The Undersea World of Clint Gardner

Michael Pemberton editor of Across the Disciplines has honored me in asking me to take on the role of guest editor for a special edition of the journal about Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing In the Disciplines in community colleges. I’ve got a pretty solid call for papers which I will post here in the Undersea World when Michael gives the go-ahead. I’m excited by the opportunity to guest-edit a journal. It is something I’ve aspired to do, but never been given the chance.

In other news (sorry to be such a bad blogger), I was also honored by current CCCC Chair Chuck Bazerman to be chosen as the CCCC National Day on Writing (NDoW) chair. NDoW (Oct. 20, 2009) is a NCTE campaign to bring wider awareness to writing. I worked with an stellar crew of folks–Eric Bateman, Michael Day, Neal Lerner, Jon Olson, Michael Pemberton, and Bonnie Sunstein. We came up with a strong list of existing online resources and suggested activities. We’ll probably keep working for the time being too, as more resources will be developed. Kent Williamson (NCTE Chair) emphasized the need to make certain the NDoW is not just an academic activity, but includes everyone. One thing our committee emphasized is that if the event takes place in an institution or a community that has a writing center, that the writing center become the locus of NDoW activities.

Stay tuned!

Well I feel compelled to write something, given that it is the end of the semester. I will, therefore, make notes:

1. One can tell the student who has been working on her or his paper for a long time by the state of their attire. Sweats and bad-hair-day beanies mean the student is pulling an all-nighter to hopefully get the paper done. The well-dressed student who does not have that desperate look in her or his eye is the one who took more time or (I hope this is not the case) such students just don’t care.
2. Something or someone must be trying to hack WordPress, as my administrator account was deleted. Time to upgrade, I suppose.
3. The end of the semester is notoriously unpredictable. Our rush days came early this week. Now it is relatively quiet.
4. I am looking forward to getting back into the classroom next semester.
5. I feel scatter-shot at the moment.
6. I have a peer review to write that I thought I had finished. I understand why the editors want more now, but at the time I was under the happy delusion that my enthusiastic acceptance of the piece in question was enough.

Random notes on a random day.

The second “season” of the PeerCentered podcast begins with where we started, at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW). NCPTW 2007 was held at Penn State and was hosted by the Penn State Center for Excellence in Writing.

I hope that this season will feature more contributors. Harry Denny from St. John’s University Writing Center in New York expressed interest in the podcast, and perhaps some of the people now contributing to the PeerCentered blog from the Boise State Writing Center will want to participate.

There is a lot of potential for PeerCentered either as a blog or a podcast. I think I am going to make it my priority after I finish up as IWCA President this November.

Recently on WCENTER (the email list for people interested in writing center work) the topic of “handouts” has come up again. This discussion has occurred previously and IWCA established a “handouts” web site committee to develop a web site that would house resources for the writing center community. I rather liked that idea, but felt that the usefulness of the web site would be considerably constrained if it were bottle-necked through an overworked web master or site editor.

Given my role as IWCA Web Editor at that time, I proposed the use of a wiki to solve the bottle-necking problem. Almost immediately, however, a disagreement arose about the academic rigor of such a site if it were left completely open to anyone and (perhaps) everyone editing it. I believe that this concern is valid, but I also think that constraining the wiki to a select group of editors has stifled the project.

This morning, therefore, I took it upon myself to try to revamp the IWCA Handouts Resource wiki by placing a very specific disclaimer on the page that states that IWCA does not vouch for the content for authenticity or endorse any particular method described. I also noted very specifically that the site is open to anyone to edit, not just a select few. I think this is the only way that the resource is going to develop. No doubt there will be bad information provided and approaches that others don’t endorse. I believe, however, that such conflict will work itself out collaboratively. If we have to flag pages as problematic, then that decision will be made collaboratively.

I’ve been a particular slacker in my blogging this summer. That is unfortunate, because I think I do have a great deal to report.

I shall summarize it, however in an ordered list, and will get back to it when I am not on vacation:

1. We completed our Student Writing Center advertising video. It is a bit stilted at times, but that gives it a bit of charm or perhaps just reality. The Peer Writing Advisers (from now on to be called PWAs) collaborated on it quite effectively, I think.
2. We have hired 6 new PWAs. Staff education begins in earnest the first week of the semester.
3. The Student Writing Center was the lucky recipient of two iMacs, two iPods, and a new video camera to create useful online resources for student writers and writing advisers.
4. We wrapped up a successful summer of tutoring.
5. We conducted a workshop on self-reflective writing in order to improve how students make use of it for their portfolios. It was the first thing recorded with the iPod technology and is currently distributed to the PWAs and Faculty Writing Advisers (FWAs) via passworded podcast. I apologize that I cannot make it open to the whole world, but I don’t think that is fair to the participants.
6. I had the honor to be the outside reviewer of Lansing Community College’s (LCC) Capital Writing Institute last week. I also conducted a program review for the LCC Writing Center. It was great to get work with Jill Pennington, LCC WC director, for more than just the few days I normally see her at various conferences.

After a moderately slow June, the Student Writing Center is hopping now. June gave me a chance to map out several projects I want to engage in over the next year:

1. participate in SLCC’s push to join iTunes you by creating audio and video podcasts that would be useful for student writers
2. coordinate a new push to have faculty develop new resources for the Student Writing Center
3. create a video orientation (in cahoots with number 1 above) for both our online and in-person response services
4. the writing center movie project I discussed early on the UWofCG
5. consider methods to record and distribute advising sessions to student writers via mp3/iPod

I’ve also been discussing with my IWCA colleagues various issues that have come up about publications as well as our fall agenda. We went into recess just a few short weeks ago, so it has slowed down considerably on the IWCA front.

Now, of course, what interest might a reader find in this? Probably nothing. As I mentioned in the first post, the UWofCG is a tool that I want to make use of to keep track of things. I think, in fact, I’ve missed a couple of projects I’m thinking of above. That’s a shame.

Given that I’m working on a couple of video projects (one currently in production with my colleague Tiffany Rousculp and one in pre-planning stage), I’ve been interested in what others have done related to writing centers. Most of the videos found on Youtube are advertisements for writing center work. There are a couple of humorous ones out there (1, and 2) but one serious one stands out in that it seems to define writing center work quite well is from Evergreeen State:

.

I like how they’ve taken the voice and integrated it with the image.

My colleague Tiffany Rousculp (of the SLCC Community Writing Center) and I are making a short video of our tutor alumni. We got it down to the 5 minutes we’re seeking today and I’m quite pleased with the results. The movie will be shown to the SLCC Board of Trustees because we want to show them that the work that goes on in a writing center has a broader impact than just on the student or community writers who go to our respective centers. Our purpose is to demonstrate that peer writing consultants learn a great deal and are, indeed, shaped by their writing center experiences.

I will probably post the final version of the video on PeerCentered, since it is about peer tutoring.

“How many side projects to I really need?” I thought to myself while riding the train in to campus today. ” I mean my hell! Do you really need another blog?” I’ve been wanting to fiddle around with WordPress more lately, given that it is the system that is currently in use on writingcenters.org. And I needed an index for my account on the Student Writing Center’s web server, Bessie (there is a history behind that name that I will explore at some point on UWCG.) I’ve been meaning to develop my account on that server given that all my previous professional work was removed from our old Student Writing Center web site because of a change over in how the web server works and general Community College policies. I find that people ask me questions that could easily be answer by a site like this, and I want to organize my work in ways that help me to understand it and, more importantly, remember it!

I am anticipating that any reader who would stumble upon this fine corner of sheer academic egoism is going to ask “why the title?” Here’s the story: when I was setting up WordPress, I got to the point when it asked for what I wanted to call the site. Initially I typed in “Clint Gardner” and immediately erased it as it kind of meant the page was me or I was the page. I then typed in “About Clint Gardner” and hit the backspace key immediately upon hitting the final “r” in my name. That was even worse and perhaps misleading since a text such as this site isn’t just about me. I want the site to work for me.

So at that point I was really stumped. I started running through all the clever quotations I could think of from writing center research, comp/rhet studies etc. I pulled out Beth Boquet’s Noise from the Writing Center and flipped through the pages. It then struck me that it would be awfully brazen to pull a catch phrase or a quotation from a fellow writing center colleague and use it as my own, so I put aside that idea, although Noise from the Writing Center would be a great name for a blog. (I would really love to see Beth create a blog with that title!)

Finally I turned to where I always turn for inspiration and ideas: poetry. Garcia Lorca came to mind as did De Cervantes. Nothing. I flipped through Larkin, Frost, Levin, Pinsky, h.d., Bishop and more but nothing struck me and it all just started to seem pretty pretentious and, frankly, stupid.

I was stuck, and just about to scrap the whole idea of using a blog to manage my academic affairs/projects when suddenly the opening sequence of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau popped into my head. Don’t ask me why, but I saw the bright yellow credits in that odd blocky type that Wes Anderson imitated so well in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

That random thought made me laugh and then I said it out loud: “The Undersea World of Clint Gardner: Nothing to do with oceanography in the slightest.” I laughed again and decided that had to be it–I mean one can only take one’s work so seriously, after all. Levity is a great leveler and a check upon one’s vanity and ego. Analogically, I suppose it does reflect my desire to find adventure in my work, as well as to explore ideas that are un- or under-explored.

So that’s the official launch, I guess. I don’t have a champagne bottle to smash on my fancy new WordPress Calypso, however.