News

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Scroll Up for Program and Other Information

Colleagues:

As a blog, you need to scroll up to access all the entries. Below this blog entry, find these:

1. Schedule as of March 12.

2. Registration, local travel, and other info.

3. Gratitude to the organizations that have supported this program.

4. Link to interview with Terry Tempest Williams in The Progressive.

5. Schedule of presentations organizd by the Montana Heritage Project.

SCROLL AWAY! See you on Thursday!

posted by Crag at 7:25 PM  

Saturday, March 12, 2005

NCTE Region 7 2005 Conference Program

Below is the most recent schedule for the conference. Scroll for more news, especially a post below this (this is a blog, most recent post on top) for pertinent information for conference registrants and presenters.

NCTE Region 7 2005 Conference Program March 13, 2005 (subject to tweaking)


Wednesday, March 16
5:00-6:00 Opening Ceremony: Nez Perce dancers (this may be cancelled – check back on Monday)

6:00-8:00 Registration Open and INCTE Welcome
Red Lion


Thursday, March 17
7:00-1:00 Registration Open
Williams Conference Center

8:00 Conference Welcome: Crag Hill, Conference Chair

Presidential Welcome: Dene Thomas
Williams Conference Center

8:15-9:45 Keynote: Terry Tempest Williams TITLE FORTHCOMING
-Introduced by Jeanette Rogers, INCTE President, Potlatch Junior-Senior High School
Williams Conference Center

10:00 -6:00 Exhibits Open
SUB-Cafeteria


Meeting Rooms:
MLH = Meriwether Lewis Hall; SGC = Samuel Glenn Complex; TCC & CLC = Library
INCTE Conference Headquarters: SUB 141
Printed program will include a campus map.


10:00-11:00 Session A

Writing the West

Beverly Chin, Jeanette Ingold, and Christa Umphrey: Voices from 1910: Discovering Jeanette Ingold’s The Big Burn and the Fire that Changed the West (JH-HS)
The author, a classroom teacher, and a teacher educator will explore the many connections that draw readers into The Big Burn's story, share insights into the writer's research and writing craft, and offer strategies for engaging students in the further discovery of their own Northwest heritage.
MLH 110

Terry Tempest Williams: Q & A Session (10:00-10:30)
Sub 143

Terry Tempest Williams: Booksigning (10:30-11:00)
SUB 143

Coyote in the Classroom

Terry Young: Happily Ever After: Sharing Folk Literature with Elementary and Middle School Students (E-JH)
Participants will learn of the best of the newly published folk literature and participate in strategies that guide students into the "happily ever after" wonder found in folk literature.
MLH 130

Dorothea Susag: Reading a Movie-An Activity for Media Literacy (JH-College)
Using clips from The Crucible, participants will analyze and discuss the ways elements of media production (music, lighting and weather, camera angles, costumes) contribute to the ways audiences experience and understand films.
SGC 32

Terry Martin: “Raise your hand when you understand it:” Revising your reading of poems (HS-College)
This session will introduce participants to effective strategies for facilitating students' reading, interpretation, and critique of poems and will examine shifting identities and stances demanded of teachers as part of critical and conscious pedagogy in teaching poetry.
SGC 127

Grassroots Activism

Susan McGinty: Contemporary Adult and Young Adult Books That Stimulate Secondary Readers (HS)
This presentation will discuss several current adult and young adult books that address contemporary issues
and stimulate critical thinking.
SGC 41

Settlers and Unsettlers

Ron Craig: York, a film, and question and answer (E-College)
MLH 100
Funded by a grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee


Priscilla Wegars: Polly Bemis: A Chinese American Pioneer (E)
In this presentation, historian Wegars will separate fact from fiction in her account of Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis.
Booksigning to follow presentation.
SGC 36

10:00-12:15 W1 – Workshops

Claire Rudolf Murphy: Her Story Through the Ages (E-JH)
Drawing from the stories and research behind her fiction and nonfiction books, Claire will give a dramatic rendition of women’s lives through the ages.
SGC 128

David Groth: Juggling As A Stimulus to Writing – Sharing Our Passions (E-JH)
We all juggle life, but in this 5th grade classroom the students literally juggle, and they write about
it prolifically.
SGC 123

Lisa Walden and Nori Wyatt: Tickling the Socratic Rib: Engaging the Thoughtfully Challenged (E-HS)
Through simulation gaming, stories, handouts and practice, this workshop will introduce the Socratic art
of questioning.
Limited to 20 people
CLC-Library

Idaho Humanities Council Co-sponsored Speaker: Josephine Jones: Writing Popular History: Walking the West with Sacagawea (E-College)
Techniques to help students discern wishful thinking from valid historical evidence and present their findings
in clear prose and public presentation, using Sacagawea as a model topic.
TCC-Library

11:15-12:15 Session B

Writing the West

Idaho Humanities Council Co-sponsored Speaker: Jack Nisbet: All of Idaho: Connecting the Explorations of David Thompson with Lewis and Clark, 1805-12 (E-College)
SGC 32

Connie Grant: Corps of Discovery – A Mother Relives the Story (E-College)
In this first person living history program Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks, herbalist and mother of Captain Lewis, relives the story while reading through expedition journals, fall 1807-- after the expedition.
SGC 41
Sponsored by the Clearwater Snake Lewis & Clark Bicenntenial Committee

Coyote in the Classroom

Carol Brown: Leave No Good Reader Behind (E)
Advanced readers have special needs and can be a neglected minority at this time of pressure to "bring up"
the lowest performing students.
MLH 110

Bruce Robbins: Using the “Original Approach” to Teach Shakespeare (JH-HS)
This session adapts theatre techniques for training actors to work with Shakespearean scripts, offering fun and useful activities for teaching Shakespeare in English classes in English classes. Activities derived from Patrick Tucker's "Original Approach" can help students strengthen comprehension and make inferences about characters' movements, motivation, and conflict.
MLH 130

Darlene Beck and Julie Diehl: Piecing Together Our Community’s Past: Engaging English Students in the Fabric
of Community and Communication (HS)
Investigate with us how powerful community-based research can be as a medium for writing and thinking -- especially organized around something as colorful and pervasive as quilting.
MLH 320

Grassroots Activism

Juniper Stokes and Josie Nedved: An Ecofeminist Approach to the Teaching of Writing (JH-College)
Ecofeminism will be simply defined and connected to the teaching of writing through poetry, short story, music, and video rooted in natural imagery.
SGC 127

Settlers and Unsettlers

Maria Griffin and David Lange: Study and Application of Narrative Pedagogies in a 21st Century Classroom
(HS-College)
Presenters will discuss and demonstrate the uses of American Indian oral narratives and classical narratives
in composition instruction.
SGC 125

12:30-1:45 Luncheon: Kim Barnes: Leaving Home, Finding Home: A Meditation on Memory, Place and Belonging
-Introduced by Crag Hill, Moscow Senior High School
Williams Conference Center

2:00-3:00 Session C

Writing the West

Mary Cronk Farrell: Fire in the Hole: A New Novel Brings Alive a Pivotal Event in Idaho History (E-JH)
The author’s "Show and Tell" about her novel based on a dynamite explosion that changed the course of hardrock mining in Idaho.
MLH 110

Coyote in the Classroom

Candy Gillis: Everybody’s Talking at Me (JH-HS)
Demonstration of activities to help readers make sense of stories with unreliable narrators or told from multiple points of view or in multiple genres.
SGC 125

Janet Peacock, Toni DuFour, and Holly Ferrell: A Light In the Forest: A Multicultural, Interdisciplinary Unit (JH-HS)
This unit combines art with literature using creative, very innovative strategies to expand reading, writing, listening and artistic activities in the classroom.
SGC 128

Mary Sullivan: Hometown Heroes (HS)
Learn strategies for implementing a local studies project that involves members of the community and that culminates in gifts of scholarship for the community.
SGC 123

Grassroots Activism

Paul Gregorio: Discovering the Child Behind the Headlines: Current Event Fiction for Youth (E-HS)
An overview of fiction for students K-12 that presents recent political developments.
SGC 41

Settlers and Unsettlers

Beverly Chin: Discovering the Chinese Immigrant Experience Through the Literature of Yep and McCunn (JH-HS)
Learn teaching ideas that help students grapple with issues of racial and gender discrimination in Yep's Dragonwings and McCunn's Thousand Pieces of Gold.
TCC-Library

2:00-4:15 W2 - Workshops

Terry Young: Reading for Real: Exploring Informational Text (E-JH)
Participants will learn of and experience strategies for accessing, processing, and communicating information in nonfiction trade books.
MLH 130

Millie Davis: Good Insurance: Writing Rationales for the Texts We Teach (E-HS)
Even the listing of a work in the curriculum isn't all you'll need if the work is challenged -- come learn about NCTE's anti-censorship resources and write your own rationale for a text.
SGC 127

Louise Freeman-Toole Writing Family History through Diaries, Letters, Photos, and Other Family Memorabilia
(JH-HS)
A workshop on how to work with diaries, letters, photos, and other family memorabilia to craft a family history or to inspire your own personal memoir.
SGC 36

Madelaine Love and K.C. Jones: Writing on the Wild Side (HS)
A River Runs Through this cross-curricular course in which students discover the inter-relatedness of nature, science, English, and the arts.
SGC 32

3:15-4:15 Session D

Writing the West

David Magleby and Robin Armstrong, Kristy Cooper, Bryn Knowlton, Derik Robertson, Rachel Rose, students from SCED 370: I’m Engaged: Student Connections to Literature (JH-HS)
To better bridge student realities with literary voices, let students now crossing those bridges share connections they make from literature to student life.
MLH 110

Coyote in the Classroom

Brenda Kneeshaw: What Do You Mean You Don’t Use Daily Oral Language? Alternative Approaches to Teaching Conventions (E)
MLH 320

Dorothea M. Susag: The Beginnings of Oral History – Purpose, Procedure, Etiquette and Skills (JH-College)
What happens when you send young people out to interview the elderly? What are the processes? The end results? Participants will watch and then discuss videos of students conducting interviews. Student-friendly handouts will be provided.
SGC 41

W. Scott Cheney: American Voices in Conflict: Thomas Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis Re-Examined (College)
Using Warren's conception of southern hatred and western expansion to engage critical student response to history and literature.
SGC 123

Grassroots Activism

Barbara Monroe: Not Your Grandfather’s English Class: Teaching Reading, Writing, and Critical Thinking – Not (Just) Literary Analysis – In One Fell Swoop (Yeah Right. No, Really.) (E-HS)
This cross-level conversation focuses on how to teach critical thinking by using a poststructuralist approach to literature. Instead of asking for "objective" literary analysis or "subjective" reader response, this approach invites readers to examine the implicit values embedded in texts.
Limited to 20 people.
CLC-Library

Settlers and Unsettlers

Jan Clinard: The Role of Writing Assessment in College Admissions: Montana’s Story (HS)
Presentation and discussion will focus on how the Montana University System develops, administers, and scores a voluntary writing assessment for high school juniors as a college admissions standard.
SGC 125

Ruth Williams: Imagination in the Composition Classroom: Expanding the Range of the Possible (College)
Exploring the implications of a theory of the imagination in the composition classroom.
SGC 128

4:30-5:30 Session E

Coyote in the Classroom

Susan Hodgin: Bit by a Snake: A Model for Successful Research-Essay Writing (JH-HS)
If you have been searching for a writing model that gets students to use research with a narrative/expository voice with success, this workshop is for you.
SGC 125

D. Beth Beaulieu: Local Heritage/Multi-genre Research Project for the English Classroom (HS)
A Montana Heritage Project teacher shares a collection of activities and ideas for integrating the study of local heritage with the English curriculum and helping young adults connect and give back to their community.
SGC 32

Grassroots Activism

Leyton Schnellert: Developing Writing Sequences that Help Students Become Self- and Other-wise (JH)
In this session, participants will consider and experience the impact of lesson sequences that involve fueling student writing and engaging students in the generation criteria in order to surface student thoughts and feelings in their writing.
SGC 36

Settlers and Unsettlers
Sarah Quilici: Negotiation: Teaching Revision in a High School Classroom (HS)
Revision instruction requires time for discovery; high school teachers have to negotiate teaching revision as discovery with meeting the demands of curriculum and mandated testing.
SGC 41

Curt Whitaker: A Modernist’s ABCs: Pound’s Advice for Prospective Teachers (HS- College)
Session will discuss Ezra Pound's advice to beginning instructors on how to approach the teaching of English.
SGC 123

4:00-6:00 B1- Publishers Break/Book signings: Robert Wrigley, Kim Barnes, Louise Freeman-Toole, Claire Rudolf Murphy, Jack Nisbet, Mary Cronk Farrell
SUB-Cafeteria

5:30-7:00 NW Inland Writing Project Reunion Tour
Red Lion

7:00-8:00 O & A 1: Out & About: Poetry Reading: Robert Wrigley
Red Lion
Friday, March 18

7:30-9:30 Registration Open
Williams Conference Center

8:15-9:45 Breakfast: Chris Crutcher: True Lies: Life into Fiction
-Introduced by Candida Gillis, University of Idaho
Williams Conference Center
- Booksigning will follow

10:00-6:00 p.m. Exhibits Open
SUB-Cafeteria

10:00-11:00 Session F

Writing the West

Ingrid Wendt: The Country Within the Body: Ingrid Wendt reads poems from The Angle of Sharpest Ascending and Surgeonfish (E-College)
SUB 143

Andrea Carter: Constructing Identities, Constructing Conflict: Using Character “Telling” Artifacts as a Strategy for Teaching Literature (JH-College)
An interactive exercise building character identities through "telling" artifacts (such as clothing, accessories and personal items) allows students to interpret conflict within plot structure for in-depth discussion.
SGC 127

Coyote in the Classroom

Jana Horne: Building from the Known: Activities to Help Students Write (E)
This workshop is designed to give teachers usable activities that encourage students to build from what they know and gather ideas for writing. These projects are hands-on and bring art into the writing process.
SGC 123

Nancy Widdicombe: Using Student Voices to Build Community (HS)
Ten rural high school students research, interview, and photograph three area Hutterite colonies dispelling local myth along the way.
SGC 128

Anikke Trier, Neal Hallgarth, Liz McGinn, and W. Scott Cheney: Engaging Student Voice through the Lens of Reality TV (College)
A series of compostion projects that take a creative spin on reality television.
SGC 32

Grassroots Activism

Ingrid Spence: Conflicted Teaching in the Age of NCLB (E-College)
This session explores the conflict teachers face when questioning high stakes testing while knowing they must help students achieve or face dire consequences.
SGC 125

Janis Johnson and Aaron Miles: Discovering Tribal Perspectives on the Environment through Local Tribal Literatures (E-College)
This session will give teachers strategies for incorporating local tribal literatures that reveal tribal perspectives on the natural world as well as sustainable environmental ethics and practices. We will provide materials and methods that can be used in the classroom that connect tribal literatures to the natural world and environmental issues.
MLH 130

Settlers and Unsettlers

Ron Craig: York, a film, and question and answer session (E-College)
MLH 100
Funded by a grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

Allen Pinkham: Nez Perce History and Legends (E-College)
This speaker emphasizes Lewis and Clark and contact with the Nez Perce from the Nez Perce’s perspective, a side of Lewis and Clark rarely heard.
TCC-Library
Sponsored by the Clearwater Snake Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Committee

10:00-12:15 W3 – Workshops

Beth Russell and Sarah Sedgewick Kellems: Grendel’s Mother Meets Maria Montessori (E)
Interactive strategies for teaching sentence grammar and punctuation in the remedial, ESOL or mainstram classroom.
MLH 320

Elinor Michel: Goldilocks and the Three Bears (E-College)
This workshop will explore our own insecurities about reading and teaching poetry and should result in some approaches that will help our students (and us) enjoy and comprehend poetry.
SGC 41

Jeffrey N. Golub: Making Learning Happen: Constructing an Interactive Classroom (JH-HS)
Presenter will describe and demonstrate several engaging activities designed to make critical thinking, cooperative learning, authentic assessment, and interpretive discussions of literature work for you and your students.
MLH 110

Duane Pitts: The OTHER Research Paper-Using Style B and Multigenres (HS)
Through a hands-on approach, teachers will learn about the Style B, multigenre research paper which can be adapted to a variety of content areas and grade levels.
SGC 36

11:15-12:15 Session G

Writing the West

Carol Brown: Fun with Folk Literature (E)
Folk and fairy tales, myths, tall tales and legends are an exciting source of classroom reading and writing activities.
SGC 123

Dena Jones: Buddy Journals and Book Buddy Journals (E-HS)
Buddy Journals and Book Buddy Journals are fun ways to engage students in writing and responding to literature.
SGC 125

Jeanette Ingold: From Idea to Print: Writing, Submitting and Publishing Step by Step (E- College)
With slides and examples from her own work, author Jeanette Ingold discusses where a writer hoping to be published can turn for help; suggests writing strategies; reviews the mechanics of manuscript submission; and illustrates what happens during editing, revision, and printing.
MLH 130

Walter Hesford: Discovering the Poetic Core of the Journals of Lewis and Clark (E-College)
A workshop on turning some of the entries in the Lewis & Clark journals into "found" poetry through a technique that may be applied to bring out the poetry in other texts, in us, and in life.
SGC 128

Coyote in the Classroom

Paul Gregorio: The Best of Recent Children's Literature (E)
An overview of recent literature for students K-5, includes state, regional, national, and international award winners in a variety of genres.
MLH 100

Anna Brown: Critical Literacy and Practical Application in the E101 Classroom; Shannon Corrick: Pop Goes the Academy: Pop Culture as Curriculum in Composition 101; and Thomas J. King: Negotiated Authority in English 101 From the Location of Graduate Assistant (College)
Anna Brown will show how Critical Literacy allows students to study voice and purpose in a given piece of written work which in turn allows them to adopt these "voices" in creating/finding their own voices. Shannon Corrick will show how to utilize a pop culture theme in the Composition 101 classroom. Thomas King will show a pedagogically sound means of negotiating instructor authority to foster and encourage diversity in the multicultural classroom.
SGC 127

Grassroots Activism

Chris Crutcher: Talking Censorship (JH-College)
The author shares his recent experiences with book challenges in several states, and the implications for teachers and their students.
TCC-Library

Settlers and Unsettlers

Jim Martin: In the Quest of the West: Francis Fuller Victor’s Search for Truth on the Frontier of America (College)
An overview of Frances Fuller Victor (1826-1902), one of the earliest and best historians of the American West.
SGC 32

12:30-1:45 Luncheon Speaker: Mary Clearman Blew: Writing from Documents
- Introduced by Jean O’ Connor, MATELA President
Williams Conference Center


2:00-3:00 Session H

Writing the West

Ingrid Wendt: Off in the Left-Hand Corner: Writing Poems of Place (E-College)
MLH 320

Coyote in the Classroom

Gail Rochelle and Peter Kavouras: Discovering Woody Guthrie: Picture Books for Teaching Multiple Literacies Across the Secondary Curriculum (E-HS)
Woody Guthrie: Poet of the People, an ALA Notable Children's Book (2002) about the folk musician's experiences with the struggling poor of the Depression, is used to demonstrate interdisciplinary uses of picture books with older readers.
MLH 130

Erica Lee: Beyond “Mine” and “Yours”: The Ethic of Shared Ownership in the Composition Classroom (College)
Erica Lee asserts that by accepting the idea that they are co-authors of student texts, composition teachers may foster even greater self-actualization in themselves and their students.
SGC 128

Carolyn Sweeney, Donna Johnson, and Amy Quarry: Lewis and Clark, Corps of Discovery: A Cross-Curricular Unit (JH)
The unit includes mapping skills, reading for information, journaling, and reading for comprehension.
SGC 41

Grassroots Activism

Bonnie Warne: Who’s Out There? Writing for Local Audiences (JH-College)
Local audiences are outside our classroom doors when we identify and meet their needs.
SGC 36


2:00-4:15 W4 - Workshops

Carlos Schwantes Rivers of History: A Personal Confluence (E-College)
TCC-Library
Funded by a grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

Mary Johnson: Details! Details! Details! Developing Details in Writing (E-HS)
Strategies of "Snapshots," "Thoughtshots," and "Explode the Moment" are presented from Barry Lane's book, After the End: Teaching and Learning Creative.
SGC 125

NCTE Co-sponsored Speaker: Bobbie Houtchens-Cirizia (title forthcoming) (HS)
SGC 32

Diane Ponozzo, Brian Madland, Suzy Quinn, and Jaye Wacker: Power to the People (HS)
A group of International Baccalaureate teachers will show how they have improved the process of thinking, writing and discussing in their literature-based classrooms by valuing the quality of thought instead of focusing on formats, formulas, scoring guides and rubrics.
SGC 127

3:15-4:15 Session I

Writing the West

Dorothea Susag: Teaching Fools Crow by James Welch (HS-College)
Listen to traditional Blackfeet stories featuring Napi, the trickster/transformer figure, and watch a student-created video clip of their visit to the Baker massacre Site, and discuss themes, motifs, historical background, approaches to reading, sensitive issues, and questions in the handout taken from Roots and Branches by Dorothea Susag.
SGC 41

Coyote in the Classroom
Jean O’Connor: The Saga of the Research Guidebook: One School’s Quest for Better Research (JH-HS)
Learn how one school standardized instruction of research techniques utilizing MLA format by creating the Research Guidebook.
SGC 123

Bruce Robbins: Teaching Grammar with Standardized Tests in Mind (JH-HS)
The research on teaching grammar takes us in one direction, and increased standardized testing is taking us in another. What can we do about grammar? This session offers some suggestions.
MLH 320

Karen K. Kitt: Teaching E-literacy: Websites, E-mails, and Much More (JH-College)
This presentation will cover why and how to teach e-literacies to our students, including netiquette, identifying reliable websites, plagiarism, e-mail hoaxes, forwards and petitions. Limited to 20 participants.
CLC-Library

William Jolliff: Discovering and Drafting in the Folk Tradition: Incorporating Oral Storytelling into the Composition Classroom and Judy Huddleston: Situating the Personal and Feminist in the Composition Classroom (College)
William Joliff's presentation demonstrates how the oral storytelling practices -- and the energy -- of the contemporary storytelling movement can become a practical pedagogy in the college composition classroom, particularly during students' first stages of prewriting and invention. Judy Huddleston's presentation asserts that a personal, feminist pedagogy brings a broader range of learning and expressing knowledge to both genders.
SGC 128

3:00-4:00 O & A 2:
Dale Coryell: Intro to Fly Casting
SUB- Outside

4:00-5:00 B2: Book signings: Mary Clearman Blew, Carlos Schwantes, Ingrid Wendt, Ron Craig, David Matheson, and Ron McFarland
SUB-Cafeteria

6:00- 7:00 No-host bar/INCTE Reception
Red Lion

7:00-8:30 Dinner Speaker: NCTE Co-Sponsored Speaker: Dale Allender (title forthcoming)
Red Lion

8:30-10:30 The Vigilantes: The Clark and Lewis Show
Red Lion
Funded by a grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee


Saturday, March 19

7:30-9:30 Registration Open

8:15-9:15 Breakfast Speaker: David Matheson (title forthcoming)
- Introduced by Isabel Bond
Williams Conference Center

9:30-12:00 Exhibits Open
SUB-Cafeteria

9:30-10:30 Session J

Writing the West

David Matheson: A Conversation with the Writer (E-HS)
A conversation with the novelist. Come with questions about writing.
SGC 36

Coyote in the Classroom
Duane Pitts: Helping Children Write: The Grammar Connection (JH-HS)
Through a hands-on approach, teachers will learn about grammar, what it is, what they can do about it, what uses it has, and what research says about it.
MLH 110

Settlers and Unsettlers

Carolyn Lott: 2004 Nonfiction: What it takes to be the Orbis Pictus Winner (E-JH)
Using the criteria established by the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award Committee, participants will examine and evaluate books published in 2004 for use in the K-8 classroom. Come handle many new books, talk about what is good, discover trends in publishing, and select titles you can adapt for your own classroom applications.
SGC 125

9:30-11:45 W5 – Workshops

Rebecca Novick and Jana Potter: A Tapestry of Tales: Shared Vision, Shared Memories, Shared Lives (K-5)
This workshop focuses on the importance of connecting reading, storytelling and writing to maximize student literacy development.
SGC 123

Mary Johnson: Journey Into Journals (E-JH)
Take a journey into the various ways you can use a journal in any classroom content area and how to get through the reading and grading/scoring of them.
SGC 128


10:45-11:45 Session K

Coyote in the Classroom

Candy Gillis: Young Adult Lit Not Just for the Classroom (E-College)
MLH 130

Romana Hillebrand: Imitation: A Good Method for Learning Sentence Patterns and Correct Punctuation: Fun Explanations: A Good Method for Usage Corrections (JH- College)
This presentation displays classic sentences with imitations to promote style and punctuation.
MLH 110

Settlers and Unsettlers

Ron Craig: York, a film, and question and answer (E-College)
MLH 100
Funded by a grant from the Idaho Governor’s Lewis and Clark Trail Committee

12:00-1:30 Luncheon Speaker- Ron McFarland (title forthcoming)
- Introduced by Susan Hodgin, Moscow Senior High School
Williams Conference Center

1:30-2:30 Closing Ceremony: Nez Perce dancers (this may be cancelled—check back on Monday)



posted by Crag at 11:55 PM  

To Conference Registrants & Presenters

This post provides answers to the most frequently asked questions, to help you arrive smoothly, ready to discover the core:

1. DRIVING DIRECTIONS: Go to http://www.lcsc.edu/. Click on People at the top of the screen. Click on Driving Directions to find directions from where ever you are coming from. L.C.S.C. is on spring break so there should be lots of parking in the lots and on the streets.

2. BUS/SHUTTLE TRANSPORTATION. For those who need transportation from the Red Lion, Lewiston Valley Transit provides bus service that picks up passengers across 21st St. at Inn America. (Click on this link for a schedule: http://www.co.asotin.wa.us/lewis.html.) It picks up on 21st St. at 10 minutes after the hour, delivering you to the L.C.S.C. campus at 43 minutes after the hour. The service runs from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. (last run begins at 5 p.m.) We will have schedules available at the registration table on Wednesday night at the Red Lion. The Red Lion, if it doesn’t have any runs to the airport, will also provide shuttle service to and from the campus.

3. CAMPUS MAP: Go back to http://www.lcsc.edu/ and click on Campus Map. Most of the conference will take place at the Williams Conference Center, on the corner of 4th Street and 9th Avenue. (Look at the bottom of the map, a little left of center.) The exhibits will be in the SUB cafeteria.

4. WEDNESDAY REGISTRATION: From 6:00-8:00 p.m. at the Red Lion, you will be able to pick up registration material -- name tags, program, packet from the chamber of commerce, and hearty welcomes from the sponsoring affiliate INCTE -- at a table located near the Meriwether Restaurant.

5. THURSDAY REGISTRATION: Registration on Thursday will begin at 7:00 a.m. at the Williams Conference Center.

6. FRIDAY AND SATURDAY REGISTRATION: Registration on Friday and Saturday will begin at 7:30, ending at 9:30, at the William Conference Center.

7. OUT & ABOUT CANCELLATIONS: Because of low enrollment we have cancelled the Out & About trips to the Wolf Recovery Center, to the Nez Perce Historical Monuments, and the Beamer's Cruise on the Snake River. Check the program on-line for other Out & About activities. Those who signed up will receive refunds.

8. PRESENTERS: Bring 25-30 handouts.

Make sure to visit our website (http://www.wsu.edu/~discovery/) for more information. The schedule continues to be tweaked.

posted by Crag at 10:38 PM  

Friday, March 04, 2005

Gratitude to those organizations that helped support the conference program

INCTE and the 2005 NCTE Region 7 Conference Planning Committee is immensely grateful to the following:

1. The Idaho Governor's Lewis & Clark Trail Committee for the support that made it possible to bring film-maker Ron Craig, historian Carlos Schwantes, and acting troupe "Vigilante Theatre."

2. Idaho Humanities Council for sponsoring presentations by Jack Nisbet (All of Idaho: Connecting the Explorations of David Thompson with Lewis and Clark, 1805-12) and Josephine Jones (Writing Popular History: Walking the West with Sacagawea).

3. The National Council of Teachers of English for co-sponsoring a presentation by Bobbi Ciriza Houtchens and our Friday night dinner speaker, Dale Allender.

4. The Clearwater Snake Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Committee for co-sponsoring Connie Grant and Allen Pinkham.

Immense gratitude!

posted by Crag at 7:32 PM  

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Terry Tempest Williams Interviewed in The Progressive

Check out the February 2005 issue of The Progressive for an interview with Terry Tempest Williams. Click here to read it: http://www.progressive.org/feb05/intv0205.php

posted by Crag at 10:38 PM  

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Check Out the Montana Heritage Project at Core of Discovery

During the NCTE Region 7’s Core of Discovery Conference, seven different Montana Heritage Project teachers are delighted to offer you lively, practical, and unvarnished insights into this special school-community partnership.

The Project is a privately-funded, collaborative approach that engages young people in comparing and contrasting community life in Montana today with that of the past. Students conduct primary-source archival and oral-history research. They analyze their findings. They work with community organizations and mentors. Then they give “gifts of scholarship” back to their communities in the form of programs, tours, research indices, and literary journals.

During its ten-year history, the Project has drawn from service and expeditionary learning models to engage students in research essential questions about community life and in contributing to solutions. For more information about the Project, you can visit either of our two websites: www.edheritage.org and www.montanaheritageproject.org.

Our Project teachers—well represented by your NCTE presenters—have found powerful ways to integrate curriculum requirements for grammar, writing, literary analysis, and speech and debate into Project processes and outcomes. If coyote success is measured by survival, adaptability, and great communication, then you’ll want to follow Montana Heritage Project teachers in “Writing the West” and “Coyote in the Classroom” sessions.

Thursday
10:00 Writing the West: Beverly Chin, Jeanette Ingold, and Project teacher Christa Umphrey, Voices from 1910: Discovering Jeanette Ingold’s The Big Burn and the Fire that Changed the West.

11:15 Coyote in the Classroom: Darlene Beck and Julie Diehl, Piecing Together Our Community’s Past: Engaging English Students in the Fabric of Community and Communication

2:00 Coyote in the Classroom: Mary Sullivan, Hometown Heroes

3:00 Coyote in the Classroom: Dorothea M. Susag, The Beginnings of Oral History—Purpose, Procedure, Etiquette and Skills

4:00 Coyote in the Classroom: D. Beth Beaulieu, Local Heritage/Multi-genre Research Project for the English Classroom

Friday

10:00 Coyote in the Classroom: Nancy Widdicombe, Using Student Voices to Build Community

posted by Crag at 9:52 PM  

Thursday, December 30, 2004

Great Resource: The Clearwater Snake Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Committee (CSLCBC) Speakers Bureau

The Clearwater Snake Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Committee (CSLCBC) Speakers Bureau is a superb resource for teachers in Idaho's Region II. Core of Discovery has selected the following two speakers from the speakers bureau:

Connie R. Grant, "Corps of Discovery: A Mother Relives the Story." In this first person living history program Lucy Meriwether Lewis marks, herbalist and mother of Capt. Lewis, relives the story during early fall 1807.

Allen Pinkham, "Nez Perce History and Legends" Pinkham emphasizes Lewis & Clark and contact with the Nez Perce from the Tribe's perspective; a side of the Lewis & Clark story rarely heard.

The purpose of the Speakers Bureau is to facilitate the effective delivery of accurate information about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Nez Perce as we commemorate the bicentennial.
The speakers listed are available to travel throughout Region II for luncheons, dinners, school groups, and special events sponsored by your organization. CSLCBC pays speaker's honoraria and travel. You make the meeting arrangements and handle the local publicity.



posted by Crag at 8:23 PM  

Links to Hotels and Lewis-Clark State College and Other Information

Hotel links:
Our main hotel is Red Lion Lewiston. Evening events -- INCTE and NIWP receptions, Robert Wrigley's poetry reading, music and dancing on Thursday night, Friday night dinner, followed by Vigilante Theater Group -- will take place at the hotel. Click here for more information: Red Lion Hotel Lewiston. To receive conference room rates -- $78 single; $78 double; $88 suite; 98$ executive suite -- reserve your room before February 16.

Our secondary hotel is Inn America, across 21st street from the Red Lion. Click here for more information: Inn America. To receive conference room rates -- $55.99 single -- reserve your room before February 16.

Transportation info:
The Red Lion provides a shuttle between the hotel and the airport, but L.C. Valley Cab will also provide shuttle service for $7.00. They can be reached at 208-746-7039.

Lewis-Clark State College links:
For information on the main conference site, the cozy campus of Lewis-Clark State College, click here: L.C.S.C.

In February we will send conference registrants a map with room locations, but for a general map of the campus, click here: L.C.S.C. map.

posted by Crag at 8:14 PM  

Friday, December 24, 2004

News Article on Conference Speaker Priscilla Wegars

Pioneer's life revealed Historian aims to separate fact from fiction
in account of Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis

By Laura Pierce
Staff writer, Moscow-Pullman Daily News
Reprinted with the gracious permission of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News

By anyone's estimation, Polly Bemis lived an extraordinary life.
The Chinese immigrant who came to the United States as a slave and then forged an identity as an Idaho businesswoman, saw enough happiness and heartbreak to fill an encyclopedia set. Distilling Bemis' life story from the myths that unfurled around her has been the focus of Priscilla Wegars, founder and curator of the Asian American Comparative Collection at the University of Idaho.
"She really was an interesting person - there are very few Chinese women in the pioneer days that we know anything about," Wegars said Monday, seated amid the shelves of Asian artifacts that comprise the UI collection she helped bring about.
Wegars' doctorate in history and background in archeology inspired her interest in Bemis, but it was two books and a movie about the Chinese woman that fired Wegars up enough to write her own book.Wegars' book, a 2003 children's biography titled "Polly Bemis: A Chinese American Pioneer," recently received an honorable mention from the Idaho Library Association.
Wegars, who is donating the proceeds from sales of her book to the UI collection, is out to prove one thing, and it isn't to shine up her résumé as a children's writer. It's about correcting years of myths that have persisted about Bemis, she said."I hope I'm giving the people the opportunity to see her in a real way, rather than a fake way," Wegars said of the turn-of-the-century immigrant.
Wegars first came upon Bemis' story in a 1981 book by Ruthanne Lum McCunn titled "Thousand Pieces of Gold."An historical novel about Bemis' life, the book took hard facts about her and intertwined them with some fictional elements, as well as well-known stories that persisted for decades.The book also is the basis of a 1991 movie by the same title.
Wegars said her main issue with the book and resulting movie was the reader had no way to separate the facts from the fiction."I really admire her work," Wegars said of McCunn. "She brought Polly to the attention of so many people. But we interpret our sources of information differently." McCunn, in the forward to her novel, notes there are fictional elements to the book." A few fictitious characters have been added and certain events transposed for the sake of narrative," the author wrote, but noted "the essential story of Polly's life remains accurate."
Wegars said she opted to approach her book about Bemis using only what facts she could verify. That meant interesting but ultimately unproveable stories - such as Bemis' future husband winning her in a poker game, and her poverty-stricken childhood in China - were axed in Wegars' account."
We know nothing about her life in China," Wegars said of Bemis. And as for the story about the poker game, Wegars noted, there was no way to know outside of rumors if it ever happened - and it was something that Bemis herself denied just before she died in 1933.
A number of those stories were chronicled in a 1979 account about Bemis titled "Idaho County's Most Romantic Character: Polly Bemis," written by the late Sister M. Alfreda Elsensohn, who drew much of her material from the memories of people who had known Bemis, and who publicized the poker-game account Wegars now questions." Sister Alfreda never knew her, but got the stories from people who told her stories," Wegars said.
In spite of some parts of her life that are up for question, the basic facts about Bemis still have an element of excitement and danger. Bemis was born Sept. 11, 1853 in Northern China and at 17 years old, was smuggled into Portland, Ore., after arriving by ship from China. In 1872, she arrived in Warren, Idaho as the property of a wealthy Chinese man. Unable to write or speak English, she wound up with the name Polly, reportedly bestowed by an American who helped her from her horse when she arrived in Warren.

Bemis eventually won her freedom, although Wegars said it's not clear if her owner died or went back to China. She began keeping house for an American businessman named Charlie Bemis, who several years later became her husband.
Bemis, according to Wegars' book, didn't know how to read or write English, but she was enterprising enough to run a boarding house on her own in Warren. Apparently, she didn't take kindly to critiques of her coffee-making abilities. When some of her boarders - mostly hardened miners and outdoorsmen - complained about her java, Bemis cut the chatter right away. "Who no like my coffee?" she reportedly asked, brandishing a butcher knife.
She also nursed Bemis back to health after he was shot by an angry gambler. They were married in 1894, but due to federal restrictions, Polly Bemis was never permitted to become an American citizen. The couple eventually moved to the Salmon River canyon, where they ran a farm for decades and were mostly self-sufficient.
In 1922, Charlie Bemis died and Polly, aided by two neighbors, moved back to Warren. Although she was a minority, Wegars said, Polly retained many friends there. She also made some trips into the neighboring town of Grangeville, staying with friends there as well. In 1924, she moved back to her farm on the South Fork of the Salmon River, where she lived until the summer of 1933, with assistance from neighbors. In August that year, she sustained what is believed to be a stroke and was taken to a hospital in Grangeville. She died in November, at the age of 80 years.
Her remains have since been transferred from Grangeville to the farm she and Charlie had maintained. The current owners of the property, Wegars said, are maintaining the land as a historic site and museum about the enterprising Chinese woman and her American husband.
For her own involvement in the memory of Bemis' life, Wegars said it only seemed fitting to that the proceeds of the book go to the Asian American Comparative Collection. "I feel like I can't make money off of Polly," said Wegars, who was supported in her book-writing efforts by the Idaho Humanities Council and the University of Idaho's John Calhoun Smith Memorial Fund.
Wegars said she is hopeful the book proceeds will help build on an endowment fund for the Asian American Comparative Collection. The goal of the fund, she said, is to raise $1 million, the interest of which would enable the entity to have a paid curator." Then I can retire," said Wegars, who is volunteering as the collection's curator.
The collection functions as a means for researchers to compare artifacts they're excavating with researched objects that have known ages. Wegars said the collection is a critical facet in understanding the lives of Asian pioneers to the region. "We are trying to let people know about the contributions of the early Asian pioneers of the Northwest," she explained.
Laura Pierce can be reached at (208) 882-5561, ext. 238, or by e-mail at lpierce@dnews.com. For more information read Priscilla Wegars' book Polly Bemis: A Chinese American Pioneer, which can be purchased at BookPeople of Moscow and the Prichard Art Gallery in Moscow. The book was published in 2003 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Bemis' birthday. Proceeds from sales of the book will go to the Asian American Comparative Collection at the University of Idaho.

posted by Crag at 10:32 PM  

Questions or Comments?