Roger: I'm not sure how much credence I have since I've only participated at one conference--which I found both interesting and useful--in Canmore. I'm also a philosopher, which puts me at the periphery-- perhaps--of the goals and aims of the group. However, as a general observation I can attest to the failure of other groups and it seems to me that there are two reasons for the failure of these academic groups: (1) a failure to initiate the next generation of young scholars into the ethos of the group, and (2) a failure of the group to consistently identify and reify the values and identity of itself, its reason for being. For example, I was a member of a philosophy association which disappeared--and hardly anyone noticed--partly because no new members could see themselves as part of the group and partly because they couldn't see any long term value in identifying themselves as part of the group. So, there needs to be some recruitment of new members to move the group forward, with the condition that they may also re-evalate the ethos of the group. For what it is worth! Cheers, Jim
________________________________________
From: CASLL/Inkshed [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Roger Graves [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: March 23, 2009 10:58 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Newest Inkshed Newsletter is on the web site
The latest edition of the Inkshed Newsletter is up on the web:
http://www.stthomasu.ca/inkshed/nletta09/inkshed25_2.pdf
It features three book reviews, two of Wendy Strachan's Writing
Intensive: Becoming W-Faculty in a New Writing Curriculum and one of
Rhetorical Genre Studies and Beyond, edited by Natasha Artemeva and
Aviva Freedman. Information about the CASDW conference in Ottawa, the
CSSR conference in Montreal, and the CWCA meeting in Fredericton is
included, as well as a link to Tania Smith's blog.
I'd like to put my own plug in for Writing Intensive: Becoming W-
Faculty in a New Writing Curriculum. This book tells important stories
about how curricular change occurs and the factors that influence it.
I'm particularly interested in the administrative positioning of the
the various writing initiatives and how that positioning affects the
nature of the instruction that gets delivered. If you don't have time
or access to the book, make sure you read the reviews by Margaret
Proctor and Theresa Hyland.
On an equally important note, I found Tosh Tachino's review of
Rhetorical Genre Studies and Beyond to be extremely useful as a quick
refresher guide to the RGS approach to discourse studies and to the
limits and advantages of that approach.
For the next issue, we'd like to encourage notes, ideas, and thought
experiments of all kinds on this topic: Inkshed 2.0. It is clear that
there will not be an Inkshed conference this summer, so we think that,
as an organization, Inkshed needs to be re-invented. Any thoughts on
how to do proceed with this would be most welcome, and this summer I'd
like to convene a working group to create the next version. If you are
interested, email me offline ([log in to unmask]).
Heather Graves and Roger Graves, Co-editors
Roger Graves
Director, WAC and Acting Director, Centre for Writers
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~graves1/index.html
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For the list archives and information about the organization,
its newsletter, and the annual conference, go to
http://www.stu.ca/inkshed/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
To leave the list, send a SIGNOFF CASLL command to
[log in to unmask] or, if you experience difficulties,
write to Russ Hunt at [log in to unmask]
For the list archives and information about the organization,
its newsletter, and the annual conference, go to
http://www.stu.ca/inkshed/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
