• Last week, TEFL/TESL faculty and students attended the Annual Co-TESOL Convention in Denver (November 14-15, 2014). Three student-led presentations were delivered at the convention: Angela Sharpe, Moriah Kent and Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker discussed the benefits of Using Corpora in the L2 Classroom; Kenshin Huang and Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker shared their insights on Engaging Asian Students in Classroom Interactions, and Reyila Hadeer and Victor Kuan presented a session on Teacher’s Support during Project-based Learning. Due to the generous support of INTO-CSU, 16 graduate students attended the convention this year.
• Sarah Sloane gave two presentations, one at a roundtable and another on a featured panel at Writing on the Range, a conference held at University of Denver for college and university faculty from Colorado (and a couple from New Mexico) who do scholarship in the field of writing studies.Her roundtable participation included a discussion of state guidelines for advanced composition classes and a proposal for an advanced writing course that starts by reading Colorado prepper literature. Looking historically at the various permutations of prepper responses to a culture of fear as it has informed 1980s survivalist literature, 1990s prepper handbooks, and contemporary descriptions of potential disasters and 72-hour bug-out bags, students will examine the shaky evidence and rhetorical appeals embedded in YouTube videos, podcasts, social media, listserves like “Vegas Preppers,” and blogs about prepping. Students will then move from reading these flawed rhetorical constructions to composing their own well-supported arguments on a wide range of topics. Students will develop the rhetorical sensitivity and critical acumen necessary to compose within more typical rhetorical situations and Colorado contexts.Her featured panel presentation discussed the Colorado State University Composition Program, its location within local, regional, and state contexts, and our program’s collaborative efforts to bring state-of-the-art facilities to support critical analyses of websites, blogs, podcasts, prezis, and new notions of intellectual property, copyright, credibility, the material and the virtual, credibility, representation, and all the many forms, genres, and questions that digital systems, digital publics, and online social networks allow.
• Leif Sorensen’s essay “Against the Post-Apocalyptic: Narrative Closure in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One,” on the most recent novel by MacArthur genius grant recipient Colson Whitehead is now available in the current issue of Contemporary Literature.Professor Sorensen also attended the annual meeting of the Modernist Studies Association in Pittsburgh in early November and presented a paper, “Fragmented Ancestors,” on the literary recoveries of Américo Paredes and D’Arcy McNickle.
• Graduating English Education student Clint Pendley has accepted a position teaching seventh grade Literacy and English Language Development at Columbia Middle School in Aurora, CO. Congratulations, Clint!
• Greyrock Review is now accepting submissions! Greyrock Review is an undergraduate anthology at Colorado State University. Submissions are open from October 6, 2014 to December 1, 2014 for original work in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual arts. Any undergraduate at CSU may submit their work at https://greyrockreview.submittable.com/submit for free and will be notified by December 15, 2014. Any questions may be sent to editor.csu@gmail.com