Proposed Response to Executive Order “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.”

This is a very rough draft of a resolution I intend to introduce at the next Village Board Meeting. It is very much a work in progress.  Please post any and all suggestions in comments.

Whereas any way forward for the North Country economy requires welcoming people from other countries as tourists, visitors, residents, teachers, students, and businesses owners,

Whereas refugees founded, built and have improved the Village of Canton for its entire 171-year history,

Whereas the Village of Canton continues to be culturally and economically enriched by refugees and migrants from other countries and their descendants,

We the Board of Trustees of the Village of Canton hereby condemn the Executive Order “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.” and urge our local, state, and federal elected officials to work immediately to stop its implementation and ameliorate the damage already done.

If you have suggestions for further action, I am all ears.

If you have criticisms or think this is a terrible idea, I value your opinion as well.

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20% Project

There are three requirements for my 20% assignment: it must be connected to course material in some way, shape or form; it  must be awesome and it must be designed to be shared.  The project should carefully reflect that it is worth 20% of the grade. I ask students to include an annotated bibliography and a one page “story” of the process through which they conceived of, researched, and executed the project, using footnotes, if appropriate.

While I think “designing to share” helps with the development of important skills, whether a student shares their work or not is, of course, completely up to them.  This blog contains a number of examples of the work of students who have given me permission to re-post their hard work.

My colleague at the College of Charleston Anton VanderZee used it to great effect last spring in his class “Writing the ‘American’ Self: From the Founding to Facebook”, with students producing personal scrapbooks, a cookbook and even a quilt. More details and examples of Anton’s implementation of the 20% idea are available here.

I have showcased some of my student’s work. Understanding that my comments, evaluations, and so forth are between myself and the creator, I present their work “as is,” and hopefully the examples are more valuable as a result.

Here is some sample work on YouTube, Prezi, and using timeline tools.

Catholic Youth Literature Project

Last year, my colleague Eric Morgan and I made a web-application called theCatholic Youth Literature Project.  It was designed as a classroom tool to offer students opportunities for close- and distant-reading of 19th-century texts and possibilities for the class as a whole to contribute to notions of Catholic identity by sharing interpretations of these texts.

Now that I am teaching both literature and composition at SUNY Canton.  I would like to adapt the project to expand to meet broader instructional needs for myself and others, forking the current code.