This readers’ theater performance (where a text is read aloud in semi-dramatic style by the authors) focuses on the chaotic nature of teaching lives, both inside and outside the classroom. The reading will be accompanied by music and hopes to engage audience members in rethinking their own ideas about what it means to engage in the teaching life.
This performance is sponsored by IUP’s Graduate Studies in Composition and TESOL Program and IUP’s Department of English.
Dr. Schaafsma is director of English Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The author of Eating on the Street: Teaching Literacy in a Multicultural Society and Literacy and Democracy, he is working on a book about narrative inquiry. Dr. Schaafsma also served as co-editor of English Education for several years.
Additional information about the performance can be found on Dr. Pagnucci’s website.
]]>The essay originally appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Stymie magazine.
]]>For more than twenty years, Larges has sought ordination as a minister in the Presbyterian Church. Larges is a member of the Noe Valley Ministry, a Presbyterian church in San Francisco. After her talk, Ms. Larges will take questions from the audience. A reception will follow the event.
Ms. Larges’ talk is cosponsored by IUP Pride Alliance and the IUP Unitarian Universalist student group.
]]>The Indiana LGBT Film Festival continues at 6:00 p.m. next Sunday evening with two short subject films titled Kaden Later and Reunion. The feature film on October 18 is Hannah Free, produced by and starring Sharon Gless, who played Christine Cagney in the 1980’s TV detective show Cagney and Lacey.
The Indiana LGBT Film Festival is sponsored by the Indiand Cares Campaign, PFLAG of Indiand, IUP Pride Alliance, the IUP Department of English, and various other university departments and organizations.
]]>Duda, author of The Monster Hunter in Modern Popular Culture (MacFarland, 2007) will visit Dr. Powers’s class in LNRD 205 at 1:25 to discuss “Harry Potter and Studying Popular Culture,” and Dr. Slater’s 6:00 class in LNRD 211 to discuss “Women’s Studies and Amanda of the Saw Films.” All are welcome.
These events are open to any faculty member or students. The presentations and discussions are sure to be lively, so feel free to bring your thoughts and questions and join in.
]]>Anyone interested in posting news, questions, or ideas is welcome to get involved. Check it out and participate.
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In Service presents the experiences of Western Pennsylvanians serving in Iraq as soldiers and government officials, and those recording events as journalists. The film weaves first-hand video recordings, interviews, and still photography as individuals from the region recount their tales unfolding on an international stage.
At the foreground are authentic voices, images, and narratives, and the tales coalesce as a cohesive narrative of how world events affect local communities and touch the lives of those just down the street from ourselves.
(Ralph Vituccio; 2009)
]]>Local filmmaker José Muniain produced this exceptional documentary, which has screened at the Three Rivers Film Festival (where it won the Audience Choice award) and the Latino International Film Festival in Los Angeles. It begins as film director Robert Young sits for his first formal portrait with Spanish painter Félix de la Concha in a studio in Pittsburgh's Hill District.
As we watch de la Concha at work, Young discusses his career filming subjects ranging from nomadic Eskimo tribes to Sicilian slum-dwellers. In the process, the two artists discuss their calling. What drives them to do independent work? How do creative people find their subjects? How are they supported, thwarted, and inspired by what goes on around them?
Muniain is scheduled to appear.
(José Muniain; USA; 2006; 55 min)
]]>Pittsburgh Reframed is a program of shorts by local film and video artists produced as part of the 2008 Three Rivers Film Festival. This anthology celebrates Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary through a series of pieces, each with a run time of two minutes and 50 seconds.
The artists pay tribute to a promotional film commissioned for the city's bicentennial in 1958 by using excerpts from that original work. From there, these artists take their visions in many directions, from documentary of local personalities to impressionistic works of abstract video art. Local artists participating include Tess Allard, Mike Bonello, Tony Buba, Olivia Ciummo, Brian Cohen, Matthew R. Day, Carolina Loyola Garcia, Anna Hawkins, Ben Hernstrom, Charlie Humphrey, Thad Kellstadt, Brady Lewis, Michael Mallis, Jesse McLean, Bob Rutkowski, Elizabeth Seamans, Minette Seate, Chris Smalley, Josh Tonies, and Lucian Wintrich.
(total program: approx. 90 minutes)
Other upcoming films in the Pittsburgh Filmmakers at IUP Film Series include An Independent Portrait, November 11, and In Service, February 24, 2010.
]]>They were recently quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
]]>He will be engaged in March, before the official Big Read kick-off, for a week-long residency that will focus on poetry workshops in area high schools in preparation for the Walworth County Arts Council writing competition. Carvalho’s workshops will be geared towards high school males who are noted as a special concern in the NEA report Reading at Risk.
]]>The article, published on the ten-year anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting, gives a critical look at violence in schools.
]]>Elizabeth Maroski and Marrissa Michael are English majors, and Andrew Thompson and Ashley Talley are English minors.
]]>The “Password Primeval” reading series provides a forum for local (and visiting) writers interested in showcasing original poetic compositions and offers a democratic space for those who prefer to recite selections from poets of their choosing. Over the past year, “I Speak the Password Primeval” has hosted several IUP student and faculty member readings, including Abdullah Aldagamseh, Majid Al-Khalaqi, Mais Al-Qutami, Angel Anderson, Pat Bizzaro, Mitch James, Krystal Hoffman, Tony Lang, Laurie Miller, Ken Sherwood, Justin Watts, and Jen Woolston. Future readers include Sean Carswell, Chauna Craig, Tracy Lassiter, Stacey Mascia, and local poet Jessica Jopp.
“I Speak the Password Primeval” is sponsored by the IUP English Department and convenes at the Commonplace Coffeehouse the last Friday of each month. Open mic signup is available at 6:45 p.m. Readings begin promptly at 7:00 p.m.
Check Password Primeval each month for updates on featured readers and scheduled readings.
If you would like to read your poetry (or the work of another poet) as a featured reader at “I Speak the Password Primeval,” please send an e-mail to e.j.carvalho@iup.edu.
]]>Their panel was titled “Mapping Programmatic Composition Waters: Does Having a Teaching Vision Matter?” and was chaired by Dr. Kathy Sohn, a C&T distinguished alumnus.
Three C&T doctoral students teamed up with their faculty mentors in C&T’s Teaching Associate Program to report on the development of a teaching vision over the past two years. The student-faculty pairs were
The session opened with a theoretical framework and review of literature, followed by a description of how the vision was developed and implemented. The panelists also described the stengths and limitations of the vision and their goals for the future of the C&T Teaching Associate Program.
Teaching associates in the C&T Program are typically fiinished with doctoral course work and are working on their dissertations. The TA-ship offers them an opportunity to teach two or three classes during the year and to develop their teaching skills under the guidance of a head mentor, Dr. Sharon Deckert, and other faculty mentors.
The teaching vision for the program is based on three key values and practices: Community-oriented, Learner-centered, and Reflection-driven, or CLeaR.
]]>On March 8, 2009, Stanley Fish in his New York Times opinion piece “Neoliberalism and Higher Education” addressed the latest Works and Days volume, Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University. Fish cited Works and Days contributors Sophia A. McClennen, Henry Giroux, and Susan Searls Giroux. McClennen was also one of the speakers at the Works and Days “Academic Freedom after 9/11” symposium on February 23 that featured keynote speakers Cary Nelson and Ward Churchill.
On March 15, 2009, Stanley Fish again cited the Works and Days volume in the New York Times, this time in the opinion piece “To Boycott or Not to Boycott, That Is the Question.” In this article, Fish cited Grant Farrad’s essay “The Act of Politics Is to Divide” from the Works and Days volume.
Since Fish’s publicity, Henry Giroux has published a new essay in CounterPunch (“Making Democracy Matter: Academic Labor in Dark Times”), where he states that the Works and Days volume “may be the best collection yet published on intellectual activism and academic freedom.” Such endorsements follow Marc Bousquet’s proclamation in the on-line edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, that the Works and Days volume is “the best value in academic freedom short of joining the AAUP.” Similarly, in a recent letter to IUP administration, AAUP President Cary Nelson asserts “that the special issue of Works and Days devoted to academic freedom is one of the most important academic publications in recent years.”
]]>SJ Miller also recently became cochair for the National Council Teachers of English Assembly for Research (NCTEAR). Together with University of Pittsburgh, NCTEAR will cohost a national research conference highlighting cutting-edge research in English in February 2010, to be held at the University of Pittsburgh.
]]>She will be on sabbatical in Fall 2009 working on a manuscript about African American literature that focuses on white characters, known as white life literature.
]]>The Weekend Writing Retreat aims to create positive perceptions of and attitudes about the writing/publishing process by providing an intensive focus on scholarship development for women and minority participants. Selected faculty members will work to advance a research project during the retreat and will participate in professional development workshops on topics such as increasing scholarly productivity, the publication process, developing a research agenda, and nurturing your scholarly voice.
The Weekend Writing Retreat proposal was initially envisioned for IUP and submitted as part of the Diversity and Social Equity grant competition, but was adopted by the State System office for implementation statewide. Two Weekend Writing Retreats will be held in Summer 2009, serving over fifty faculty members across the State System.
]]>Dr. Kevin Patrick (Geography)
“You’re Not Dead: You’re in Newark: A Sopranos Geography of New Jersey”
Mr. Matt Ferrence (English)
“The Written Redneck: Regional Image, National Identity”
Dr. Susan Gatti (English Emeritus)
“Leonard Hall and the Democratization of Public Space”
Dr. Stacy Wickers (Geography)
“‘A love affair with a pile of rock’: Landscape and Gender in the Writings of Edward Abbey”
The conference is sponsored by the English Department, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Graduate Program in Composition and TESOL, Graduate Program in Literature and Criticism, Women’s Studies Program, and Center for North Appalachian Studies.
For more information, contact Dr. Lea Masiello (English) or Dr. Cheryl Wilson (English).
]]>“‘You Jealous or Something? Huh? Oh, I Bet You’re So Jealous Sweetheart’: Vindicating Nancy Spungen From Patriarchal Historical Revisionism,” will appear in the special “Presence and Importance of Women in Punk Rock” issue of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal during the 2009–10 academic year.
]]>The conference took place on the Tamkang campus Nov. 30–Dec. 1, 2008, and opened with an address by the university president and a keynote speech by Dr. Ilona Leki.
Rafoth and Pagnucci were invited to speak at the conference by Dr. Peter I-min Huang, chair of the Tamkang University English Department. Excerpts from Rafoth and Pagnucci’s presentations appear below.
IUP enjoys an exchange program with Tamkang University and hosts a number of undergraduate Taiwanese students each year. Tamkang has a strong reputation in Asia for preparing excellent teachers of English. Each year, Tamkang students join IUP’s Graduate Program in Composition and TESOL.
An excerpt from the presentations by Rafoth and Pagnucci:
]]>The training of teachers is a divided enterprise. On the one hand, we expect teachers to learn their subjects through formal and extensive study. On the other hand, we expect them to become good teachers without giving them much preparation. In other words, once teachers have mastered their subjects, we assume they are well qualified to teach, even though we all know from our experience as students that someone who knows a subject well is not necessarily good at teaching the subject to others. In the United States and other countries, curricula devoted to training teachers—the curriculum of pedagogy—is concentrated in Education Departments and methods courses. Even licensing and certification exams tend to be divided into separate sections for subject matter and for teaching.
The division between mastery of a subject and the ability to teach this subject is not a balanced division. Instead, mastery of the subject is considered by many people to be all that is necessary for someone to be a good teacher. We see this mistake occurring in many disciplines. We will turn our full attention to the field of Second Language Writing in a moment, but first, we want to make our point clear in a general way. In Mathematics, for example, it is sometimes assumed that knowledge of mathematical procedures and formulas is sufficient to teach the subject. And indeed, teachers are often hired on the basis of little more than their knowledge of mathematical procedures and formulas. In many countries, this practice occurs in most academic disciplines where newly minted Ph.D.s are hired with little or no formal training in pedagogy or curriculum development. The vast majority of doctoral curricula, including those that are closely aligned with the field of second language writing, require no course work at all in teaching methods or theories. This creates a problem in which people become experts in content matter knowledge without developing adequate pedagogical or curricular knowledge.
What we wish to offer here is a new vision of knowledge which can be used by academic leaders for whom the effective teaching of second language writing is a high priority—faculty members, department chairs, curriculum committees, program coordinators, and administrators. We want to explore a way of understanding knowledge itself which does not fall into the trap of subject isolation identified by Dewey so long ago. In this article, we describe three components of a comprehensive vision that brings coherence and clarity to the challenge of preparing to teach and learn second language writing. Each component refers to a domain of knowledge: Content Knowledge, Pedagogical Knowledge, and Curricular Knowledge. Altogether, these three domains answer the question, What must one know in order to become an effective teacher of second language writing?
Three English faculty members, Dr. Gloria Park, Dr. Lisya Seloni, and Dr. Lilia Savova, were joined by more than twenty-five Composition and TESOL students, presenting on various topics within the field of TESOL.
Faculty presentations included “Engaging ESOL Student in Autobiographical Narrative Writing” (Dr. Park), “Effective Use of Textbooks” (Dr. Savova), and “Academic Literacy Socialization of Multilingual Students” (Dr. Seloni).
Graduate students in the Composition and TESOL program led conversations on topics, including the incorporation of multimodal theme-sets to facilitate literacy development among English-based Creole-speaking students, developing English proficiency through e-mail exchanges, and reading practices within the EFL classroom, as well as many other topics.
Janet Pierce, president of Three Rivers TESOL, ELL coordinator for Franklin Regional School District, and IUP doctoral candidate, hailed this event as a complete success, partly due to the high level of participation from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
For additional information regarding the Three Rivers TESOL’s 2008 fall conference or membership, visit the Three Rivers TESOL website.
]]>This presentation explored the emergence of Pittsburghese from the same Scots-Irish influence as the Appalachian dialect and how it has been addressed, traditionally, in the classroom. The presentation was followed by a roundtable discussion and brief reception where students and faculty were able to discuss other research they have been conducting.
Johnstone’s most recent publication, Discourse Analysis, has been highly acclaimed for its significant contributions to the linguistics field and is currently being used in the M.A. TESOL program at IUP.
]]>Norris will present "Making Teaching Tangible: Reflections on a Preservice Teacher Education Project that Closes the Gap Between University and High School Spaces" at the 98th National Council of Teachers of English Convention in San Antonio, Texas on November 21, 2008.
]]>Downing, of the Department of English, has written the Afterword to the soon-to-be-released double volume of Works and Days—Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University. He will read a paper, “Teaching the World Bank University,” at the MLA annual convention in San Francisco in December 2008. The two most recent reviews of his book The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace appeared this fall in College English (September 2008) and jac: Journal of Advanced Composition (September 2008).
]]>Carvalho’s interview with 2007 Pulitzer poetry finalist Martín Espada, “A Branch on the Tree of Whitman: Martin Espada on the 150th Anniversary of Leaves of Grass,” currently appears as a reprint in the Summer 2008 print edition of Ed Folsom’s (U of Iowa) Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. In addition to his “The Day After Canticles” poem featured in Indiana University of Pennsylvania's print literary journal New Growth Arts Review no. 28, he has had the following accepted for publication: “In the grain of an oak, a horse” and “The lost chance for epiphany at a gas station in Connecticut,” which will appear in Billy Finnegan's . . . like this (2008-09); and “A bachelor takes his pound of pasta seriously,” “(Finding an Internet Video of) The 1971 ‘Crying Indian’ PSA Commercial,” and “Roach interlude in Leonard Hall (Indiana University of Pennsylvania English Department)” will appear in Viviparous Blenny (January 2009).
Earlier this year, Carvalho received a $1,200 honorarium for a poetry reading and lecture to promote his current book Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short (Fine Tooth Press, 2007) at SUNY’s North Country Community College. In June, he was selected as one of seventeen international students to participate in the Walt Whitman seminar Dortmund, where he also delivered a paper during the conference symposium. His forthcoming collection of poetry, “If the radiance of a thousand suns”: Songs of the American Hiroshima, is currently under contract with Six Bad Apples Press (forthcoming 2008–09), the release of which will be preceded by an audiobook collection, Chants from the Seven Cities. He is the curator of the local poetry reading series “I speak the password primeval” and founding editor of the newly announced creative and critical journal The Acknowledged Legislator.
]]>“We compare undergraduate teacher education students at three Pennsylvania campuses to capture a range of student backgrounds and educational contexts,” said Park.
Department of English]]>His essay “Bohemianism, The ‘Cultural Turn’ of the Avant-Garde, and Forgetting the Roma,” published in last summer’s issue of TDR, the leading performance-studies journal, received Honorable Mention in the Outstanding Article Award competition held annually by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the largest international organization dedicated to drama, theater, and performance studies.
This fall, Sell will present a paper on “Blackness, the Body, and Politics in 1960’s Drama and Performance” as part of West Virginia University’s Eberly Family Distinguished Lecture Series; will be a member of a seminar on right-wing avant-gardes to be held at the American Society for Theatre Research conference; and, in his role as editor of Theatre Survey’s Critical Stages column, will attend the University of California-Berkeley’s groundbreaking conference on African and Afro-Caribbean Performance.
This past spring, he gave a university lecture and public interview as part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s biannual Lorraine Hansberry Project.
He is currently developing two anthologies: a collection of essays titled “Vectors of the Radical: Mobile Materialities, Performance, and the Avant-Garde” and a collection of non-European, non-U.S. drama titled “Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1950-2000: The Global Challenge,” which he is coediting with Mary Washington University’s James Harding.
This past spring, Sell was a member of the Franklin Regional School District Strategic Planning Committee, which drafted and successfully passed a six-year curricular plan that emphasizes science, diversity, foreign language, and world-knowledge education.
The funded project for which she will be an EL Fellow is in Malawi, where she will work at Mzuzu University as an instructor and teacher trainer focusing on English for writing and speaking. She will also deal with methodological issues related to student outcomes and academic assessment. Part of her professional duties includes the preparation of future Malawian secondary school teachers and the mentoring of future teacher-trainers. The funded project in Malawi runs from January to October 2009.
A doctoral candidate in Composition and TESOL at IUP, Thomas is working to complete her dissertation which deals with the professional identity development of minorities in higher education. In addition to being a teaching associate in the Department of English, she has also worked as an instructor and reading coordinator at the American Language Institute. In Spring 2007, she received the prestigious Scholars for the Dream Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the National Council of Teachers of English.
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IUP, in cooperation with East Stroudsburg University and DeSales University, again offers its popular three-week Summer Study Abroad Program July 18 to August 9.
Participants will study in Oxford, England, with professors from accredited Pennsylvania universities. Classes and accommodations will be provided at St. Edmund Hall, one of Oxford's oldest colleges.
For more information go to the IUP Oxford Summer Study Program website at: http://www.chss.iup.edu/oxford/.
Or contact Dr. Lynne Alvine in the IUP English Department at: lalvine@iup.edu.