#4c14

[nctecccc]

Lifeworlds of 2014 CCCC Attendees

Have you seen Joyce Carter's study using animation to understand how attendees navigated their way around the 2014 CCCC Convention?

Also see the accompanying article (pdf) at http://joycelockecarter.com/CCCC/TrackingCCCC2014.pdf

[4c15-tampa]

A study that uses animation to understand how 2014 CCCC members navigated their way around the conference. Please see the accompanying write-up:

http://joycelockecarter.com/CCCC/TrackingCCCC2014.pdf

[nctecccc]

Did you post your CCCC session materials online?

If you haven't already, please consider uploading your CCCC convention session materials for others to view in the NCTE-CCCC Connected Community.

Wondering why you should consider uploading your materials? Watch this 7-minute video from members of the CCCC Committee on Disability Issues describing the benefits and possibilities of sharing session materials online.

Of course, the site is also a great resource for all memebers to access open reources from sessions whether or not you had the opportunity to attend #4C14 or earlier conventions.

[nctecccc]

CCCC Convention Presentations in the NCTE Connected Community

You can browse materials uploaded by presenters from the 2014 CCCC Convention in Indianapolis at http://ncte.connectedcommunity.org/2014CCCCbrowse/

Many papers, slides and handouts are available as part of the NCTE Connected Community

[badatenglish]

While this project originally focused on the "bad at English" theme, over the course of collecting photos and stories for the blog I realized how important a critical consciousness on being a millennial educator has been to my professional development and career.

I'm not sure if my baby-boomer and Generation X colleagues realize that when they complain about millennial entitlement and overabundance of self-esteem, they are millennials in the room.  We are turning 30 every year!  We are getting hired by your departments.

It is important to me to speak back to these conversations, but also to draw on my generational background in social media and popular culture to challenge the norms of what it means to be a professional and a teacher.

I obviously have a lot more thinking to do about what this all means, but this project has been an important start.

[Image: Franny Howes, a white woman with glasses, poses for a selfie in a hotel bathroom mirror.  She is wearing a pink flower crown and a bright green blazer.  Colorful bags of toiletries and a white sink are visible in the foreground.]

[badatenglish]

Flower Crowns

Flower Crowns are headbands or other hair accessories created by stringing a number of flowers together. On Tumblr, these floral accessories have become an exploitable photoshop meme by adding them to photos of males who would not normally wear them.

Everybody at the conference really liked my flower crown and I got a lot of compliments, even from strangers.  (I think it looked especially good with my suit.  I wore it for my panel and everything.)  But I also got a lot of questions about whyyyyy I was wearing one and what it meant.

Flower crowns are a meme; they got picked up especially hard by fans of the tv show Hannibal, but putting them (via photoshop or sometimes in person) on masculine actors and characters is a very millennial way of queering and appropriating media.  I think.

For me, wearing a flower crown around an academic conference, and inviting other people to wear my extra one with me, had a few purposes:

feminist critique of the discourses of respectability

playing with my identity and visibility as a queer millennial educator in a venue that skews a lot older

it looked awesome on me and my tumblr friends egged me on to do it

I was hesitant at first, but I have no regrets about the choice and considering how much we literally talked about tumblr and queer rhetorics at my panel (thanks queryingthequeer) it was an excellent choice.

[badatenglish]

I went to the Eiteljorg Museum while I was in Indianapolis for the conference: Pearson held a party there one evening so I got in for free!  I took some blurry and unhelpful pictures of the totem pole they have on display in the atrium: here is some information about its history. Narrative things like this pole harken back to my previous post about not turning things into texts!

It's really hard to describe an image that is itself a complicated story.  I hope the link I have provided will tell you more about the pole than any description I could type here.

[badatenglish]

I hung out for a bit with Malea Powell, my MA advisor, current PhD committee member, and past chair of CCCC one morning at the conference.  She was delighted to pose with a flower crown and I regret not getting these pictures up sooner.

I asked Malea her thoughts about being "bad at English" and she told me that colonialism assigns value to a very narrow set of skills (linear alphabetic texts) and devalues the same material rhetorics and practices she is most concerned with (making, crafting).

Which reminds me of her call in the Octalog 3 panel put on at CCCC to stop turning things into texts.  A thing demands a different kind of interaction than a "text"--our default mode of interaction is "reading" but material rhetorics ask us for a deeper engagement with all the facets of a meaning-laden object.

[Image: a close-up shot of two women with glasses wearing flower crowns.  The first woman, Malea Powell, wears a daisy crown.  The second woman, Franny Howes, wears a pink flower crown.]