Transitions and Transactions III:
Literature and Journalism Pedagogies in Community Colleges Today

We invite Community College faculty to send proposals for the April 1-2, 2016 conference presented by Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, English Department.

Please note that the dates of the conference have changed. The CFP that you received previously stated the conference dates as April 22-23, which would have overlapped with the start of Passover. Several colleagues alerted us to the conflict in schedules, mentioning that the holiday would prevent their participation in the conference. Happily, we have rescheduled campus facilities and the featured speakers for April 1-2, 2016.

Transitions and Transactions is dedicated to helping community college teachers flourish and excel as we envision, invent and expand our ideas of teaching given the demands of the community college population and the demands and constraints specific to our profession. The conference emphasizes teaching strategies intended to address and engage issues that concern community college teachers of literature, creative writing and journalism today.

T&TIII invites teachers to think about the pressing issues of our particular historical moment. The escalation of police-community clashes, the rise in rampage school shootings, the constant media-presence of violent radical Islamic fundamentalism, all coupled with the reduction of culture and history to media sound-bites make the issue of trust in communication and speech and the ability to bear ambiguity all the more necessary and timely. At the same time, our work at community college shows that language is not simply a medium of reconciliation that pacifies aggression in the name of culture, but that as privileged cultural and critical discourses, literature and the humanities can themselves be a violent medium of contentious confrontation where language exerts a performative efficiency, as pernicious as it can be liberating.

At once transformative and threatening, literary studies affects and is affected by the global and the particular. T&T III’s concern with context invites presenters to consider the discourses that affect and create us as subjects and as teachers. These include: negotiating new “sexualities” and “gender identities”; increasing our environmental awareness; negotiating virtual existence and social networking, navigating the rhetoric of marketing where we urged to never “unplug”; making sense of history and culture often reduced to “take-aways” – or what one of our students’ asked so well in her essay: “What is the difference between reality and spin?” Our context calls on us to create new ways of critically and creatively engaging with our students in the historical moment we share with them. We are poised to respond through the varied voices and expertise of community college faculty across the U.S. and beyond and look forward to our extended conversation.

With over 50% of American undergraduates in community college, more than at any other time, community college teachers have their hands on America’s future. The stakes

are higher than ever, especially given the challenges of our diverse student population, diverse in every thinkable way: age, race, religion, level of preparation, goals, stage in life, basic literacy etc. Our classes, full to the brim with a vast swath of the population pose new challenges for teaching and for what it means to become educated and able to negotiate the challenges of our fast-paced, and fast-changing, increasingly global and increasingly virtual world.

Literature Pedagogy Topics:

1. Teaching Literary Theory at the Community College
2. Teaching Literature in Interdisciplinary Humanities Courses
3. Assessment & Self-Evaluation in Teaching Literature
4. The Reader and the Texts in the Literature Classroom
5. Digital Multimodal Practices in the Teaching of Literature
6. Teaching Classical Literature
7. Game Theory and New Theoretical Approaches to the Teaching of Literature
8. Gender Constructions in the Text and in the Classroom
9. Psychoanalytic Theories of Pedagogy
10. Teaching Literature in the ESL and Developmental Skills Classroom
11. Student Experiences in the Community College Literature Classroom
12. Post-Multiculturalism and Marginalized Voices
13. The Rhetorics of Racial Profiling
14. (Dis)abilities and Teaching in the Literature Classroom
15. Urban Identities: students and texts in the Literature Classroom
16. Argumentative Writing in the Literature Classroom
17. Culturally Relevant and Responsive Teaching
18. Collaborative Teaching and Learning Communities
19. How Comics Teach
20. Creating a Reading Culture
21. Unlearning Plagiarism in the Literature Classroom
22. Teaching Writing (Composition) in the Literature Classroom
23. Public Policy and its Relation to Community College Education

Journalism Pedagogy Topics:

1. Crowdsourcing Community Projects
2. The Curators and the Curated (Aggregation and/or Original Content)
3. Effective News and Feature Writing Assignments: A Roundtable
4. From Citizen to Journalist
5. 140 characters v. 14000 words: The New Longform
6. How to Help Prepare CC Students for Careers in 21st Century Journalism
7. How to Discuss and Debate Ethics Effectively in the CC Classroom
8. Maps of Time: Data as Narrative
9. Data Visualization and the Future of Research
10. What Journalism Can Learn from Science
11. Open Web, Open News: Reporters and Developers Remix

12. Election 2016: Campaigns, coverage and the Internet
13. Politics of Online News: The role of ideological journalism in online news 14. The Ethics of Authority in Broadcast and Online Journalism
15. Library and Research Methods for CC Journalism Students
16. Models for Successful Two-Year College Student Newspapers
17. Is that News or Opinion? How to Help Journalism Students Decipher the

Differences Across Media Platforms
18. The Power of Digital Storytelling as an Easy-to-Learn Tool for CC Journalism

Students
19. Money: Is Journalism being Shaped by Rising Income Inequality? 20. How Women Journalists Present Themselves in the Digital Age 21. Accuracy & Fairness: Best Practices in the CC Newsroom
22. Can You Tweet That? Teaching Social Media and the Law
23. Developing Digital Strategies for the CC Newspaper: Design

This is an interdisciplinary call extended to community college teachers and graduate students. Additional topics are welcome. Deadline for submissions is November 15, 2015. Send abstracts (minimum of 250 words) or inquiries to:

Dr. Margaret Barrow and Dr. Andrew Levy
Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY
English Department, Room N720
199 Chambers Street, New York, NY 10007
Telephone: (212) 220-8270 /Email mbarrow@bmcc.cuny.edu and alevy@bmcc.cuny.edu

Please include a) name of author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of presentation (e) body of proposal and (f) brief bio. We acknowledge receipt of all proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should resend.

Non-presenters who prefer to participate in the conversations and workshops rather than deliver a presentation may attend on a first come, first serve basis subject to space available at the venue. To book, send an email to Dr. Barrow or Dr. Levy with “Booking Request” as the subject. Please include your name, affiliation and email address. Cost: $125.00 Full-time faculty; $65 Part-time faculty and $25 Graduate Students.