2006 WCTCHA Conference

The 2006 WCTCHA conference took place
Friday, October 20 – Saturday, October 21, 2006
at the Minnaert Center for the Arts at SPSCC

Click here to view an image gallery from the conference.

Conference Theme | Keynote Speakers | Conference Program

In Ulysses, James Joyce noted that "Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground for all minds that have lost their balance." As purveyors of the arts and humanities, we encounter on a daily basis extreme opinions, economic and social imbalances, a world variously imbalanced. If we do not become equilibrists in our professional--and personal--environs, who will? Like Henri Matisse, who dreamed of "an art of balance," is it our charge as educators and artists to sustain this Balance? Or to invent a happier ground where we can and should focus on other humanizing projects?

This conference invited colleagues to explore these issues with two keynote speakers who have achieved creative and personal balance and who value the challenge of the tight-rope. Author Jim Lynch, after a career as a journalist with The Oregonian, moved to Olympia (site of our conference) and wrote his first novel, The Highest Tide, to the delight of literature lovers and critics alike. He has garnered both journalism awards and stellar literary reviews, and he has learned in the cauldron of experience the art of balancing . Professor Robert Wallace teaches at Northern Kentucky University. He has taught seminars on paired artists, Jane Austen and Mozart, Douglass and Melville, and Emily Bronte and Beethoven among others. He is a creative and energetic scholar who balances the demands of several disciplines and the day to day challenges of his very appreciative students.

The Friday evening Poetry Reading and Banquet was held at the Water Street Café on Capitol Lake.

James Finley and Lynne Nolan - Clark College
Sexing Up Theory
Where is the balance to be found between academic concerns and so-called “real world concerns”? What is the role of theory in the classroom and the practicality of teaching critical theory to students?

Dean Hagin, Janice Brendible, Peter Kaynor, Torey Ericson - Whatcom CC, Northwest Indian College, Ferndale School District
Finding Our Way: Perspectives from Four Different Stakeholders in the Early College Initiative for Native Youth
Opportunities and challenges of this unique Early College/High School Program.

Janet Lucas - Peninsula College
Between Pleonexia and a Hard Place: Finding Aristotelian Balance in a Consumer Culture
Focus on the Greek “Middle Way” between the idea of pleonexia (the disease of wanting more) and voluntary simplicity.

Fred Thompson - Peninsula College
Of Tygers and Lambs: Fearful Symmetries in the Arts
Examining selected works of art in different genres, which, in embracing contraditions and imbalances, invite us into regions of dynamic tension where the fearful symmetries are not so much resolved as transformed into artistic Truth.

Thom Lee - Everett CC
Finding Center/ Establishing Balance: The View from the Potter’s Wheel
A teacher of Design and Ceramics uses the physical process of working with a potter’s wheel to discuss the nature of balance as it applies to craft, art, and life. Audience participation strongly encouraged.

Alice Derry and Holly Hughes - Peninsula College and Edmonds CC
Dear Ghosts, Appreciated: The New Poems of Tess Gallagher
Gallagher’s use of the dramatic and her position of speaking from the real world and her Buddhist poetic and connection to all sentient beings.

Daniel Yezbick - Peninsula College
Write Naked: Teaching Composition through the Visual Arguments of Fashion Photography and Nude Celebrity Portraiture
Exploring how students can learn to critically encounter, interpret, and evaluate the many themes and issues imbedded in the rich and often controversial tradition of celebrity portraiture, balancing themes of innocence, decadence, virginity, eroticism, martyrdom, empowerment, and exploitation.

Don Foran - Centralia College
Brook Farm, The Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Hopedale: Utopian Experiments and Dystopian Elements
After teaching fictional utopian classics for decades, the presenter participated this Summer in the NEH/CCHA Workshop in Concord, Mass. on Utopian Communities in the 19th Century. The result is an awakening to the promise, success, and heartbreak of real utopian communities in the Transcendental Era.

Michael Shurgot and Jerry Zimmerman - SPSCC and Lower Columbia CC
The Status of the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech in the Current Political Environment
Looking at reporters’ freedom to pursue leads and maintain confidentiality, Bush administration silencing of scientific critics of environmental policies, and the real causes of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Robyn Condit - Cascadia CC
Historical Narrative: Where Research Can Synthesize Subjectivity and ‘Truth’
Exploring how a research course can engender original stories of historic events and new ways of valuing perspective. How students shape details and discrepancies into meaningful arguments about human experience.

Karen Harding - Pierce College, Ft. Steilacoom
The Practice of Reflection
The demands of our fast-paced world can lead to a lack of balance in our lives. When we feel this is so, it is difficult for us to do our best work and be the person we want to be. This workshop provides an opportunity for participants to slow down, look inward, and discover (or rediscover) something about themselves, their life, or their work.

Linda Foss and Doris Wood - Centralia College
Constantly Risking Our Balance
A facilitated discussion of helping students appreciate the excitement of learning something that leaves their equilibrium a bit off kilter. How do we assure them there are safety nets, and then help them learn to balance on the newfound balancing beams of knowledge? Join us to discuss the tightrope of effective instruction.

Susanne Weil - Centralia College
'Fair and Balanced': Handling Contention in the Composition Classroom
As teachers of argument and research, we must strike a tricky balance: we must foster students’ critical thinking, yet not influence too greatly what they think. How do we create an atmosphere in which students feel genuinely free to inquire into contentious questions without self-censorship? The presenter will provide two case studies from her own courses: the 1919 Centralia Tragedy between legionnaires and Industrial Workers of the World, and student readings of Plato’s Crito, Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” and King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Matt Teorey - Peninsula College
Dialogues with Nature and Craig Childs’s The Secret Knowledge of Water
The best human discussions occur when participants balance listening and understanding with self-expression. This also applies to discussions humans could and should have with the natural world. We will analyze active, participatory ways Craig Childs listens to and responds to the natural world in his non-fiction book. He allows the environment to speak through his writing as we listen to its “voice.”

Nicole DiGerlando - SPSCC
Balancing the Outlaw: Lesbian and Heterosexual Subversions
In queer studies, students respond well to a balanced presentation that examines both hetero and homosexual characters and characteristics. Presenter focuses on female characters in a range of texts. The two sets of characters can each be subversive in unique ways.

Keith Harrington - Peninsula College
Asymmetry and Balance in Japanese Temple Architecture
Dynamic balance requires tension, passion, and compassion in a state of changing pressures and forces. This study will be illustrated with photography and Japanese Temple layouts.

Heritage Room, adjacent to the Water Street Café in downtown Olympia at Capitol Lake (maps available at Registration)

4:45 - 5:45 pm Poetry Reading
5:45 - 6:45 pm Social Hour
6:45 - 8:30 pm Banquet and Awards

Saturday, October 21st
8:30 - 9:00 am Coffee
9:15 - 10:30 am Keynote: Jim Lynch
10:30 - 10:45 am Coffee Break

Jared Leising and David Ortiz - Cascadia CC
Balancing Creativity and Assessment in the Learning Community: America through the Looking Glass
Facilitators will introduce the concept of building conceptual maps for assessing student learning. Conceptual notions of bridges, intersections, tunnels, and dead ends provide opportunities for students to design a visual framework for addressing learning outcomes for the course.

Jane Stone - SPSCC
Is the Lecture Dead in the Digital Age?
How can professors capture students’ imagination and stimulate their academic curiosity in the digital age? How can we use technology to help balance traditional methods with interactive techniques, classroom activities, PowerPoint, research, reading, and other tools?

Geeta Sadashivan - Cascadia CC
The Balancing Act: Students as Producers and Consumers
We need a broader, more balanced concept of Freshman Composition that includes modalities involving not only print, but images, video, sounds, and interactive elements. Students need to be given the opportunity to design projects that integrate elements which allow them to become producers as well as consumers in our multimodal culture.

Ruth Schnabel - Centralia College
Imbalance
Taking Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the political as a community of radical imbalance as point of departure, we will look at thinkers/artists such as Edward Said (in dialog with Daniel Barenboim), Hannah Arendt, and performance artist Diamanda Galas, who address coexistence as including imbalance. Can we create a balance that is not utopian or idealistic, but always already imbalanced?

Bruce Hattendorf - Peninsula College
Bitten by a Parrot: The Failure of American Idealism in The Third Man
The Third Man portrays a world that is decidedly out of moral and political balance; though most works of film noir express worlds that are askew, The Third Man is particularly interesting because it is a British film, shot on location in post-war Vienna, and starring two Americans—Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. When Holly is bitten by what appears to be a cockatoo, the event at first seems to have no meaning, but later, when Holly claims to have been bitten by a parrot, the scene takes on thematic resonance well worth discussing. Video clips will be shown.