A couple weeks ago I attended the annual PCEA conference, which this year was paired up with parent society, the CEA, for a conference at the lovely Omni William Penn in Pittsburgh. Since it was in the 'burgh, I got to cut cost and stay with friends, (and enjoy a nice metro ride into town). Overall, the conference was a pretty decent success as far as I'm concerned. Here are the highlights:
My own presentation:
Unfortunately, I was scheduled for the 1st panel on the first day; so I expected an audience of 0 much like last year's conference, but fortunately, we had two audience members in addition to presenters and moderator, so that was a 200% improvement. Things got off to a pretty good start. I read from "Deconstructing Happily Ever After," and it went ok-ish; nowhere near as fun as the smashing success the story had at Spalding, but still a pretty decent reading.
Flow
Also during that panelone of my co-presenters spoke about Flow and theories set by herself and Csikszentmihalyi regarding the process of writing and how it affects our minds. The presenter, Julie Kearney of Penn State Harrisburg expanded on Csikszentmihalyi's theories by studing the level of serotonin in the brain in relationship to the state of Flow a writer is in. Basically, achieving flow is that state that we as writers, (and by extension, I would imagine any artistic endeavor as well) come to when we lose sense of the world around us and are totally absorbed in our work; that feeling you get fleetingly when "the keyboard is writing for your, or if you're old school like Dave Harrity, when the pen is writing the poem." She found that Seretonin levels go up, which makes me think then that (and this is my own thought, not Julie's) that writing is somewhat addictive; we're always searching for that absorbative high, when we're fully geared in creative mode; and we hate coming down from it. I wonder if so many writers over history were also addicts (Faulkner and alcohol, Ken Kesey and LSD, etc) for this reason -- sort of short circuiting the true payoff. Julie also reported that she planned on running writing experiments with folks that can achieve flow where she inhibits seratonin to see what happens. Interesting stuff.
The New Historicism way of Responding to Student Papers
I went to a panel geared towards comp teachers that stressed a new method of using critical theory as a method to respond to student papers. Essentially, the presenter, argued that "Rubber Stamp comments" were doing nothing for our students and that New Historicism theory will allow instructors to better approach the students' work without making the students just appropriate what we tell them for a better grade. I like the idea behind this; teach the student how to write what they want, and communicate their designs well, but I'm unsure of its effectiveness in the sea of 100 essays every 2 weeks. I currently average between 10 and 20 minutes per paper, which places me at around 30+ hours worth of grading per essay. Adding a new historicism twist by showing students how their essays fit into the historical context of their writing realm, while not rubber stamping comments, sounds, to me, to be very time intensive. Our departmental meetings have constantly stressed that when commenting on student papers, less is more, and that students rarely, if ever, pay much attention to the blood on the page, so I've got to say that I'm not entirely sold on this model of response. It doesn't seem to have openings for structural, grammatical, and clarity issues, which are all too common. Perhaps I'm missing the point of this methodology. I can see definitley how it'd work well in more advanced classes for seminar papers, and even creative works, but it seems a bit too much for a freshman comp class.
Other Stuff
One of the better aspects of the conference was that I got to meet up with several former IUP professors and hear about the very excellent sounding revision they've done to the English curriculum at my alma-mater. When I transfered into IUP in 2000, I was aghast at how archaic and backwards IUP's English program was in comparison to Behrend's. Not only did it severly limit a student's ability to gain depth in Literarture studies, it allowed little avenue to specialize and/or excel in particular interests. I ended up spending a rather large portion of my final two years taking survey classes that struggled to cover massive amounts of literary time, and offered little depth, and because I had pretty specific interests (postmodern theory and creative writing), I ended up taking several more classes than I needed to graduate, just so I could satisfy some of my curiosities.
Fortunately now, IUP is offering a much more modernized track system with several different areas of specialty, and an expanded and updated list of courses. They'll be launching this program in the upcoming Fall 2009 semester, and by the looks of it, it'll be a smashing success.
1 comment:
That's interesting about "flow" and a possible link with seretonin. As you may remember I've written before about Zen moments while writing. Most meditation research I've ever come across, however, links those occurences to lower brainwave cycles brought on by concentration. And I agree with you, that grading strategy would be unrealistic and for an undergraduate class, not to mention a waste of time.
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