I was happy at WSCA this year because most of the papers I
heard were given as presentations instead of being read. I attribute this to the fact that most of the
panels I attended were sponsored by the Community College Interest Group. My favorites, as always, were the Great Ideas
for Teaching Students panels. Of course
I liked the presenters shared the panel with me the best. The always dynamic
Amy Edwards of Oxnard College chaired and panel and also took the lovely photo
I’m sharing here. We were missing one
panelist which meant that we could take 15 minutes rather than 10 to talk about
our ideas. My chin-wag about the interpersonal communication course project
that involves creativity (making a short movie), analysis (writing a critique
of the relational message), and understanding (students need to know the six
steps of constructive conflict management and use them to explain to the
characters in the movie how to problem solve) took only 8 minutes. I believe that shorter is better when it
comes to public communication.
The other panelists took more time but were very energized
and interesting. Linda Carvalho Cooley of Reedley College offered a GIFT in
which she used “What do you want to be when you grow up” as a topic to teach
students the parts of the Toulmin Model of argumentation. (From her I learned another way of explaining
“warrants,” a concept I always struggle to clarify in the classroom.) I also appreciated another argument-oriented
presentation by Anthony Ongyod, of Mira Costa College, that required students
to teach certain principles of fair argument to someone “important” to them
(relational partner, parent, child, friend) through the 18 weeks of the
semester. He said one problem that he
faced was making sure students didn’t choose their most recent love-forever as
the focus of the teaching project. And Christine
Burke of CSU Channel Islands talked about how in her public speaking courses
she required students to do some public performance of a more artistic type to sell
their view on an issue of “social justice.”
Besides my own panel and a few other G.I.F.T.S., I also
enjoyed some of the more academic research presentations. One favorite was “Disaster! Imperialism in Crisis,” an analysis of four
environmental disaster movies by Jenna Hanchey of the University of Texas at
Austin. She looked at two movies from
the nineties and compared them to two movies in the oughts and found in the
latter a greater sense of anxiety about the ability of both science and the American
government to solve problems. The
imperialism comes in with the idea that some cultures and countries (notably in
Africa) don’t matter when it comes to saving people from disaster.
Speaking on a panel sponsored by the Health Communication
Division, Mary-Jo Losso-Engle of CSU Northridge offered a fascinating analysis
of the way in which breast cancer survivors either deploy or reject the images
presented of them by the media. What I
liked in this presentation was hearing about all those who reject the “battle”
and “hero” metaphor, adopting instead a view, “well, what other choice did I
have?” Her paper was called, “Warriors
in Pink: The Negotiation of Mediated
Breast Cancer Rhetoric by Long Term Survivors.”
But as an old (in all ways) fan of Kenneth Burke, my
favorite presentation was the one given by Scott Church of Brigham Young
University: “Perspective by Congruity,
Possession by Misnomer, and the Rhetoric of Girl Talks Mash-ups.” He managed to speak with energy and wit as he
reviewed Burke’s concepts and link them to his text. I also liked the texts on which he
focused. I enjoyed the return to Burke
as well as the bits of video he showed on his own laptop.
And of course I enjoyed the panel on assessment in which my
colleague Jon Bouknight participated. It
taught me that there are no perfect methods of assessment and that colleges differ monumentally when it comes to the ways in which they measure, test, review, etc etc student and program learning outcomes. Knowing the vast diversity in the universe of assessment just made me feel a little bit better about the known world.
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