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MnWE News Winter Issue
January-February 2023
MnWE 2023
Conference on Zoom and at St. Cloud State
Fri.-Sat., Mar. 31-Apr. 1, 2023
Learning Ecologies: Building, Improving, and Refining Pedagogy
In this issue:
1. Propose Now for
Conference: CAN YOU PRESENT AT 3/31-4/1 MnWE?
2. Campus News: FOUR ELEMENTS STUDENTS OF COLOR WANT
3. A Note from the MnWE Committee: ADDED FOCUS ON EQUITY
4. Review: CLIMATE CHANGE–MINISTRY
FOR THE FUTURE
5. Equity/Diversity Literary Resources
(in each issue)
6. Free Teaching/Learning
E-Newsletters
(in each issue)
7. About MnWE
(in each issue)
If you are new to
our listserv, welcome! We never share your address, and you always may
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view this or previous issues in your
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MnWE News goes to over 2500 English and Writing faculty in
Minnesota and parts of nearby states. Our next conference is Fri.-Sat.,
Mar. 31-Apr. 1, 2023, with almost all events available simultaneously in
person at St. Cloud State University and on Zoom.
If you are a long-term member of this listserv, thank
you for your continuing participation. If you did not receive this
newsletter directly and want to see it six times per year, join us by
sending a request to the editor at jeweLØØ1
at umn
dot edu.
We suggest you give us a permanent email address.
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1. Propose Now for Conference:
CAN YOU PRESENT AT 3/31-4/1 MnWE?
PROPOSALS
FOR MnWE' 23
We’d love to see you make a
simple, brief proposal for MnWE’s Thirteenth Annual Conference Fri.-Sat.,
Mar. 31-Apr. 1, 2023. Like last year’s, the conference will be hybrid–both
in person and on Zoom interactively–at St. Cloud State University,
Minnesota. The theme is “Learning Ecologies: Building, Improving, and
Refining Pedagogy.” Deadline for proposals is Feb. 10.
We accept most proposals and
group people with simi-lar topics (or you can propose your own group). You
may suggest anything on the theme–or off of it–related to teaching
Writing, Literature, Creative Writing, tutoring, or working with English
in ESL/EAP.
MnWE is a warm, welcoming
conference focusing on transforming theory into pedagogy, on equity, and
on sharing teaching/learning methods. Presenters hail from the Upper
Midwest and beyond. The conference offers a plenary each day with experts
in their fields. Breakouts are smaller roundtable discussions, each
discussant talks six-eight minutes, and then discussants and attendees ask
questions and answer them.
Registration is open now: fees
are unusually low even for a two-day state conference (with an additional
$10 charge in the final week and at the conference). If you have
questions, email us at
mnweconference@gmail.com.
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www.MnWE.org
Send a Proposal!
Questions
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2. Campus News: FOUR ELEMENTS STUDENTS OF COLOR WANT ON A CAMPUS
Here are four elements that students of color want when
choosing a campus–or staying on one. And you may be able to help make them
happen. Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez developed them in conversation with Brown
U. sophomore Skye Alex Jackson, the founder of
the National Black Student Alliance, and PhD student at UC-Berkeley and
Alaskan Native Tvetene Carlson. Zamudio-Suarez featured them in the
Nov. 8, 2022 online newsletter she edits, Race on Campus:
- “Students
Are Looking for Communities Within Their Campus Community...with
people who share the same racial identities [to] help them cope with
feelings of isolation and navigate racist experiences they may face on
campus.”
- “Benefits
of Black Student Housing.” For example,
Harambee House is a residence hall for Blacks at Brown University
for students to “engage in authentic cultural and, by extension,
self-expression,” says its website.
- “Precollege
Programs Help Students of Color.... Before her first year at Brown,
Jackson participated in a precollege program for students of color” in
which “incoming freshmen got to move into their dorms early and were
each paired with...upperclassmen, who served as mentors.”
-
“Faculty Representation Matters.
Having four professors who
were people of color in her first semester at Brown made a huge
difference in her success that school year, Jackson said. It made her
more comfortable seeking out mentors and going to office hours. At the
University of Alaska, Carlson also found mentorship in one of his
professors who was Alaskan Native.”
How badly does your school want to find and keep more
students of color? Statistics consistently show you can’t just say, “Let’s
advertise more,” “We need an equity administrator,” or “We should try
diversity training.” All of these are fine, but experience across the
country demonstrates they won’t work without building communities of color
on campuses.
In other words, a campus must create specific spaces and
experiences to help students of color groups access college more easily
and comfortably. Otherwise, they’ll simply go to places such as the
historically Black colleges or wherever else they feel more welcome...or
they won’t go at all.
What can you do? Now is a good time to suggest such
programs or their expansion at your school.
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Equity, Diversity, and Multicultural
Programs at UM-Morris
Univ. of Mass.--How To Support Students of
Color: Advice for Teachers
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3. A Note from
the MnWE Committee: ADDED FOCUS ON EQUITY
The MnWE Committee decided, after the
murder of George Floyd, to add a new commitment to MnWE’s purpose.
Previously, MnWE’s focus was “on practical pedagogy in college-level
Composition, Rhetoric, Creative Writing, Literature, Tutoring, and related
professional activities.” The MnWE Committee decided by consensus, over a
period of months, to add “equity” to “practical pedagogy,” pursuing both.
This parallels the same new focus as
national organizations such as
MLA, CCCC, and NCTE. You may have noticed this added focus in the MnWE
News, which has had much more information about equity/diversity since
Floyd’s murder. And those of you who have attended our last two
conferences also will have observed this increased focus.
There is a significant difference between “equality” and
“equity.” “Equality” means the laws are exactly the same for everyone.
“Equity” means that deserving people with great brains, hearts, and wills
have the same opportunities. We believe in lifting those who have been
left behind but have the same potential so that we all have the
opportunity to rise together.
As a Committee, we also have voted to commit the new,
yearly MnWE Journal to a primary focus on equity and diversity. We
hope you enjoy the new Journal when its first issue comes out, and
learn from it. As Committee members, we are growing in knowledge each
month about equity and diversity, and in how we may affect our students
and peers.
MnWE always has been deeply concerned about such issues
during its sixteen years, whether BIPOC, LGBTQ, disabilities, poverty, or
other cultural or life separations that sideline people unequally. Why? It
is because all of us–Committee, conference goers, and you as readers–are
MnWE: a community of 2000+ college-level English, Writing, and related
experts. We all are learning what students need for success. Committee
members have heard each of your voices, directly or indirectly, through
the thousands of conversations each year in department meetings,
gatherings, and informal discussions in hallways. The great majority of us
in our wider community clearly want all students to become equal members
of society when possible.
So we on the MnWE Committee thank you for your support and
suggestions in this endeavor. We all are moving forward together.
–Richard Jewell, Editor, MnWE News, for the MnWE
Committee
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4. Book Review: CLIMATE CHANGE–THE
MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE
By Kim Stanley Robinson, Orbit,
2020. Novel. Classroom: Short science and story readings.
How do you make climate change the subject of English
studies? It is in the writing of good stories, both of fact and fiction.
The Ministry of the Future, billed on the cover as
“one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year,” contains both the real
and the made up, deeply and richly intertwined.
Author Robinson long has been a member of realistic “hard
science” fiction’s top novelists among both critics and readers, arguably
an inheritor of the Arthur Clarke-Isaac Asimov mantle. Robinson’s famous
Mars Trilogy set science standards so accurately for humankind’s eventual
presence there in coming centuries that his work can be more predictive
than imaginary. One wonders whether–like Clark and Asimov earlier–he
sometimes is leading scientists toward our future. In Ministry,
he offers two major streams. One is a series of short, sharp essays
declaring the current, very factual state of the world’s climatological
needs and, sometimes, the political resistances to them. The other is a
group of fictional characters with whom we move steadily into an ever more
perilous world in the decades ahead.
Many of these latter portions revolve around Dr. Mary
Murphy, head of the newly formed UN Ministry of the Future in Zurich,
funded moderately and charged with changing nations’ and large
corporations’ burning of carbon. Her friend Frank May, an American aid
worker, is the sole survivor of a heatwave in his city in India that kills
twenty million. In his devastation, he imposes on himself such a huge
obligation to create climate change that their first meeting occurs when
he kidnaps her. For this he ends up in jail, where she visits him.
Another friend of hers and coworker is assassinated by rich
Russian oligarchs. And a close colleague is running, unknown to her, a
“black ops” eco-terrorism group that may or may not be killing some of the
world’s worst billionaire “climate criminals.”
Other story lines tantalize, as well. In one, Antarctic
scientists dig well holes in dangerous conditions in glaciers to remove
water beneath so that the country-size fields of ice slide more slowly
into the sea. In another, an eco-terrorist group named after Kali, the
Hindu goddess of death, uses drones to destroy oil-burning container ships
and cargo jets. In yet another, great waves of immigrants in the tens of
millions move away from their new deserts, flooded regions, and
increasingly war-torn, starving countrysides.
This is apocalyptic science fiction, all based on realistic
projections even now slowly unfurling. Individual stories grip with tense
plotting and empathetic three-dimensional characters. And the science–some
of it current, some projected –is so accurate and detailed as to be
depressing.
Yet Robinson is an optimist. However unsettling the facts
and stories, he shows us an Earth–with all its failures, anger, and
narcissism–gradually pulling back from the brink of self-destruction. The
final chapters may move some readers to tears.
In short, Ministry is a graduate class using
introductory-college language to bring all the science, politics, economic
trends, and individuals’ pain and volunteerism together to tell us the
Earth’s real and great climate tragedy. “All are punished,” Shakespeare
says at the end of Romeo and Juliet. Indeed. But according to
Aristotle’s Poetics, tragedies also can end on a better note:
redemption is possible. Mercifully, Robinson shows us how.
Is this a book for classroom reading? It offers many short
chapters of pure fact, others of interesting, even fun speculation. Still
others are well-honed dramas that stand on their own with likeable
characters with whom students can identify. A teacher assigning individual
selections or readings would work well, as would students choosing
different chapters, then discussing them in small groups and as a class.
Robinson has woven, superbly, hard science and speculation
with emotive tales. Ministry may be a modern masterpiece of
science, forecast, and futuristic fiction.
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YaleClimateConnections.org Review
Rolling Stone Review
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5.
Equity Literary Resources
(listed in
each issue)
What diversity books might you or your students read?
Suggestions are welcome.
Asian-American:
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Black:
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Indigenous/Native American:
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Latinx:
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LGBTQ:
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Graphic Novels and Diversity:
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(in
each issue)
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Past
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7.
About MnWE: Old
Issues, Joining, Who We Are, Grad Credit, Unsubscribing
(in
each issue)
More
Online-Teaching Resources:
See
www.mnweconference.com/resources.html.
Our Newsletters: For new and old issues, visit
MnWE News.
Forwarding/Joining:
Please forward this email to other
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We always enjoy signing up new list members.
Who
are
we?
“MnWE” is “Minnesota Writing and English,” an all-volunteer organization
started in 2007. MnWE has a coordinating committee, a listserv, and an
annual, two-day spring conference attended by 100-200 faculty. Our main
coordinating committee, which meets about six times per year, is composed
entirely of unpaid college, university, high school, and other
professional English/Writing volunteers.
All
activities are by and for college, university, and
college-in-the-high-schools English and
Writing
faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and related academic and
literary scholars, , tutors, publishers, authors,
and others in the Upper Midwest and
beyond. Our purpose is to bring together these
communities in Minnesota and in nearby states and provinces.
Where are we?
Please visit us online at
MnWE.org.
Our
geographical center is Minneapolis-St. Paul.
About 2700 faculty, graduate students,
tutors, and related administrators see our emails.
Those on our listserv receive this
newsletter six times per year, along with additional conference
announcements and helpful forwards. Our listserv
members come from state universities, public and private two-year
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companies, and the public universities of Minnesota, Wisconsin, North
Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, and other schools and locations
in the United States, Canada, and overseas countries.
Conference:
At our annual two-day conferences, our
speakers highlight pedagogical concerns
and are scholars and writers of national excellence from both local and
national locations. Some of our presenters come from states or countries
far beyond our own geographical area. The majority of our attendees and
presenters are from universities and private four-year
colleges; a significant
minority are in two-year colleges, high
schools, and other groups.
Graduate Credit: Anyone may earn one graduate credit from Southwest
Minnesota State
University for attending a
MnWE Conference day and writing a related research paper (up to three
such credits may be earned). For
questions about this course–“Eng 656: MnWE Practicum”–please contact
lisa dot lucas at smsu dot edu
or see
www.smsu.edu/academics/programs/english/?id=11637.
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Questions:
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invited to attend any of our six or more
MnWE Committee meetings per year. To join the listserv, email Richard at
jeweLØØ1
at umn
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If you’d like to attend a meeting, or join the committee for Zoom
meetings, please ask
Richard. In addition, you always are invited to offer suggestions to MnWE,
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annual conference.
Copyright:
This newsletter is written primarily by MnWE News editor Richard
Jewell without copyright so that anyone may quote, paraphrase, or forward
any or all parts freely, unless otherwise noted. We do
ask that you give credit to the MnWE News
and/or
www.MnWE.org;
and when you use material that has been quoted or paraphrased in this
newsletter from another source, please be sure to give proper credit to the
original source.
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Richard Jewell, Editor
MnWE News
Minnesota Writing and English
www.MnWE.org
MnWE Coordinating
Committee:
David
Beard, UMD Advisor, University of Minnesota-Duluth
Heidi
Burns, Web & Docs Coordinator, Minn. State University-Mankato
Mary
Ellen Daniloff-Merrill, SMSU Advisor, Southwest Minn. State University
Samantha
Denney, Southern New Hampshire University
Judith
Dorn, 2023 Site Coordinator, St. Cloud State University
Gene
Gazelka, North Hennepin Community College
Edward
Hahn, Registration Coordinator, North Hennepin College
Ryuto
Hashimoto, Undergraduate Connection Coord., Mn. State U.-Mankato
Danielle
Hinrichs, Program Coordinator, Metropolitan State University
Richard
Jewell, Co-founder & Gen. Coord., Inver Hills Coll. (Emeritus)
Yanmei
Jiang, Equity Co-Leader, Century College
Carla-Elaine Johnson, Plenary Coordinator, Saint Paul College
Linda
O’Malley, Volunteer Coordinator, Metropolitan State University
Priscilla
Mayowa, Metropolitan State University
Kerrie
Patterson, Treasurer, Hennepin Technical College
Gordon
Pueschner, Secretary & Conf. Floor Co-Manager, Century College
Beata
Pueschner, Conference Floor Co-Manager, North Hennepin College
Jana
Rieck, Communications Coordinator, Champlin Park High School
Donald
Ross, Co-founder, Univ. of Minnesota-Twin Cities (Emeritus)
Larry
Sklaney, Conference & Cost Center Coordinator, Century College
MnWE Journal
Editorial Board.: David Beard and Yanmei Jiang
Email Contacts:
danielle dot hinrichs at metrostate dot edu
-
(651) 999-5960
larry dot sklaney at century dot edu
- (651) 747-4006
jeweLØØ1
at umn
dot edu
(Richard Jewell)
- (612) 870-7024
MnWE
.org
Minnesota Writing & English
A Consortium of Colleges & Universities
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Format updated 5 Oct. 2022
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