Before heading off to CCCC in San Antonio, I’m busy making some last-minute preparations: note for the cat-sitter, fresh litter in the boxes, trash out, clothes washed, long-term parking located, laptop batteries charged, and all that. Naturally, I’m planning on blogging at least some of the presentations I attend.
From a quick skim of the online program, here are some of the titles (as usual, there are many groaners and clunkers: aren’t these people supposed to be writing teachers?) that look interesting:
Wednesday 9:00-12:30
MW.3 Pixels, Paints, and Operating Tables: Experimental Writing Workshops and the First-Year Writing Program.
Um, well, this is the one at which I’m co-presenting. We’re doing a brief session on a group writing exercise we taught in an experimental writing workshop on surrealism and the avant-garde in last year’s spring semester. It has to do with magazines and syllogisms, and when we did it last year, I came up with “Events That Led to My Divorce”. There’ll be lots of other fun, cool presentations, too.
Wednesday 1:30-5:00
AW.10 Classin’ Up the Joint: Class as a Critical Tool in High School, Access, and College Composition
“This workshop lays out socioeconomic class as a critical teaching paradigm”: well, OK, but these are several of the same folks who had their question and answer session last year dissolve into acrimony largely because they completely failed to offer any definition of the term “class”. It was an absolutely amazing failure. Let’s see what happens this time.
Thursday 10:30-11:45
B.27 “But I Thought That Was OK”: Plagiarism and the Changing Rules of the Computer Composition Classroom
I’m hoping there’ll be some interesting connections made here between plagiarism, property, and technology.
Thursday 12:15-1:30
C.30 In and Out of ‘Class’: Repositioning Ourselves and Our Discourses So That Literacy Matters
More on class. This is one of those sessions that features the word “resistance” but seems to offer the possibility of interrogating the use of that term, so I’m hopeful.
Thursday 3:15-4:30
E.33 Online Classes: The Focus Is On Students
I wonder here if the focus is on students — or, as usual, on the technology as instrument of change. The title seems to indicate a possibly critical perspective.
Thursday 4:45-6:00
F.21 Economies of Composition
With one paper titled “Political Economies of Composition” and one paper’s title clearly referencing Bourdieu, you know I’m totally stoked about this one.
Friday 9:30-10:45
H.11 Weblogs: Exploring Contexts, Community, Collaboration, and Practice
C’mon. It’s Charlie, Clancy, Terra, and Dr. B. Of course I’m gonna be there.
Friday 3:30-4:45
L.24 Composition and Rhetoric in the Age of Empire
I’m assuming the title is referencing Hardt and Negri (PDF) and their take on economic globalization, which is sort of the same idea I’ve got for my presentation at RSA in May (only in May I’ll be doing it via Tacitus, and with a focus on Web rhetoric).
Of course, this is a lot to absorb already, and of course there are a lot more that I’m interested in. If anybody’s going to other sessions on class or technology, I’m hoping you might be willing to post some of your notes online.
And I’m looking forward to Wednesday night at Mi Tierra, as well.
Back to packing.
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