Young Rhetoricians' Conference

The next YRC is June 21-23, 2012. ECCTYC has been a strong supporter of the Young Rhetoricians’ Conference since its inception, with many ECCTYC board members attending and presenting sessions.

This June, academics, writers, publishers, and lovers of language will converge as colleagues to explore the issues of pedagogy, diversity and outcomes, as they affect the way we communicate the skills and joys of language.

The YRC looks to issues and ideas that enable us to enable our students. Bring your concerns—ideological and/or intuitive—to the beach as we gather to rejuvenate ourselves andponder what we are about—where the Monterey Bay warmly greets general sessions, workshops, panels, and luncheons. Please join us!

For more information including registration, visit the YRC Website.

If you have a session proposal for this year’s YRC, please fill out a Call for Proposals form and send to the YRC chairs for consideration.

Bedford/St. Martin’s

ECCTYC Reception Special Guest, Thursday Evening, October 20, 6:00 pm.
ECCTYC Reception Hall Appearance, Friday, October 21.

Special ECCTYC Conference Guest Andrew Lam

Thursday Evening on October 20, 2011 at 6:00 pm, join Andrew Lam as he kicks off the ECCTYC Reception, saying a few words from his newest book, East Eats West.

On Friday, October 21, 2011, visit the ECCTYC Exhibition Hall, drop by the special booth featuring works by Andrew Lam, and meet and talk with the author.

Andrew Lam, who was born in Vietnam and came to the US in 1975 when he was 11 years old, has a Master in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University in creative writing, and a BA degree in biochemistry from UC Berkeley. He currently resides in San Francisco, where he was the associate editor for the Pacific News Service, a regular commentator for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and current editor at New American Media. His real love, however, is writing fiction. His articles have appeared in Nation, Mother Jones, and The Washington Post—as well as many anthologies—and his work has been acknowledged by many prestigious organizations.

Along with De Tran and Hai Dai Nguyen, Lam edited Once upon a Dream: The Vietnamese-American Experience and he wrote Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Most recently, Lam published East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres—a collection that takes on the familiar immigrant’s tales once more, but almost always with a surprising twist, an unexpected detail, an unforgettably distinguishing moment. “As a Vietnamese refugee who became an American writer, who found his tongue and then his own path in life, I can tell you that you matter, that your sadness matters, that the story of how you survived and triumphed matters.”

WHEREAS, Budget cuts to the California Community Colleges have the potential to compromise the system’s ability to meet the educational mission, deny state residents access to education, and/or adversely affect students enrolled in the Community College system; and

WHEREAS, The California Community College Chancellor’s Office has rightfully affirmed its support of and commitment to Basic Skills, Career/Technical education, and Transfer Curriculum and Programs; and

WHEREAS, English curriculum and programs are critical to students’ ability to achieve their diverse educational goals, including Associate Degrees, Certificates, job training, and transfer; therefore be it

RESOLVED, The English Council of California Two-Year Colleges reaffirms the principles of shared governance process in budget decisions; and be it further

RESOLVED, That English faculty participate in campus decision-making committees and professional organizations; and be it further

RESOLVED, These actions will insure that English programs:

• Offer a curriculum that fully supports student completion of stated educational goals,
• Provide timely access to these vital courses,
• Promote hiring policies that provide sufficient qualified faculty (fulltime and adjunct) to teach these courses, and
• Foster working conditions that support fulltime and adjunct faculty efforts to promote student success in English courses.

For the pdf version of this document, visit our Position Papers and Publications page.

2011 ECCTYC Conference Brunch Speaker, Saturday, October 22

2011 Brunch Speaker Aimee Suzara

Oakland-based Filipino-American writer/performer, cultural worker, educator Aimee Suzara has been writing and performing spoken word, poetry and theatre incorporating movement since 1999. Her first play, Pagbabalik (Return), was awarded a Zellerbach Community Arts Grant in 2006 and 2007 and selected for Bay Area festivals, and she is working on her second, A History of the Body, also supported by Zellerbach and in residence last Fall with Kularts, Inc. Her poetry collection, the space between, was published by Finishing Line Press (2008) and her writing appears in many journals and anthologies, including Check the Rhyme, An Anthology of Female Poets and Emcees, 580 Split, Kartika Review, Lantern Review and Walang Hiya/No Shame. As a performer, she has been featured as a poet throughout California and nationally at colleges and venues and was a recent collaborating performer in Amara Tabor-Smith/Deep Waters Dance Theater’s sold-out premiere of Our Daily Bread, in residency at CounterPULSE. As an educator, Suzara has shared her passion for the intersection of the arts, literacy, and education with Aim High, Art in Action, and schools throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as her performance workshop series, “Making Soul,” and “Writing to Remember.” Her focus on supporting young women’s voices has been seen in her series “A Woman’s Word” and workshops for women of color. While coaching youth and adults in poetry and performance, she teaches English at two-year colleges including Las Positas, Laney, and San Francisco City as well as Creative Writing at Cal State Monterey Bay. A longtime social and environmental justice activist who co-founded the Filipino/American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity, Aimee’s passion for social change also has led her to positions with San Francisco Women Against Rape and the Youth Media Council. Suzara’s mission is to create, and a help others create, work that builds community, fosters healing, and provokes important questions through poetry, movement, and theatre. For more information, visit Aimee Suzara Online.

Suzara will precede her brunch presentation with a special workshop entitled “Conversations with Aimee Suzara.”

2011 ECCTYC Conference Keynote Address, Thursday, October 20

Katie Hern of Chabot College

Katie Hern, Ed.D., an English Instructor at Chabot College, has been teaching students to read, write, and think critically for 20 years. She heads up the California Acceleration Project, a 3CSN initiative that supports faculty from the state’s 112 community colleges to redesign their developmental English and Math curricula. Along with Los Medanos Math Professor Myra Snell, Hern published the widely circulated article “Exponential Attrition and the Promise of Acceleration in Developmental English and Math” (June/July 2010, Perspectives, RP Group). Her work has been featured in the New York Times, KQED radio’s “California Report,” and a literature review by the Community College Research Center. For additional resources on Hern’s work with the California Acceleration Project visit 3CSN Online.

ECCTYC Luncheon Speaker, Friday, October 21, 2011

Jeannie Barroga

Jeannie Barroga was born in Milwaukee in 1949. She graduated with a B.A. in fine arts from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in 1972. After graduation, she moved to northern California and felt a connection with this place that hosts rich and diverse cultures and people from different backgrounds. Since then, the San Francisco Bay Area has been home for Barroga and a prominent stage for her career as a playwright. An active Member of the Dramatists Guild, she’s a nationally-produced playwright, teacher, director, and local video producer. Recently, for development on Buffalo’ed, Ms. Barroga was awarded the Wallace Alexander Gerbode/William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grant. “A dramatization of the presence of the Buffalo Soldiers in the Philippines in 1899, Buffalo’ed raises questions of national loyalty to the American policy of Manifest Destiny. Formed during the Civil War, the Buffalo Soldiers were renowned for their bravery and were “invited” to participate in more wars for “freedom,” including the war in the Philippines. Faced with conflicts of loyalty and dignity, a number of these soldiers defected to the Philippine cause. Her play, Walls, (15 productions) received the NEA “Access to Artistic Excellence” grant and is published in Unbroken Thread. In two decades, she has written more than fifty plays. Her work has been published, anthologized, and produced nationwide. Today, Barroga plays an active role in many theater groups in northern California and in the nation. Her plays are an ardent quest into the self, the Filipino American experience, and American national identity. Intergenerational conflict, the tension between tradition and assimilation, ethnic culture, and mainstream culture are the focus of Barroga’s earlier plays. Barroga’s plays also move beyond the tale of assimilation to portray immigrant groups’ quest for identity, truth, and understanding. Her Asian American female characters are active, inquisitive, conscious, and awake, quite the opposite of Asian females stereotyped as geishas, ornaments, prostitutes, or submissive human beings. They are engaged in a search for meaning of personal, cultural, and historical magnitude, sometimes in angry, confounded, tormented, and emotionally charged states. Barroga will follow-up her luncheon speech with a special workshop entitled “Conversations with Jeannie Barroga,” featuring Bay Area Actors reading from her new play, Buffalo’ed.

Three-step registration process:

1. Register for Conference
2. Pay for Conference
3. Reserve a Hotel Room

“Slowly, students can see that these metaphors differ based on experience, that the “marathon runner” and the “root canal patient” feel this way for a reason (or many reasons) that have to do with their unique pasts. Optimally, in theory, students begin to see that their attitudes towards writing have been composed through experience, and thus, can be revised. They don’t have to hate writing forever – they can “liberate themselves” as Pugh claimed, they can scrap the draft of their past, and move onto a new page.”

“Fiction’s use of the first-person point-of-view differs slightly from these points; one very useful discussion of options for pov comes from Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction. As he says, “First person is immediate, engaging, and instantly convincing. You create a distinctive voice, a character, a personality, with the first words of the story” (178). This applies to composition, so the book is worth knowing; his treatment of the tricky biz of second-person pov is one of the best there is.”