homes."<br />
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Yesterday, I saw <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/more-than-11000-icelanders-offer-to-house-syrian-refugees-to-help-european-crisis-10480505.html" target="_blank">an article about Iceland</a> wanting to increase the number of refugees it allows into the country, with quotes from citizens about wanting to take refugees into their homes.<br />
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Today, when I ask my students what is our responsibility to refugees, it won't be benign.<br />
<br />Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-6452829310354030222015-09-02T08:10:00.002-05:002015-09-02T08:10:53.918-05:00Where I'm From, NHCC Edition: Up North<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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I started classes last week and I've been pondering this blog post since that first day. I'm teaching two sections of the combined developmental/general composition (990/1200/1201) and they really are everything I hoped they would be in terms of stretching my teaching experience. My students are a wonderful mix of ethnic groups and experiences; refugees, some recent, some brought over as children; immigrants, recent and not; all ages. Their first writing assignment was "A Short History of My Reading and Writing Life," while responding to Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts" and Marie Foley's "Unteaching the Five-Paragraph Essay." I don't know why I expected resistance from them in that assignment, that I expected to read how much they hated reading and writing, how boring it was--probably because that's been my experience with my more privileged students--but that wasn't the case. My students miss class for court dates and I know they're more likely to be fighting for custody of their children than they are appearing for an underage DUI. My students don't have their education as their first priority--and that's not a lever I can use, like I could with my more privileged students--education is only one part of their lives. They had wonderful stories to tell (that will make for excellent seeds for their first writing project) and even that little glimpse into who they are--I tell them that their weekly Think Pieces are my favorite part of the week and I'm absolutely not kidding.<br />
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We're starting our Writing Project 1 (Literacy History Narrative) with a <a href="http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html" target="_blank">"Where I'm From"</a> poem, something I've never taught before. In fact, I've never taught literacy narratives before--so this is all new to me. But there's something here that I didn't expect: what I'm learning is that when I asked my students to identify where they're from on the first day of class, I learned that there's the Cities and its environs and "Up North." I'm from Up North a couple of them said, because they knew that their classmates wouldn't know where they came from. It's a thing here, I'm learning, to say you're from Up North, as if there isn't anything of importance outside the metro area. Maybe there isn't or maybe it's just a foreign concept to live outside an urban area. I don't know--but it really is a thing here. I know that when we talk about politics, we talk about the Metro area and "greater Minnesota," but actually living here, I'm starting to see how that mentality is being shaped and how it's actually playing out. Intellectually, it's fascinating--especially as it's a completely different mentality from teaching at Concordia, where most of my students came from rural areas.<br />
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The learning curve is steep for me here, in a good way. Last Wednesday wasn't a great day in my 1200/1201 class, where one student told me in the middle of class that he had no intention of buying the books and no intention of reading them. Another student was arrogant to the point of serious disrespect. I left that class wondering what I'd gotten myself into. Intellectually, I know that resistance in composition classes is often bred of fear--and so that's a good thing to remember. But Monday redeemed everything, made me remember why I'm a teacher and why I don't know that I could be as happy doing anything else.<br />
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One of my girls in my 1200/1201 class hung back after our 990 (after the 1200/1201, we have our developmental class, which is 50 minutes with just the ten students who are in 990/1200), and I'd reminded them of the reading assignment for Wednesday, which is the introduction and first two chapters of Mary Pipher's book about refugees in Lincoln, Nebraska, The Middle of Everywhere. She said she'd read the book over the weekend--she didn't mean to read the whole thing, but before she knew it, she was done. It was so interesting, she said. That makes my little teacher heart go pitty-pat, I said--so many of their first Think Pieces identified that they started to hate reading when teachers forced them to read books they didn't want to read. And here I am, requiring them to read a book I think is interesting, that fits into what we're talking about, and I hope against hope that they find it valuable--but it really means a lot for them to say that out loud.<br />
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(In my literature class later that day, one of my guys walked out (we'd discussed Edgar Allan Poe) and said, "I used to think Poe was so boring! And now I think he's amazing!")<br />
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Yesterday, in my TR class (different section from the MW), we were discussing definitions of literacy and I mentioned my niece, who just started Spanish immersion kindergarten and was finding it difficult on a lot of levels, both in language and not knowing anybody, and one of my students said she had a cousin in Chinese immersion who would come home and try to speak Chinese to them, but her family couldn't understand her. She'd try to speak Chinese to her grandparents, but they don't speak it anymore.<br />
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I can't wait for their "Where I'm From" poems--and I straight-up can't wait for their literacy narratives. This is going to be amazing.Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-27438743655077511562015-08-21T08:56:00.000-05:002015-08-21T08:57:59.874-05:00Final Friday Prep<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
It's the Friday before classes start and I'm starting to get an idea of what I'm doing next week. Tis the life of an adjunct to have one's schedule up in the air even to the last minute. I'm learning flexibility here. I'm thrilled to teach the composition here, because it's one of the few places in the country that's using this model of separating out its developmental students from its classes. I think it's brilliant--we all learn more when we are challenged by our peers, see models of work and behavior we want to emulate, and I much prefer talking about writing students in terms of what they bring to a classroom, rather than their "deficiencies." </div>
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So, I'm teaching a 990/1200/1201 course, which is six credits for me. All 25 students take 1200/1201 together (the code difference has to do with the 990 component) and then the 990 students take two extra hours a week with me. Everybody's doing the same thing, with a little extra attention to the 990 students. I plan to approach this like there's no difference between the "developmental" and the "regular" students, not even calling attention to the way that the class is set up. We are who we are. </div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1A6__HssHW8/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1A6__HssHW8?feature=player_embedded" style="clear: left; float: left;" width="320"></iframe>Today, as I'm trying to figure out how to use D2L, finalize my syllabus (or at least the first two weeks of each class), I'm also thinking about new ways to start off the semester. Since I'm thinking so strongly about highlighting student strengths, I think I'm going to have Colaiste Lurgan playing as they walk in. We're talking about cultural literacy in the first couple of weeks in my comp class and though we're talking about refugees (Mary Pipher's The Middle of Everywhere) and Hmong refugees in St. Paul (Kao Kalia Yang's The Latehomecomer), what Colaiste Lurgan does with its students is terrific. Irish is compulsory in Ireland and many kids go to these summer schools for immersion experiences so that they can pass the requirements. Naturally, many kids hate this. But a few years ago, the administrations decided to translate popular songs into Irish and make music videos of them--and whatever the students' strengths are, they're incorporated. Voice, dance, fiddle, and more. The way this one activity--whose goal is to strengthen language--also strengthens students' beliefs in what they bring to a group, that's terrific. And it's what I want to do this semester in this class. It's going to be a fun one. </div>
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We had two days of workshops this week, as many others did, and hearing all the great things NHCC is doing with and for its students--I'm so glad to be here. (I'm also getting a better sense of what it means to be a state school...) A beneficial thing they did for us, that I haven't seen in any other pre-semester workshop setting, is that they had actual workshops for us to attend--actual professional development--which was brilliant. I went to one that showed us how to migrate our grades from D2L (the management software NHCC uses) to the registrar's office. That was less than helpful, because I didn't even know where to find my gradebook in my class in D2L, so I made notes for later. </div>
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But the second two were great: the first was "Sexual and Dating Violence Bystander Training For Faculty" led by Chad Henderson, director of the Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution--part of their Behavioral Concerns and Response Team, and Sheila Lindstrom, sociology faculty, who had just come back from Green Dot training in Washington, DC. I've never been a part of a non-residential campus and it definitely has its challenges, when keeping its students safe. The information was very important, very timely, and I'm so glad I went. Partly because I'm teaching my Intro to Lit as crime literature, but also because when the fall Assay comes out, we've got an article on there, an annotated bibliography by Christian Exoo and Sydney Fallone titled "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of Sexual Assault to First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography"--and I'll update this post once Assay goes live and you can see it--and as I'm listening to this information, I'm thinking of the various aspects of my professional life colliding. So I'm going to send both presenters Christian and Sydney's article. </div>
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The last session I went to was on "Responding to Students in Distress," by the counseling center--and as a new employee, I wanted to know more about the counseling center as much as I was hoping for new information. As anybody who teaches first year students knows (and English teachers who often require personal writing in their classes), we see a lot of distress that goes beyond what we're capable of handling. </div>
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So, the takeaways here: actual workshops during workshop days (rather than updates on construction, etc. that could be taken care of in an email) are something that every institution should work towards. </div>
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<br />Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-1616522006001189272015-08-16T10:59:00.001-05:002015-08-16T11:00:12.143-05:00New Adventures at North Hennepin Community College!It's been a long time since I posted here, but I'm inspired to start it up again as I embark on a new adventure in teaching at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Since I last posted, many things have happened, including the publication of <a href="http://www.karenbabine.com/" target="_blank">my first book</a> and the birth of my brand new nonfiction studies journal, <i><a href="http://www.assayjournal.com/" target="_blank">Assay</a></i>, which will publish its third issue in about two weeks.<br />
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I'm in the midst of planning my new classes at NHCC and as I'm reworking my Place and Community class for this particular group of students and their needs, so much is changing. Just on a personal level, it's a new place for me and that always shakes new creativity loose, both for my own writing and pedagogically.<br />
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So, here's where I'm starting: I finally finished <i>Imagination in the Classroom: Teaching and Learning Creative Writing in Ireland</i>, edited by Anne Fogarty, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, and Eibhear Walshe, as I'm writing a review for New Hibernia Review. It's fascinating on a lot of levels, only partially because I just got back from Ireland a few weeks ago, where I basked in the glory that is the Galway Arts Festival. (Which is why I'm listening to the incongruous combination of Little Green Cars and Damien Rice this morning, because I got to hear both of them in concert.) The trip gave me new perspective on my own writing--one of which is that I realized that I lost the joy of reading somewhere along the way, so there's a post coming about Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's <i>Selected Essays </i>that I found in Charlie Byrne's bookshop in Galway--and that kind of energy always finds itself in my teaching.<br />
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As I'm working on formulating this review, I'm trying to document its process for my students--we all know that our work doesn't spring fully formed, but very rarely do we see the iceberg under the water. Art, of any persuasion, requires work. I've also been working on my own writerly habits this summer, through Julia Cameron's book <i>The Sound of Paper</i>, doing the work of being a writer, focusing on my process, rather than product. It was in Galway a few weeks ago that I realized some truths about myself as a writer, things I'd lost over the past few years in the transition from my teaching at Bowling Green to my PhD at Nebraska--and I'm slowly starting to get those pieces back and it feels really good. I'm hoping that reporting on my pedagogy as I used to will also help me regain some of what I've felt has been missing lately.<br />
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This semester, I'm teaching and intro to lit (will post on that later) and two sections of NHCC's gateway composition course, which combines developmental writers with those who tested into Comp I--the format I'm not exactly sure of yet (I just got the job a few days ago), but I'm really excited for this new stretching of my teaching, both pedagogically and personally. I've wanted the chance to work with first generation and low income students since teaching in the Thompson Scholars learning community at Nebraska--and so I'm very, very excited about this. Since I don't know the parameters of the course yet, what the departmental requirements are, I'm formulating the basic class anyway and I think it's going to concentrate on this kind of scaffolding:<br />
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<li>Literacy narratives: where they come from (George Ella Lyons' poem), what they bring to the classroom (rather than the deficiencies they think they have), and what constitutes cultural literacy;</li>
<li>Using Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater's textbook <i>Fieldworking</i>, we're going to research a community of their choosing. This will involve interviews and oral history work, as well as objective library types of research. I've always found that separating field research from library research is problematic.</li>
<li>This research project will then expand into an advocacy project, working on the difference between arguing and advocacy, to formulate a plan that identifies stakeholders and proposes something that would benefit this community.</li>
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Obviously there are kinks and how this works out is going to depend on the specifics I get from the department, but I like the way this is shaping up. I've never taught literacy narratives before, so that's going to be a fun new thing for me. When I've taught this before, I used Mary Pipher's The Middle of Everywhere, which is about refugees in Lincoln, Nebraska--and that's great when I was teaching in Lincoln, but I also want to incorporate something local. I picked up <i>The Latehomecomer</i> by Kao Kalia Yang, about Hmong refugees in St. Paul, and that might fit the bill.<br />
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So, here's to new adventures in place-conscious pedagogy!<br />
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Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-71736501860051040132014-03-30T11:43:00.000-05:002014-03-30T11:43:54.251-05:00IWC 100 (NDN): Final Drafts and ReflectionsI can't believe how bad I've been about reporting on my classes this year. I'm just going to blame it on the incredible mental energy required in starting a new job, with new classes, while also being on the job market. And once again, I'm writing this as we're under another blizzard threat, this one of the Out Like A Lion variety. I'm supposed to go to Aberdeen, to Northern State University, to read--a reading that was rescheduled from last fall because of a blizzard. If I can't get there, again, the blizzard might have bruises from my temper. But we'll see. I'm glad I haven't taken the winter survival kit out of my car yet. <br />
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Mostly, it's a week of readings--and it's been long enough since I've read that I'm way too excited about it. Especially since it's my first reading since my first book, <i>Water and What It Knows</i>, was accepted by the University of Minnesota Press! How exciting is this?! So, I'm reading in Aberdeen Tuesday/Wednesday and then I'm part of the Faculty-Student Reading Series at Concordia on Thursday night and I'm reading with seniors Lisa Streckert and Heather Burtman. And we're all reading some form of travel writing--it should be awesome.<br />
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Anyway. To the classes.<br />
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A few things have happened in the NDN class lately. They turned in their final drafts, with their Prezis, last week, and I've been working my way through them. And I am incredibly humbled by the work that they've done, to the point where I don't care if they're brown nosing me in their reflections with what they've learned. I don't care. This field research project, which asks them to research a disaster that happened in their hometown and create not only a written paper but a Prezi that will be attached to their local library/historical society/newspaper, is heavily dependent on interviews and primary research. Most of them have never done interviews before and one of the things I've been most impressed with them is watching them get over their fear of talking to people. The ones who have gotten the furthest out of their comfort zones and emailed mayors and other people they don't know have produced the most interesting projects. The ones who only interviewed family and friends are definitely lacking the truly fascinating perspectives. I had a couple of projects that went generationally with their interviews, interviewing somebody from their own generation, their parents' generation, their grandparents' generation--and that was likewise fascinating.<br />
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In their reflections, many of my students wrote that they're no longer afraid of talking to people they don't know, that the risk involved in calling up the mayor or somebody who works for the DNR is worth it. They might say no, but they might say yes. <br />
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One thing I learned: next time I do this, I might require that they talk to somebody in the government, somebody outside their family/friend memory bank. <br />
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Another thing I learned: next time, I'm going to ban the phrase "the community came together" or "we learned what we were made of" or anything remotely resembling that cliche. In one paper, I counted "the community came together" 12 times. The sad thing is that those cliches mask the truly interesting moments. What does it mean that the community came together? For that student, part of it was that the community housed students from the local colleges. In another paper, it meant new networks that brought together disparate groups of people. <br />
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Another thing I learned: next time, I'm going to focus more on how what happened in that place is different from any other time and place. For instance, I had many students writing on the various Red River floods, from Fargo to Grand Forks to Valley City, from 1997 to 2009. What's the difference between Fargo's experience in 1997 and Grand Forks' experience? Between Fargo and Valley City? Between Fargo and Oxbow? They're absolutely different--but how? We're going to spend more time on that. In hindsight, I'd do more with examining how the Tri-College affected the Fargo-Moorhead flood efforts; I'd do more with the Air Force Base in Grand Forks. <br />
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Something that freaked me out: when my student writing on the 1997 flood in Grand Forks wrote that he was two years old when it happened. When did I get old?<br />
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The goal of this project is to create new knowledge that has never existed in this form before. And for me, the real risk of this project is the public Prezi, which I've never required before--because I want that community engagement. I want my students to understand how what they do in a classroom is much larger than an assignment, that they are a part of something larger. Concordia is committed to Being Responsibly Engaged in the World (BREW)--and right here, for this project, that's what that means for us. I'm so ridiculously proud of my students, even the ones who clearly didn't care and didn't put in the time or effort--such is the life of a teacher of required composition. Because these Prezis are public, I'm sharing a few of them as they come in (attached to their local organizations) and I'll post more as I get them. Several of my students will be interviewed about their projects by their local newspapers and have parts of their papers published. One of my favorite moments has been watching their faces (and reading this in their reflections) when they hear from these places, that anybody actually wants their work--and is excited about it. They've never considered that anybody might be interested in what they're doing.<br />
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So, here's the Prezi on the 1972 flood in Randall, MN: <a href="http://morrisoncountyhistory.org/?p=4505" target="_blank">click here</a>.<br />
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I learn things every time I teach. Learning from my students is my favorite part of the job, even as another favorite part of my job is hearing "I never thought about it that way before." During this project, I watched one student learn that all the tornado prep we all take for granted (tornado drills in schools, going to the basement, etc) came about because of the 1965 tornadoes through Minneapolis, not too far from where she lives. I watched another student pore into the archives of her town's newspaper and discover that the majority of the photographs she'd been looking at were taken by a great-uncle who had changed his name. I watched student after student question how memories turn into history and why it's important to preserve what we know, even if it's a storm that took place six months ago--because it's history. It formed us, even if we're not completely aware of all the ways. <br />
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My students in these two classes have been remarkably resilient throughout this semester. It's been A LOT of work for them, but I cannot believe how much they've grown and improved. But it's also a test to spend an entire semester on natural disasters, which is one of the most not-cheerful subjects in the world. I'm so proud of them.<br />
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Last week, we watched Donald Worster's lecture on water and the Great Plains--and a huge kudos to my students for not falling asleep. I had to preface the lecture with why I was torturing them with it (and I pushed pause several times for us to discuss what he was saying, so we broke it up), but it's really hard to watch a guy standing behind a podium and he doesn't move and the camera doesn't move. We'll start discussing Eric Reece's book The Lost Mountain tomorrow, about mountaintop removal coal mining, and last week and this week, my students are bringing to class examples from news sites about current human-caused disasters going on right now. So far, we've had articles on the Casselton, ND explosion, the Galveston oil spill that happened last week, and the mudslide in Washington. <br />
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We're approaching this last project--on human-caused disasters and why the subject of them is so complicated--from the perspective of exploring complications. My brilliant sister Kim Babine, who is the legislative liaison for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). She's going to Skype with us in two weeks, to bring us another set of complications to think about. What's the state's interest in subjects like this? The Sandpiper pipeline that's proposed to run across Lakes Country (and too close to the Headwaters of the Mississippi River)? What about the PolyMet mine in the Iron Range? How does the state balance economic development and making sure there are jobs, so people can feed their families, with natural resource management and conservation? It's not as easy as saying Keystone Pipeline Good (or Bad). So, what are the complicating factors?<br />
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And my final thought today is that the Hjemkomst Center has an exhibit right now on Minnesota Disasters. Be still my ridiculous heart. I wonder if there's a way to get my students up there. Hmmm.<br />
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<br />Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-87268739002161998152014-02-12T10:42:00.001-06:002014-02-12T10:42:41.485-06:00IWC 100 (NDN): Special Guest Star, Ted Kooser!I've had a couple of really spectacular classes this week, not only in my Natural Disaster Narratives (NDN) classes, but yesterday in my Place and Community class (also IWC) was also really great. This morning, our sunshine is back and I don't quite believe the Weather Channel when it says it is two degrees and there isn't any windchill. <br />
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This morning, we had a bit of shuffle with my NDN classes, because Ted Kooser (we read his book of poetry, Blizzard Voices, last week) had to reschedule our Skype, which was supposed to be Monday. So we talked about interviewing on Monday and today we mashed the beginning of Timothy Egan's <i>The Worst Hard Time</i> with our phone conversation with Kooser. We basically did it, but Friday's going to be a day full of Dust Bowl. It's true, just like all these other disasters, I get too excitable about it. I had to give my students the disclaimer that the Great Plains is a subject I get very excitable about, I have soapboxes and opinions, and this does not mean that mine is the only opinion, that I am trying to convince them of something, or that they cannot disagree with me--in fact, I would like to be disagreed with. </div>
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<i>Grasslands! Bioregions! History! </i>Why should anybody care?</div>
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I can feel myself getting excited just typing. It's a problem. I did recommend Google for those terms and places they don't recognize, so we'll see how that goes. Also, there's a certain level of inexpressible glee that only comes from teaching books that have that many Post-It notes in them, that many notes in the margins, the book that you guard with your life and never let anybody touch, because those notes are not replaceable.</div>
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<i>But why should anybody care?</i></div>
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I look forward to pressing them on this question as we keep going. <i> History is only boring when you forget that it's about real people.</i></div>
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Then, about 9:00, we called Ted Kooser, who's just about the nicest person on the planet. We started off with some questions about the blizzard itself, about the poems (why he chose to not name the voices, where Ron Hansen's short story gave them names), we asked about the poetry as preserving something that might otherwise be lostwe asked about his writing process--AND HE READ US A BRAND NEW POEM HE WROTE THIS MORNING. Be still my little teacherly heart. We talked on Monday, as we were going through some interviewing things, about getting the interviewee to say something new, and it doesn't get much better than that. He talked about getting up at 4:30 to write, suiting up for the work, and I think it made an impression on my students that he considered it work. He talked about writing every day, and he talked about failing most days, that only a couple of days out of the month does he end up with anything that's usable, but he needs to show up. He talked about working in the insurance agency and the importance of being able to write--not creative writing--but just clear communication. </div>
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After we hung up with him, and we were debriefing, my students seemed a little stunned that he read us a new poem, that he apologized for its rough form before he did (and I said, remember that first workshop we did when I told you no apologizing for your work (they nodded), and I said, it doesn't go away...). They also seemed very taken with the idea of failure and that he allowed himself the failure.</div>
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This blog post is indeed today's love poem to Ted Kooser. I love the guy. What I didn't know is that a jazz musician named Maria Schneider put some of his poetry to music and she just won a bunch of Grammy's. Poetry is alive. </div>
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And the world is beautiful.</div>
Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-31761217318278384452014-01-24T05:47:00.000-06:002014-01-24T05:50:04.998-06:00IWC 100 (NDN): Ground Blizzard #4From Wednesday:<br />
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There's a certain deliciousness to the fourth ground blizzard of the winter landing on a day that my NDN classes meet. We're still talking about earthquakes, but it's still relevant. I don't know what it is about ground blizzards--as opposed to regular snow-from-the-sky blizzards--that have this special quality. I was a bit nervous about leaving the house this morning, because where I live in south Fargo is basically open country, which equals white out. But once I got out of my maze of apartment complexes, the roads were protected enough that it wasn't too bad. Could be worse. I'm just glad the roads weren't slick.<br />
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Today we finish Jonis Agee's <i>The River Wife</i>--and on Friday, we get to Skype with her. I'm excited about that, just by itself, but I've had a lot of caffeine already this morning, so I'm even more excited. To back up a few days, I introduced them to the concepts of the Southern Gothic--which this book fits into--and asked them to pay attention to a few things in particular. First, instances of the supernatural--ghosts and other weird things (like references to Jacques staying young and fit as he ages). Second, the role of the built environment (the inn, the house) in the formation of the plot, as well as the natural environment. These ideas seemed to catch fairly well, and in the days since we first talked about this, they've been able to discuss them in class.<br />
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The other major concept I introduced them to was Othering. I had them read two brief pieces on it--and this coincided with one of their weekly Think Pieces, so many of them wrote on it. As I expected, they mostly wrote about high school cliques, the treatment of jocks and nerds, as what they knew of Othering--and so in the last couple of classes, I've asked them to go further. Where does Othering happen? How and why does it happen? What's the role of power in Othering? One of my students, who is of Latino descent, however, wrote about his experiences Being Othered--and it always breaks my heart to read about how terribly they've been treated. It's one of those teaching moments that I want to bring to the large group, but I would never embarrass the student like that.<br />
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We talked about MLA on Wednesday, which chewed up a lot of our class time, so we didn't get as much time to talk about the book as I wanted--so that's our plan for today. It's always a risk to teach a book you love (and always so delightfully surprising when students write about how surprised they are that they like it)--but this book is so, so good. I think we'll also do some in-class writing<br />
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I'm still struggling to get my students to pay attention to the news and current events (West Virginia--Elk River, in particular), but I think that will come as we get into talking about more current things. Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-81184572834395832822014-01-21T11:01:00.000-06:002014-01-21T11:04:25.186-06:00IWC 100 (P&C): Blizzard Days and Pursuit of Place-Consciousness7: 32 am. This morning, I am not in a good place. I do not feel good. Most of this is due to the fact that someone in my apartment complex thought it would be a good idea to plow the parking lots with the little backhoe thing that makes the most annoying beep-beep sound when it backs up--at 11:00 last night. He did a lot of that backing up (plowing out the parking spaces, mostly) outside my apartment window and he didn't finish till after midnight. My alarm goes off at 5:00. Add to that my inability to read the ingredients on the yogurt I bought two days ago--which contained sneaky artificial sweeteners, which I'm allergic to--and no wonder I've been feeling like crap. It's dark, it's cold (-12 with -29 windchil), and I'm about to walk into my 8:00 classroom, for only the third time. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sun Dogs, South Fargo, -36 windchill</td></tr>
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Last Thursday, when we would have had class, Concordia closed (which shocked everyone, because it NEVER closes)--because we were about to have a blizzard with very dangerous winds. Not much in the way of new snow, but ground blizzards are just as bad. People in town, apparently, were complaining that everything was closed when it was just fine--but once you got out of the wind-protected inner streets, it really was very bad. I live in South Fargo and I couldn't see the street from my apartment window for most of the day. But the point is that I'm playing catch-up with this class on a syllabus that doesn't leave much wiggle room. So it'll be interesting to see how the new class plan I've cooked up for today works. We don't know each other very well yet, so I'm hoping that we can get talking. We'll see. <br />
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And yesterday, on the way home, we got hit with Polar Vortex #2, which took the windchill down to -35. The sky was clear and blue, with the wind kicking up enough of the ground snow to make visibility a problem as I was driving home. As a result of all this, the sun dogs were glorious. Full sun dogs. So, I went a few blocks south of where I live and took some pictures. There's just something about sun dogs that makes me irrationally happy.<br />
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Here's the class plan, to talk about some readings from Paul Gruchow's <i>Grass Roots</i> (on the rural world), some excerpts from Emilie Buchwald's anthology <i>Toward the Livable City</i> (this is a change from last semester, when I didn't use very many urban pieces at all, which in hindsight was a ridiculous oversight), with a couple of chapters from our textbook on Fieldworking, and a couple of critical articles. It's going to be a hefty day.<br />
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But here's the plan: Because we can't talk about each of these pieces individually, like the original lesson plan, I'm going to get them into their groups and get them to do some synthesizing--and to do this, I'm going to have them make some web/bubble charts and get them on the various white boards in the classroom. I need to get them physically out of their chairs and moving if I have any hope of them doing more than staring at me. <br />
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Here is the prompt:<br />
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<li>With references to as many pieces as possible, what do places require of us, to know them well? What kind of knowledge is required?</li>
<li>How do we come to know a place well? (Look particularly at the Fieldworking chapters.) And why should we? What is at stake if we do not know the place where we are?</li>
<li>What kinds of knowledge do these pieces reference? (For instance, Gruchow mentions breadmaking and tomato canning.) What kinds of knowledge are valued?</li>
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<li>What are the differences--and similarities--between rural knowledge and urban knowledge? Put Gruchow's tomato canning alongside the urban gardening piece--what do they have in commong?</li>
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<li>What is the larger purpose in coming to know a place?</li>
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10:00 am. Post-class. Sometimes I need to forcibly remind myself that my freshmen are still not completely college students. That they will make enough wrong assumptions that I need to be more explicit than I think I need to be. For instance, they assumed that since we didn't have class on Thursday, we would push everything back. So half of them did not have their assignment for the day done. But I had (a bit) assumed that something similar would happen, so this get-out-of-your-seat sort of activity would at least form a composite of knowledge. </div>
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I also underestimated my international students. I haven't had students with such severe language issues before and this is already proving to be a challenge--in just basic comprehension. I'm meeting with them (separately) tomorrow, to hopefully clear some things up and give them some tips, but I also set them up with Academic Enhancement, as another resource. This is going to be a tough semester for them--and a huge learning experience for me. Right now, the problem is basic comprehension of the reading--and so I worry, greatly, that if reading is this much of a problem and, as they told me after class today, that they can't follow their group-mates' conversation, the writing is going to be even more of a hurdle. Whew.</div>
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So, at various times in the activity, I had them write their bubble webs on the board--and one of the coolest things about the way this turned out is that even though they were all working with the same basic material, the connections and webs they made were completely different. Love this. <br />
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We did this for about an hour--this is a 100 min class--and to bring it together and talk about some of these ideas, I asked them to do a free write. Make connections, write about things they connected and discovered that they hadn't before class. And then we used that to talk about some of these ideas and articles--ideas of idea-diversity, mixed realities, even how integral food is to our cultures. We talked about Paul Gruchow's farming ideals with the article we had read on urban gardening; we connected urban knowledge to rural knowledge and how in certain ways we devalue both. </div>
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To wrap things up, I walked them through one of the chapters in their Fieldworking textbook I had assigned and watched their faces change as I briefly flipped through freewriting (which we have done), bubbles and webs (which we just did) and then introduced them to double-entry field notes, which they will do. I think this is definitely an activity I will do again. </div>
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On Thursday, we're doing their proposals in class, so I'm excited to hear where they think they might ground their papers. Last semester's projects were diverse and fascinating, so I'm looking forward to these too!</div>
Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-73910390968364121122014-01-14T10:34:00.000-06:002014-01-14T10:34:09.389-06:00IWC 100 (P&C): What are Stories For?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tim Robinson's awesome map of the Aran Islands, on my office wall.</td></tr>
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Well, the plain truth of today is that I didn't plan enough to fill 100 minutes. It happens, I suppose, but I'm always annoyed with myself when I do. It's only the second time I've seen these students, courtesy of a TR schedule and starting the first week on a Wednesday. It's also 8:00 on a snowy Tuesday morning, my students don't know each other (or me) yet, and so they're not sure how to handle themselves. This I know. But I definitely need a different method for provoking discussion on these two essays that I assigned for today: Paul Gruchow's "Home is a Place in Time" from <i>Grass Roots</i> and W. Scott Olsen's "Love of Maps," which I think I pretty much assign to every single class I teach. Of course, it's a completely different thing to be teaching these two pieces at Concordia (while I'm pretty sure that my office used to be Paul's office, if my memory is correct). <br />
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This morning was all about the power of perspective and how we come to ground ourselves and consider our identities. But I started thinking about this in a different way last night when I downloaded this fisheye photo app for my phone and I started playing with it. When I was finishing the prepping for class this morning, taking pictures of whatever I could find in my office, naturally I fixated on Robinson's map, which is on the wall behind my desk. Scott stops by my office on the way to his office, says something sarcastic, and I waved my copy of his essay at him, which he grabbed to see what kind of marginalia I'd written. I still haven't convinced Scott, who is the map guru, to read Robinson, which at this point is just sheer stubbornness on his part. (In this way, he's a bit like my dad; I've given my dad stacks of books and authors that I know he will LOVE, but he will only read them when he has nothing left in the house and no other choice--and then, of course, those become his favorites. If only he would trust me months earlier...) After Scott left my office, I took this picture of Robinson's map, and I liked the larger perspectival ideas it gave me.<br />
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I started class with the boring stuff I wanted to get on their radar and out of the way--audience, Aristotle, context, purpose. Then, as I'd asked them to read a critical article in one of our books about rhetorical reading and the construction of meaning, I said that I'd spent the last twenty minutes talking about the responsibility of writers--but what is your responsibility as a reader? Obviously, not everything will be entertaining, but teachers don't assign work willy-nilly. How do you, as the reader, embrace your responsibility and get what you need to out of the piece? This led to a fairly interesting discussion about active reading, about using your own personal experience and way of thinking, about actively seeking to make connections to the article and the larger class (even a question as simple as "why in the world do we have to read this?"). Then we looked at the previous page, which lined up Dawn Duncan's Closer Reading steps (which is different than the Close Focus assignment I detailed the other day). <br />
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Then I asked them to pull out Gruchow (and I should have had them do this with Olsen too, but I didn't). <i>Okay, Gruchow. Who is Paul Gruchow? </i> Blank stares, as I expected. I nodded. This is what Dr. Duncan means by close reading, what these authors mean about your responsibility as readers. Pull out your phones. This is why God invented Google and Wikipedia. (Which got the expected laughter.) Who is Gruchow? Slowly, they started to pull out information about who he was, what he wrote, etc., and they started to make other connections (Minnesota Book Award, suicide) about why they should Google these things. I did tell them, after they made the MBA connections and read about his death, that he was bipolar, that he finished a draft of a memoir about depression before he died, that I've only made it partway through. I told them, imagine these sentences, writing about depression. And in one of the most amazing moments of the day, the vast majority of my students got That Look on their faces like, <i>oh, God</i>. They knew exactly what I meant. <br />
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Our discussion of Scott's essay started, as I always do, with this idea of dwelling, and how many ways there are to consider dwelling and You Are Here. I had them in groups, looking at the sections of this essay, for how many ways he thinks can answer that question. They had a harder time with it than I expected, but it's still only the second time I've seen them. And it really felt like a good chunk of them hadn't done their reading. Or weren't awake yet. Or something. We did get a few things moving, in terms of ideas that resonated, of the belief that stories matter, that human connection matters, that the question of <i>why should anybody care that Olsen is on the interstate or that Gruchow's mother dies?</i> is in this idea of if I tell my story right, you will be able to see your universal in my specific. And isn't it a wonderful thing to know that we're not alone. <br />
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On Thursday, we're scheduled to do a Campus Writing Marathon (sort of), but we're supposed to have weather, so I don't know how that'll shake out. I will prepare some class stuff, just in case. But I did tell them to bundle up and prepare for weather, so unless it's dangerously cold, I might send them out anyway. Might yield some very interesting impressions.Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-54378798502151696482014-01-10T14:03:00.000-06:002014-01-10T14:03:21.065-06:00IWC 100 (NDN): BEAM and Closer ReadingI don't mean to neglect my Place and Community IWC as I post to this blog, but the sum total of our first day of class yesterday was lovely freewriting and starting our discussion of place and community, and I'm really excited about them--it didn't take much to get them to start talking, even on the first day. Here's<a href="http://minnesotababine.blogspot.com/2013/06/eng-254-what-constitutes-community.html" target="_blank"> the link to the free writing</a> I did with them yesterday--and it turned out great.<br />
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So, today in my NDN I'm trying something completely new and different that newness is just a little bit terrifying. I assigned my students Mary Warnock's article "What is Natural? And Should We Care?" and Theodore Steinberg's "What is a Natural Disaster?" and I knew that the Warnock article would turn them inside out. I did preface those articles with "not for entertainment" and honesty about the denseness of the work, and that gave us a starting point this morning. But in the course of my teaching in the last few years, I've been struggling with the most productive way to teach students how to read critical articles. I've been conscious of arguments against close reading--and for that, I keep coming back to Heather Horn's <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/ideas-2010/archive/2010/07/stop-close-reading/59005/" target="_blank">article in the <i>Atlantic</i></a> a few years back, in which she writes:<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Close reading" is about taking a chapter, a page, a paragraph, or even a single sentence, and picking it apart to extract meaning or see what the author is doing. It's a vehicle for teaching students about cadence and imagery, hopefully leading youthful minds to appreciate the complexity of authors' thoughts.</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">We should end it. Students almost universally hate close reading, and they rarely wind up understanding it anyway. Forced to pick out meaning in passages they don't fully grasp to begin with, they begin to get the idea that English class is simply about making things up...and constructing increasingly circuitous arguments by way of support. [...] What the attentive reading proponents ignore is that many students are in danger of failing to see the literary forest for the trees.</span></i><br />
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This, I admit, is a valid criticism and actually one I share, to some degree. As a creative writer, I believe that sentences have power and much can be learned from the microscope--but it cannot be the only lens we use. Dawn's Close Focus asks students to get to the nitpicky of a page, research the terms they don't know, names they don't recognize, and to use Google and Wikipedia for the purposes they were invented for. I've seen this in action, more than once, and I have been inspired to try it, though I haven't been exactly sure how. Until now.<br />
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Because, then, my friend E. gave me Joseph Bizup's article "BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing." This morning, I melded these together for the first time to see if this method might work.<br />
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The premise of Bizup's BEAM is to reconsider the nomenclature of research, from the standard primary, secondary, and tertiary to language that asks how that research is being used. He argues that definitions of "primary," "secondary," and "tertiary" vary even by discipline, so this isn't the most productive conversation. Instead, he proposes asking how and why we use sources--for Background, Exhibits, Arguments, or Methods--and as he details his use of this in his own classroom, as a method not only of critical reading, but also critical writing, his use of BEAM offers new perspectives and nuances to how we construct and communicate ideas. I had my students, in class, read the middle section of Bizup's article, where he defines and explains his terms, and then we talked about the idea. Basic reactions? My students loved the idea. Loved it. With a vigor I hadn't expected. <br />
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And so then, we flipped back to the Warnock article and started into the Close Focus, as a combination of tools for handling dense written work. Dawn's Close Focus exercise goes beyond thinking about "what does this elm tree symbolize?" because I agree that that's the wrong nitty gritty of a page. She wants them to research people, places, events, and terms on the page that they don't know--and some other aspects geared towards the study of literature that don't really apply here now. Here's how it worked with Warnock.<br />
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<li>Start with the author, title, publication and date.</li>
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<li>Where was it published? <i>Philosophy</i>. Why does that matter? We know it's going to be a particular type of argument and it's not going to be zoology.</li>
<li>The title has an asterisk. Follow the asterisk and what does that tell us? Huh, it says "Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture, 2002." Anybody know what the Royal Institute of Philosophy is? Me, neither. So I hopped on Google (with the projector focused on the screen, so they could see what I was doing) and found out it's British, we found out its history, how long it had been around. Searching further into their Annual Lecture, we found out that it's a pretty big deal.</li>
<li>Why does it matter that we know it's a lecture? Well, we decided, that the rhetorical choices for a lecture in the way an argument is structured will be different than an argument that will only be read. There might be some repetition, there might be a more conversational tone.</li>
<li>Mary Warnock. Anybody know who that is? Me, neither. Back to Wikipedia. She's a Baronness, born 1924. Philosopher, with some pretty extensive educational credentials. A Big Deal.</li>
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<li>We went through the first page together. Nothing of note in the first paragraph, but then we come upon <i>The Treatise of Human Nature</i>. What does the italics tell us? Yes, it tells us that it's most likely a book. Two lines later, we learn the author, David Hume. How many of you know what <i>The Treatise of Human Nature</i> is about? And who is David Hume? Back to Google. Scottish philosopher. This published in 1739-1740. What else was happening in the realm of science, religion and philosophy in the 18th century? My science students were quick to jump on the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. Ahhhh, yes. That gives us some room to consider Warnock's ideas of natural, unnatural, and moral judgments of each. </li>
<li>Okay, so Warnock is bringing up Hume. Why? If we were to toss Bizup's BEAM in here, how is this source functioning? We decided B.</li>
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From there, I told the class to pick a page and pull out their phones or computers (which may be the first time I have actively encouraged cell phones in my class) and for them to hit up Google and Wikipedia. I gave them about ten minutes and then we came back together and they shared what they had found. I think three students volunteered to share their pages and what their Googling had turned up--and it was all very good, very interesting, and exactly what I was hoping for. (At the end of class, I strongly suggested that they use this strategy to work on understanding the articles I assigned for Monday. We'll see if they do--I hope they do!)</div>
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Then we jumped into comparing both Warnock's article and Theodore Steinberg's "What is a Natural Disaster?" I asked them to consider purpose: why would I have them read Warnock (and torture them with it) when it doesn't have anything to do with natural disasters? Why did I pair it with Steinberg? That got them thinking about my thought processes and I could start to get them to consider the teacher's perspective in putting things together--they might not see the connection right away, but if they put some effort towards it, they'll probably find it.</div>
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And I borrowed from Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elisabeth Chiseri-Strater's <i>Fieldworking</i> textbook (which I did not assign for this class) which asks students to consider various things via three questions:</div>
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<li>What surprised you?</li>
<li>What intrigued you?</li>
<li>What disturbed you?</li>
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Steinberg's article begins with a discussion of the 1889 Jonestown Flood--and can we consider that a natural disaster? I also posted a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/11/us/west-virginia-chemical-spill.html?hpw&rref=us&_r=0" target="_blank">link to the water contamination in West Virginia</a> right now--and can we consider that a natural disaster? We'll definitely talk about them when it comes to the third writing project and human-caused disasters, but where along the spectrum do we fall? I told them that there is no one right answer to this question, it's definitely not black and white, and they'll need to decide for themselves what they think. But, I stressed, since the beginning of time, we've struggled with how to understand the world around us--and one function that disaster stories have is as morality tales (a theme of Steinberg's). One benefit of being at a Lutheran college is that I can toss off Bible stories and they know exactly what I'm talking about. So the reason I started with these two articles is that I wanted to give them a foundation for the role of stories in our societies and our struggles to explain what is largely inexplicable--and that there is a wide range of discussion about what we can consider natural and unnatural.</div>
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So, this combination of reading strategies and discussion strategies actually resulted in some good--though brief--discussion of these two articles. I'm hoping we can use them next week, even as we don't talk directly about natural disasters on Monday, because we didn't get as deep into them as I wanted. In the future, though, I don't know that I'll use Warnock again. I like it, but I think it's too far in the deep end to throw students so early in the semester. But teaching is endless revision.</div>
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Both of my classes handed in their first Think Pieces today and I'm excited to read them (even as I'm interested to see how many of them could follow directions and use MLA formatting...). </div>
Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-10314130757149495872014-01-08T13:20:00.000-06:002014-01-08T13:24:08.314-06:00IWC 100 (NDN): First Day of Class!My MWF classes (two of them) will be my Natural Disaster Narratives (NDN) classes; the TR class will be my Place and Community. So, I met with my first class this morning, bright and early in a classroom where the digital thermometer on the clock read 63 degrees; the second was at 11:50 in another classroom that wasn't much warmer. Hard to be professional when you're trying not to shiver and turn blue. There are only 13 people in that class, eleven of whom where there (the others had Polar Vortex-related travel delays) and already they're talkative and at least beginning to be interested in what we're doing. The later class is at capacity and it has a noticeably different energy and chemistry. (Part of it I think is the time of day and the character of student who signs up for an 11:50 class and I actually think the physical make up of the room, which is long and narrow, is partly to blame. I anticipate moving the desks around a lot in there.) <br />
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I warned them that I get irrationally excited about this stuff, so beware, and both classes laughed. Better to weird them out on the first day of class than save it for later. And I did get excited. And it was excitement, more than anything else, when my students didn't know where New Madrid was--or who Mitch McConnell is. Ah, the field is wide open! Much learning will happen! (I also gave them my standard speech about checking the news as they left.)<br />
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In addition to our Moodle site, I pulled up the <a href="http://io9.com/5915324/six-decades-of-us-tornadoes-visualized-in-one-stunning-map" target="_blank">spectacular maps by John Nelson</a> of tornado tracks over the last 56 years and left that on the projector as we went through the general First Day of Class housekeeping. (I'm also fond of his other maps, so you should definitely follow the links to see them. Gorgeous.)<br />
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But then as I scrolled through the F0, the F1, F2, F3, F4, and then stopped on the F5 map, I asked them what they saw.</div>
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And then I made circling motions around the northernmost line, that horizontal line that crosses the North Dakota-Minnesota border, and somebody said it: <i>that looks close to here</i>. I nodded. <i>That's Fargo</i>, I said. Something sparked behind their eyes--they were not expecting that. Fargo was the tornado (system, as it was a supercell system) that provoked Dr. Theodore Fujita into creating his scale of measuring tornados--and that 1957 Fargo tornado was an F5.</div>
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What this map represents, I told them, is more than a record of destruction. If you could find somebody to tell you about the 1957 Fargo tornado, they'd tell you a story--they probably wouldn't tell you the wind speeds. If you asked somebody about the 1997 Red River Flood (which I immediately thought of through this Polar Vortex, because the last time that happened, it was January 1997 and we know what happened two months later...), they might tell you how deep the river got, but you're more likely to get a story. Stories like this matter. The historical record of them matters. It's important to know, if you live in Missouri, about the New Madrid fault line, and know its history of a major shake every two hundred years, and know that we are now overdue. (I said this to the later class and when I said "every two hundred years," 3/4 of them looked down at the syllabus to make sure that I did write that the last one happened in 1811.) It's important to know that the Red River floods. We have to know what it means to live <i>here</i>, as opposed to any other place, because the difference matters.</center>
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I didn't mention much about Storm Christine wreaking havoc on Ireland, but here's a link to some of the truly awe-inspiring photographs of what that storm did: <a href="http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Storm-Christine-leaves-Irish-shores-after-unprecedented-damage-239031721.html" target="_blank">click here</a>.</center>
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Then we did some free writing as a way to do some introductions: I introduced free writing to them, as the concept and method, and then I asked them to write (and follow their tangents) about <i>what does it mean to live in this place on this day</i>? After about 5 minutes, I asked them to write about <i>how they learned </i>what they were writing about. Some grew up knowing, taught by parents or grandparents or even bad experiences. I told the story about my friend E. and I taking our friend L. shopping for winter gear early last semester, because L. hasn't ever had a real winter, and as we kept loading her down with a good jacket, snow pants (she insisted on them), boots, hats and mittens, we had to teach her that she needed to dress in layers, not just one thick sweater. We picked up a little pink shovel for her car (which, we learned later, was appropriated by her daughter) and we taught her that she needed to pick up kitty litter--and the cheap stuff, not the Tidy Cats. At this point in my story, the majority of my later class looked lost, so I asked how many of them had kitty litter in their car--and one person raised his hand. So we had a mini-discussion about it.</center>
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All in all, an excellent first day of the semester. I've about got my housekeeping for the day done, so I'm ready to take off my heels (which always makes me feel like a badass teacher) and put on my Sorel Snow Lion boots (which make me feel equally badass) and head out into the -7 (-20 windchill). This, a trick I learned from watching my mother put on her boots with her Sunday finery to walk to church and then put her shoes on once she got there. But also this knowledge that after this weekend and the windchills of nearly -50, -20 doesn't seem so bad.</center>
Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-83029107514309701802014-01-05T09:42:00.000-06:002014-01-05T09:42:45.488-06:00Prepping the Spring SemesterI'm hoping that spring semester will be kinder to my writing time than fall was, especially with regard to keeping this blog current with the exciting things that are happening in my classes. I'm not exactly sure where the fall semester went and I'm not exactly sure how spring semester snuck up so fast as to be starting on Wednesday. My three IWCs ended up fairly well and the independent study I did with a senior, on travel writing, turned out really, really well--so I'm going to take that basic framework we used and create an actual course syllabus out of it. (In my spare time...) I'm trying to write this book review on Anna Ryan's <i><a href="http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409429357" target="_blank">Where Land Meets Sea</a></i>--which is a very, very cool book--but I've got too much on my mind to sit still, and I'm getting distracted, because in reading Ryan's book, it has direct and specific implications for one of my IWC classes, so here we are. Yet I hoped the review would be done by the end of today...<br />
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Last semester, I had three IWC 100 classes (the first-year writing class) and I taught the same course across all three of them, both the MWF and the TR schedules--and that was really rough. This semester, I'm going to be teaching my Natural Disaster Narratives on MWF and Place and Community on TR. I'm hoping it'll be easier than trying to balance the same class on two different schedules.<br />
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Mostly I'm getting distracted because we're having the Polar Express here in the Midwest (it's not that bad in Fargo yet, just -16 air temp and -35 windchill) and my friends in Galway are getting battered by a storm that's producing some spectacular flooding. This, then, has led to seeing several articles about how global warming doesn't exist because it's -40 (oh, dear) and reminiscences of 1997, the last time this trough happened. Also, weather does not equal climate. But since I'm teaching on natural disasters, all of this is interesting to me. <br />
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<b>Brief Reflection on Fall Semester:</b><br />
I think my favorite moment of last semester came in my Credo section, where they asked me a question, and true to form, I answered that there was no one right way to do it, and they all laughed and said they were going to put that on a t-shirt. But on a separate note of reflection, I feel like my insistence on No One Right Way really became part of my teaching this semester in a way that it had not been comfortable before. This made my students nervous in a lot of ways, because they wanted me to tell them what to do and how to do it. I rewarded risk a lot more this semester than I have in the past--particularly on the last paper, when I had two girls come into my office after getting B's on their second project and wanting to know how to get an A on their last project. I had to remind them that there wasn't anything they did wrong to get a B, that I don't start with an A and mark things off; I start with a C (I expect that everything that comes in will be average) and I grade up or down from there. But I told them (they came in separately) that they were playing things too safe for an A. What they were doing was excellent work, excellent B work. So I encouraged them to take a risk in their final paper. Risk their language, risk their structure, see what happens. And I tell you, when I saw the rough drafts of their third paper, they just about blew the top of my head off. Truly spectacular work. Looking forward to doing more of that this semester.<br />
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So, here is the plan for the spring semester: <br />
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<b>IWC 100: Natural Disaster Narratives</b><br />
We're reading Jonis Agee's<i> The River Wife</i>, Ted Kooser's <i>Blizzard Voices</i> (along with Ron Hansen's short story on the 1888 Children's Blizzard, "Wickedness"), Timothy Egan's <i>The Worst Hard Time</i>, and Eric Reece's <i>The Lost Mountain</i>. The class is scaffolded to start local, with the land under our feet, so we will read Jonis's novel as a springboard to talk about the implications of knowing the natural history of the place we are living. What does it mean to live in this place on this day? We'll talk about local knowledge, which reminds me of my friend Leila (new in the political science department) who moved from California and had no winter gear and no real idea how to handle winter here--so Erika (new in English too) and I took her thrift store shopping, where we found her Sorel boots, a good winter coat, snow pants (she insisted), a shovel for her car, layers to keep her warm (we had to explain that layers were much preferable to, say, a thick sweater). For this first project, they'll write a summary-response-analysis and I'm excited that Jonis will Skype with us.<br />
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The second project will branch out a little--and while I wanted them to construct a digital project that would be attached to their local library, I've backed off that a little. They're going to read about the 1888 Children's Blizzard and the Dust Bowl and they're going to do field research to research a natural disaster that happened in their community and explore how it affected that community. Every community has a disaster story and it will never be the same story. My own compromise to this project is that they're still going to write a paper, but they're going to create a Prezi to accompany it (so that they can incorporate digital sources). Doing this project in the spring will be interesting, because the Red River always floods in the spring. And Ted Kooser is going to Skype with us.<br />
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The third project moves further out towards the global and the idea of active citizenship by exploring human caused disasters. We'll read Reece, on mountaintop removal coal mining, which should be interesting, because it looks like Mitch McConnell will have a primary challenger. Add to that the controversies over Enbridge wanting to build a pipeline through Minnesota Lakes Country (including Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi) and the Bakken oil fields, it should be interesting. Last week, a train carrying crude from the Oil Patch exploded in Casselton, ND (25 miles from Fargo)--and this summer, a train carrying the same crude exploded in Quebec, killing 47 people and leveling neighborhoods. I can get really worked up over this stuff, so I'm going to have to rein myself in... But I'm excited that Leila is going to come talk to my class about energy politics (she's teaching a class on energy politics this semester), so that will be another perspective.<br />
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<b>IWC 100: Place and Community</b><br />
This course isn't going to change a whole lot, except for some of the readings--and figuring out what to do at the end of the semester, which seemed to drag. My students last semester really seemed to like this class, so I'm excited to refine it. We're reading Mary Pipher's <i>The Middle of Everywhere </i>again, which students liked more than they thought they would. And what's interesting this time around is that a lady my mother does water aerobics with--who also applied for a grant through the government agency my sister works for--is basically doing what Pipher advocates, down in the Cities. I'm going to see if I can get in touch with her and see if she'll Skype with my students.<br />
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The first project will still be the field research paper, the exploration of the relationship between a specific place and community. A couple of chapters in Anna Ryan's book will be relevant to their fieldworking project, so I'm excited to bring that in. <br />
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The second project will again be the advocacy project (the library research paper) and I've definitely got a stronger idea of the pitfalls that will happen, so I hope I can head those off earlier. One of the best moments of last semester happened in a student's reflection with her third paper, when she wrote about doing her advocacy paper and interviewing the heads of Dining Services about the food waste she saw, and in her final reflection, she wrote that just the act of asking the questions motivated change, because no longer were pots of soup being brought out early, which cut down on the amount of soup they had to throw away. Just the act of asking the questions. But doing this project also gave them confidence that they could make a difference, that they had credibility as college students, they had brilliant ideas, and that their voices mattered.<br />
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The third project, the summary-analysis-response, turned out to be the surprise of the semester for me--and for them. Each of them was writing an analysis of Pipher's book, but even as I knew that none of them would write the same analysis, the fact that I strongly encouraged them to use their personal experience as it colored their reading hit most of them in a place they hadn't seen for a long time. More and more, as the years go on, I realize how much my students have been taught that their personal experience doesn't matter in papers, which is crap. I told them, for example, that I can't just magically forget that Pipher is writing about Lincoln, Nebraska, a place I know very well. It colors how I read that book, because I know exactly what she's talking about. The same goes for their experiences, personal, educational, or otherwise, and to leave that out of the thought process development is going to be extremely problematic. And as a result, when I saw the final projects, I was stunned with how far my students had come over the course of the semester.<br />
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<b>Other Spring Semester Goals:</b><br />
I'm excited for spring on the Plains, simply because it's going to be a more dramatic example of why place is important, which will be an important part of both classes. I'm also going to implement a version of Rachel Maddow's Best New Thing in the World each day in my classes, to get them talking about the world around them. I'm hoping to manage my time better this semester, so I can get some writing done, some revising of the dissertation-book and send out some of those pieces, and I hope that my employment situation settles itself (I'm on the job market) so that I know if I can take the Scamping trip to Nova Scotia like I'm saving for or if I have to spend that money on moving. I'm thinking about Nova Scotia (and Scamping) a lot lately, because my niece's birthday is coming up in February and her birthday always falls around the Minneapolis RV Show, which has become an annual tradition. It always gets me too excited about camping, too early.<br />
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Now that I've written my way through these thoughts in my head, I think I can actually write my book review now. Onward!Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-80316476235199001522013-10-30T10:40:00.002-05:002013-10-30T10:41:27.555-05:00Teaching Update: IWC 100My brain is very full right now, mostly in a good way. It's partly, also, very full in a way I hoped would never happen. Gram passed away on Sunday morning, at the age of 90, and her death--even though we knew it was coming--hits me in a way that I don't yet know how to process. She was the holder of so many of our family's stories, witness to so many important moments in history, and my opportunity to get her to tell me a story, just one more time, that's all gone. On a strictly personal level, I'm incredibly grateful that she did not die on my birthday (Friday) and that Mom and I got to take my niece and nephew to see her on Saturday, so her last memories would have included Cora "reading" her a story and Henry giggling at her. She, a loyal Gopher fan, lived long enough for the Gophers to beat the Huskers in football for the first time since 1960 (though she was not exactly aware of it). Things work out the way they should, but death never gets easier, no matter who it is that we lose. But losing grandparents--something that happens with alarming frequency to my first-year students--is a special kind of loss.<br />
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You might want to check out this <a href="http://minnesotababine.blogspot.com/2012/11/state-of-mind-on-my-grandmother-casting.html" target="_blank">State of Mind post</a> from last year, when Gram cast her ballot: it's a good one. But there are larger implications here, beyond the grief my family and I are working through, trying to balance that with our existing commitments (mine being to my students). My grandmother made an incredible impact on my life. And one way that I bring this into my classroom is that I want to teach my students--and it surprises me, every semester, that my students don't have more confidence--is that they can and will have the power to influence and impact the lives of other people, often without realizing it.<br />
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We're in the midst of Writing Project 2 right now, which is an advocacy project that involves the department's library research component. They've researched a need in a community, formulated a solution, and are arguing for it. And I have to say, the projects that my students are coming up with are just making me speechless. We've had conferences this week, so I've gotten to talk to my students about their drafts, and drafts being what they are, they need work, but they're on the right track. Mostly, my students aren't focusing on their solution yet and their audience isn't clear. Many of them simply want to advocate for awareness and so far, convincing them that awareness isn't enough has been a struggle. But the lightbulbs going on in this office in the last three days have blinded me. I've told them basically that the goal of the project is for them to take this project, hand it to their audience, say hey, you've got a problem, here's a solution, here's what the solution looks like, here's why you should do it, here's research that contextualizes and supports--GO. <br />
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And I've given them this Real World Example: a colleague and I have an idea that we want to take to the department chair. Were we to wander in to his office and say, <i>hey, let us do this</i>, he would look at us, shake his head, and kindly tell us <i>no</i>. So. We're going to write up a proposal. Here's what we want to do, here's how it would work, here's why we want to do it, and here's the research and the scholarship and the pedagogy behind it. Which might get us upgraded from an immediate <i>no</i> to a <i>maybe</i>. (At this point in my anecdote, this usually gets a grin from the student.) And then the light bulb goes on. <br />
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I cannot stress enough how spectacular these proposal are. And I will say that getting my students to focus on the local, a particular community has made all the difference in the world. I've told them individually--and I will tell them collectively when I see them today and tomorrow--that I hope to God they actually do hand their proposal to their audience and work towards getting it implemented. Because these are beyond good. This is the kind of change we need. Some example of advocacy proposals:<br />
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<ul>
<li>Setting up a free thrift store in each dorm on Concordia's campus to cut down on landfill waste and help students with financial issues pick up items they need (that others don't need any more).</li>
<li>Organizing a Health Day (clever name to come) on Concordia's campus once a month, to help the United Blood Services in Fargo increase their donations--but this would be assisted by nursing and premed students (to get experience), food and nutrition students (to make healthy snacks for donors), and she has a lot of other ways to get other majors involved.</li>
<li>Advocate for Pass/Fail art/music/writing classes to be included in the Wellness/PE requirement, to give students not only a physical outlet in a low-stakes requirement, but also to increase their creativity.</li>
<li>Several ideas to solve Hope Lutheran Church in Fargo's space problem--including a proposal to buy the empty St. Mark's in downtown Fargo, rather than building new.</li>
<li>Advocating for the Arc of Cass County, that the program become a permanent part of Concordia's Service Learning program.</li>
<li>Setting up mentoring programs in their high school to bridge the gap between Somali immigrant students and Caucasian students.</li>
</ul>
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There are more. I've handed back almost all the drafts, so I'm running out of remembering--but they're so good. They seem to like that what we're doing in this class is not just a classroom exercise, that everything we're doing has Real World Implications that they can see, that we're in active pursuit of learning and expression and that there is no one right way to write these papers. They're starting to understand that what they do has consequences--both good and bad--and that they can make a difference, that what they have to say matters. If the need could be solved by existing solutions, it would be solved already--and that means there's a fantastic opportunity for them. </div>
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We're shifting into WP3 today, which is a rhetorical analysis of Mary Pipher's book, The Middle of Everywhere, and they're going to be analyzing that book and honoring the unique perspectives they have on it. I want to see how they filter that book, given the specific experiences they had doing their field research in the first project, the library research and advocating in the second project, their own personal, life experiences that make them who they are. And I get to wave around the Real World Implications of this type of analysis, because I'm writing a book review for <i>New Hibernia Review </i>that was technically due in two days, but I've gotten a two week reprieve because of Gram's death. Since we're teaching transferrable skills, here's my contribution to that. </div>
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But it's also impossible to stop thinking about next semester, since our book orders were due. I'm going to teach my Natural Disaster Narratives class on MWF and the Place and Community class on TR. I'm not going to try to do the one-class/two-different-time-schedules again, like I did this semester. It's too hard. <span style="font-family: inherit;">A few things have come up in the last few days that (a) make me think of Gram and her love of travel, commitment to conservation; (b) how I'm going to approach next semester, especially the last project on human-caused disasters:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Exhibit A: "<a href="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2013/10/28/environment/enbridge" target="_blank">Enbridge Files Application to Run Pipeline Across Northern Minnesota; Opponents Gird For Fight</a>."</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Absolutely not. This enrages me to the point where I can't see and all my vocabulary is full of four-letter-words. They want to run this pipeline through Itasca State Park, which is the headwaters of the Mississippi--and through my home county. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Exhibit B: "<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/28/pipeline-spills-north-dakota_n_4170133.html" target="_blank">Nearly 300 Pipeline Spills in North Dakota Have Gone Unreported to the Public Since January 2012</a>." How many of my North Dakota students have any idea about what really goes on in the Oil Patch?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Which brings me to the timeliness of Exhibit C, from last night's Rachel Maddow Show and the world according to Nebraska, climate change, and who cares about a flyover state?</span><br />
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Exhibit D comes from a friend's posting on Facebook and a reminder of why place matters, how we look at place matters, and the implications of those views has. Also, I'm just in love with maps anyway.<br />
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Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-185534938929063042013-09-20T08:34:00.000-05:002013-09-20T08:34:26.508-05:00Teaching Update: Independent Study & IWCI can't believe it's been so long since I last posted--and I can't believe it's the end of Week 4 already. But I've been having all kinds of strange intersections of thoughts about community and this campus and beyond, something I'm incredibly grateful for on a personal and existential and professional level.<br />
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It's Family Weekend at Concordia, which has put me on an unexpected train of thought these last few days. This week, it was the one-year anniversary of my beloved uncle's unexpected death, and each memory of him (and pictures that my cousins have posted) chips at my heart a little more for their grief. My godfather died, also unexpectedly, of a heart attack in May. And then my father ended up with basal cell carcinoma on his ear, necessitating removal, which was followed by chest pains that resulted in stents (and Dad has lost nearly 20 pounds in the time since and this brand-new attention to his health has made the rest of us breathe a sigh of relief). Too much loss and too much threat of loss in a short time and it makes me incredibly grateful for all the ways we define our families, how we love and support each other in all sorts of ways. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">On a building in the "Latin Quarter"</td></tr>
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I'm in a particularly good Irish mood today, mostly due to the misty gloom of the morning and the Barry's tea in my mug (I'm in the office, though I'm not generally here till noon on MWF), but also because I've been doing an independent study with a student on (women's) travel/place writing and as we've been reading (just finished<a href="http://www.michelemorano.com/" target="_blank"> Michele Morano</a>'s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/158729530x" target="_blank">Grammar Lessons</a>,</i> which L. loved, as I knew she probably would) and writing, I've been free writing along with the prompts I've been giving her. We were writing about "What does Liverpool (insert other place as necessary) eat for breakfast?" and I wrote about "What does Galway eat for breakfast," which was lovely. Gaelic Storm's "Irish Breakfast Day" never fails to make me grin, especially when that song appears on my playlist as I'm on the roundabout in south Moorhead, on my commute from Fargo to campus. As a result, I've got some movement on Galway hookers (I got to see the <i>Naomh Bairbre</i> again when I was in Galway in July and the <i>Bonnie Roy</i> was moored on the Claddagh Quays across from my B&B) that will help me revise my beloved Quays essay (one of my favorites, of all time). I haven't been able to make time to do my own writing since I got back from Ireland, moved to Fargo, and started my new job. I've never done an independent study before, let alone on a subject so close to my heart, so this is exciting on a lot of different levels. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The <i>Bonnie Roy</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The <i>Naomh Bairbre</i></td></tr>
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L. and I came to the reading list like this: I proposed a fairly long list of books that fit with her desires for the independent study (she could also propose possibilities), which is to do some substantial writing about her study abroad in Liverpool last semester, and from that list, she chose four books, plus a craft text. Here's our reading list:<br />
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<ul>
<li>Michele Morano, <i>Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain.</i></li>
<li>Erik Weiner, <i>The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World</i>.</li>
<li>Alice Steinbach, <i>Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman</i>.</li>
<li>Robert Root, ed., <i>Landscapes with Figures: Nonfiction of Place</i>.</li>
<li>Bill Roorbach, <i>Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature</i>.</li>
</ul>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheP5-_ouqZCcm12IcJrZTI-bM_fNtYIzFYHu0VFcenvaH9hhbGaQB5vWegF33RYLXsxpURdtnqXqSDPMr8Hgdqg5-FSlxOWMc-kpB8qsMvizymXLXHxlhqH9V8n8GFdk_S8FR109Aq9T4/s1600/IMG_1611.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheP5-_ouqZCcm12IcJrZTI-bM_fNtYIzFYHu0VFcenvaH9hhbGaQB5vWegF33RYLXsxpURdtnqXqSDPMr8Hgdqg5-FSlxOWMc-kpB8qsMvizymXLXHxlhqH9V8n8GFdk_S8FR109Aq9T4/s320/IMG_1611.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Inside the Galway City museum</td></tr>
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What's great about this list is that two of these books L. suggested--and I haven't read--so this is as much a learning experience for me as it is for her. She turned in her first writing yesterday, on the Scouse accent of Liverpool and how that translated (ha) into the culture shock and travel disorientation of her arrival to England and her study abroad. So much possibility there. She turned in three pages and one look at it and I know what she has there will be at least twenty pages. That kind of promise is so exciting.<br />
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I've been doing ten hour days in the office this week, unusual for me, since I generally do much of my course prepping and grading at home (and I got rough drafts from all three IWC classes this week, so in the immortal words of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, "What's a weekend?"). It's Family Weekend this weekend, so the campus will shortly be filled with parents and families, all excited to draw the community closer together. This morning--and this is why I'm here on a morning when I'm not generally here--is because during community time, the English department is hosting Coffee and Conversation for (English) students and their families. (The way that Concordia's schedule is constructed, on Fridays, time from 9:20-10:20 is left unscheduled for meetings and gatherings and events--very cool.) <br />
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My IWC classes have been going very, very well and I'm seriously excited to see these drafts they've turned in. My TR morning IWC has been a challenge of late, for a variety of reasons, though I'm hoping that we've turned a corner. Part of the challenge with that class is that the chemistry is wonky, it's at 8:00 in the morning, and it's a TR class, which means the class is 100 minutes long. Earlier this week, they were not only staring blankly and clearly not paying attention as I was explaining how to use quotations (obviously not the sexiest subject), but a few of them got snarky and aggressive with each other. They turned in rough drafts yesterday and I sent a prefacing email suggesting bringing some kind of caffeinated beverage or anything else they may need to stay awake--and I walked into class yesterday morning to the most boisterous, nearly-frightening GOOD MORNING!. <i>Is this the caffeine talking? </i> I asked. <i>Yes</i>, they said. In the immortal words of Dr. Jerry Hathaway from <i>Real Genius</i>, up the voltage. But the whole situation is a good reminder of what it means to be a teacher of first-year writing and the attitude most students have about writing. <br />
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But to bring this reality check back to my point: there are at least four students in that particular class who are dealing with heavy personal issues, which I suspect is coloring their attitude and performance in that class. One of them is from Colorado, where his family and friends are all affected by the flooding there, and I started to wonder about the unhealthy bonding this class has done and how we could work together towards a more positive community in there. I have no idea how to go about this, to make it fit with department expectations, but I started to wonder if this particular class could work on a project together, as a positive community united in outreach, rather than a negative community united in their dislike of my class, to support those Coloradans affected by the flood. Food for thought. But I've already changed my activities and approach to that class--hopefully the shift will help. Can't hurt.<br />
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My final thought is this: from the moment I first set foot back on this campus, the transition from long-ago student to faculty, this place has been exactly what I needed, as a teacher and a human being. It's a place that speaks my language, that the place-conscious pedagogy I so value is reflected in the college's mission and core curriculum; even though the language we use is different, the movement is exactly the same. Start local, move outward towards the global. This place so values the first-year experience that the faculty teaching the <a href="http://www.concordiacollege.edu/student-life/first-year-experience/inquiry-seminars/" target="_blank">Inquiry Seminars</a> and the faculty teaching the Inquiry--Written Communication and Inquiry--Oral Communication <i>wanted</i> to have time before the semester started to talk. <i>Wanted</i>! This is a place where even full professors teach composition, because they believe it's important. Creative writing professors, literature professors, journalism professors, rhetoricians--<i>everybody teaches IWC</i>. This is a place where my department <i>chooses</i> to get together once a month to talk about teaching and pedagogy. <br />
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And yet, since I'm on a one-year contract, and the MLA Job List just came out a week ago, I have to apply for all the jobs I can possibly find and resign myself to the fact that I will go elsewhere next year. Way to set the bar too high.Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-17657184065761547842013-09-05T09:15:00.000-05:002013-09-05T10:37:28.045-05:00IWC 100: These Things I KnowTo tell the truth, I'm slightly terrified. I've never done a Writing Marathon before and I'm not convinced that doing my first one with my 8:00 class full of sleepy freshmen was a good place to start. But live and learn. I will do this two more times (at 2:40 today and 1:20 tomorrow) and I'm very interested to see how it all goes. <br />
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(If you've never heard of Writing Marathons or the National Writing Project, <a href="http://www.southeastern.edu/acad_research/programs/slwp/marathons/index.html" target="_blank">start here.</a>)<br />
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We're thinking about communities and knowledge these days (and I say "these days" because I have one class that's on a MWF schedule and two that are on a TR schedule) and when I ask them to free write about "something that they know," I get blank stares and after they've written for a while, it's been pulling teeth to get them to say things out loud, because even if they can't verbalize it, what they're reacting to is that some forms of knowledge are valued and others are not. They're afraid of sounding dumb, like a thing they know will get them laughed at. These classes are all fairly talkative, so this is a brand new wrinkle for them. But then somebody gets the ball rolling. <br />
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So far, they've started out with bodies of knowledge that are fairly valued. I know how to play basketball. I know how to solve a Rubik's Cube. But then, as I've learned, somebody shouts out something less valued. I know how to jump start a car. I know why my hometown can only grow potatoes, strawberries, and edible beans (because the soil is sand). I know how to knit. I know how to make a "mean corn chowder," one of my students said yesterday, to which I replied: "Why do people always say that? Why is it always 'mean'? Why don't people make 'nice' corn chowders?" This made my class laugh. Then, because the class is getting more comfortable, they shout out things that are less and less valued as bodies of knowledge, but are still important.<br />
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How do we come to know these things? We've read a few pieces from Paul Gruchow's book<i> Grass Roots</i>--and we talk about the different ways that Gruchow has come to specific knowledge. Sometimes it's personal experience, sometimes it's a mentor, sometimes it's basic, gut-level curiosity that leads us to Google or to the library. Who owns various bodies of knowledge? What do the women in a community know? How is that different than what the men know? What do insiders know that outsiders don't?<br />
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Today, I brought to class two different articles that considered the relationship between place and community in very different ways. The first was an article from the Huffington Post about the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/03/happiest-healthiest-american-cities-prevention_n_3825029.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009&ir=Green" target="_blank">"25 Healthiest and Happiest Cities in America"</a> and Minneapolis-St. Paul was #3 (for scores in heart health) and surprise of surprises, Fargo was #6, for strength of faith. Also of interest was what HuffPo labeled as the "Happiness Hub," the <a href="http://www.npbotanicgarden.com/default.aspx" target="_blank">Northern Plains Botanic Society</a>. I know where I'm going with my camera when I get some (make some?) free time. But this idea of Our Place (and by that I'm including Moorhead with Fargo) as being a healthy and happy place--rather than being in the middle of a wasteland, a piece of flyover country, a place considered of little value to Those of Discerning Taste, is incredibly interesting. <br />
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My friend Jeannie also posted this article about Cleveland:<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sally-fay/the-american-grandeur-of-_b_3837502.html" target="_blank"> "The American Grandeur of Cleveland."</a><br />
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But the other article I brought was from MPR: <a href="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2013/09/04/food-insecurity" target="_blank">"Minnesota Food Insecurity Still at an All-Time High."</a> How do we, then, measure happiness? What are the obstacles to creating strong communities? How can we truly be a place that measures high on happiness indices but still has more than ten percent of its citizens not knowing where their next meal is coming from? What is the obstacle to all Minnesotans--and Americans in general--having adequate food? My parents' church in the Cities participates in<a href="http://www.stjamesincrystal.org/kidpack.htm" target="_blank"> Kid Pack</a>, which packs weekend food for kids whose only meals might come from school. On the weekends, then, those kids might go hungry until Monday, when they can get lunch at school. Then my friend Mandy posted an <a href="http://www.classwarfareexists.com/new-jersey-schools-turning-away-hungry-children-from-free-lunch-program/" target="_blank">article</a> about New Jersey throwing food away if a child cannot afford lunch. I have no words for that.<br />
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Not true. I have lots of words.<br />
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But thinking about this: what do I know? What do I know that is inherent and unique to the place? How do I see things in a way that nobody else does? This is why I'm jumping off the high dive, pedagogically speaking, and sending my students on a Writing Marathon (I hope to God it works and they're not screwing around out there): what do they see that nobody else does? How do their own bodies of knowledge affect what they see and how they think about it? And what questions does it raise for them?<br />
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I'm looking forward to finding out. The debriefing from my first class described the experience of doing the Writing Marathon as awesome and fantastic, freeing. Because they didn't have to worry about comments of any sort, they could--and did--let themselves write anything they wanted. They talked about the places they felt comfortable in, places they felt very uncomfortable in (other dorms, etc.) and then we talked about the difference between insiders and outsiders and what do those communities need to know, to feel comfortable? I will admit to being surprised that they had such positive experiences with the Writing Marathon, since I had absolutely no idea how it would go and what they would gain from it. But I am heartened, bolstered, intrigued, and thoroughly eager to see what my other two classes make of the experience.Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-92164504209146148852013-08-24T09:50:00.000-05:002013-08-24T09:55:44.818-05:00IWC 100: Writing and Community, Concordia-Style<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This week has been a revelation to me, filled with two full days of new faculty orientation and two days of full faculty workshops. On Wednesday, the only day this week without workshops, I went with my new friend and colleague in the English department to the campus Corn Feed, something she'd never experienced before. It had been years since I had been to one, so I was looking forward to it. All you can eat corn, served by members of the faculty, staff, and alumni. You could even have your corn served to you by the president or his wife. It's a good time, full of smiles and laughter. Nobody can be unhappy while eating corn on the cob. It's impossible.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our mascot, Kernel. Fear the Ear.</td></tr>
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Earlier in the week, one of our speakers told us that this Corn Feed is one of the only times that members of the community will physically set foot on Concordia's campus. For all that we are a globally-oriented campus community, wanting to create community with our neighbors near and far, I suspect there's a perception and a barrier that keeps various communities away from our physical campus. When I heard this, I filed it away for further thought at a later time. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The acoustic duo Flatlands, who I heard many times when I was a student. </td></tr>
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But this is the kind of place who asks, quite seriously, in its faculty workshops, "What kind of community do we aspire to be?" It's true that my three IWC classes will focus on the relationship of place and community. But what I am relearning--and learning new from this different faculty perspective--is this commitment to a campus community and how that contributes to the global community. But, even as there is no specific place studies attention here, this is a place that already is exercising these tenets I know well: <i>start local and move outwards to the global.</i> If I didn't already know Concordia's mission statement, it would have been carved on my bones this week with its repetition: <i>The purpose of Concordia College is to influence the affairs of the world by sending into society thoughtful and informed men and women dedicated to the Christian life</i>. (More on the mission statement later, but the discussions this week about the "Christian life" part of it were particularly fascinating to me, especially with discussions of the recently approved Campus Atheists student group--and the discussion of even though we have this Lutheran foundation, we're exercising that foundation in a variety of very cool, very inclusive, very varied ways.)<br />
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This was vibrantly clear to me several times over the course of the week, with two shining examples: the first was on Thursday morning, as we gathered for the beginning of the faculty workshop, and who should walk by, but Dr. Leigh Wakefield, my Cobber Band director. He looked at me, and with instant recognition, called me by name without any hesitation and gave me a huge hug. I haven't seen him since I graduated, but he still remains one of the most influential and inspirational people in my life. He gets mentioned every semester, on the first day of every class I teach, because, as I tell my students, there were 150 of us in band, 50 of whom were flutes, and by the second week, he not only knew our names, but knew about us and would call us by name and ask about our lives. Surely I can learn their names in the first week. Dr. Wakefield hasn't changed a bit and he's still a person who can raise your joy quotient just by being in the same space. At the coffee break, he dashed back to his office in the music building to fetch the black and white photograph of my mother's hands playing piano that I gave him in 1999 and that he still has in his office. He wanted to show me he still had it. <br />
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The second moment happened on Friday morning, with the faculty banquet having been held the night before (and new faculty being introduced). At the coffee break, my PE professor, Larry Papenfuss, came to find me in the crowd. He reintroduced himself, said he didn't know if I'd remember him (he's not one I'd forget either), and told me how excited he was to see my picture up there at the banquet the night before. And so we talked for quite a while, catching up. <br />
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A few moments from various times of the workshop came together in a way that surprised me, especially as I was thinking about community formation. We heard the reports on the budget, enrollment, and such, and a few things jumped out at me: the first is that 19.7% of our freshman class are Legacy students (those who have had family members attend Concordia) and 15% of the freshman class is first-generation students. We heard numbers on students of color, about male/female ratios. But I kept coming back to the Legacy/1st Gen. numbers, especially as I considered the nature of privilege in attending a private liberal arts college, one whose roots are Norwegian. It's going to be difficult to convince non-Legacy students to attend Concordia, especially ones who have crossed various colleges off their list simply because of price. But there has to be a way to make it easier and more welcoming for first-generation students and students of color (and in my mind, particularly students from the Native American communities of the Upper Midwest) to come to this place. <br />
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At UNL, I worked for a semester with the W.H. Thompson Scholars program, a scholarship program that consisted of only first-generation and low-income students from Nebraska. The students form a cohort and take specifically designated WHT sections of various core classes (I taught a composition class) in their first two years, with professors who have had some training in the specific needs of low income and first-generation students. Their experiences and perceptions of the way the world works is not like any other group of students and in all the classes I taught at UNL, that particular section might have been my favorite. And I just got an email a couple of days ago from a former student from that class, for whom I wrote a recommendation letter for her admission to the nursing program--and she wrote to tell me she got in. Various other events were set up through the Thompson family, including the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Affairs (the year I taught the WHT class, the theme was Water and Global Security, which was fascinating.) If you're curious about my WHT class, click on the Topics on the right and find W.H. Thompson Scholars. <br />
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But it got me thinking about the ways a program like this could work at a place like Concordia. Concordia is blessed with generous alumni, like Ron Offutt, whose name graces the spectacular new Offutt School of Business (that I got to tour this week)--and even though business isn't my thing, just hearing from the new faculty who will be working there, it's going to be an incredible place to work on a business degree. Perhaps there could be a capital fund drive of some sort to support a scholarship system for just this purpose, to bring in more viewpoints and voices. We heard a lot from the Concordia Language Villages this week--and there was brief mention that there are no courses in any Native American languages, either at CLV or on Concordia's campus. (Which, then, made me think of my dear friend Aubrey, who spent three intensive semesters at UNL learning Omaha, and then while I was shopping at a thrift store this week, I found a book on Dakota verbs.) Each year, several groups of students do work on reservations (Justice Journeys trips, etc)--but it seems like this could be a terrific opportunity for expansion and enrichment.<br />
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But a community needs to start with the local, not only on a campus, but in the ways that we break down the barriers--physical and perceptual--between a campus and the larger community it participates in. This week, I have been overwhelmed by the recurring feelings that I am in the right place, that I'm finally in a place that believes in first-year writing as much as I do, that I'm in a place that values the student above all else, a place where "student-centered" is not an empty catchphrase of academia. This is a place where everyone, from adjuncts to full professors are straight-up excited for the students to arrive tomorrow. This is a place where first-year courses are not farmed out to the person with least seniority. This is a place where as much of our job is to help students find their passions, to find what their vocation could be. All of this feels so familiar to me, because it's been my teaching philosophy from the beginning--which I'm guessing comes from seeing it modeled in my undergrad--but it's beyond my capacities for language to express how wonderful it is to be in a place where what I do and how I feel about teaching and how I feel about my students matches up with the institution.<br />
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Of course, the reality is that this contract is only a year (and the MLA JIL comes out way too soon for my comfort level), which means that I save my ideas for a more appropriate time and place. (Like a blog...) But if I only get to be here for a year, it's going to be one of the most amazing sequences of months I can imagine. <br />
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Now. Back to the syllabi.<br />
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<br />Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-65068808149604617622013-08-21T09:42:00.001-05:002013-08-21T09:42:48.828-05:00IWC 100: Place, Community, and Responsible EngagementFirst, start here, with listening to Richard Wilbur, reading his poem "The Writer."
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If you want the full text of the poem, <a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15487" target="_blank">click here</a>, where there is also an audio version. When we started our new faculty orientation on Monday, our president, Bill Craft--who is a former English professor himself--would read this poem to end his remarks to us. For myself, who is simultaneously writer and teacher, there's no better way to start my brain going in the right direction. But then, Ernie Simmons began his remarks with the deceptively simple question of "Why are you here?" which is a question I often use to start my classes, since I am so interested in place studies and place-conscious pedagogy. That question gets to the heart of the existential reasons why we are here in this classroom, on this campus, on this earth--but it also requires the practical. Simultaneously, it also wonders about the physical placement as well as within space and time. <br />
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Right now, as I'm sitting at my desk in my half-unpacked apartment with my patio doors open as long as the heat and humidity stay bearable, I can say that I am here, at my desk and in cyberspace, because I need a place to think through the last two days before I can articulate what I want to in my syllabi.<br />
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For myself, I answered (in my head) that I am so thrilled to be in a place like Concordia that values first-year writing and the first-year experience as much as I do. This is a place where the first-year experience is so vitally important that full professors routinely choose to teach in it. This is a place where I heard, over and over, from the First Year Experience workshop last week to the speakers at our New Faculty Orientation, how excited they are about first-year students, how excited they are to be teaching, even after decades here. I heard, over and over, about the arc of the student experience, how we are participating in the work of educating the whole student, for a whole life. Nowhere else have I heard so much about helping students find their passion. <br />
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Dr. Peter Hovde, professor of political science, gave us some advice, advice that he had received over the years, advice that is valuable no matter how long one has been teaching, something I would like to ruminate on further (at a different time and space): <br />
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<ul>
<li><i>Always find a way to teach more than you know.</i></li>
<li><i>Walk into the classroom with important questions, not answers.</i></li>
<li><i>Let the quality of what you do speak for itself.</i></li>
<li><i>Be real with students.</i></li>
</ul>
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My classes, no matter if they are composition, creative writing, or literature, have been based for some time now on a place-conscious pedagogy, which starts local and expands out towards the global. It's amazing to me that such could have been the foundation for the CORE curriculum at Concordia and its guiding principle of BREW: Becoming Responsibly Engaged in the World. Dr. George Connell, director of the Humanities Division, told us that the view of the Humanities is of the impregnable Ivory Tower (moreso than some of the other divisions), but BREW ensures that this does not happen. What I found particularly interesting about his remarks was a quote that I'm going to butcher, but something to the effect that words mean what they mean because of the implicit contradictions of those words. If BREW means Becoming Responsibly Engaged in the World, what are the implicit contradictions? Irresponsible Disengagement/Overengagement? But what might Irresponsible Engagement look like? At what point does Responsible Disengagement become the right course of action?<br />
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My classes will be based on the 254 I taught this summer, with some adjustments to the standards of Concordia's English department, but I will still be teaching a project that requires field research (place observation as well as first-hand investigation of the community) to understand the relationship of a particular community to the place where they are; the library research paper will shift, then, into being the advocation paper, finding an issue of importance to that community and advocating for them; the third project will be the textual/rhetorical analysis of Mary Pipher's book <i>The Middle of Everywhere</i>. Given how these projects worked in my summer 254, with my students becoming incredibly involved in their projects and communities (many to their deep surprise), I hope that something similar will happen with my first-year students. Associate Dean Lisa Sethre-Hofstad spoke of Lara Galinsky's "<a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/find_your_moment_of_obligation.html" target="_blank">Moment of Obligation</a>" and I hope to use the article in my classes, because it's a perfect articulation of what I'm already thinking.<br />
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I'm excited to see how various aspects of this unique, specific Concordia community show up in my class, from the annual Faith, Reason, and World Affairs Symposium (on Happiness) and how do our ideas of place and community show up in the symposium? What is the relationship of place and community to various ideas of how happiness is constructed or revealed? On a more practical level, what natural and built environments are being used for lectures, concurrent sessions, and other events and how does that add to or detract from the rhetoric being used? What about the cultural events on campus, the music, theatre, art, visiting lectures, and more? How do those work to form community, not only in the fields they operate in, but also across the campus--and even wider, to the entire Fargo/Moorhead community? I'm toying with the idea of giving my students the option to live Tweet various functions, for the purpose of asking them to discern whether or not such social media activities promote or inhibit community function.<br />
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In the course of this morning, I hunted through my various memory boxes, because I knew my beanie from my freshman year was here somewhere. Not only did I find it, but I also found my student ID. Beanies are one obvious, visual way that Concordia creates community among its first-year students. But this afternoon, it's another: a Corn Feed, a time for Cobbers new and old to gather and feast on the mascot. (Strange, now that I think about it, that the Huskers never did much with corn...) My new friend and colleague in the English department has never been to a Corn Feed before. I feel a need to educate her. It's quite a unique experience.Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-63779091693399530942013-08-12T10:40:00.002-05:002013-08-12T10:54:31.698-05:00State of Mind: Back to School Reading EditionI'm back! This summer has not been a good one for posting, something I really wanted to do during my summer 254 (which was absolutely incredible in so many ways), through the process of getting a job and defending my dissertation, ending my summer class and packing up my apartment and movers coming, to my lovely two-week trip to Ireland to present at the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures on the subject of place in Irish noir, and now the moving-in to my new apartment in Fargo. I have books on the shelves! I have internet! And I think I know where, maybe, half my stuff is. It's all here somewhere, right?<br />
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I may have had a slight breakdown in Target over the weekend as I was shopping for that stuff you need when you move into a new place and the teenage girl in front of me had her shopping cart loaded with college ruled paper, binders, pens, and other assorted back-to-school supplies. It can't be Back to School yet! This distressed me on several levels: an inability to comprehend that we're into the second week of August, that the semester starts in two weeks and I haven't gotten my syllabi done, that I haven't even gotten to enjoy the pleasure of my own school supplies shopping. But this coincided with my movers good-naturedly complaining about having to lug eighty boxes of books up to the third floor and one of the movers asking if I'd actually read all these books (I said, "most of them.") and the other mover confiding that he hated reading. "Dangerous thing to tell an English teacher," I said. He said that he'd dropped out of school, was a slow reader. I told him what I tell all my students: <i>reading is a muscle, it's not magic. You have to practice. But the reality is that it doesn't matter what you read as long as you read. You could read car magazines, you could read newspapers, you could read short stories--it doesn't matter.</i> I don't know if it made any difference, but one effect of teaching first-year writing for so long is that I have to combat this culture of fear around reading as much as I have to combat the fear of writing. There's an incredible amount of shame I've noticed surrounding those who say that they hate reading (and writing). Maybe it's partly a culture of exceptionalism that says that if you're going to do something, you have to be an expert at it. So then, maybe it's easier to say that you hate something and avoid it.<br />
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Of course, I didn't tell him that my idea of tourist destinations when in Ireland included Chapters bookstore in Dublin and Charlie Byrne's in Galway...<br />
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Maybe it's intimidating to haul eighty boxes of books up three flights of stairs, but if my mover had stuck around long enough to see those books on the shelves, he would have seen that my shelves are the least-intimidating shelves ever. There are writers that scare me, writers I've never read, and I admitted this to my mover (though I will only admit those writers out loud, not in print), which made him laugh. But my shelves of nonfiction are incredibly varied, from books on cheese and dirt (two separate books) to books on natural disasters, to memoirs and histories and all kinds of random stuff. My Irish shelves don't contain much in the way of scary authors (I only have Joyce's <i>Portrait</i>...and I have no shame in admitting that Joyce scares me...)--and if he'd checked out the shelves of literary fiction and crime literature, that's the least scary part of what I do. Crime literature? Seriously? Except for the subject matter, there's nothing easier to get into than mysteries. Yesterday, I finally decided to get over my distaste for Dashiell Hammett as a human being (I read Lillian Hellman's memoir ten years ago, learned to dislike Hammett for his treatment of her, and refused to read him...)--and finally pulled <i>The Maltese Falcon</i> off the shelf, settled down on my new balcony in my zero gravity chair, and started and finished it in one sitting. Glorious prairie night. And it was a good book, as I knew it would be. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihXgt-yDDtA_vDTDPkokmfCL0H0uirpRw-Nd4MUwYTiurOSYd0GMdPEatgL43PMZRh7SIZxNPaQu2l7UuByPXz33StpkHHm16RddmUsQfpJx3vJlhkIc-G4hOYFBQWydtRe8Xq81H4XEg/s1600/surprising+book+facts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihXgt-yDDtA_vDTDPkokmfCL0H0uirpRw-Nd4MUwYTiurOSYd0GMdPEatgL43PMZRh7SIZxNPaQu2l7UuByPXz33StpkHHm16RddmUsQfpJx3vJlhkIc-G4hOYFBQWydtRe8Xq81H4XEg/s400/surprising+book+facts.jpg" width="215" /></a><br />
But then, today, as I'm crossing all kinds of things off my To Do list (update insurance policies, get paperwork in order for my new job, etc), my friend Karen Craigo posts to Facebook this graphic: Surprising Book Facts. My first reaction, as a reader, as a writer, as a teacher, is disappointment and a certain amount of resignation. But even as I try to crawl out of that hole of despair, I realize that the nature of this graphic is misleading and it goes back to what I told my mover. Perhaps we place too much value on the books themselves, as a form, rather than what they contain. It's something I've been thinking about as I've been shelving my books and wondering where to put my<i><a href="http://www.one-story.com/" target="_blank"> One Story</a></i> archive. By reimagining the form that reading takes, we put more value on the words, the sentences, the ideas. With so many literary journals going online, the delivery method of the work and the inherent value we put on that method needs to change. <br />
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<i>It doesn't matter what you read, as long as you read. </i> In a few short weeks, I will tell my students that nothing will teach you more about how to put a sentence together than reading. Even if you don't like what you're reading, you can still learn something from it. I will tell them about my dislike for Cormac McCarthy, but there are few who taught me more about language. I will tell them that "that [wo]man can write a sentence!" is the best compliment I can give a book. On my flight from Shannon, Ireland to Chicago (where my television didn't work, so I had to read while everybody else watched movies...), I started and finished Declan Burke's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Slaughters-Hound-Harry-Rigby-Mystery/dp/1907593497/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376320608&sr=1-1&keywords=declan+burke+slaughter%27s+hound" target="_blank">Slaughter's Hound</a></i> and Joy Castro's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nearer-Home-Novel-Cespedes-Mystery/dp/1250004586/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376320628&sr=1-1&keywords=joy+castro" target="_blank">Nearer Home</a></i>. I tweeted a few days later that I felt like my soul had been singed when I landed in Chicago. Both books were incredible, in different ways, but the result of them was the same: as a reader, it made me want to read more, to keep following the characters wherever they would go; as a writer, they made me want to write. I included Burke in the paper I presented at IASIL and as I revise that paper into an article for publication, I can't wait to include <i>Slaughter's Hound</i> in my analysis. <br />
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I've also seen this graphic floating around cyberspace too and I think it's going to be the newest addition to my office door. It's been so long since I've been able to read anything just for the pure pleasure of it and I'm hoping that now that I'm done with my PhD I'll be able to get back to the joy of reading. For the last three years, I haven't read anything that hasn't been assigned for a class, on my exam reading lists, or something I'm teaching in my own classes. If I've wanted to explore something new, I've had to justify it by writing something critical on it or teaching a class where I could include it. That's how I got to read all kinds of natural disaster narratives, that's how I got to read all kinds of fun crime literature. I might have to justify fun reading to myself this way for a while longer, but such is the life of an academic, though. <br />
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It's helpful to see reading, visually, in terms of this graphic, though. Twenty minutes doesn't seem like a long time at all, though the cumulative effect of all those words and sentences and ideas is so much larger than the equivalent of sixty whole school days of reading. I didn't have a television while I did my PhD (no physical room in my tiny apartment) and I don't plan to buy one now that I have room. I have Netflix on my computer and that's enough. I hope that I can spend my downtime reading the books on my shelves that I haven't read yet. The Lincoln library book sale has ensured that there are more books on my shelves than I could possibly read--and I see this as a good thing, not a bad thing. But I also like to reread books (and I don't understand those who don't reread books--but that's another blog post...). There's always something more to be found, even on my own shelves.<br />
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Maybe the disconnect is in differentiating between fun-reading and work-reading, between reading that happens in a long-form book or another form. I'm not sure how to break that down into something else, but maybe that's the first, necessary step. There is no bad reading, there is no bad time spent reading. Even writing that isn't the best (like this book my mother lent me, self-published by a man in her hometown about a crime that went on in his family's business, or even poorly written online work) will teach you what not to do, as well as good writing teaches what to do. While this graphic focuses on elementary students, the same can be applied to college students. Who will be better critical thinkers? Who will be better writers? Who will be more compassionate human beings? Who will discover new interests, new curiosities, things they never knew existed? <i>I never thought about it that way before</i> is my favorite thing to hear as a teacher. <br />
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It's time now to get back to unpacking, adding new things to the To Do list, and planning to end for the day around 4:00, so I can sit on my balcony in my zero-gravity chair in the prairie evening with something new to read. Or maybe something I've read before. The possibilities are endless.<br />
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So, here's today's question: which authors/books are you afraid of? And what's on your list to get your twenty minutes of reading in? What books would you recommend to others to get their twenty minutes?Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-35736986496061394942013-06-21T09:08:00.000-05:002013-06-28T08:57:16.801-05:00Eng. 254: Investigating KnowledgeYesterday was a fun day in 254. It's nearly the end of Week 2 of 5 and though we've gotten fairly comfortable with each other, since we see each other every day, yesterday was the first day when the discussion has just felt really good, that indefinable something that makes a class period, the students, and the material all just click. It got to the end of class and I didn't want to let them go.<br />
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We're still in the beginning stages of the second Writing Project, but that doesn't mean much because of our shortened schedule. We examined a place in the first WP, the rough drafts of which I saw this week and the final drafts of which are due on Monday, and the drafts were excellent--and going to get better with revision. Such a varied group of places. We've shifted now into considering subcultures and tribes within communities, particularly those associated with a particular place. My students have the option to continue WP1 into WP2 or they could choose a completely different place and community. Things seem split fairly evenly as to who is continuing with the same place and who is choosing another. <br />
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Interviews are an important part of this next project and my students are required to interview at least two, preferably three, members of the subculture they are investigating--so yesterday, we talked about how we measure the knowledge of a community, what constitutes valued knowledge, and such. We talked about our positioning in this process, what about ourselves affects the way we view data (fixed positions, subjective positions, textual positions). In the course of the lecture-ish portion of the class on interviewing, we watched Jon Stewart interview Michael Pollan and we talked about how deceptively brilliant Stewart is at interviewing--and what is he doing as an interviewer that we could learn from? We talked about rapport, about following the informant's lead, building on background knowledge that the interviewer has done (there are such things as stupid questions). Then, as I'd assigned them to choose any Paris Review interview they wanted, we looked at how those interviews were conducted, what strategies were being employed. We're Skyping today with Debra Marquart, who wrote <i>The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere</i> that we're reading for our class--and it's my goal to have my students practice their interviewing techniques on her as we talk to her about her book, about place, about community.<br />
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Their reading included the first chapter of Mary Pipher's book <i>The Middle of Everywhere</i>, "Cultural Collisions on the Great Plains," and Lisa Heldke's article "Farming Made Her Stupid," as well as two pieces from Paul Gruchow's <i>Grass Roots</i>, "What the Prairie Teaches Us" and "Remember the Flowers." We started with Pipher and how she writes about community in Nebraska, the goals she has for investigating the refugee populations that have come to call this place home since the 1990s, and the associated issues with changing populations. She writes, "These trends can be called many names but, for shorthand, I will call them globalization. Many writers have explored this phenomenon, but they have ignored the questions that most interest me. How do these processes change us humans? How do they affect our choices, our relations with one another, our allegiances, our mental and social health, our sense of place, and--at core--our identities?" She considers the various subcultures she belongs to, how the fabric of Nebraska is changing--and it's really interesting that as she notes the various writers who have come from Nebraska (and then a bit later, mentions the wonderful Minnesotan essayist Bill Holm)--and my students and I talked a little bit about the relationship between writers and place, that writers who come from places that are not considered valuable (like the Great Plains) want to set their works elsewhere, in sexier places, like Los Angeles or New York. I talked about Sean Doolittle, his work, and his visit to my class last semester--and I could see something new, not exactly understanding, but something close, fill my students' faces.<br />
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We also read Heldke's article, which talks about how different bodies of knowledge are either valued--or not valued--from one community to another. Her article starts off with a conversation she had with a colleague about a group of students who were about to spend a month in a large U.S. city and that many of them will have no idea how to use the subway: "Sue described the students' unfamiliarity with urban mass transit as if she were reporting on a deficiency in basic arithmetic skills. No, more fundamental than that, really; more like not knowing how to wash one's hands. Knowing how to navigate a metropolitan transit system is, to her, a fundamental life skill of the sort that every human being has--or had better have, before they consider themselves a college graduate." She goes on to consider this idea of <i>metrocentrism:</i> "One chief characteristic of that metrocentric perspectivee is that its inability even to countenance the possibility that living in a small town or in the country requires any particular forms of knowledge. Let me sharpen that: its inability to countenance the possibility that living in a small town or in the country requires any <i>desirable</i> forms of knowledge." With this perspective, farmers possess either no knowledge or no desirable forms of knowledge--and the article gets better from there, discussing stupid knowledge, metrocentrism, and more. It's a very cool article.<br />
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I told my students the story of my grandfather, who took his older brother's place in the WW2 draft, and after four years of dodging kamikazes in the South Pacific, he returned home to the farm in southwestern Minnesota and (I'm not clear whether it was his father or brother who said this) his family, in these words, thought he was on a "four year vacation." But, as I told my students, to a farmer, nothing else is considered work. Certainly a farming--or at least gardening--perspective has resurfaced in recent years, with fights over Monsanto, the organic markets, and other agricultural issues, but farming is still not considered valued knowledge within the larger American community. My students hopped in with their experiences, of times when their knowledge was not valued, of experiences where they might have contributed to this process--and most importantly, how when they go out to do their interviews this weekend, they can be aware of what they're doing.<br />
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It was truly a great day. I can hardly wait to talk to Deb later this morning!Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-69632028848087332112013-06-17T11:55:00.001-05:002013-06-17T12:11:22.911-05:00Eng. 254: Community, Field Reports, and a Sense of PlaceToday, my students are turning in their Field Reports that they did over the place they chose for their first Writing Project (the rough draft of which is due tomorrow). They did place observations, first-hand field research, interviews and such, and I'm very excited to see what they turn in tomorrow. My class--which has ten registered, nine who came to class today--is very smart, willing to talk, and that's such a nice change of pace from my first-year students who I have to teach to trust themselves, that what they have to say is valuable. It says a lot for these students (most of whom are upper classmen), but it also says a lot about the community we've been able to create in our class in just the last week. On Friday, it was that spectacular moment when the class feels comfortable enough to call each other by name.<br />
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As I handed back the Field Reports they wrote on our Morrill Hall excursion last week, we talked about the danger of using "there is/are" sentence constructions when describing things, simply because verbs are important--and they should always make their verbs do double duty. <i>Spark</i> is a much better verb than <i>is</i>. They nodded at me. Excellent.<br />
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We did a bit of a write-around, with my students writing on their Field Reports for today, helping their group member push their details and descriptions harder, looking for where to expand and push analysis (brain work) and reflection (personal/emotional) work. <br />
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And then we hopped into a guided free write to get them moving on their rough draft, due tomorrow:<br />
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<ol>
<li>What is unique or compelling about this place? What drew you to it in the first place? Is it visually compelling? Is it emotionally compelling? What about it creates the curiosity that you are feeling?</li>
<li>How would you describe the sense of place? What is it, on an existential level? What purpose does it serve? What major questions does it pose for you?</li>
<li>What contributes to that sense of place? What is the physical structure? Spatial? Auditory? What goes into making that place what it is?</li>
<li>What function does this place serve? Is it practical? Entertainment? Existential?</li>
<li>What are the other senses inform how you perceive this place? Unpack what "noisy" and "quiet" sound like. What individual sounds can you identify? What is the acceptable noise level of this place? Why do we have that perception? Why must museums be quiet?</li>
<li>What is your purpose in this paper? What are the curiosities and questions and such that are propelling your investigation of this place? What do you want your readers to understand when they finish your paper?</li>
<li>Are you uncovering some universal truths, given your exploration of this place?</li>
<li>How does your primary research add to the texture of your exploration?</li>
<li>Who has access to this place? Who is denied? What is the reasoning between who is allowed access and who is not? What are the reasonings behind who is allowed and who is denied? Is it safety, privacy, exclusivity, etc? How does that influence your perceptions and experience of the place? How does it affect the place itself? Does it make the place more compelling, less compelling, or something else?</li>
</ol>
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I'm really looking forward to seeing these rough drafts. My students are exploring places like Memorial Stadium, the Lincoln Blood Bank, Goodwill, Village Inn, and others. Should be a spectacular mix of ideas and places!Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-81016862756461682182013-06-16T09:13:00.000-05:002013-06-16T09:13:48.588-05:00State of Mind: Fast-Paced Summer<br />
<ul>
<li>Happy Father's Day--to all the fathers and grandfathers, by blood, by choice, by serendipity. There are so many ways we create family.</li>
<li>I'm really hoping to finish my Tim Robinson article today, a prospect that is being hampered by the atmospheric pressure inside my head. Apparently there will be storms in Lincoln today. No matter: Excedrin and a lake of water have taken the edge off, so I can work. I'm hoping that the lingering pressure in my head will dissolve my writing-filter, knock out the self-censor, so I can get this bad boy done. It's turning out to be much more of a beast than I thought it would. Write a paper on Tim Robinson and Chris Arthur and argue for more Irish nonfiction writers to write Montaignian essays? Sure, no problem. Piece of cake. Ugh. Not so. It'll be good when it gets done, but it's proving to be harder than I anticipated. </li>
<li>I can officially announce now that I've taken a one-year position teaching composition at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, starting in August! That means that I defend my dissertation on Tuesday the 25th and I will graduate! I'm seriously excited about it, getting back to Minnesota, teaching at this spectacular institution, and seeing what cool things will happen in the next year.</li>
<li>This means I have to move! And pack up my tiny little apartment while still teaching my summer class. My parents were coming down this week to bring me boxes, pack up my books, and take them North, so I would have some floor space to pack, but those plans have become tentative.</li>
<li>The draft programme for IASIL is out! How cool does my panel look? Of course, I haven't started writing the paper, because I've been working on my Robinson article, but this should be a really cool experience. This also means that I can back off using Benjamin Black and Stuart Neville in my paper and concentrate on some other writers. Bring on the Ken Bruen! </li>
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<li>My 254 class continues to go well, as we all adapt to the 5-day schedule and the longer hour and a half class period. They turn in their rough draft of their first project on Tuesday. Should be interesting. We went to Morrill Hall on Thursday--which was, as usual, wonderful--and they used it as practice for doing place observation and writing up a field report. We had a great time talking about their experiences in class on Friday. I'm really going to miss Morrill Hall when I move to Moorhead.</li>
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<br />Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-80957231070443290382013-06-11T09:31:00.000-05:002013-06-11T09:31:28.160-05:00Eng. 254: What Constitutes Community?Yesterday was the first day of class for the first summer session and I met my 254 class for the first time. I had eleven registered, nine were there. Most of them are upper classmen and that should be interesting--I've never taught this many upper level students (in a 200-level class) before, I've never taught a summer class before, and I've never taught such a condensed schedule before. But I'm really excited about the class, so I hope they will be too.<br />
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I started yesterday with a variation on SueEllen Campbell's "Layers of Place," which was published in ISLE in 2006. It's an exercise she says takes about 45 minutes, so that's about how long I planned for. I added some of my own questions and didn't use all of hers, but the purpose is to consider how layered our relationship with place is--and can be. I know that most of my students have never thought about place and probably never thought about the ways that place shapes their identity. So, I asked them to think about a place that means a lot to them. It can be a place they call home or it can be a different place.<br />
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<li>What do you actually see, with your eyes, right now? Forget what you know and think only about what you see. Be concrete, detailed, and straight-forward--the visual facts, but precise. Avoid metaphors.</li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Consider your perspective as a lens. What happens if you zoom close? Do you see streets? Houses? Veins on leaves? Cracks in foundations? What happens if you zoom back? What do you see from space? (I showed them this photograph of the Moore, Oklahoma tornado track (from a <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/06/09/satellite_view_of_a_tornado_the_moore_ok_devastation_seen_from_space.html" target="_blank">very cool article</a> on Slate) and I also told them about the Missoula Floods, the Channeled Scablands in eastern Washington, and the ripple marks visible from space).</span></li>
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<li>How, why, do you know this place? How do you feel about it? Think about the story of your relationship with this place: when did you first meet? How did your relationship develop? Was it love at first sight? A gradual friendship? Any quarrels, rough spots, temporary separations? </li>
<li>Do you think your own identity, or your sense of yourself, the shape of your life, how you matter to yourself, is somehow tied up with the identity of this place? </li>
<li>What people do you see? What do they look like, individually? What groups do they form themselves into? How many different communities make up the human element of this place?</li>
<li>What human events have happened here? Who has lived here, or spent time here, and how? How has this place been tied to events happening elsewhere, through commerce or politics? Who owns it, or controls what happens to it? How have different parts of our culture thought about this place? Is it a kind of place we have typically valued, or not? </li>
<li>What threatens the place? Pollution, poverty, warfare, invasive species, habitat loss, climate change, strip mining, deforestation, desertification, suburban sprawl, volcanic explosions, hurricanes, golf course or ski area development, disease? </li>
<li>When people in your community talk about this place, what words and terms do they use? What is the insider language of this place? When outsiders talk about this place, what terms do they use?</li>
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We used this free write as our springboard to get to know each other and my students' choices of places were as varied as I expected. One student wrote about the digital space he occupies between his birthplace in Germany and his life in the United States and how Skype and such gives him a better foothold in two worlds; another wrote about his grandfather's birthplace in Rhode Island and how he wants to go to law school up there, because of the sense of history; another wrote about the house she lived in for fifteen years. It was a terrific start.</div>
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Then I had them make a list of all the communities they belonged to: academic communities, athletic, religious, etc. What are the characteristics of a community? What makes a community different than a group of people all standing in the same place at the same time? We got a good list going on the board: similar foundation (experiences, knowledge, beliefs, etc.), similar purpose and goals, a common language, common location (even if it's digital). This turned out to be a great start to considering who we are together in our class and where we will go from there. For class today, I assigned Paul Gruchow's "Home is a Place in Time" from Grass Roots, Evelyn Nieves' <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/03/07/public_libraries_the_new_homeless_shelters_partner/" target="_blank">"Public Libraries: The New Homeless Shelters"</a> from Salon, and W. Scott Olsen's "<a href="http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20B%20Vol.%2011-16.1/Vol.%2014.2/14.2Olsen.htm" target="_blank">The Love of Maps</a>," published in <i>Weber Studies</i>.</div>
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As I finished prepping for class this morning, I also found this article from <i>The Guardian</i>, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/voluntary-sector-network/2013/may/03/community-spurs-fans" target="_blank">"The Complexity of Defining Community,"</a> so I copied it and I'll bring it to class to talk about, as we get into some of the very cool nitty gritty of our large-scale questions and goals for the class: <i> how do we define community? How do we define rhetorical practices? What different communities do we all belong to? What issues are important to those communities? How is language used and valued in those communities? </i></div>
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I'm pretty excited to see where we go from here.</div>
<br />Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8887277299275979797.post-63882075433784419532013-06-04T08:07:00.003-05:002013-06-04T08:08:26.193-05:00Eng. 254: Writing and Communities<span style="font-family: inherit;">This morning, as I'm finalizing my syllabus for my English 254: Writing and Communities, which starts next Monday, I'm thinking about conflicts. At the moment, the biggest conflict is inside my head, the argument of my brain and skull against the barometric pressure changes that have turned my local radar a delightful shade of green and yellow. But my Excedrin is kicking in, smoothing off the sharp edges, and I'm running my Almond Biscotti tea leaves again. For the time being, my cats are not in conflict, asleep in their separate spots. I have to keep an eye on Maeve, because her favorite time to attack Galway is when he's asleep. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But as I run my leaves again and refill my electric kettle, I am reminded that any community, no matter how large or small, has its own rules. I've just returned from a month Up North with my family, where one of its most specific rules is <i>if you empty the teapot, fill it</i>. This either means running the leaves again and filling up the teapot or filling the kettle to heat so when the pot is ready for refilling, the water is hot. There are more rules to the community of my family (like taking off your shoes when you enter my sister's house), but that's the one I'm thinking of this morning, mostly because for the four weeks I was with my parents, Mom and I were up at 6:00 every morning and we spent a lot of that time with our hands wrapped around our mugs, waiting for their dog Daisy's best friend JoJo to come for their morning romp. Try as she might, Daisy has never been able to make friends with the cats, another eternal conflict when we come to visit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is the first time I've taught 254 and the first time I've taught a summer class, so both will be an adventure. But as I put Post-Its on various pages in my books, ready to take them to campus to get them scanned, I'm getting more and more excited about the class. (I would not have been able to do this without the help of the awesome Susan Martens, for sure.) Here's the description of the class:</span><br />
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>This course will
investigate the relationship of place and community, a lens through which we
will develop a way of looking at what and who surround us, physically,
intellectually, and emotionally. Throughout the class, as you study,
read, and write about issues important to you, you’ll develop three writing
projects through which you will 1) represent a community through your
experience of it primarily as a place; 2) represent a community through
your study of it primarily as a tribe; 3) represent the combination of
personal inquiry and researched inquiry in a final writing project that
investigates how humans have shaped this place—and how has it shaped us, the
community who lives there? What are the issues important to the
stakeholders in this community (which includes you)? Our purpose in
this class is to develop a greater understanding of the ways place influences our
community identity, to actively inquire into the ways that community is formed
and expressed, and to communicate what we have learned in modes that best suit
our audience and purpose.</i></span><!--EndFragment-->
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm using Paul Gruchow's book<i> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Grass-Roots-Universe-Home-World/dp/1571312072/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370349146&sr=8-1&keywords=paul+gruchow+grass+roots" target="_blank">Grass Roots</a></i> and Debra Marquart's book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Horizontal-World-Growing-Nowhere/dp/1582433631/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370349176&sr=8-1&keywords=debra+marquart+the+horizontal+world" target="_blank">The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere</a></i>, excerpts from Mary Pipher's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Middle-Everywhere-Refugees-Community/dp/0156027372/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1370349200&sr=8-1&keywords=mary+pipher+middle+of+everywhere" target="_blank">The Middle of Everywhere</a></i> and the anthology <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Empty-Contemporary-Nonfiction/dp/080329011X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370349239&sr=8-1&keywords=the+big+empty+nebraska+nonfiction" target="_blank">The Big Empty: Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers</a></i>. We will question the relationship between place and identity, we will explore how communities are created and for what purpose, what conflicts are represented by the community, and we will work towards advocating for issues important to the community. To do that, we will explore how knowledge in a community is created, what forms of knowledge are valued and which are not, and how the distance between what is valued and what is not affects the community as a whole. I'm looking forward to my students being able to Skype with Deb Marquart, a part of my pedagogy I consider essential, to get my students to talk with the writers we are reading, to more fully understand that we are a community of writers and that the community extends beyond our classroom.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Right now, my class stands at eleven students and their majors (and years) are all over the map, so we'll have an incredibly rich opportunity to explore different communities and places. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The day before I left Minneapolis to drive back to Lincoln, my sisters' neighborhood in north Minneapolis had their annual community garage sale, which is always immense, always a lot of fun, and I hope it's becoming an annual tradition for us (now that we've done it, as a family, for three years--which includes my brother-in-law's mother and sister as well). Each year, we've found things we've really needed, and it has been so much fun to walk around those alleys with the family, basking in the community atmosphere, the brats and such that the Lions Club sells, the closing off of a couple of streets so that musicians can set up their equipment. This year, I got to carry around my four-month-old nephew, wrapped in a sling, snugged against my chest, and I barely felt him, because he hasn't cracked ten pounds yet. And my niece, three years old, who proudly had dressed herself in a red, white, and blue sundress with plaid shorts underneath, with pink Crocs, (and the really cute white hat my sister put on her head to protect her from sun). Two years ago, her daddy bought her a little slide for the backyard, which sent her into hysterical tears when we tried to show her what it was for. This year, I found a loveseat to replace mine that needs replacing at a garage sale where all the proceeds were going to charity. There were three jars we could choose from: north Minneapolis, the Oklahoma tornadoes, and I forget what the third was. I chose the north Minneapolis jar, as it was just about exactly two years since a tornado ripped through the area, only about ten blocks from my sisters' house. I've used the north Minneapolis tornado as an illustration before in my classes (particularly my Natural Disasters class) to illustrate that not all communities are the same. When I came back for Christmas of that year, many of the houses still had blue tarps for roofs. Had the tornado touched down in Edina, roofs would have been repaired immediately. This usually turns on a light inside my students and they start to understand what community means.</span><br />
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When I finish my syllabus, I'll head to campus, to Andrews Hall, into another of the communities I claim as mine.Karen Babinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06244482527334002814noreply@blogger.com0