It was a pleasure to meet some, but not nearly enough, of you at 4C's. We really must decide on a means for a more directed SIG, I agree. A perfect focus within that would be to direct at those grad students who are attending for the first time. Early in the week is tough, but could we even consider, given the nature of grad students, tacking on an event later than most? We may be able to circumvent the many SIGs that are offered by trying to squeeze something in at a later-than-traditional time. I'm not sure how it would fare at first, but it seems reasonable to me in many respects. Thoughts?
And I would love for everyone to take a moment of introduction, especially indicating their research trajectory, whether real or expected, so that some thought and resource sharing can occur long before next year's conference.
I'll begin...
I am at Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh. They have a divided program in MAPW an MA Rhet. I'm in Rhet, focusing on feminist voices in political rhetoric, especially in campaigns and elections or other modes of raising voice for change.
Remember, society at large finds most of our research of limited interest - if we share resources, knowledge, and feedback here - we are seated at the table of academic discussion among friends and colleagues, so drink up.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Getting the Word Out
Hello everyone,
Fify Juliana and I, at Arizona State, have sent information on the GSSIG and the blogspot to all of our graduate students and I have already heard back from a few that are forwarding it to other universities.
It's exciting to have this space to begin a conversation and I'm interested in what Matthew asked about what this space/SIG should be used for.
I'm interested, based on my work with other grad students, in exploring our research topics, but also professional development and teaching. I think it would be great to start threads on various topics, as specific as 19th C spiritualism and rhetoric, as broad as Peer Review Workshops in first year comp. I don't know exactly what others have had in mind but this seems like it would be a good way to start discussing issues we face as grad students and grad student teachers and writers at a national (etc) level.
What do you think?
Kirsti Cole
Fify Juliana and I, at Arizona State, have sent information on the GSSIG and the blogspot to all of our graduate students and I have already heard back from a few that are forwarding it to other universities.
It's exciting to have this space to begin a conversation and I'm interested in what Matthew asked about what this space/SIG should be used for.
I'm interested, based on my work with other grad students, in exploring our research topics, but also professional development and teaching. I think it would be great to start threads on various topics, as specific as 19th C spiritualism and rhetoric, as broad as Peer Review Workshops in first year comp. I don't know exactly what others have had in mind but this seems like it would be a good way to start discussing issues we face as grad students and grad student teachers and writers at a national (etc) level.
What do you think?
Kirsti Cole
Karen Mitchell's WPA-L Post from 03.27.07
Hello, Everyone,
I posted this comment earlier on WPA and got this great response. Thanks to Michael and Rachel for starting this. As I'm just learning how to post to a blog, I'm not sure if this is the right spot.I think this is a good way to begin because perhaps folks are involved in types of activities at their schools.in their states that might be useful for others too at our own sites. So many of us don't come in before Thurs. that I think it would be fine to find a time the last 2 days, but I'd make an effort if it were to be Wed. I know Wed. evening is the Women's Forum, so that would be difficult. Anyway, thanks again.
WPA Post:
Thanks to everyone for a great conference. Although I've never written to the list before, I have a question that grew out of the session on including professional experiences in one's graduate program.Unfortunately, I didn't think of this question until after I left.Although there were many excellent suggestions,interestingly enough no one talked specifically about how to go about getting involved in C's activities, committees, etc., at the state/national levels. It seems a bit daunting at times to think about this, and I wondered if anyone has any advice or experiences to share. Thanks so much.
Sincerely,
Karen Mitchell, Assistant Director
Roger and Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence
Miami University of Ohio
Oxford, OH 45056
Phone: (513) 529-6006;
248 Bachelor Hall
Fax: (513)529-1392
mitchekg@muohio.edu
I posted this comment earlier on WPA and got this great response. Thanks to Michael and Rachel for starting this. As I'm just learning how to post to a blog, I'm not sure if this is the right spot.I think this is a good way to begin because perhaps folks are involved in types of activities at their schools.in their states that might be useful for others too at our own sites. So many of us don't come in before Thurs. that I think it would be fine to find a time the last 2 days, but I'd make an effort if it were to be Wed. I know Wed. evening is the Women's Forum, so that would be difficult. Anyway, thanks again.
WPA Post:
Thanks to everyone for a great conference. Although I've never written to the list before, I have a question that grew out of the session on including professional experiences in one's graduate program.Unfortunately, I didn't think of this question until after I left.Although there were many excellent suggestions,interestingly enough no one talked specifically about how to go about getting involved in C's activities, committees, etc., at the state/national levels. It seems a bit daunting at times to think about this, and I wondered if anyone has any advice or experiences to share. Thanks so much.
Sincerely,
Karen Mitchell, Assistant Director
Roger and Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence
Miami University of Ohio
Oxford, OH 45056
Phone: (513) 529-6006;
248 Bachelor Hall
Fax: (513)529-1392
mitchekg@muohio.edu
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Ideas for a Grad Student SIG...
In the meantime, as we add authors to this weblog, we thought it'd be a good idea to set up a few posts to start discussion.
What should a grad student SIG do? What might you need out of such a thing?
thanks!
What should a grad student SIG do? What might you need out of such a thing?
thanks!
Want to be an "author" here? Email us...
Hello people:
Email gradstudentsig AT gmail.com FROM an email address you want us to use to invite you to author here.
We'll try to update the author invites at least a few times a week. We'll do our best in the next couple of weeks to do it every day at least.
thanks!
Email gradstudentsig AT gmail.com FROM an email address you want us to use to invite you to author here.
We'll try to update the author invites at least a few times a week. We'll do our best in the next couple of weeks to do it every day at least.
thanks!
Hello CompRhet Grad Students...
We hope those of you who were in New York for this year's CCCC conference had a good and/or useful time. I saw some good papers and felt relatively prepared for my own paper--way more so than last time. I also got to see some people I only do at Cs, so that was nice. And, about 75 or so of us who showed up in Sutton North on Saturday at 12:30 got to dialogue with Talib Kweli, which was one of the highlights of the conference for me.
A few of us met at the conference and thought that we should keep talking, writing, listening, and reading to one another even after the face-to-face conference ended, so here goes one attempt at that.
This grad student special interest group (SIG) grows somewhat out of a previous effort to come together via a SIG to network and to perhaps get some grad student voice in the larger conversations in the field of CompRhet. We hope this effort can be much more widespread and diverse than any previous efforts. As our field continues to professionalize and grow, some of us want ways to meet each other--to start or continue conversations online that we can also have in person, at Cs or other meeting places and conferences.
Ideally, the grad student SIG would be a place where the new generation of teachers and scholars could not only network as we apprentice to the field, but also think about how we might put our stamp on things in the future. For example, taken as a whole, the 300 graduate students who presented at CCCC this year in New York appear to be one of, if not the most, racially and ethnically diverse group at Cs. Perhaps we can help lead the field in better understanding and taking head-on issues of language and its intersections with race and ethnicity, among other things.
Logistically, an online presence for our SIG might help address the difficulty any SIG has in terms of getting people together in the midst of a busy conference. In terms of racial and ethnic diversity, again, SIGs face a difficult planning issue: nearly all SIGs take place on Thursday or Friday evenings, so a SIG will conflict with either, on Thursday, the Scholars for the Dream reception, or, on Friday, other SIGs that focus explicitly on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
As we move forward, perhaps we can think about how to be a group of graduate students that is open to all grad students in our field and also is useful for and responsive to a wide-range of us. Personally, I think it would be a bummer if a grad student SIG only reproduced some of the inequities and limited perspectives that our field has struggled with and still is to this day.
Perhaps this gradstudent sig online presence will soon move to a non-commercial webspace or will transform into another form that works better for us (wiki, message board, listserv, etc.), but for now, we hope this space can serve anyone and everyone who wants to connect with other graduate students in the field, for whatever reasons we all see as important. We're new to the weblog interface, so we'll do our best to make this site accessible to all. Anyone who can think of anyway to improve on our ways to communicate with one another, please feel free to suggest and even implement new ideas. We think anyone who wants should have the username and password to this site and our email address, but we'll hold off on offering those, just in case that would be a mistake to post publicly (like we might get a ton of spam email or people altering this site maliciously). Again, ideas for managing this all we welcome. We assume we'll develop a nice set of links here and perhaps serve some day as a fairly central resource for grad students and perspective students in the field.
Enough for now. Please feel free to forward this url--gradstudentsig.blogspot.com to your grad student colleagues and friends. By way of "norms" for posting here, we'd like this space to be primarily for grad students, so perhaps it's best folks use the honor code and only post if you're a grad student. But, like anything else, this policy is open for debate and, like writing, revision!
A few of us met at the conference and thought that we should keep talking, writing, listening, and reading to one another even after the face-to-face conference ended, so here goes one attempt at that.
This grad student special interest group (SIG) grows somewhat out of a previous effort to come together via a SIG to network and to perhaps get some grad student voice in the larger conversations in the field of CompRhet. We hope this effort can be much more widespread and diverse than any previous efforts. As our field continues to professionalize and grow, some of us want ways to meet each other--to start or continue conversations online that we can also have in person, at Cs or other meeting places and conferences.
Ideally, the grad student SIG would be a place where the new generation of teachers and scholars could not only network as we apprentice to the field, but also think about how we might put our stamp on things in the future. For example, taken as a whole, the 300 graduate students who presented at CCCC this year in New York appear to be one of, if not the most, racially and ethnically diverse group at Cs. Perhaps we can help lead the field in better understanding and taking head-on issues of language and its intersections with race and ethnicity, among other things.
Logistically, an online presence for our SIG might help address the difficulty any SIG has in terms of getting people together in the midst of a busy conference. In terms of racial and ethnic diversity, again, SIGs face a difficult planning issue: nearly all SIGs take place on Thursday or Friday evenings, so a SIG will conflict with either, on Thursday, the Scholars for the Dream reception, or, on Friday, other SIGs that focus explicitly on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
As we move forward, perhaps we can think about how to be a group of graduate students that is open to all grad students in our field and also is useful for and responsive to a wide-range of us. Personally, I think it would be a bummer if a grad student SIG only reproduced some of the inequities and limited perspectives that our field has struggled with and still is to this day.
Perhaps this gradstudent sig online presence will soon move to a non-commercial webspace or will transform into another form that works better for us (wiki, message board, listserv, etc.), but for now, we hope this space can serve anyone and everyone who wants to connect with other graduate students in the field, for whatever reasons we all see as important. We're new to the weblog interface, so we'll do our best to make this site accessible to all. Anyone who can think of anyway to improve on our ways to communicate with one another, please feel free to suggest and even implement new ideas. We think anyone who wants should have the username and password to this site and our email address, but we'll hold off on offering those, just in case that would be a mistake to post publicly (like we might get a ton of spam email or people altering this site maliciously). Again, ideas for managing this all we welcome. We assume we'll develop a nice set of links here and perhaps serve some day as a fairly central resource for grad students and perspective students in the field.
Enough for now. Please feel free to forward this url--gradstudentsig.blogspot.com to your grad student colleagues and friends. By way of "norms" for posting here, we'd like this space to be primarily for grad students, so perhaps it's best folks use the honor code and only post if you're a grad student. But, like anything else, this policy is open for debate and, like writing, revision!
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