Thursday, August 9, 2012

Presentation: Done!

So, this morning I was given the amazing opportunity to share my research with a bunch of folks who were actually interested in the amazing world of rhetoric and composition!  Before I go too far along, though, I need to mention the amazing group of people I have been camping with for the last two weeks: Bill, Joey, Kelly, Cecile, Angie, Chris, Mark, Alanna, Lindsay, Liberty, Ann, Kim, Kerri, Amy L, Amy Z, Suzanne, Sarah, Liz, Hyoejin, and Melanie (I hope I didn't forget any of my fellow participants!).  We come from all sorts of different institutions but share one huge common trait:  incredible kindness!  And since most folks already have that PhD, I have also appreciated the encouraging stories about finishing mine.

The other huge shout out would be out "camp counselors":

Dr. Christiane Donahue (Dartmouth):  The biggest person here for the facilitation of this event.  She is an incerdibly kind person and has done tons of research on internationalism and comp studies.

Dr. Chuck Bazerman (U. of California Santa Barbara):  The other huge facilitator for this event.  He has written a ton of stuff in our field (too many to name so you will just have to Google him!).

Dr. Cheryl Geisler (Simon Fraser University):  We used her books Streams of Language as the basis of our coding activities last week.

Dr. Chris Anson (North Carolina State University):  He has written a ton of stuff and is a leader for NCTE (again, Google him if you need more info!).

Dr. Les Perelman (MIT):  Again, another biggie in the field but perhaps best known recently for the written essay and assessment debates going on with standardized testing.

Dr. Neal Lerner (Northeastern):  Most famous for The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring (2007).

Dr. Mya Poe (Penn State):  Most known for the recent Race and Writing Assessment (2012).  The very fact that she was in the audience made me super nervous.  But I am so excited that she will be giving me additional feedback later!

Dr. Cinthia Gannet (Fairfield University):  Most known for Gender and the Journal (1992).

Dr John Brereton (U. of Mass):  Has done a lot, including some books on composition's history!

Is this not the most amazing group of people?  (OK, I get that only rhet/ comp geeks would be excited by this but imagine being in a room with folks who represent some of the best in your field!)

I did my presentation this morning -- and though I was super nervous (mostly because of Dr. Poe's presence) -- I loved the Q&A afterwards -- Dr Gannet suggested the idea of "verbing" to help me better define my categories -- and by lunch this lead me to think about "re-seeing" my categories as an image (see below):
(at the moment, I can't get this pic to face the right way but I will work on this tomorrow!)

I am not sure if the picture shows this, but my actual course is the ship (the USS Rhetoric) and the "iceberg" is the whole subject of "race" as the theme for the class.  Each person on (or off) the ship represents one of my new "verbing category" such as the "fixing" stick person representing the Activist Writer stance that I originally designed.  Enough for today, though!  But I promise more tomorrow including some culminating notes of my time here at Dartmouth.  One more day of presentations tomorrow and then the drive to St Louis starts on Saturday morning.



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