Call for Artists, Photogs, & Writers: 5 Books, 5 Charities, 5 Ways to Help!

Composing with Images Press, the press that I co-founded with Billie Hara, has released it’s latest call for entries. Take a look and consider submitting. If you have any questions, please let me know!

Composing with Images Press (CWiP) seeks images (photographs, drawings, or paintings), poetry, prose, and personal experiences (stories, letters, or journal entries) that explore and/or represent 5 different themes to create 5 different multi-genre books to benefit 5 charities. The charities and themes are:

  • Children’s Defense Fund (theme: I have a Voice)
  • Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (theme: The Teenage Experience)
  • March of Dimes (theme: Motherhood)
  • Operation Homefront (theme: Heroes)
  • Wildlife Conservation Society (theme: Wild)

The books created in response to this call will compose the first 5 books in our Student Books Series. In the Student Books Series students at colleges and universities under the guidance of their instructors and in collaboration with CWiP, will conceive of, design, and edit books to benefit a charity of their choosing. As with all CWiP books, 100% of the proceeds from book sales and submission fees will be donated to the students’ charity. The charities and themes for the first 5 books were selected by Writing Arts majors in Bill Wolff’s Writing, Research, and Technology course at Rowan University.

Deadline for submissions: October 17, 2011, at 11:59pm, Eastern Time.

Composing with Images Press is a small not-for-profit, all volunteer, independent book publisher founded by Bill Wolff and Billie Hara. CWiP publishes photo and art books that bring together image and text to engage creative, social, and cultural issues within a particular theme. 100% of all proceeds are donated to charity. Our first books were immediate best sellers and raised almost $1000 for BP oil spill cleanup efforts. Play!, a book to benefit The Marine Toys for Tots Foundation, will be released in November, 2011.

You will find a summary of each call below. Follow the links to the full call and submission specifics.

We look forward to your submissions!

Call for Entries: I have a Voice
(to benefit the Children’s Defense Fund)

CWiP is seeking a variety of genre entries that represent and capture the essence of the theme, I have a Voice, and empowers and inspires children to view life in a positive way and to follow their dreams. Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to, individuality, role models, dreams/goals, success, family/friends, play/activities, safety/health, environment/community, and love and perspective. If you are a parent or teacher, ask your child or students to write about or create artwork that responds to to this theme in ways that only a child can present. We encourage entries that express your and children’s imaginations!

This call is open to amateur and professional artists and writers worldwide of any age working in any artistic or written medium. Work by children is of particular interest.

Call for Entries: The Teenage Experience
(to benefit the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network)

CWiP is seeking a variety of genre entries that represent and capture the essence of the theme, The Teenage Experience.  These might include, but are not limited to, entries that represent common problems facing teenagers, what it feels like to be a teenager in your contemporary society, or the joys that come with being a teenager today. Subjects that might be considered in writing or images, for example, are bullying, friendship, athletics, drama, school-life, concerns about the future, and so on. These are of course just suggestions for representing The Teenage Experience. We encourage entries that express your imagination!

This call is open to amateur and professional writers and artists worldwide over the age of 13 working in any artistic or written medium. We are specifically interested in work created by teenagers.

Call for Entries: Motherhood
(to benefit the March of Dimes)

CWiP is seeking entries in a variety of genres that represent and explore the essence of the theme, Motherhood. These might include, but are not limited to, photographs of pregnancy, photographs of children and families, photographs of motherhood, drawings or poems in the area of motherhood, tips on motherhood, letters on motherhood from the perspective of children, and personal stories on the stages of motherhood before, during, and after pregnancy, and as motherhood evolves throughout the life of the child. We are also interested in work that depicts motherhood from the perspective of children, partners, and/or spouses. These are of course just suggestions for representing Motherhood. We encourage entries that express your imagination!

This call is open to amateur and professional writers and artists worldwide of any age working in any artistic or written medium.

Call for Entries: Heroes
(to benefit Operation Homefront)

CWiP is seeking entries in a variety of genres that represent and capture the essence of the theme, Heroes. These might include, but are not limited to, photographs, drawings, and paintings portraying who your hero is or what a hero is to you, as well as poems, stories, or even lyrics about a heroic experience, someone you consider to be your hero, and/or what it means to be a hero. The work you submit might also attempt to capture through image and words metaphorical ideas of what it means to be heroic. Although the book will be specifically benefiting families of military personal, the pictures may include, but are limited to, a person in uniform.  These are of course just suggestions for representing the idea of Heroes. We encourage entries that express your imagination!

This call is open to amateur and professional writers and artists worldwide of any age working in any artistic or written medium.

Call for Entries: Wild
(to benefit the Wildlife Conservation Society)

CWiP is seeking entries in a variety of genres that represent and explore the essence of the theme, Wild.  These might include, but are not limited to, entries that showcase animals in their natural habitat, survival in the wild, personal experiences in the wild, or simply, a depiction of what you believe Wild  represents. We are not, however, limiting our desire for entries to focus solely on animals, but human experiences in their natural habitats: you could consider the place where you live, i.e. the city as a wild place. These are of course just suggestions for representing Wild. One might also consider what ‘Wild” means from the standpoint of the animal, the place, the person in the place, etc. Dress up as an animal – we encourage entries that express your imagination!

This call is open to amateur and professional artists and writers worldwide of any age working in any artistic or written medium.

CWiP thanks you for supporting these charities and the students who are doing the important work of creating the books! We look forward to your submissions!

Have a great day!

Posted in rowan, teaching | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Call for Artists, Photogs, & Writers: 5 Books, 5 Charities, 5 Ways to Help!

“schools aren’t businesses”: two must-read education articles

There are two must read education-related magazine articles this September, one in Harper’s and one in Smithsonian. These are must-reads for educators, but the real beneficiary of them would be those who are not in public education (and, especially those who also continue to complain against it and rail against teachers) and politicians who spend most of their time extolling the benefits of standardized tests and competition based education. As a bonus, I’ll also link to an old and excellent interview by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo with then presidential candidate Wes Clark, who is spot on about education.

Getting schooled: The re-education of an American teacher [full pdf so you don’t need subscription],” By Garret Keizer in the September 2011 issue of Harper’s

Choice passage (mostly because of the use of the word “nincompoop”):

Except for a few precious hours on Friday nights, I had little of what is generally called a life. My wife and I seldom went out. My normally robust correspondence dwindled to nothing. I was unable to file our income taxes until July. Though I took pains not to appear so to my students, I was often despondent. One morning, when my wife remonstrated with me for picking up a drunk hitchhiker by myself on a lonely road late the night before—“What if he’d pulled a gun?”—I responded, half joking, that if I could just get myself shot I might not have to correct any more papers.

My point here is that even under ideal circumstances, public-school teaching is one of the hardest jobs a person can do. Most sensible people know that. Anyone who claims not to know that is either a scoundrel or a nincompoop; or, to put it another way, a typical expert on everything that’s wrong with American public education and the often damaged children that it serves.

Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?” by LynNell Hancock in the September 2011 issue of Smithsonian

Choice passage:

The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. “I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good.”

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

Wes Clark on competition in education from a 2003 interview with Josh Marshall (.pdf) of Talking Points Memo:

For example, take the idea of competition in schools. OK now, what is competition in schools? What does it really mean? Well, competition in business means you have somebody who’s in a business that has a profit motive in it. It’s measured every quarter. If the business doesn’t keep up, the business is going to lose revenue, therefore it has an incentive to restructure, reorganize, re-plan, re-compete and stay in business.

Schools aren’t businesses. Schools are institutions of public service. Their job–their product–is not measured in terms of revenues gained. It’s measured in terms of young lives whose potential can be realized. And you don’t measure that either in terms of popularity of the school, or in terms of the standardized test scores in the school. You measure it child-bychild, in the interaction of the child with the teacher, the parent with the teacher, and the child in a larger environment later on in life.

So when people say that competition is-this is sort of sloganeering, “Hey, you know, schools need this competition.” No. I’ve challenged people: Tell me why it is that competition would improve a school. Most of them can’t explain it. It’s just like, “Well, competition improves everything so therefore it must improve schools.” If you want to improve schools, you’ve got to go inside the processes that make a school great. You’ve got to look at the teachers, their qualifications, their motivation, what it is that gives a teacher satisfaction, what it is a teacher wants to do in a classroom. We’ve got to empower teachers. Give them an opportunity to lead in the classroom. Teachers are the most important leaders in America. All that is lost in the sloganeering of this party. And the American people know it’s lost. So you asked me to give you one thing about this party that’s in power — it’s the sort of doctrinaire ideology that doesn’t really understand the country that we’re living in.

Posted in pedagogy, teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on “schools aren’t businesses”: two must-read education articles

throgs neck: a poem

Well, it seems that I’ve written a poem for the first time since 1997. While fourteen years between poems might not seem like much for some, for someone who wrote poetry all through college, has an MA in Creative Writing, and two Academy of American Poets Prizes, fourteen years is a really long time.

This one came to me as Wendy, Hydan, and I drove north from Bear, DE, to Boston last Monday evening, just before a stop-over in Waterbury, CT. I wrote most of it in my mind before having time to put it down Word a few days ago. For those not familiar with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Madame in the poem is a reference to:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. (lines 43-46)

As with all my most recent poems (if you can call 1995-1997 recent) this one is meant to be read aloud. Comments and thoughts, as always, are welcome.

Throgs Neck

Bear to Boston—barely leaving before
Sunset, our shirts, socks, slacks, blue jeans—Yes,
Take that pair—laid bear before us,
Now folded, now packed, now between
Here and us and there lay the Connecticut Turnpike.
What’s that you say? I may be a little bit crazy.
Yes, Six-Eighty-Four to Eighty-Four. Yes, Brewster.
Yes, picnics at that rest stop that June or July—
Humus, sandwiches, salad. Cold beverages.
But, Madame GPS (that famous clairvoyant)
You see, it’s all in her cards, plotting points,
Rooting routes, orienting bearings. Plus
(And she knows this, of course) Ninety-Five
Ushers us by crusty consonants—
Jerome, Hutchinson, Bruckner, Cross Bronx,
Throgs Neck—that mouthful mono-syllab.
I say Throgs Neck, aloud, slithering the thr
On to an overly oblong o, gulping the gs,
Decapitating it with the terse truncation of neck.
Fuck, I say: Madame blares traffic
So and so miles ahead so many miles long.
Warning lights. Bitch, I say (though I should’ve known
What with her being sick and all). And then
It’s gone. Blissfully. That bitch.
That tease. That high roller. I bear
The car—a memory of this place.
The buildings. The signage. The signifiers.
I am 8 or 10 or 16 driving north to—
Where would we be driving north? Where
Am I sitting? In the back? Maybe south. But, no,
The bearing is north. Northeast. From the southwest.
Breaths from the back seat. I hear slight
Shifts of position. Our son, barely four months,
Bewilderingly beautiful, my wife and he, as she bears
Him to her breast, mouth wide, eyes wide,
Wider, widening, before us and hereafter.

Boston, April 9, 2011

Posted in art, just for fun | 2 Comments

on blogging, tweeting, professional & course web sites, and tenure

Today marks the 3 year anniversary of my first blog post, preparing for classes, a small post that speculated on readings for two collaborative class I would be teaching in fall 2007. In honor of this occasion I’d planned on discussing how I am locating my use of blogging, tweeting, and professional and course Web sites in my tenure and promotion packet (due this September). Coincidentally, this morning I see that Cathy Davidson at HASTAC is addressing this very topic in her post, “Should Blogs Count for Tenure and Promotion?

Cathy begins her post by describing how a colleague at a conference asked her if blogging should count toward tenure and promotion. Cathy’s answer: Yes. My answer: Yes. The colleague then asks her if blogs should count the same as referred publications. Cathy’s answer: No. My answer: No, not with the current construct of what counts as valued writing. Finally, her colleague asks her if electronic or online publications should count the same as print. Cathy’s answer: Maybe. My answer: Yes. Cathy then discusses why she thinks blogging is valuable and where she thinks it should be located within the tenure and promotion packet: Service. My response: It depends on your college, university, and department guidelines.

Let me step back a bit. All colleges and universities require faculty to succeed in four general areas:

  • Teaching effectiveness
  • Scholarly and creative activity
  • Contributions to university community
  • Contributions to the wider and professional community

The type of university you are at will determine how much each area counts toward your being recontracted, tenured, and promoted. Colleges, four-year universities, and Masters-level universities, such as Rowan often put the emphasis for recontracting, tenure, and promotion, on teaching, and as a result faculty tend to teach more classes. Research universities put their emphasis on scholarly and creative activity, and, appropriately, faculty tend to teach less often but are required to publish a significant amount of work. The last two items in the list above count toward Service, which is always emphasized third.

Each college and university also has different processes for recontracting, tenuring, and promoting faculty. At Rowan, for example, probationary faculty (those who have yet to be tenured) submit recontracting packets their first year of service (application for second year), second year (application for third and fourth year), third year (application for fifth year), and fifth year (application for tenure). The tenure and promotion process are separate—tenure packet due in September, promotion packet due in January—though university documents were just rewritten (and departments are scrambling to catch up; this summer I’ve been on a committee that is composing our new guidelines) to align tenure and promotion guidelines so that faculty only have to compose one packet. Once tenured faculty submit thorough review packets every 5 years.

Okay, back to my “it depends” answer about where blogging should be discussed in the packet. Tenure packets are rhetorical constructs. The faculty member’s goal is to make the case for why the university should grant them tenure (which in and of itself is a gesture of good faith that the faculty member will continue to perform at at or above the level they showed during the probationary period). To make the case for why one should be tenured and/or promoted, faculty must provide evidence that they have met or surpassed the criteria as described in university, college, and department guidelines. At Rowan, university criteria are laid out in the Memorandum of Agreement (so named, I think, because it is an agreement between the faculty union, administration, and New Jersey). There is one memorandum for Tenure and Recontracting and one for Promotion. Colleges within the university compose Promotion codicils that elaborate or expand upon the university guidelines. Departments compose their own criteria for Tenure & Recontracting and Promotion that elaborate or expand upon the university guidelines. Faculty include college and department guidelines at the front of their tenure, recontracting, and promotion packets. The University Tenure & Recontracting and Promotion committees assess each candidate against the department, college, and university guidelines and criteria.

When Cathy Davidson writes that she thinks blogging should be counted as Service, I can see her point. But her argument is made without considering Yale’s tenure and promotion guidelines. Rather, her argument is located within a framework of what counts as valued writing within the academy: something that is peer reviewed. Blogging has, I think, very different rhetorical goals than does a peer-reviewed article. For me, blogging is about reflecting—reflecting on my classes, teaching practices, assignments, and so on.

As such, when I consider where blogging should be discussed in my tenure and promotion packet, I look for places where I need to provide evidence of reflection, especially about teaching. In the Memorandum of Agreement, within the bold-printed section “Criteria and Documentation for Evaluating a Candidate’s Excellence in Teaching,” under the heading “The candidate must demonstrate excellence in developing as a teacher,” it reads “1. Reflecting on one’s instruction and classroom to benefit the teaching-learning experience.” My blog posts about teaching with Twitter, YouTube, the Flip Video Camera, about how to help students learn how to tag, and so on, are evidence of reflection. As such, in my packet I discuss blogging under the heading “Excellence in Developing as a Teacher” and point to several blog posts as evidence of reflection.

Under the same heading, I make a similar argument about Twitter:

Twitter has provided an unparalleled opportunity for me to expand and develop my professional, teaching, and scholarly community. We share syllabi, discuss assignments, think about pedagogy, point to important articles and blog posts, and support each others’ efforts to become better and more creative teachers and learners.

As an example of that engagement and reflection, I point to and discuss a recent exchange between @kellimarshall, @samplereality, @billiehara, and I, in which we discussed possibilities for how Kelli might implement Twitter in her classes. As a result of Twitter, I write, I am in “a consistent state of reflection about my courses, my assignments, and the development of the field.”

I locate my professional Web site and course Web sites in a different section: “Excellence in Developing Learning Activities.” This is because in the Memorandum of Agreement, within the bold-printed section “Criteria and Documentation for Evaluating a Candidate’s Excellence in Teaching,” under the heading “The candidate must demonstrate excellence in developing learning activities,” it reads “3. Developing teaching materials, manuals, software, and computer exercises.” The operative phrase is “developing teaching materials.” Course Web sites are teaching materials. Because my primary responsibility as a faculty member at Rowan is teaching, I created a professional Web site that showcases teaching-related activities. As a result, the Web site itself is also an example of a “teaching material.” In this section I discuss the evolution of the site, how many course pages and sites I’ve created, and site statistics—all as evidence in excellence in developing learning activities.

You can download a rough draft (.pdf) of my “Excellence in Developing Learning Activities” and “Excellence in Developing as a Teacher” sections. Please note that this is an in-progress rough draft that needs revision; the final draft isn’t due to the department until September 10th-ish. Once the new department guidelines are approved, I’ll upload the guidelines for these sections so you can get an idea about how they’d be assessed.

It is important to note that in my department’s guidelines, in the section for Service, under the heading “Contributions to the Wider and Professional Community” it reads “managing, creating, or maintaining professional web sites or discussion groups.” Though I am managing and maintaining my professional Web site, I do not think the site itself works as well as evidence of service as it does as a teaching activity. It I maintained, for example, techrhet or CompPile or an important Twitter list, I’d discuss it in depth here.

So, looking back at Cathy’s colleague’s question about where to locate blogging in the tenure packet, I’d locate mine under Teaching Effectiveness. Looking to your university and department guidelines, where would you locate your blogging, tweeting, and Web sites?

Posted in academia, rowan, teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , | 15 Comments