2009 WCCHA Conference

The 2009 WCCHA conference, Mirrors, was held
Friday, October 16 – Saturday, October 17, 2009
at Lower Columbia College, Longview, Washington

Conference Theme | Keynote Speakers | Conference Program

When we view the world through the arts and humanities, what do we see? Join us to share your reflections. We’d love for you to join us this coming October.

FEATURED SPEAKERS:
Our keynote speakers were Lucinda Parker, Rose Center Muralist, and Sam Green, Washington State’s First Poet Laureate

8:30 - 9:30 AM       Registration, Coffee & Rolls in the Rose Center Foyer
8:45 – 9:00 AM      Video: “The Lucinda Parker Mural at Lower Columbia College”
9:00   AM                Introductions: Jared Leising, WCCHA President
9:10   AM               Welcome: Dr. James McLaughlin, President, L.C.C
9:15 – 10:15 AM    Keynote Address: Lucinda Parker, Painter, Printmaker, Muralist
10:15 – 10:30 AM Coffee & Rolls: Rose Center Foyer
10:00 AM – 4 PM “Concerted Effort” Mural Exhibit: Rose Center Art Gallery

Session A: "Kicking and Dreaming: The Kinesthetic Learner"
Moderator, Debby Handrich, Shoreline Community College.

(1) John Kellermeier, Tacoma Community College
“Mirror Curves”
Cultures throughout the world express themselves with images known to ethnomathematicians as mirror curves. These drawings can be made with one continuous movement never retracing a path. Examples include sona, the sand drawings of the Tchokwe people of Angola; kolam, the threshold drawings done by the women of Tamil, India; and Celtic knots. This presentation will explore the use of mirror curves in a variety of cultures and look at some of the recent development in ethnomathematics on mirror curves. In addition, I will share the results of a student project from an Ethnomathematics course taught at Tacoma Community College on mirror curves utilizing Photobucket, an image hosting website.

(2) Jane Stone and Joe Batt, South Puget Sound Comm. College
“Assembling Fragments”
What is the result when ceramic and drawing students study historical and contemporary approaches to portraiture, reflect on their place in the world today, and create a series of self portraits on ceramic tiles to be assembled into a larger group portrait? We will share our experience of embarking on this group project and conduct a related hands-on group activity with participants.

3) “The Lucinda Parker Mural at Lower Columbia College”
Yvette O’Neill, Lower Columbia College (ret.)
Video and discussion of the mural at LCC created by Lucinda Parker.

Friday, October 16
10:30 a.m. to noon: Breakout Session I (Presentations and Workshops)

Session B: “Students, Pedagogy, and Online Communities”
Moderator: Susanne Weil, Centralia College

(1) Deborah Woehrmann, Lower Columbia College
“Concluding with What Matters: Student Voices Sharing Discovery”
With so much to cover in our courses, we sometimes hesitate to let go of class meeting time (or time in an online course!) to student presentations. Yet I have learned to end most courses by asking students to teach about something they have chosen to research. These presentations work to convey knowledge, build enthusiasm for learning, inspire confidence and engage all members of the course in our final work. For the composition course, it s often an I-Search project that begins with a question the student will try to answer; in Creative Writing students study and then present a Mentor Writer; and in Literature courses we end with presentations of writers we would have never been able to cover otherwise. In each case, students also submit a written project. One student in English 101 said, “It [preparing for the class presentation] helped me organize my thoughts, and you can’t organize writing without organizing your thoughts.” She thought her final writing improved because she had to also be able to tell her peers about her work. At the end of an online American Literature course students amazed me with Power-Point presentations, simply compiled text onto a discussion forum, and one student created a web page that introduced her author, Jhumpa Lahari s work.

(2) Geeta Sadashivan, Cascadia Community College
“Reflections on Adapting Teaching to an Asynchronous Environment”
Intuitively, instructors feel that the face-to-face courses and online courses they teach should be mirrors ; the quality and quantity of instruction offered in these two types of courses should not be markedly different. However, the asynchronous nature of online courses makes differences inevitable. Which elements of face-to-face instruction would need to be tweaked, and which ones would need to be transformed, to meet the demands of the asynchronous environment? Which teaching strategies, if any, would have to be trashed? And how do these lessons apply to hybrid courses? In brief, how can we make our instruction comparable, if not a mirror image in these formats? This session will be an open-ended discussion in which we will ponder these questions and share our struggles, stories, and strategies for adapting traditional classroom instruction to online classes.

(3) Karen Robertson, Bellevue College,
“Rethinking Morality in a Now Culturally Diverse Nation”
My composition and literature students recently read Robert Olen Butler’s “Fairy Tale” [http://www.webdelsol.com/butler/rob-1.htm], the final story in the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Butler’s story explores the shadows of meaning in a simple phrase like “once upon a time,” but—more importantly—it transports students (almost before they realize what is happening to them) into a fictional world where they must examine the basis for their real world “morality” and “humanity.” My presentation will include examples of student writing/discussions, as well as my own narrative about how teaching “faceless” students in an online setting has revealed “faces” that I rarely saw in the classroom.

Session A: “Environment and Narrative”
Moderator: Don Foran, Centralia College

(1) Carmen Germain, Peninsula College
“Fiction's Reflection: Bradford Angier and the Cult of the Wild”
For many who embraced the back-to-the-land movement, Bradford Angier was an authority on wilderness survival. In the 1940's, he left Boston for Hudson's Hope in northern British Columbia where he lived according to the Gospel of Thoreau. His many books taught wilderness skills and how to live the simple life, and he gathered disciples who headed out for the territory. However, the residents of Hudson's Hope tell a different story.

Session B: “Collaborative Self-Representation”
Moderator: Bruce Hattendorf, Peninsula College

(1) Joseph Green and Marquita Green, Lower Columbia College
“The Mirrored Poem: Printing Broadsides as a Collaborative Reflection”
When Joseph and Marquita Green print a poem as a broadside using metal type, set by hand, with a complementary graphic element, usually cut in wood or linoleum they find themselves reflecting not only on the poem but also on the give-and-take of their partnership in The Peasandcues Press. In this session, they present samples of their broadsides, discuss their collaboration, and describe what the printing of poetry mirrors in their own lives.

(2) Michael A. Huffman, Tacoma Community College
"The Plate as Paper and Mirror: Teaching the Personal Essay through Food”
This presentation will discuss strategies for teaching the first person narrative essay through food. Everyone eats. We all have experiences with food. But food means more than breakfast, lunch and dinner. Food is nourishment, yes, but it is also so much more. By examining representations of food in essays, stories and films, students can look beyond their everyday experiences and see that what they eat, how they eat and with whom they eat has broad meaning. Thus the essays they write are more than their stories; they become texts that address varied and often complex social and cultural themes.

(1) Jeff Calkins, Tacoma Community College; Green River Community College
“Mirror Image or Touchstone? Brain Research and Process Based Writing Pedagogy”
The humanities and the sciences sometimes seem at odds with each other, but science can validate humanistic instructional practices. This presentation will make the audience aware of current scientific discoveries about how our brains turn information into usable knowledge--specifically the role of myelin in the creation of efficient neural circuits. It will then make connections between this research and several traditional methods of process based writing pedagogy.

(2) Allen Braden, Tacoma Community College, and Derek Sheffield, Wenatchee Valley College
“Smoke and Mirrors: The Magic of Duality in Poetry”
Discussion of sample poems and exercises will address the following: how scientific inquiry mirrors the creative process, how the poem projects a modified reflection of the poet’s self; how poetic techniques involve imitation, reflection, personae, and other doppelgangers; how poetry functions as sympathetic magic; and how creative works on the natural world often reflect the artist’s inner world.

Session B: "Content and Discontent: Get the Message?"
Moderator: Michael Darcher, Pierce College

(1) Cheryl Ronish and Jan Roose, Lower Columbia College
“It’s All About Me: Media in the New Millenium”
I-News. American Idol. Blogs. Twitter. These are but a few of the many ways that Americans today are able to decide what they hear and see in the media. As interactive communication technology has exploded, so it seems has the obsession with each individual's opinions and perspectives being heard and seen. Today, the media's role is often no longer seen as the defender of democracy, and decisions as to content are frequently made according to what individuals want rather than by editors based on what they feel is important for Americans to know. The trend todayis less about exposing or informing and more about verifying and affirming what individuals already believe. But what does this interactive democratization of the media mirror? Do these forms of media reflect a new America? And in what ways? Through video clips, a survey, and other interactive activities,we'll explore this shift as well as the ramifications,.implications, and consequences of the focus on the "I" in today's media.

(2) Walter Hudsick, Cascadia Community College
“The Ninth Art: ‘Now I have to start pretending I like graphic novels, too?’”
Unlike the disgruntled woman in the classic New Yorker Cartoon by Bruce Kaplan, you may not have to pretend you like them, but you should be aware that graphic novels comprise a growing dimension of both high and low culture and have a place in our classrooms alongside art and literature. In this hands-on workshop, a composition instructor and part-time comics scholar will explain the fundamentals of formalist analysis of comics and show you ways to incorporate comics into your praxis. Using the lens of Scott McCloud s five choices and drawing on the work of other comics theorists, the presentation will introduce you to semiotic principles immanent in pictorial narratives including the structure and application of elements such as panel and page to establish pacing and mood; camera angles as expressions of time, space, and emotion; word balloon and caption types and their particular uses; and sound effects and other out-of-balloon texts, and will include a genre-based bibliography.

4:45 to 5:45 p.m., Monticello Hotel: Social Hour

5:45 to 6:45 p.m., Monticello Hotel: Poetry Reading

6:45 to 8:00 p.m., Monticello Hotel: Banquet and WCCHA Awards

8:30   AM       Coffee & Rolls in the Rose Center Foyer
8:45   AM        Video: “Mirrors”
9:00   AM        Announcements: Jared Leising, WCCHA President
9:10   AM        Introduction: Karen Bonaudi, Chair, State Poet Laureate Development
9:15   AM        Keynote Address: Sam Green, Washington State’s First Poet Laureate
10:15 AM        Coffee & Rolls in the Rose Center Foyer

Session A: “The Living Text”
Moderator: Tracy Heinlein, North Seattle Community College

(1) Jacob Martens, Tacoma Community College
“When Our Reflections Talk Back: Creating Community Generated Fiction for Active Learning in the Nonfiction Classroom”
Come laugh and learn with us as you meet your very own community built character in a round table write-and-pass activity. As you fill out character dossiers, you’ll be asked to think fast, provide details, make inferences, and laugh at the surprises. We ll have quirks to analyze and questions to ponder: What does our fictional community reveal about our classroom community? After we’ve shared our colorful creations, we’ll discuss strategies to design parameters into the dossier that will tone and shape this activity to your specific discipline.

(2) Michael Mills, Peninsula College
Reflecting the Student Perspective with a "Living Text”
This presentation will explore an experimental course format designed to reap benefits for present and future students of the course by creating a "Living Text". Such a text grows and changes from quarter to quarter by soliciting user-generated content in the form of student lectures and presentations on various integral components of a given course. This user-generated material functions collaboratively with faculty generated content and is carried over to future cycles of the course, where future students learn from their predecessors: and in turn, are expected to contribute to the body of knowledge housed in the text.

Session B: “Race and Identity”
Moderator: Allison DeBoer, Grays Harbor Community College

(1) Sedia Dennis, Tacoma Community College
“Letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom: Honoring the Mosaic in the Reading and Writing Classroom”
All cultures are products of human history, and language is one of the main pillars of culture. As colleges become increasingly diverse, it is becoming even more pertinent that instructors find ways to better incorporate into the curriculum and utilize materials that reflect and--in so doing--honor who our students are. Reading and writing instructors have the opportunity to honor diversity in the classroom every day. In this sixty minute workshop, we will explore the importance of doing this, how to go about doing it, and discuss specific activities instructors can do to honor diversity in the reading and writing classroom.