Author Archives: Mary Gondringer

From History to English

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We have so many amazing Graduate Assistants in our department! Some teach, some do other things, and some work for the Write Place, our SCSU Writing Center designed to help students of all levels improve their writing!

Read below, an experience from one of our GAs working in the Write Place!

I have been a history student at St. Cloud for a few years and I loved my experience so much that now I am a history graduate student! One of my history professors thought I might be a good fit to be a graduate assistant with the English Department.  I was hesitant at first, but after talking with people in the English Department, especially Tim in The Write Place, I thought I could make it work.  Once the semester began and I started meeting with students, I realized how helpful these sessions could be for the student and for myself.  I think I have learned a lot working with the English Department this semester! I look forward to working more with the other coaches and English Department staff as I continue to work on my master’s.  I will always love my History Department relationships, but I am so happy to develop new relationships with the English Department as well!

–Jennifer Sonterre

For more information about the Write Place, visit their website or follow them on Twitter and Facebook!

From the SCSU Write Place website:

“The St. Cloud State writing centers provide free services to support any of the writing and reading you do in and outside of school. We work with writers from all levels of experience and ability at any stage in the writing process. Our purpose is to help you become a more effective, versatile, and confident communicator. 

Most students who visit the writing center schedule appointments to discuss papers that they’re writing for their classes. Some want help getting started. Some have begun writing and are ready to discuss next steps. Some bring drafts that are nearly finished and need help with documenting sources and fine-tuning the language. 

The graduate and undergraduate writing coaches on our staff have been trained to provide this kind of guidance, and they will collaborate with you in making many other kinds of writing decisions.”

This semester, the Write Place offers both in-person and online consultation! Consider checking them out!

Ettien Koffi, Ph.D. – Newest Book

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Check out this message from one of our faculty members!

Happy New Year!   I have some good news to share with you.  My book: Relevant Acoustic Phonetics of L2 English: Focus on Intelligibility has been published by CRC Press, the Science Publishing Imprint of Routledge.

 

From the back of the book:

Intelligibility is the ultimate goal of human communication. However, measuring it objectively remained elusive until the 1940s when physicist Harvey Fletcher pioneered a psychoacoustic methodology for doing so. Another physicist, von Bekesy, demonstrated clinically that Fletcher’s theory of Critical Bands was anchored in anatomical and auditory reality. Fletcher’s and Bekesy’s approach to intelligibility has revolutionized contemporary understanding of the processes involved in encoding and decoding speech signals. Their insights are applied in this book to account for the intelligibility of the pronunciation of 67 non-native speakers from the following language backgrounds –10 Arabic, 10 Japanese, 10 Korean, 10 Mandarin, 11 Serbian and Croatian “the Slavic Group,” 6 Somali, and 10 Spanish speakers who read the Speech Accent Archive elicitation paragraph. Their pronunciation is analyzed instrumentally and compared and contrasted with that of 10 native speakers of General American English (GAE) who read the same paragraph. The data-driven intelligibility analyses proposed in this book help answer the following questions – Can L2 speakers of English whose native language lacks a segment/segments or a suprasegment/ suprasegments manage to produce it/them intelligibly? If they cannot, what segments or suprasegments do they use to substitute for it/them? Do the compensatory strategies used interfere with intelligibility?

The findings reported in this book are based on nearly 12,000 measured speech tokens produced by all the participants. This includes some 2,000 vowels, more than 500 stop consonants, over 3,000 fricatives, nearly 1,200 nasals, about 1,500 approximants, over 1,200 syllables onsets, as many as 800 syllable codas, more than 1,600 measurement of F0/pitch, and duration measurements of no fewer than 539 disyllabic words. These measurements are in keeping with Baken and Orlikoff (2000:3) and in accordance with widely accepted Just Noticeable Difference thresholds, and relative functional load calculations provided by Catforda (1987).

Ettien Koffi, Ph.D. linguistics, teaches at Saint Cloud State University, Minnesota. He is the author of four books and author/co-author of several dozen articles. His acoustic phonetic research is synergetic, encompassing L2 acoustic phonetics of English (Speech Intelligibility from the perspective of the Critical Band Theory), sociophonetics of Central Minnesota English, general acoustic phonetics of Anyi (West African language), acoustic phonetic feature extraction for application in Automatic Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech, Voice Biometrics, and Intelligent Systems.

Call for Proposals – Minnesota Writing and English

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Minnesota Writing and English

Call for Proposals
           
for Zoom Conference Thursday-Friday, March 25-26, 2021
         
“Reinvent, Reinvest, Reinvigorate: Teaching after 2020”

Proposals due Sunday midnight, January 24, 2021

We welcome your proposal–no matter your state or region of the country–for the 2021 MnWE Zoom Conference Thursday-Friday, March 25-26! Please go to www.MnWE.org by January 24 to send it to us. Registration for attending the conference will open soon.

MnWE is a warm, welcoming professional organization emphasizing friendly, respectful discussion and exchange of information. We accept almost all presentations: especially, this year, those that use the theme. The annual, two-day MnWE Conference is an Upper Midwest regional event centered in Minnesota, but open to people from any state or country. Past conferences have featured speakers and presenters from a variety of places and nations. This Zoom conference, in particular, is a great opportunity to practice presenting, prepare for a future presentation, or share your knowledge from your work or a past conference, no matter your geographic location.

This year, our conference theme is “Reinvent, Reinvest, Reinvigorate: Teaching after 2020.” The year 2020 imposed an involuntary reset on academe: an opportunity to take stock of our pedagogy, adapt what needs a refresh, and create new techniques and tools for tutoring and teaching Composition, Literature, and Creative Writing. Our MnWE theme invites you to share your experiences in keeping English and Writing education vital for students during a pandemic, economic disruptions, demands for law enforcement reform, and more.

Our theme also encourages you to look to the future. Social justice, health, and economic crises have illuminated our nation’s disparities in both higher education and high schools. Health and safety concerns and financial uncertainties threaten our students, our colleagues and coworkers, and us. How will the lessons and experiences of the past year transform our teaching

We welcome proposals responding to the theme “Reinvent, Reinvest, and Reinvigorate: Teaching after 2020” for teaching Literature, Writing, or ESL/ELL/MLL; tutoring students online or in writing centers; or building relationships between high school and college-level English and Writing. You may address questions such as

 

  • What have you had to reinvent for your socially distanced or virtual classrooms and individual work with students, and how might those revised strategies inform your teaching beyond present emergencies?
  • How have you made your English courses work for nonnative English speakers and other students who faced educational challenges even before the pandemic added barriers to learning?
  • How are you responding to recent and long-standing demands to end systemic racism in our justice systems and beyond?
  • How should we wisely reinvest our time, energy, and resources in schools?
  • What can we do to alleviate student debt and lift graduate students’ wages and career prospects?
  • What place do unions have in this profession, and how do we talk about labor history and economic justice in our courses?
  • With the pandemic accelerating the turn to online education, what will be the value of face-to-face campus life going forward from 2020?
  • How will we equip students with research and critical thinking skills for sifting through conflicting accounts or disinformation to make sense of chaotic times and reach informed and thoughtful conclusions?


Roundtable Breakouts

The entire conference will be held via Zoom. For this virtual event, breakouts will be somewhat different. With the goal of making the conference as interactive and engaging as possible, all sessions will be 60-minute roundtable discussions: three to five discussants will have several minutes each to address the breakout’s topic, and the remainder of the session to exchange their views with each other and respond to questions from other participants.

Proposals

You may submit a proposal on behalf of a group or as an individual; proposals by individuals will be grouped into topic-appropriate roundtables.  Groups should prepare an approximate 200-word proposal that summarizes the presentation and explains its value to teachers of English and writing. Individuals should prepare an approximate 100-word proposal.

Please submit your proposal by Sunday midnight, January 24, at www.mnwe.org. If you have questions, let us know at any email address below.

The MnWE Committee
—
Richard Jewell, General Coordinator, jeweL001@umn.edu or richard@jewell.net
Larry Sklaney, Conference Coordinator, larry.sklaney@century.edu
Danielle Hinrichs, Program Coordinator, danielle.hinrichs@metrostate.edu
Gordon Pueschner, Volunteer Coordinator, gordon.pueschner@century.edu
Jana Rieck, Communications Coordinator, janaL.rieck@yahoo.com
Heidi Burns, Registration Coordinator, heidi.burns@mnsu.edu

My Experience with COVID and being a student athlete

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It is no question the distress of the COVID-19 pandemic has been quite unfavorable to our regular way of living, no matter the role we play in society. As a student athlete at St. Cloud State University, my experience has been an anxious blend of challenging lows and uncomplicated standstills. As a person with attention deficit disorder who prefers physical lectures over technology-based methods, one major struggle for me has been the transition into courses that are completely online. This began as a call for concern but has gradually become less difficult to grow accustomed to. I can owe this easy familiarization process to my SCSU professors, who have been very understanding and helpful along the way.

I am also a student athlete who is on the SCSU tennis team, which has been the biggest obstacle regarding the pandemic so far. With restrictions on flying to avoid putting entire teams at risk, I am unable to visit my sisters in the near future for holidays, Air Force promotion ceremonies, or any other substantial reason that may arise. As someone with asthma, it has also been quite difficult for me to perform at our required workouts to the best of my abilities with restricted breathing underneath a mask. We are strongly advised against pulling them down for air, which completely eliminates the only strategy for me to grasp a full breath, and predominantly takes away the demanded energy for a successful workout. Although there have been obstacles and many other unmentioned changes that are minor to my SCSU athletic lifestyle, my coaches and fellow teammates have also made the transitional process much easier for me to endure.

There haven’t been any drastic changes to my regular lifestyle as a university student, but there have still been a multitude of social, educational, emotional, and health-related challenges I’ve had to conquer as a result of the pandemic, assumingly along with the rest of the student population. While living in a constant state of anxiousness and uncertainty for the future, I am grateful to be a student at SCSU, who has made me feel safe during these times of peculiarity and obscurity.

Thank you for reading,

Samantha Fitzpatrick

Join the Writers’ Club!

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Writers’ Club was started by a group of classmates from creative writing class who thought it would be fun to meet outside class hours to get more feedback on their work and brainstorm ideas to prompt more writing. We found out that lots of people like to write but don’t get enough feedback on their writing to improve or advance in their storyline. Hence, the club was made so that like-minded individuals can share stories, ideas, encouragement, and just get to know each other. Of course, anyone who is interested is welcomed to join us. It’s not just a club for English majors and minors. The Club is very new and still getting started so we welcome any ideas that would benefit everyone who joins.

In a typical meeting, if there are new members, we do an introduction. Then, we talk about what we have been working on. If someone brought a piece they would like to share for feedback, they can share it on the screen, read it to us, and tell us what they need (this hasn’t happened yet). We will then do a workshop as a group. Sometime during the meeting, we would take a couple minutes to do some free writing and read it out loud to the group. At the end, we suggest writing prompts for the next meeting.

For questions about Writers’ Club, please email: cyoleson@go.stcloudstate.edu or type in Huskies Connect in the search bar of SCSU’s homepage, look up Writers Club, and send a message there.

Stony Brook’s Creative Writing MFA program

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Greetings loyal readers,

Check out this opportunity that just popped up in my email today!

We’re excited to offer two Zoom Open Houses for Stony Brook’s Creative Writing MFA program.

On Monday, 11/30, at 4 p.m. EST, we’re convening a faculty panel: Secrets of a Great MFA Application. Faculty Admission Committee Members will talk about what makes an outstanding Statement of Purpose. They’ll also be giving advice regarding the all-important Writing Sample.

ID: 96348126097
Password: 334096

On Monday, 12/7, at 5 p.m. EST, we’re offering a Pop-Up Faculty-Student Reading and Q & A re: the Stony Brook MFA in Creative Writing & Literature.

ID: 92184320719
Password: 424973

Here at Stony Brook’s Creative Writing MFA program, we’ve been impressed by the quality of our applicants and by the strength of our writing community. Stronger still in this year of virtual classes.

Here are 7 ways The Stony Brook MFA program makes a difference in a student’s creative life:

1.)  Small classes and plenty of attention: Writing workshops capped at 12.

2.)  Outstanding faculty—all of whom are working writers: Paul Harding, Susan Scarf Merrell, Ursula Hegi, Molly Gaudry, Robert Lopez, Susan Minot, Patricia Marx, Patricia McCormick, Matthew Klam, Melissa Bank, Roger Rosenblatt. Guest faculty members have included Regina Porter and Hugh Ryan.

3.)  Rigorous and supportive writing guidance.

4.)  During the thesis process every MFA student works one-on-one with an advisor for a year and a half to complete a book-length manuscript, whether a novel, collection of short stories, memoir, or poetry.

5.)  We offer a teaching practicum during which students craft 3 creative writing syllabi, then teach undergrads. A great résumé builder. Very few MFA programs offer grad students the chance to teach creative writing.

6.)  Our graduates find jobs in publishing and academia.

7.)  Our students get published! And win prizes. Genevieve Sly Crane’s thesis became her short story collection and this year she won the coveted Whiting Award. Here are a few of our other outstanding writers: Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand was an international bestseller. Tricia Rayburn has written several YA novels, including The Siren Series. This year Caitlin Mullen’s Please See Us was published to rave reviews. Alison Fairbrother is an editor at Riverhead Books and Random House is publishing her novel, The Catch, next year. Graduates Miranda Beeson and Nancy Keating both have poetry chapbooks appearing soon. Elena Gorokhova has published two award-winning memoirs, including A Mountain of Crumbs.

Other benefits? We offer Submitathons to help students prepare cover letters then send work out to literary journals. Our Writers Speak Wednesday reading series has featured luminaries such as T Kira Madden, Major Jackson, Jamil Jan Kochai, land Roz Chast. Each Spring we offer agent visits. Graduating students get one-on-one meetings with literary agents—and several have been signed on.

With our two creative writing campuses, one in Manhattan, the epi-center of the publishing world, and the other in Southampton, a stone’s throw to Atlantic Ocean beaches and the literary community of the East End of Long Island, we are able to offer students wonderful, sometimes unexpected, opportunities.

We have rolling admissions. Applications to be considered for funding are due 1/7/21. www.stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/cwl/

State tuition is a fraction of the cost of other MFA programs.

Thanks for letting your students know about our Open Houses. Please contact us if you have any questions.

With all best wishes,

Lou Ann Walker

Director

MFA in Creative Writing & Literature

Stony Brook Southampton + Manhattan

stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/cwl/

631-838-8742

Let’s talk about the humanities and liberal arts educations

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This week, we’re talking about the humanities and the liberal arts education! Buckle up! It’s a good one!

The following was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Survey on American Attitudes on the Humanities

By Elizabeth Redden

 November 9, 2020 

Just over half (56 percent) of Americans agree strongly with the statement that “the humanities should be an important part of every American’s education,” while 38 percent “somewhat agreed” with the statement, according to a new survey of 5,015 American adults from the Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

The survey found differences in attitudes across educational levels, political ideologies and gender. While 68 percent of college graduates strongly agree that the humanities should be an important part of every American’s education, just 47 percent of people without a college degree do. Liberals (70 percent) are more likely than conservatives (48 percent) to strongly agree the humanities are important. Women (60 percent) are also more likely than men (52 percent) to see the humanities as being an important part of every American’s education.

The survey also found that 78 percent of Americans wish they had taken more courses in at least one humanities-related subject in school. Nearly half (49 percent) wish they’d taken more classes in languages other than English.

Eighty-one percent of respondents said they regularly use at least one humanities-related skill in the workplace, and 29 percent of respondents said they think their career advancement has been “at least partially impaired” by a deficiency in at least one humanities-related skill.

The survey also asked Americans about their engagement with humanities-related content in their daily lives, through such activities as consumption of humanities-related video or audio programming, reading fiction and nonfiction books, researching humanities-related topics online, visiting museums, and attending poetry readings and other cultural events. While 97 percent of respondents engaged at least sometimes in at least one humanities-related activity over the last year, a majority of those surveyed did not engage in any single activity often or very often.

The following was published in the St. Cloud Times, our local newspaper:

Why we need to embrace liberal arts

Carolyn Hartz (professor of philosophy), St. Cloud
November 11, 2020
Many Americans woke up the day after the election in disbelief — how could so many of my fellow citizens really have voted for the other guy? If anything is clear from this experience, it is that there is a deep divide in our country.

This goes beyond a failure to communicate; it’s a failure of understanding.

Both sides say they value freedom, for example. But neither side is very good at articulating what their concept of freedom consists in. This is a philosophical question.

Another aspect (among many others) of this divide is between a conception of persons as independent individuals and one that sees them as fundamentally connected. This is a metaphysical issue about the nature of persons, and is also a philosophical issue. But most people have little awareness of how their conception of persons underlies their political views, or even how to think about these conceptions.

There are many more issues at the heart of our failure to understand each other, issues that lie deep in our fundamental conceptions of ourselves and our values. What makes it so hard to talk about these things? The situation was not always this way, but it has been building for a while now. How did it get this way?

It’s no accident that the increase in the rancorous political atmosphere has accompanied another change: education (particularly higher education) has increasingly tailored itself to market forces. Students don’t go to college to become educated, learn how to think, expand their horizons and deepen their appreciation of life experiences. They go to college to get a job.

There are many (good) reasons for this; the cost of college and the burden of student debt is a major factor. But I want to focus on the effects of this trend.

The liberal arts have always been the place where students learned how (not what) to think about value, about their own conceptions of themselves and others. Philosophy, literature, theater, the arts and history have all centered on these fundamental issues about human nature and how we relate to each other and the rest of the world.

As interest in these issues have eroded in favor of marketability and employability, we find ourselves increasingly at a loss about how to understand or even talk to each other about political, ethical and metaphysical issues that divide us. We have no common language in which to position different views on these issues.

Even many of the liberal arts have been forced to shoehorn themselves into a model of education that sees their value only as a path to employment. We’ve just seen the result.

The problem is not so much that we don’t agree on what freedom is (for example). The problem is that we have little awareness of what these different conceptions are or how to reason about them.

The erosion of the liberal arts has fed directly into the situation that the country finds itself in today.

Carolyn Hartz is a professor of philosophy at SCSU and a champion of the liberal arts.

Very interesting stuff!
Let us know what your thoughts are on liberal educations and the humanities!

What’s it like to be a GA?

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The SCSU English Department of Graduate Studies offers multiple assistantships to their students. Students who are a 191 GA or Graduate Assistant, are responsible for teaching one section of our first year composition course, English 191, as well as planning lessons, meeting with students, and grading. Teaching 191 is not the only GA position offered by the college/ For more information about becoming an SCSU GA, check out the English Department’s webpage.

This week, we are happy to feature writing from Ulysses Texx, a current GA.

Ulysses Texx, one of our second-year graduate assistants, shared some insight on teaching our first year composition course, ENGL 191 – Introduction to Rhetorical and Analytical Writing. Ulysses is one of our English graduate students. His students sure are lucky to have him as their instructor!

Check out what he has to say below!

Ulysses Texx Desk

What defined being part of the cohort of ENGL 191 GTAs last year was the community building of it all. Last year, eight of us shared an office, seeing each other almost every day of the week. Events hosted by last year’s second years often included former GTAs. The then-current cohort, most of which lived in the area and had been at St. Cloud for a while, was key to making me, the Twin Cities outsider, feel comfortable where I was, geographically, academically, socially.

From this community, our teaching emerged. We shared assignments and slides, sure, but also ideas about how to connect with our students. Games, discussion topics, conference days, reading activities, and other ways of making meaning passed from our lips and OneDrives easily and often. They connected us and the 200 students we taught collectively every semester.

Having the strength of a community influenced how I stood in the classroom, how I moved as I presented new topics and shared stories and food. I tried to use my energetic presence (and almost all my time) as fuel for their curiosity, knowing that students had acquaintances and friends in my section and across the other GTA, adjunct, and professor-led sections that they could interpret college life and its character (and often characters) with. I know they did, too—some introduced their friends to me whenever we bumped into each other on campus.

It’s difficult to give the fall semester such a charged impression. I’m back in the Cities, in my personal office, which I use infrequently, mostly as a background for Zoom and Microsoft Teams. On campus, I have an office to myself that I’ve seen once, when I reapplied the decor I took home from the cohort office in a panic in March to its dusty shelves and the side of the blond door facing the forlorn first floor hallway.

I have no other English teachers at home and have little patience for online meetups. I bounce ideas off my brother when he calls—he’s taken an equivalent of this class before—and my partner, who remembers taking an English class before. I’ve seen my current cohort maybe ten times this semester. I feel more a part of the pedagogies of nature and self-care I’m learning from the naturalists I read in the mornings and my cats as they frolic on the porch.

This cultural disconnect drives me to be as responsive to students as I can. Readings have been adjusted to their majors and are available free online, workload both laidback and rigorous. They write every week—often an essay—and I respond with an essay of my own on every submission received. I have strict deadlines but also an ear to lend to their lives. We’re taking our (structured) time making meaning out of everything. While we’re so isolated, it’s the only way we—my students, self, and cohort—can recreate the community so fundamental to 191 and our experiences at SCSU as students.

~Ulysses Texx

Linguistic Portfolios exceeds 100,000 downloads

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On October 26, 2020, SCSU’s Linguistic Portfolios (LP) surpassed 100,000 downloads! This is a huge accomplishment!

Read the following excerpt, from Ettien Koffi, Professor of Linguistics, which explains how impactful this accomplishment truly is!

Today, October 26, Linguistic Portfolios (LP), the research-based journal of the linguistic emphasis in the English Department at SCSU reached 100,000 downloads today!!!  I began this publication in 2012 with the goal of letting the whole world know about the cutting-edge research that the students in Linguistics/TESL are doing.    The response has been overwhelming, well beyond my wildest imagination.  Articles from LP have been cited by leading journals in many fields, not only in linguistics, but also in engineering, robotics, and computer science.  As of today, 10/26/2020, 32,750 institutions have downloaded articles from LP.  Of these, 55% are in education, 33% are commercial, 5% government, 4% organizations, 3% others.  The acoustic phonetic research in which my students and I are engaged has caught the attention of the world of academia and ALSO the world of language technologies: Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.  Leading universities around the world have downloaded articles from LP.  Our cutting-edge acoustic phonetic research and findings help build smarter voice-driven artificial intelligent systems.  I’m extremely proud that a small program like ours is having such a huge impact around the world.  If you click on the link below, you will see the worldwide impact of LP:

https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling/

I’m happy to share this momentous milestone with the whole department.  I’m proud of the impact that SCSU is having around the world through LP!

Consider checking out Linguistic Portfolios and by all means, download some content! It’s filled with some amazing pieces!

Thank you to anyone who has downloaded or visited this page!

Congratulations to the English Department, and more specifically our Linguistics professors and students for making this accomplishment possible.

Publish your work in Upper Mississippi Harvest!

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Calling all students!!

Do you want to get published? You have the opportunity to do so through our campus publication, Upper Mississippi Harvest! You don’t even have to submit a written piece; photographs and artwork is accepted as well!

Looking for ideas about what to submit?

  • Personal narratives are always very interesting reads!
  • Maybe you have a cultural or media critique?
  • Are you working on creating a graphic novel or comic book?
  • Poetry is always a great option!
  • Are you a photographer? Submit some of your shots!

For more information, visit the SCSU English Department Publications website or the Upper Mississippi Harvest website.

The following about submissions is taken directly from the Upper Mississippi Harvest website:

Our submission deadline each year is Oct. 31. To be eligible for submission, you should be enrolled in at least one credit during any of the following semesters: the previous spring or summer, or the current fall term.

Include your name and the title(s) of your work in the body of the email. Only the title of the work should appear on each piece submitted.

  • Poetry: 1-5 pieces per person, typed. 
  • Short Fiction/Nonfiction: 1-3 pieces per person. Maximum 3,500 words per piece, typed and double spaced.
  • Drama (monologues, short script excerpts): 1-3 pieces per person. Maximum 10 pages per piece. Formatted appropriately.
  • Photography/Art/Comics: 1-5 pieces per person. Black and white and full-color submissions accepted.

Failure to meet any of the guidelines may result in disqualification. We reserve the right to reject any submission. Faculty members enrolled in classes are not eligible for publication.

All submissions should be emailed to: uppermissharvest@stcloudstate.edu.