Thursday, September 29, 2011

For teaching about food...

The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities


In the forty years since the publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, a movement dedicated to the reform of the food system has taken root in America. Lappé’s groundbreaking book connected the dots between something as ordinary and all-American as a hamburger and the environmental crisis, as well as world hunger. Along with Wendell Berry and Barry Commoner, Lappé taught us how to think ecologically about the implications of our everyday food choices. You can now find that way of thinking, so radical at the time, just about everywhere—from the pages of Timemagazine to the menu at any number of local restaurants.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Thinking about how to teach upper level/grad courses on composition...

Should I have started with the process movement? Part of me is feeling like that story needs to be told... Who helps me?

Yagelski's book review: he proposes we read Murray, Elbow and Freire.
Lad Tobin's introduction to Taking STock: The Writing Process in the 90s

Friday, September 9, 2011

ENGL 378 or other Upper Level Studies in Composition

Framing Questions:
  • What is writing?
  • What does writing do?
  • Who is a writer?
  • What is an audience?
  • Why does one write?

Monday, September 5, 2011

Hayden James

ENGL 378 Writing Stories

RHEA JONES:




MORGAN PATRICIO:




ALISON PANICHAS:


DANIELLE IZZI: KATHY LAURENT: KELSEY DUBEAU: HAYDEN JAMES:

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Projects, ideas, etc.

Mark Bittman's Food blog on the NYTimes.

The True Cost of Tomatoes (Bittman)

Here's the passage that caught my eye:

Most of us eat or buy industrially produced tomatoes, and it doesn’t seem too much to ask that the people who pick them for us be treated a little more fairly. Speak to your supermarket manager or write to the head of the chain you patronize (the easiest way to do this is to visit this page on the CIW site). Supermarkets, I expect, are as susceptible to public pressure as fast-food chains.

There are few places in the country where migrant and immigrant farmworkers are treated well; in Immokalee, at least, they’re being treated better. Bit by bit.

This is a case study...the course could be organized around case studies with digital literacy projects in response to the studies....

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Contribution from David Barton (ecologies of literacy)

This morning, I'm reading the chapter "Public Definitions of Literacy" in David Barton's book, Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. As I'm reading, I'm thinking that this would be an excellent chapter to ask students to read early on in a WAW course to get them thinking about the question: What is literacy or what is writing? The chapter unpacks common misconceptions about literacy--or what Barton sees as misconceptions. Specifically, it focuses on the skills and cultural literacy views--but there is a lot more in it that is of use.

Because students have internalized these "public definitions of literacy" and because they guide their thinking about literacy, asking them to read this chapter and interrogate these assumptions could be enormously useful in framing the start of a WAW course.