The next ECCTYC Conference will be held in Northern California

October 20-22, 2011.

Please check back for more details. Theme, hotel, attractions, and registration information to be unveiled April 2011.

Labels: Conferences, ECCTYC_Conference_2011, President

SUBJECT: OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR CHAFFEY COLLEGE

To President/Superintendent Shannon, Chaffey College:

The English Council of California Two-Year Colleges (www.ecctyc.org) is a professional non-profit organization representing all two-year college English departments and faculty members throughout the state. ECCTYC sends representation to National TYCA, hosts a biennial conference, and, as you know well, publishes inside english, an annual professional journal that reaches every campus of our college system. These are large tasks for a small non-profit, which is why ECCTYC relies on the generous patronage of constituent colleges like Chaffey.

The ECCTYC board recognizes Chaffey College as one of this organization’s strongest supporters: through years of continued representation on the board (notably Michael Dinielli and Sean Stratton), through years of travel support for your faculty and administrators who attend our statewide meetings, and through the hosting of the inside english publication, Chaffey has shown a strong and continued commitment to the advancement of English studies in California.

For strong and steadfast support, the board is pleased to present Chaffey College with an Outstanding Achievement Award for its support and contributions to ECCTYC and California’s Community Colleges. This award was presented to Chaffey care of Michael Dinielli on April 15 at the ECCTYC Spring 2010 board meeting.

Sincerely,


Gary Enns, President of ECCTYC
English Professor, Cerro Coso Community College

Labels: Awards, President, Region_9

Spring 2010 Board Meeting
15-16 April 2010, Full Board (and 14 April, Executive Board)
Doubletree Hotel San Francisco Airport

NEWS FROM CERRO COSO

CUTS

Unless the budget crisis resolves and mandates from the district and administration are lifted, our department will be forced to cut literature and creative writing courses next year. We will focus our energies solely on core basic skills, ESL, composition, speech, and critical thinking courses while the crisis runs its course.

ESL

Our institution has, admittedly, been lagging behind other colleges in our ESL offerings until just recently. However, we are now offering ESL courses at our central campus. We are advertizing the course and dialoging with organizations such as Head Start, the Adult School, and local employers in order to insure strong enrollment. With the support of the Basic Skills Initiative, our Learning Assistance Center now runs a language practice group led by tutor/mentors. This practice group is quite diverse, including individuals with backgrounds from Mexico, Cambodia, Brazil and Jordan.

SLO’S

The communications department will begin data collection for composition courses this summer. This process will include holistic scoring of research papers from a number of courses in addition to testing results from some courses.

LITERARY JOURNAL

I am continuing my work as faculty editor for our college’s student journal, Metamorphoses: A Journal of Literature and Art. In 2009, we began publishing student work online every Monday of the school year in a new feature called Met Mondays. This new feature has proven very popular with the college, and so we will continue while selections last. Met Mondays has helped to highlight the importance of the journal and the creative spirit of the students, even in the midst of the cuts to literature and creative writing courses. We plan on publishing the best of Met Mondays in a Fall 2010 print issue of the journal.

NEW DIRECTORS

PERRI GALLAGHER

I welcome the return of Perri Gallagher of Ohlone College to the board. Gallagher brings with her a wealth of experience. From 1999 to 2004, she served as Director of Region 2; in 2001 she provided leadership as chair of the “Capitol Ideas” ECCTYC Conference in Sacramento.

In June 2009, Gallagher earned her Doctorate of Education in Higher Education with an emphasis on technology. Regarding her interests, Gallagher states: “My dissertation, More than Poetic Examination: Metaphors that Structure Online Instructor Views, is a qualitative study with a sample population of ECCTYC member college English instructors, and was presented at [the 2009 ECCTYC Conference].”

“Working with ECCTYC has been a privilege, an honor and a whole lot of fun,” said Gallagher in a recent email, “which is why I’m happy to be returning to the board.”

Gallagher will serve as Region 2 Co-Director alongside Catherine Eagan of Las Positas College.

JENNIFER SKYTT

I also welcome Jennifer Skytt of Santa Barbara Community College as Adjunct Director At-Large for Southern California. Skytt is a Stanford University M.A. graduate who has become a very active part of the SBCC English program. She currently teaches foundational composition and critical thinking courses and tutors for the Gateway program. Recently, she was accepted into SBCC’s Multicultural English Transfer program, a series of courses “designed to meet the special needs of underrepresented and underserved students” (Skytt). Skytt recently attended her first CCCC’s, “returning with a greater understanding of the relationship between the political and scholarly aspects of the profession and the composition classroom” (Skytt).

The board looks forward to the enthusiasm and insights of these new members.

ECCTYC ONLINE

BLOG

I have made some adjustments to our blog; the right column of our blog page now features a table of contents by region and officer. When a proper tag is used on a blog post (e.g. Region_5, President, TYCA_Representative), the post will list automatically in the proper table of contents section.

This blog is a valuable resource, but only if directors and officers use it and share it. Post your own reports and news updates, and share your post links with your constituents. Contact me, and I will be happy to get you started.

CONSTITUTION

I have posted our constitution to our website’s “About ECCTYC” page. Visit www.ecctyc.org, scroll across the “ECCTYC Info” button, and select “About ECCTYC.” You will see the link to the constitution in the header of that page.

TOPICS FOR THIS MEETING

We have a number of important discipline topics to discuss at this meeting, including English department responses to accreditation, CCC-EAP, and the Basic Skills Initiative. We will also discuss some topics of great importance to the running of this organization, such as ECCTYC research, the future of i.e. at Chaffey, and the clarification of institutional memberships. Finally, we must lay the groundwork—location and committee appointments—for the 2011 ECCTYC Conference. I recommend the board draw heavily from Corinna Evett’s knowledge as our most recent conference chairperson. The playbook she has compiled will be essential to the success of our next conference.

Gary Enns
President, ECCTYC
Professor of English, Cerro Coso Community College

Works Cited
Gallagher, Perri. Message to the author. 3 Nov. 2009. Email.
Skytt, Jennifer M. Message to the author. 10 April 2010. Email.

Labels: President

Briefing Report
U.S. Department of Education Stakeholder Meetings
October 13, 2009 and October 21, 2009
By Stacey Novelli, Legislative Associate, NCTE Washington Office

The U.S. Department of Education is hosting a series of forums to discuss key issues related to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Last month, Secretary Arne Duncan commented that that rewrite of ESEA should start now and that the reauthorization cannot wait. Congress reauthorized ESEA most recently in 2002 in what is known as the No Child Left Behind Act. Two forums were held in October.

On October 13, the Department hosted the second of five planned forums on ESEA reauthorization. The topic was “Great Teachers and Leaders.” Dr. Thelma Melendez, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, gave opening remarks and spoke of the important role of effective teachers and principals in promoting student achievement. According to Melendez, in order to ensure that all children have access to dedicated and highly-skilled teachers and school leaders we should:

1. Compensate teachers through a redesigned evaluation system informed by multiple measures including classroom observations and evidence of student engagement and learning;
2. Create new pathways to recruit and prepare a new generation of teachers who are supported in their first years in the classroom through mentoring programs;
3. Empower successful school leadership and faculties with the flexibility needed to build their school and create new and innovative programs to meet the needs of their diverse populations; and
4. Reach out to master teachers and leaders and ask them to bring their knowledge and expertise to the schools and communities that need them the most.

Carmel Martin, Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, summarized the overarching principles regarding teacher quality that will guide the development of a new ESEA bill for the Department. They include:

1. Treating all teachers as professionals by providing high quality pre-service training, professional development, access to timely student data and skilled leadership;
2. Recruiting and preparing talented individuals into the field of education, omitting barriers to high-quality alternative certification programs, and holding all teacher preparation programs accountable;
3. Developing school leaders that make schools work effectively for students and teachers; and
4. Equalizing the distribution of quality teachers and leaders between urban and rural communities. 

On October 21, the Department hosted the third of five forums on ESEA reauthorization. The topic was “Promoting Innovation and Rethinking the Federal Role.” Assistant Secretary Martin noted that the Department looks to develop an ESEA reauthorization package that better leverages federal dollars and makes the law less compliance-driven. Martin commented, “The best solutions are local, done at the classroom level with parents and teachers and other educators.” Jim Shelton, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement, echoed these remarks, and noted that the importance of innovation in education reform cannot be understated, but that it is crucial to examine and understand how it happens versus simply trying to replicate so-called innovative programs that are successful.

The NCTE DC Office staff are attending and tracking the information in these Department of Education forums to gather information for the Executive Committee in writing NCTE’s 2010 legislative platform that will guide NCTE’s advocacy regarding changes in ESEA.

For videos from the forums, go to http://www.ed.gov/news/events/forum.html.

Stacey Novelli, Legislative Associate, NCTE Washington Office

Labels: President, TYCA_Representative

Presented at the Fall 2009 Board Meeting and Biennial Conference
22 October 2009
Hilton Pasadena

CONFERENCE

This year’s conference theme is Pathways to Community. The theme stands as a reminder of the kind of culture we as college educators strive to create on our campuses and in our classes. We see signs of community life in our classrooms every day. When one student’s shared insight about a poem leads to a more complete understanding for all of her peers—this is community at work. When in an online workshop a student’s draft is strengthened by the comments of his classmate—this is community at work. As educators, one of our most important tasks is to create—and improve upon—learning environments that facilitate the camaraderie, helpfulness, and partnership that characterize community. I am confident that as this year’s ECCTYC conference comes to a close, attendees will take with them new and inspired ways of creating this sense of community on campus and in classroom.

I commend our conference chair, Corinna Evett of Santiago Canyon College, whose vision and perseverance have been essential to this year’s event. Thank you, Corinna, for your dedication to ECCTYC and to the planning of this conference. I also applaud all members of the conference committee listed below for their diligence and industriousness as they attended to important conference work.

• Corinna Evett—ECCTYC 2009 Conference Chair
• John Thomas—Treasurer, Conference Badges
• Micah Jendian and Jan Lombardi—Program Committee Co-Chairs
• Corinna Evett, Micah Jendian, Jan Lombardi, and Sterling Warner—Program Layout and Production
• Corinna Evett (Chair) and Sean Stratton—Promotion Logos and Flyers
• Corinna Evett—Local Arrangements
• Susan Yonker and Gary Enns—Photography
• Chella Courington, Corinna Evett, Heidi Ramirez, and Sterling Warner—Speakers Committee
• Corinna Evett, Christopher McCabe, and Susan Yonker—AV Equipment
• Michael Dinielli, Corinna Evett, and Sterling Warner—Hotel Arrangements
• Sravani Banarjee, John Thomas, and Julie LaMay—Registration Committee
• Sean Stratton (Chair), Rosemarie Guglielmino, and Sterling Warner—Best Article, inside english Committee
• Catherine Eagan, Rosemarie Guglielmino, and Sterling Warner—Best Literary Magazine Award
• Sterling Warner (Chair), Michael Dinielli, and Tom Hurley—Nina Theiss Award
• Christopher McCabe (Chair), Corinna Evett, and Heidi Ramirez—Publicity

TYCA REPRESENTATION

Representation at TYCA National is essential to ECCTYC’s status as the Pacific Coast Region of TYCA, and so the board is indebted to Elissa Caruth of Oxnard College for her hard work and dedication as our organization’s representative to TYCA National. Caruth has been to eight nationals since 2005. Her role as representative has taken her to Pittsburgh, Chicago, Nashville, New York, New York again, San Antonio, San Francisco and next month Philadelphia. Caruth has served on several TYCA committees, including the nominations committee and the best article committee. She has shared her innovative ideas as a presenter four times at nationals, has moderated sessions, and has served as a round table facilitator. Her numerous and insightful TYCA Pacific Coast and ECCTYC reports can be read in current and back issues of inside english and TETYC.

Caruth’s term as TYCA rep is up this year, and after several years of service, she has decided to step down. Thank you, Elissa, for your commitment and dedication to The English Council and TYCA. Former ECCTYC board member Jody Millward of Santa Barbara City College has been nominated to replace Carruth as our representative. Millward, for many reasons which our first vice president will delineate in his report, is an excellent choice for the position and will be a wonderful addition to the board.

NEW CO-DIRECTORS

I have appointed two new co-directors—Kate Pluta of Bakersfield College for Region Five South Valley, and Kevin Ferns of Woodland Community College for Region One Northern California.

Regarding the Region Five appointment, nominations were sought from the division and department chairs of the Southern South Valley, and Pluta’s name rose to the top of the list. Bakersfield College’s English Department chairperson, Pam Boyles, states in her nomination of Pluta: “Kate has been a former department chair of the BC English Department, former Senate President, and has served many years on the CCA Executive Board in various leadership positions. … She has my highest recommendation!”

Regarding the Region One appointment, it was Ferns that noticed the vacancy and expressed interest in participating on the board. I interviewed him through email and am confident that he will make a fine addition to the board. At Woodland, Ferns is working to expand English offerings “beyond just the comp offerings and into lit and creative writing courses. He is also working on “expanding the scope” of his school’s literary magazine and on involving more students in the writing and editing of the publication.

VACANT SEATS ON THE BOARD

Currently, we have eleven of twenty-two co-director positions filled on the board. If the board approves my appointments for Regions One and Five, our number will be brought up to thirteen. That leaves nine co-director positions vacant. I urge the board to be proactive in filling these seats so that we can better represent our constituents throughout the state.

In particular, we need to fill the following key vacancies: Region Four North Valley Co-Director, and Adjunct Co-Director At-Large. Currently, we have no members in these positions. ECCTYC is seeking two promising and motivated adjunct instructors—one from Northern and one from Southern California—as well as two faculty members from the following Region Four schools:

American River College, Columbia College, Cosumnes River College, Deep Springs College (private), Humphreys College (private), Lake Tahoe College, Merced College, Modesto Junior College, Sacramento City College, San Joaquin Delta College, Sierra College

Other regions with vacancies include Region Two San Francisco Bay; Region Six Central Coast; Region Seven North Los Angeles; Region Eight South Los Angeles & Orange County; and Region Nine San Bernardino.

ECCTYC ON THE WEB

Our current website and paid web editor James Fitch of Hartnell College have performed admirably through this conference. Now, upon concluding the event, it is time to consider more cost effective and user friendly alternatives. It is my feeling that ECCTYC’s website should be inexpensive, easy for a board member with little coding experience to edit, and easy for co-directors and officers to post reports and reach their constituents. Members of the web committee are currently evaluating alternative interfaces such as Joomla and Drupal, and even free web building interfaces such as WordPress, to see if one of these technologies might help us to build a more intuitive web space. I encourage the web committee to continue this important work and to report back to the board at our next board meeting.

AGENDAS OF THE FUTURE

Finally, as president, it is my goal to create board agendas replete with topics of the utmost importance to our profession and to our constituents. To do this, I rely heavily on the help of the officers and co-directors of this board who bring with them the issues and concerns of ECCTYC constituents throughout California. I encourage board members to contact me with issues throughout the year in order to help shape the future direction of this organization.

Gary Enns
President, ECCTYC
Professor of English, Cerro Coso Community College

Labels: Conferences, ECCTYC_Conference_2009, President

President: Gary Enns, Cerro Coso Community College

First Vice President: Sterling Warner, Evergreen Valley College

Second Vice President: Michael Dinielli, Chaffey College

Secretary: Chella Courington, Santa Barbara City College

Treasurer: John Thomas, Diablo Valley College

Immediate Past President: Heidi Ramirez, Hartnell College

Editor of inside english: Sean Stratton, Chaffey College

TYCA Representative: Elissa Carruth, Oxnard College

Historian: Edith Conn, Ventura College

Labels: Editor_of_inside_english, First_and_Second_Vice_Presidents, Historian, Immediate_Past_President, President, TYCA_Representative