RTC Literary Seminar Collaboration to Be Published

Lauren150Congratulations to Dr. Lauren Bowen and the RTC students in her community literacy seminar Spring 2014 for their collaborative publication coming out in the latest Community Literacy Journal.

The citation is:

Dr. Lauren BowenLauren MarshallKirsti ArkoJoel BeattyCindy DelaneyIsidore DorpenyoLaura MoellerElsa Roberts, and John Velat

“Community Engagement in a Graduate-Level Community Literacy Course.” Community Literacy Journal 9.1 (2014): 20-40.

Presenting at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages

Presenting at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages

 The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) called for papers for its annual Convention last spring, and I submitted a proposal about a project my friend and former colleague, Lori Wells, and I had been working on for almost two semesters. The title of our presentation was, Le Petit Prince: A Big Idea for a Small Liberal Arts Campus.

 This national conference met in San Antonio in November 2014, and when Lori, the French instructor at Schreiner University, and I received an acceptance via email, we were thrilled because our presentation would be a home game only about sixty miles from where I used to teach English and German for six years.

Lori and I launched a Big Idea on Schreiner University’s campus. We developed pedagogical concepts in our foreign language classrooms that focused on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s international classic, Le Petit Prince. Moreover, we organized several events in the course of one academic year that included theme-based discussion and interpretations of the book. These events, such as a Stone Soup discussion group that was linked to the university’s Writing Center and Monday Night Fiction, the book club on campus, also reached out to students who were not in our respective classes and even included community members in general. Students organized discussion panels and engaged in creative writing projects, e.g. a tri-lingual script for a class video. We also shared an international video commentary with our colleagues at ACTFL and received highly interested questions and remarks about how to launch a Big Idea project like ours on a different campus.

The conference was impressive with almost 800 presentations that ranged from teaching literature to experimental pedagogical approaches in all kinds of foreign languages. Attending and presenting at a professional conference like this is a fantastic way to network and to meet new people. I was warmly encouraged to apply for a job after discussing pedagogy with some fellow German professors and reconnected with a dear friend of mine whom I had not seen since grad school about sixteen years ago. He is now teaching German at the College of Charleston and would like to organize a panel with me for next year’s Convention in San Diego. The ACTFL Convention offered me big opportunities for collaboration and was truly inspir10700499_10205614458783042_1806992830906728836_oIMG_3542 IMG_3547 IMG_3549ing.

I would like to sincerely thank Michigan Tech’s Humanities Department and Student Government for supporting my project and presentation by granting me funding for this trip. I return from The Lone Star State with a slight sunburn, a mind full of academic ideas and a stomach full of the best Tex Mex food.

At This Year’s SHOT Conference

Beatty ThumbnailThis blog post was written by Humanities PhD student Joel Beatty.

I am happy to report that I just returned from the annual conference for the Society for the History of Technology in Dearborn, MI. Our fellow RTC PhD candidate, Jessica Lauer, presented a paper, “A Hard Nut to Crack: Material Consciousness and the Nutcracker”, while I presented my paper titled: “Color, Culture, and Technology: A History of Indeterminacy.”

Michigan Tech was well represented at the SHOT conference with four faculty members and three graduate students attending in total (Dr. Steve Walton, Dr. Fred Quivik, Dr. Hugh Gorman, and PhD Student John Baeten from Social Sciences, and Dr. Bruce Seeley, Dean of Arts and Sciences).

Overall, the SHOT conference was a wonderful intellectual and career shaping experience. The conference venue was split between The Henry Autograph Hotel, The University of Michigan-Dearborn and The Henry Ford Museum, which added to the unique feel of this gathering. As a first timer to the conference, I was pleasantly surprised by what can be described as an invitational attitude towards graduate student members of SHOT. The society’s officers and the conference organizers go out of their way to seek new historical perspectives and graduate student researchers into the history of technology field. As a presenter, grad students are placed into a panel mixed established professors and other graduate students, and each panel is assigned an experienced commenter to facilitate discussion and synthesize all the presentations. Also, I was impressed by the  submission process to the conference, which required an acceptance of a proposal and then a draft of a conference paper submitted one month in advance of the conference. This process produces highly focused presentations and dynamic discussions, with some of the sessions lasting a full two hours in length. Beyond the presentations, graduate students are warmly welcome to special interest group luncheons within the society and made to feel welcome at all the conference mixers, banquets ect. The end result, for me, was a very positive experience and a more focused perspective on my research stemming from long discussions with detailed oriented historians.

I highly recommend grad students from the RTC program joining the Society for the History of Technology, and submitting a proposal to present. The perspectives we learn in this program on rhetoric, science, technology, culture and diversity in general are highly valued by historians, and the networks and relationships I have developed being part of this conference have been helpful for my academic interests and hold a lot of potential for the future.

Cheers, Joel Beatty

SHOT Website:  http://www.historyoftechnology.org/

SHOT Annual Conference website: http://www.historyoftechnology.org/features/annual_meeting/

Mixer

Conference Mixer at the Henry Ford Museum

Nye

Plenary Speaker Dr. David Nye

A Great Start for PhD Candidate Rebecca Frost

Rebecca Frost
Rebecca Frost

PhD candidate Rebecca Frost has been sharing her scholarly research in several different venues as she completes her dissertation this year. This summer, she presented a paper entitled “Future or past?” at the first “Evil Incarnate” conference on villains and villainy, “Approaching Evil: The Societal Function of True Crime.” A paper by Rebecca on male violence in two works by Stephen King (“Razors, Bumper Stickers, and Wheelchairs: Male Violence and Madness in Rose Madder and Mr. Mercedes”) has been accepted for next spring’s Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association national conference. And her paper from the last PCA/ACA conference, “A Different Breed: Serial Killers in Works by Stephen King,” is being published later this year as a chapter in a collection about Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics. Nice work, Rebecca!

PhD Student Wincharles Coker Published in Journal Discourse and Communication

Beatrice-BookPhD Student Wincharles Coker has published a review of Beatrice Quarshie Smith’s book Reading and Writing in the Global Workplace: Gender, Literacy, and Outsourcing in Ghana. The review appears in the November 2014 edition of the journal Discourse and Communication (pp. 429-32). It’s available online at http://dcm.sagepub.com/content/current.

Nancy Barr’s Novels Featured

Page One: Hit and Run
Page One: Hit and Run

Mystery novelist Nancy Barr, a PhD student in the RTC program and a staff member in the ME-EM Department, was recently featured on two Michigan-oriented websites. She is the author of three novels, Page One: Hit and Run, Page One: Vanished, and Page One: Whiteout, published by Arbutus Press. All three books are set in the Upper Peninsula and feature a strong female protagonist, newspaper reporter Robin Hamilton.

The Motown Writers Network featured her on their site this summer and Michigander Monday posted an interview with Nancy on September 1.

In addition to her busy career and school schedule, she is working on a new novel that is part mystery, part ghost story that shifts between two time frames: the Copper Country’s mining boom days in the early 1900s and the early 1970s, shortly after the last mine in Houghton County shut down.

RTC at WAP

The RTC graduate program will be well-represented at the Writing across the Peninsula Conference to be held on October 9 and 10, 2014 at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. The theme of this year’s conference is “Digital Landscapes and Engaging in the Hybrid Environment.” Here is a list of papers that will be presented by RTC students:

“Will U HI R Me?: Considering professionalism in digital environments”
Rebecca Miner, Michigan Technological University

“Green, Red, Blue, Yellow, Green: Color Tools for the Writing Classroom”
Joel Beatty, Michigan Technological University

“Understanding Buzzfeed.com: Exploring the Practical and Theoretical Implications of Digital News”
Thomas Adolphs, Michigan Technological University

“Content Management and Communication in the Composition Classroom”
Elsa Roberts, Michigan Technological University

RTC Graduate Students Win Awards

Three PhD students in the RTC program have been recognized for distinctive accomplishments recently:

Wincharles Coker
Wincharles Coker

Wincharles Coker’s essay, ” Media Culture and Television News: A Review of Five Recent Books and their Implications for Future Research” (published October 2013) has been selected as the Best Article of the Year for 2013 by the International Journal of Communication and Media Studies.

Gary Kaunonen
Gary Kaunonen

Gary Kaunonen was awarded a Michigan Tech Doctoral “Finishing Fellowship” for the fall semester. This competitive fellowship recognizes outstanding PhD candidates by providing financial support as the finish writing their dissertations.

Isidore Dorpenyo
Isidore Dorpenyo

Isidore Dorpinyo was chosen as the second place winner for the 2014 CPTSC/Bedford St. Martin’s Diversity Scholarship. The award carries a $500 scholarship to assist the recipient with expenses attending the annual conference at Colorado Springs this September.

Creating a Home (Far, Far) Away from Home

Especially in the harsh and seemingly endless winter months, getting acclimated to the Houghton environment (as a whole) can be a difficult task, especially if you hail from a place where the culture vastly differs from the one that is here. Coming from Queens, New York, a 30-minute F-train ride away from Times Square, my arrival to Houghton and most of my first year were spent trying to figure out how I could make this place, and my time pursuing my Master’s as comfortable and beneficial to my education as possible.While a challenging experience, I tried as hard as I could to find and fit bits and pieces of my hobbies from New York into my schedule to fuel myself with the familiarity of home. Before the snow hit, I would attend the early morning yoga sessions in the SDC until I decided to invest in my own yoga mat so I could keep up with my practice in the event that I couldn’t drive and was snowed in; I became involved with the women’s rugby team at Michigan Tech and embraced the chance to keep my love for the sport alive. As I approach the end of my time as a Master’s candidate, I know that I may have to make the sacrifice and give up my commitment to one of  (if not both of) these hobbies in order to finish on-time but I also understand that I’ll need to find that balance again somewhere else; going to the KBC with friends and fellow graduate students,a large McDonald’s iced coffee, cooking a delicious meal, watching a good movie, picking up a good Netflix series or book (for fun, imagine!), Bananagrams, and FaceTiming with my girlfriend or friends from home are aspects of my life in Houghton that I strive to integrate into my lifestyle to ensure that the rough days less of a challenge. While several of my colleagues and friends enjoy hobbies ranging from photography and blogging to snowshoeing and broomball, I’ve found that there are places to make things feel like home here and provide that much-needed, occasional break from the work of being in graduate school and trying to find our place in the academic world.

sweet-bitter weather

Despite being absolutely freezing every winter here in Houghton, Michigan, I love the place. It has gorgeous summer which looks pretty much like a heaven during fall colors. When summer looms, my worries are gone; my anxieties no more exist. When I came here as a graduate student in RTC program, I was, however, rather petrified by the winter warnings unwittingly shared by my colleagues. The chilling cold would freeze my nose every time I would dare to walk. But, now I have learned how to enjoy winter. I don’t care about freezing winter because I can seize some moments of delights on varied festive occasions. Certainly, I don’t care about piles of snow beneath my boots because it is my dream school which offers supportive living in a warm congenial and home-like environment. Though relatively a very small program with faculty and staff of family-like friends, I find the program very interesting. It is a program that definitely considers your future, your interest, and your responsibility to fulfill as a citizen of the world.

The program offers students a solid grounding in the field. At the same time, because of the interdisciplinary nature of the program, every student gets enough opportunity to explore the area of his/her own interest. Here, I find things absolutely different from my prior institution. You do not feel lonely as plenty of RTC graduate students are willing to meet you, to hear you. You feel at home away from home as soon as you begin to interact with teaching faculty and staff, friends and other members. Each professor provides students with guidance and advice on becoming professionally active. The focus on scholarly skills and the mentoring relationships with professors assures that students can acquire a professional competence in the area of their interest. Courses offered definitely serve the interest of every student. I have been enormously benefited from the multidisciplinary and global approach of teaching and the congenial learning environment.