Wildcat Writers Meet & Greet Saturday

Service Learning Meet & Greet on Campus

I currently don't have any cool pics related to the event that UA writing teachers are doing with local Tucson Unified School District classes this Saturday, but I'll hopefully have some coming...

Hard Work Wins Pulitzer

Journalism on Police-State Sheriff Arpaio Results in Pulitzer

Since I moved from California to Arizona, I feel like I'm living in a police-state every time I stop at a border patrol checkpoint along the 8 & 10 freeways in Maricopa county. This is something I've spoken out about before, so it's awesome to see what UA alumni are capable of accomplishing.

"UA Alumni Share Pulitzer Prize"

From the UA News website:
"The Pulitzer committee said the East Valley Tribune deserved the award because of "adroit use of limited resources to reveal, in print and online, how a popular sheriff's focus on immigration enforcement endangered investigation of violent crime and other aspects of public safety," according to the Pulitzer Prize Web site."

New Directions Conference University of Arizona

End of the Conference Season

Even though I'm still putting together a potential panel at the 4Cs based on New World Rhetoric, I have my last panel presentation Friday at the New Directions Conference.

It's bitter sweat of course, although I'll be presenting on a peer-editing as New Media DJ exercise that I put together based on Jeff Rice's "Hip Hop-Pedagogy" (a discussion Hillary Danz takes up) in his Rhetoric of the Cool.

Using this framework in my classes helps because a lot of students identify with Hip-hop as being a part of their culture, and something that they feel comfortable talking about when it comes to commutation, appropriation, non-linearity, imagery & chora (often referred to as swagger.)

It doesn't hurt to start the class period with a little Dead Prez to set the mood...

Logos & Kairos for Revisiting Latino Pedagogy

Everyone Loves Statistics
Sure, this article is a few months old, but I feel it gets quoted often enough to post a link to it because it brings up the necessity of the moment to reexamine teaching practices. Speaking to this new majority, historical oral and pictographic literacy provide points of departure into the weaving practices of composition.

"Minorities set to be US majority

White people of European descent will no longer make up a majority of the US population by the year 2042 - eight years sooner than previous estimates.

The big change is among Hispanics and Asians whose share of the population is set to double to 30% and 9%."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7559996.stm

Not just a Heritage Museum, a good calender

Happy César Chávez holiday in Mexico
And other great holidays reminders: http://www.latinoheritage101.com/Tours___Holidays.html

Richard Rodriguez on NPR

Inspiration for Latin American scholars everywhere, Richard Rodriguez discusses Cosmic Race & Age Beyond Race (from Feb '09)
Never a disappointment, Rodriguez espouses the age of Americans wanting to be 'multiple'. Conceptually, this interests me, but practically, I can see where this might be appropriated by 'the rhetoric of the end of racism'. "The notion of being of several things" sounds an awful lot like the myth of the melting pot. Something in me wonders if he's just stoking the fire when he says things like "I don't want to be Mexican" and goes on to say all of the ethnicities that he wants to be; it's true that he's arguing against mono-culturalism, but does he do so in a conscious attempt to be controversial by infusing his arguments with digs that feed into his contrarian ethos as a self-loathing minority?

Blog & Site to Check Out

I enjoy NPR Latino USA Podcast, but this site looks good for a quick fix of daily issues:

http://www.hispanictips.com/


Under the influence of post-Marxism in Rhet, I don't know if it goes against the ideology to keep an eye on business concerns, or if it makes me better informed. I'm siding with the latter.

http://latinobusinessreview.blogspot.com/

¡Spring Break!

Recovering from Cs SF
Had a great time at the Latina\o workshop, UA department party, WPA breakfast (6 am Thursday morning), a new media panel featuring Jeff Rice, a panel on teaching Asian students English composition with Peter Elbow and Paul Kei Matsuda, Bedford St. Marten party at SF City Hall, and the Latina\o caucus. The list goes on, but I'm getting tired of just thinking of uploading pictures & creating links for the names above to provide context.
Cirriculum, Service-Learning, Cs 2010 proposal, Manifesto on Authority & misc Brown Pedagogical theorizing
I like getting out of town and hearing about new ideas, but I've got the above themes swimming around my mind in no particular order...

CCCCs

San Francisco

I'm off to the Cs conference in San Francisco bright and early tomorrow. Excited for a workshop tomorrow fascilitated by another PhD candidate in RCTE, Aja Martinez (soon to be featured in College English, or is it the Cs Journal?) and UA professor Damian Baca.

Workshopping con ganas...

Teaching: The Business of Fancydancing

Southwest Texas Pop Culture Conference

On Thursday morning, I checked out a U of A PhD candidate in AIS presenting on the teaching of The Business of Fancydancing, a film by Sherman Alexie, in a college classroom to Native American students.
Here's the trailer from Youtube:


One of the other people in the audience brought up an interesting issue during the post panel Q&A when he explained that Alexie often time plays on stereotypes of that non-Native audiences don't understand. As an example, the man explained that the ornate dress of the 'fancydancing' came about as a result of white audiences in Oklahoma (I believe he said) who thought the original dress was boring. The presenter agreed that this insight gives another layer of meaning to the title 'business.'

This discussion of mixed messages was particularly poignant for me because I just finished reading Viviana Diaz Balsera's Pyramid under the Cross, which deals with the subversive messages that Nahuatl translators put into the Franciscan evangelical plays, causing the spiritual colonizers to overestimate the effectiveness of their rhetoric.

"Coming into Class"

ASU Composition Conference

On Friday, I made the Tucson to Phoenix trek with a colleague from my WPA seminar to see our celebrated professor and prolific writer Edward M White deliver his keynote speech. White often jests that he became known as the authority on writing assessment by default.


A Brooklyn Tale
White explained that what he was reading from came from his in-progress memoir, although some of the material was also included in a piece called "Coming into Class." White grew up in a working class household in Brooklyn, where his family was most proud of the fact that they had indoor plumbing. As a youth, White hid out in the Brooklyn City library to avoid the tough kids in the street, soon becoming consumed by books, reading all five volumes of The Three Musketeers by the age of 13.

Finding himself at Harvard because of his test taking skills and in spite of his father's best wishes (and an attempt to create diversity on campus), Ed earned his PhD and began teaching composition. Soon after, he secured himself a tenured track position at Wellesley, and explained that it wasn't too difficult teaching students of privilege what they already knew--White said that composition class wasn't too much different than the social norms the students followed at the formal dances.

100 Tiny Glances
Leaving a tenure track position at Wellesley, White headed west, taking a job at a new Cal State in the working class, railroad town of San Bernadino. It was there White "felt useful and the job worth doing."

White felt that the students in California were his kind of people because he didn't feel like an outsider for not having an extensive knowledge of wines. "I felt like an impostor," White said, "I had no style, and no class."
I believe White was quoting a colleague of his who got it right when he said, "class and race divisions were made up of 100 tiny glances."

For White, social class at Harvard and Wellesley felt like an extra curriculum that he would never quite master, sometimes feeling almost like "a part of the grounds-keeping crew."

Even at Cal State San Bernadino, White found that these students who weren't as prepared as their Ivy League, East Coast counterparts still were "doggedly determined" and possessed a resistance that White took as a trapping of class. While the upper class students tended to be complacent, the working class students were similarly resistant to White's higher aspirations for them.
In the end, White sees how both situations made him want to "free students of the biases of the class."

White added, "I don't win in my imaginary conversations with my father. He's been past away for some years now, but I'm still met with a look of scorn."

Mictecacihuatl la norteña in 'hell-hot' Tucson

Service Learning

On a recent visit to a local Tucson high school, I was speaking with students of a Latin American literature class. The students were asked to draw self portraits, incorporating symbols that they believed identified them according to their culture and interests. Some of the students had drawn images of Aztec/Nahua calenders, flowers and pictographic heads representing various deities. I began speaking with a young girl who told me that she was from El Salvador. She laughed when I asked her if she liked Tucson. She responded with a variation of how I'd heard Tucson referred to before, as 'hell-hot', or 'hot as hell.'

I told her that the Aztecs might've agreed--although Tucson is located in what is often referred to as Aztlán, where the Aztecs began their migration to Tenochtitlán, the Aztecs also thought of the underworld Mictlan as being located north of them in relation to present day Mexico City DF. So Mictecacihuatl might've been a norteña, sweating like the rest of us under the Arizona sun.

Hopefully the next time I visit, I'll remember the names better, but it's great to see how much interest these students have in pre-Columbian history. Now, if I were only able to incorporate their love of Reggaeton into New World Rhetoric...

UPDATE: I couldn't help but add a video of Calle 13 in a response to my previous point about using reggaeton as a point of entry--Calle 13's Latinoamerica possesses a critical ethos that alludes to the tradition of colonialism in the Americas.