Hey all…I’m back from San Francisco and getting ready for next week’s Composition Conference for Student Writers. And now…the latest vlog:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3nogLw5Zpo&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b]
Hey all, I just got this email from the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Faculty:
On April 30th, contingent faculty from all over the country will be teaching their classes outside and holding rallies and press conferences to educate the public and their students about the current working conditions at American universities and colleges. One reason why these faculty members will be holding their classes outside is to draw attention to the fact that most of the people teaching in higher education do not have tenure and have limited academic freedom and job security. By bringing their classes outdoors, contingent faculty will not only make their labor more visible, but they will also gain a stronger sense of shared working conditions.
Another important motivation for this event is the threat that higher ed administrators will use the current economic downturn to justify the letting go of many non-tenured faculty, and once these teachers are released, we will witness a cutting of courses and an expansion of class size coupled with an increase in tuition and fees. In other words, parents and students will be paying more and getting less.
While it is clear that some cost cutting will have to be implemented, we have to question why the loss of funds will be taken out on the most vulnerable faculty members and students. Why can’t universities fire administrators or freeze their salaries? Why can’t the wealthy institutions borrow from their billion dollar endowments to weather the storm?
If faculty, students, and staff come out and make their presence known, they may be able to stop the easy administrative solution of just not rehiring the teachers who work outside of the tenure system. By claiming our status as the new majority in higher education, we can protect the quality of education in American universities and colleges. Please come out and support faculty, students, and higher education on April 30th.
For more info and a flyer, go to: http://thenewfacultymajority.blogspot.com/
Once again, Jon Stewart draws attention to the failings of “outrage” as a political response…especially the brand of outrage expressed from our politicians. I’m telling you, I wish the Daily Show would make t-shirts with the “Notorious AIG” image.
This segment has an added bonus–watch it to the end for Stanley Ragooch. Talk about better representing the sentiment of most people I know.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| The Notorious AIG – Outrage | ||||
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Yes, indeed Cooking with Dionysus iTunes podcast is LIVE! Woo Hoo.
No, really, I do know that I am just about the only person that is excited about this. Really, I do.
OK…so, you may have been following my trials and tribulations trying to post my first podcast episode. Well, I think I’ve got the tech part of things worked out.
So, last week I was as CCCCs in San Francisco. It was a great conference and our panel, Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing, went extraordinarily well. We had a pretty packed room and it was a privilege to be presenting alongside such awesome colleagues: Mary Boland, Seth Kahn, Amy Lynch-Biniek, Rachel Riedner, and Eileen Schell (our respondent). I was also quite pleased with the vigorous discussion following our papers. That discussion continued on over to the Serrano Hotel for our CCCCs Labor Caucus Interest Group. Truly a great way to cap off the day.
As you may have seen, I decided to use this year’s CCCCs to enter the world of video blogging (vlogging) on our
composition and rhetoric blog. That was fun and has got me on a bit of a web 2.0 kick this week (don’t even get me started about Nings). As I wrote earlier, I’ve got a rather ambitious tech agenda for the fall and I’ve submitted a tech request for some equipment that I hope will come through. I also found out that I still have a small chuck of money from a Teachnology Grant I received a few years ago for WritersBlogK, a project I undertook with Aaron Barlow. So, it looks like I’m going to pick up the Snowball
In the meantime, I thought I would take the leap and try my hand at podcasting this week. After a couple days of failure, I think I’ve finally got the hang of it. Since I just presented a paper at CCCCs, I thought that would be a good test case. So, here it is folks: “Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures.” In addition to the paper I presented, I also included a bunch of “notes” that were in an earlier draft but had to be cut due to time.
"Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures" [24:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (100)OK, I think I’ve got this now…looks like I messed up first file somehow. Here we go:
Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures [24:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (77)OK…this is an experiment in podcasting. Ideally there will be an audio link to my CCCCs 2009 paper in this post. PodPress and I have been having…shall we say…differences of opinion as to whether or not my files are accessible. We’ll see if I’ve got the kinks worked out.
CCCC’s 2009 Paper: “Rhetoric of Advocacy: Curricular Labor and Democratic Futures.”
Yesterday was a great day at CCCCs. All four of the panels I went to were fantastic. I did make one change in my schedule. I didn’t go to “We Have Been Here Forever” as I initially planned. Instead, I went to the session, “Community Literacies and Deliberative Democracy In and Beyond the University,” with Eli Goldblatt, Juan Guerra, Michelle Kells, and Carlos Salinas. Our panel, “Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing,” went extremely well…we had a packed house, our papers worked incredibly well together, Eileen Schell posed several key questions in her response, and many audience members walked with us over to the Serrano Hotel for our Labor Caucus Interest Group meeting. More on all of this when I have a little time (right now I am sitting in the hotel lobby waiting for my ride to the airport).
I was really looking forward to being here this year…and my expectations were more than met. The non-panel discussions I had with people who I haven’t seen since the last CCCCs and colleagues I see on a more-or-less regular basis were invigorating…which is, after all, why we come to these conferences in the first place, right?
More to come!
So…I figured what a better moment to begin vlogging. We have a YouTube channel for our composition and rhetoric program and a blog…so, I figured why not play around a little while at CCCCs? Check it out.
