Transitions and Transactions III: Literature and Journalism Pedagogies in Community Colleges Today
We invite Community College faculty to send proposals for the April 22-23, 2016 conference presented by Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, English Department.
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 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.
Borough of Manhattan Community College
The City University of New York
199 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007
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