A Look Forward: Spring 2012 @GSU

Dan Brown. “Burst of Blue.” www.danbrownart.com

Spring is possibly my favorite season. Back  home, the bluebonnets are in bloom and the atmosphere has a sense of renewal and invigoration. Sometimes, I feel I could climb a tree and look out at the bluebonnets all day. I’ve often found the art of Dan Brown captures that renewed and invigorated sense of Spring.  There is something about his ability to paint the past that always makes me anxious to see where the future will take me–both personally and professionally. Ironically, it’s taken me nearly two weeks to pull this post together because my last two weeks were so hectic with the start of the new semester. But now, it is time to look forward to the fresh air and bluebonnets (though I won’t see many of those in Georgia) that welcome us with open arms each semester. From the looks of this semester, it’s going to be quite hectic. Here’s a preview of just what I’ll be doing and where you can find me over the next few months.

Composition II: Controversy, Technology, and Discourse

At the forefront of my world this semester is the Composition II classes that I am teaching. The subtitle “Controversy, Technology, and Discourse” represents the theme my students are exploring for the next four months. I guided students to aspects of this topic in the past; students determined to write a Pro/Con paper after being instructed that this wasn’t an option for the class wrote some intriguing papers on similar ideas when helped to move past their initial stubbornness. So, I thought this semester would be a good chance to see what happens when I turn this into a course theme. It lets me offer students the chance to explore the pro/con sides of the issue, but from an objective standpoint. Instead of trying to persuade an audience to choose one side, they are looking at the various ways technology has changed the discussion. For me, this gives students a much better grasp on several areas that are important to their academic career (more on that in my next Critically Informed post, though). The course structure also requires students to learn and manage several technologies for the class. It’s looking (on paper, at least) like quite an interesting semester.

LILAC Project

I mentioned briefly in a previous post, that I am currently working with the esteemed Janice Walker on the LILAC Project. (You can see our campus flyer here.) LILAC, an acronym for Learning Information Literacy Across the Curriculum, investigates what students are taught about research by librarians and professors and how they actually conduct research for academic assignments. The study investigates a much broader research question than my dissertation, but uses similar research methods. For me, it’s the next step into Information Literacy research; a step I’m rather excited to take. Janice presents initial research at CCCC this spring, and we will have our first article on the research out soon after.

Allies of Veterans in Academia

On a related CCCC note, this year’s CCCC also includes a workshop focusing on Veterans in Academia. I will be speaking in this workshop on the topic of stereotypes of veterans and the ways we can enhance our pedagogy to challenge the traditional stereotypes and emphasize the maturity and leadership skills veterans bring to our classrooms. Many of you know that I come from a military family; my father was a Vietnam veteran who struggled through college on the GI Bill before becoming a successful businessman. I have also worked with many veterans in my classes and currently teach at a University with a very strong Army ROTC program. Much like the veterans in my classes, these cadets are strong leaders with perspectives that bring new diversity to my classroom.  Lisa Langstratt, Bob Hazard, and Sandra Jang deserve oodles of notoriety for spearheading this event. Their panel “Generation Vet: Composing with a New Student Population” (summarized on the KairosWiki and reviewed at InsideHigherEd) at last year’s conference brought this topic into the light for many of our colleagues. Additionally, Bob’s work to get a Special Interest Group (SIG) for this burgeoning area of academia further emphasized the need for more research and conversation in this area. So, this is another project I’m deeply entrenched in this semester.

Dissertation Part II

Now that I’ve been away from my dissertation for awhile I feel it has gelled a bit in my mind. When I first left my defense (with ideas about where to go next with the material), I felt a bit overwhelmed at the future of the project. Yet, the study should not die at this point. Reading the dissertation of a close friend of mine reignited the fire to keep pursuing this project. So, this semester, I’m working on a journal article tentatively titled “Not Always Intuitive: Social Bookmarking Pedagogy for Educators of Web 2.0 Students” that will pick up where my dissertation left off and move forward with recommendations for pedagogy. I’m hoping to eventually turn the dissertation into a book, but I feel I need several more studies to accomplish this task. I’m going to talk to a couple colleagues in my pedagogy group and see if we can schedule a summer course in Diigo and pedagogy for use in their Composition II classes next spring with an IRB approved pilot study. This will put me one step closer to the book.

Composition II: The Complete Text (with Instructor’s Guide)

On my list of things I want to start working with this semester is a multimodal Composition II textbook. I’m considering this one of my pipe dream projects right now. I have the entire text and instructor’s manual outlined in my head and I know this will be a massive project, but it’s one I want to start working on at some point this year. I’m hoping to devote a few hours a week (probably weekends) to this to see how far I can get with a draft proposal and pulling together some of the information I want to include.

Who to Believe?: The Rhetoric of Biography in the Life of Virginia Woolf

The other pipe dream I’m tinkering with (at this point only in my head) is a rhetorical analysis of the biographies of Virginia Woolf. This project stemmed largely out of my Master’s thesis and the different rhetorical approaches I noticed several of her biographers took in presenting the same moments in her life. If I’m lucky, I’ll find a few extra hours a week to start working out this project as well.

Final Thoughts

I reach the end of this ambitious plan for my spring semester realizing that I would do well to find a way to avoid sleep so that I can get work done on each of these projects. Since that will not happen, I will just take everything one step at a time. I plan to update this post and create one for the summer as well. This blog has always been a good way to track the progress I’ve made from the beginning of my doctoral studies, and I hope that adding a look forward for each semester helps me track my progress through the next few years. I can be ambitious and say through tenure, but I am curious to see if I can maintain the same blog until I reach that life goal.

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