During the academic year of 2007-08, the English department has
focused on reaching out in service activity.
University Outreach. Betsy Birmingham and Gary
Totten, both associate professors of English, have taken the lead
in our department on issues related to gender and race issues on
campus. Betsy has been focusing on gender-equity issues, while
working as a member of NDSU FORWARD to collect and share
institutional data concerning campus climate and its relation to
issues of recruiting, retaining, and promoting women in the faculty
ranks. Gary has been working with TOCAR, a group that addresses
institutional racism. In conjunction with Multicultural Student
Services, Melissa Vosen, a graduate student, participated in campus
wide readings of Martin Luther King Jr.'s work in January.
Linda Fricker, senior lecturer, is a faculty fellow for Dinan Hall
in the Faculty in Residence Education (FIRE) and Maureen Scott,
lecturer, is a First Year Experience (FYE) faculty mentor in Weible
Hall. FIRE and FYE are programs sponsored by Residence Life to
encourage faculty/student interaction outside of the
classroom.
Local Outreach. Many members of the English
department have extended their efforts in service and outreach to
the community.
Andrew Mara, assistant professor of English, hosted a literacy
summit in the city. His ENGL-275 Introduction to Writing students
gathered people and organizations to formulate and discuss future
directions for providing literacy services in the Fargo-Moorhead
area. His English 320 Business and Professional Writing class got
into the community spirit by creating and presenting marketing plan
proposals for the Fargo Theatre Executive
Director Margie Bailly.
Dale Sullivan, department head, has been working with people in
the community to build a local foods network. Learn more at
http://fargolocalfoods.net.
Amy Rupiper Taggart, assistant professor of English, continues her
campaign to promote service writing cooperative projects in the
Fargo-Moorhead area. Her Literacy, Culture, and Identity students
mentored Andrew Mara's students as they prepared for the second
Literacy Summit, collected oral histories for the National Writing
Project, and mentored youth in CHARISM's "Giving Youth a Voice"
writing project.
Kristina Caton, a graduate student, worked with the English
Language Learners (EEL) from the Fargo Public Schools in a
cooperative writing project that brought NDSU writing students
together with New Americans. This project culminated in visits by
the ELL students to two universities (NDSU and VCSU) to read from
"Journeys: Writing Partnerships Across Cultures," a book comprised
of the collaborative writing exchanges between the NDSU students
and the ELL students.
Cindy Nichols, senior lecturer, revived Poetry on Wheels, a joint
project of NDSU English and the Fargo/Moorhead MAT bus system.
Maureen Scott, lecturer has collaborated with NDSU's Volunteer
Network and FirstLink to provide service project documents for
local and regional not-for-profit agencies.
Regional Outreach. In September, English hosted
the Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota. The conference
theme, memory and memorial, drew approximately 60 presenters from
the Red River Valley Region and from farther flung
locations-British Columbia, Toronto, New Hampshire, New York, San
Francisco, Louisiana, Missouri, Colorado-to name a few.
Cindy Nichols, senior lecturer, and Maureen Scott, lecturer, have
been active in the ND Humanities Council's "North Dakota Reads"
program, in which university instructors travel across the state to
facilitate community book discussions. Her most recent visits
include Oakes, Mayville, Cooperstown, and Dickinson.
The Red River Graduate Student Conference has extended its reach
this year by increasing the number of included schools from one
(NDSU) five years ago to thirteen regional schools this year. The
conference is a great way for new scholars in the fields of
education, English, women's studies and communications to convene
in a graduate student friendly atmosphere and develop and hone
their emerging scholarship skills.
International Outreach. Students in Bruce
Maylath's ENGL-320 Business & Professional Writing and ENGL-321
Writing in the Technical Professions are matched with students in
Europe studying translation. In the fall semester, students in
ENGL-320 composed a set of instructions for a North American
audience, then reworked the text so that it would be easier for a
translator to use. (Writers can take certain steps in English, such
as eliminating idioms, to help the translator render a text
accurately in another language.) They then communicated by e-mail
with students at Gent Hogeschool (Ghent College of Translation and
Interpretation) in Belgium to have their texts translated into
Dutch. This spring students in ENGL-321 are composing procedures,
which will then be translated into Italian by students majoring in
translation studies at Università degli Studi di Trieste, in
Italy.
Kevin Brooks, associate professor, is part a local group working on
a documentary film and humanitarian project called African
Soul, American Heart. The film will document the life of
Sudanese refugee, Joseph Akol Makeer, and his efforts to build an
orphanage for the 16,000 orphans in his home county of Duk,
southern Sudan, even as he finishes his degree at NDSU, cares for
siblings, and raises his own family. The documentary is scheduled
to be finished by fall 2008; fundraising efforts will follow.
Please visit the project website to see a short video and learn
more: africansoulamericanheart.org.
Amy Rupiper Taggart was part of an international delegation to
attend the China-US Literacy Conference in Beijing, China. The
conference was developed to foster cross-cultural pedagogical
understanding and to build partnerships for future
collaboration.
This summer, Miriam Mara travels to Limerick, Ireland to work on an
articulation agreement with the University of Limerick in Irish
Literature and technical communication.
Finally, next fall, Dale Sullivan will spend the semester in
Aarhus Denmark teaching graduate classes in the rhetoric of science
and exploring ways for the two universities to work together.