Las Vegas–date and conference theme TBA
Update 11/14/2009
TYCA-West 2010 will be in Las Vegas, on Oct 8-9, 2010.
Theme :“Entering the Conversation: Creating Actionable Knowledge”
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
This quote came from Kenneth Burke’s 1969 The Philosophy of Literary Form. How do we prepare our students for the world of academice writing, literature, and creative persuasions that higher education requires? How do we prepare ourselves to prepare our students to become a part of that “unending conversation?”
