The Basics

There are a lot of blogs about education and, within that circle, a lot about community colleges. I've been perusing some lately and now know that I lack a considerable amount of knowledge about the blogosphere; my lack of knowledge about community colleges has simply been confirmed.

So, one dilemma facing me is: what to blog? another is: how much to blog under my own name? There are plenty of places to find more, and better, insider info from vastly more-experienced people than me. For exhaustive coverage of pedagogy and resources, look over Community College English. Check out Confessions of an Associate Dean for an anonymous take on a CC in the NE.

But, as I tell my students, I guess part of it depends on audience. For those of you reading this blog just because you know me - surely that's most of you? - and those of you associated with research institutions - surely that's a lot of you? - here are a few basics about my life so far.

Tulsa Community College opened in downtown Tulsa in 1970.

It has four campuses spread around the Tulsa metro area. I work at the newest campus, West, which was founded around 20 years ago.

TCC serves over 35,000 students annually, according to statistics I read on their homepage. I've read different numbers in different places, which I think points to the difficulty in defining and assessing the number of students who attend community college - is that based on enrollment? graduation? completion of a course? These questions in turn point to issues concerning retention and graduation that were not part of daily discussions in my R1 training. 

As English fulltime faculty, my course load is a 5/5. I have one course reassigned this semester for professionalization workshops, putting me at only 4 courses this semester. I am teaching 2 Comp I courses and 2 Comp II courses, both of which meet twice a week. Here's the hourly breakdown:

Teaching: 15 hours
Office Hours: 10 hours
Availability for committee work: 10-ish hours
(Eventual) Reading and Writing Lab Work: 3 hours

For those of you keeping track, there is no time allotted for prep or grading. While much of that, for now, occurs during office hours, this way of doing things is also new.  As time goes on, there are opportunities to have some of those teaching hours transfer to other responsibilities (like the faculty training sessions).

The pay is good, and has the opportunity for more (depending on how many extra courses I teach each semester and in the summer. You can teach up to 7 or 8 courses in the semester, though I am curious as to how many people in comp do that).

I have a good office, smart co-workers who aren't afraid to speak openly about how things work, the freedom to plan my course according to my own choosing, and the relief of a regular income with good benefits.

TCC employs around 275 fulltime faculty and 850 adjuncts, if we believe wikipedia. The experience of adjuncts is much more visible to my own experience as a fulltime faculty member than perhaps it was in the past, though I was also working from a graduate student position, which had some benefits and many limitations. The adjunct/fulltime difference here is visible through things like course guarantees, office space, and weighted preferences in class times/subjects, in addition to the obvious increased pay and full benefits that go along with the position.

My students are similar in many ways to the students I had at UW, at least in the personalities and anxieties they exhibit in the first few days. Still, a higher number of my students here have jobs outside of school and work more hours than their counterparts at UW did. A higher number are returning students; a higher number have children.

According to TCC's Director of Institutional Research, over 36% of students here come from historically-underrepresented groups. From what I can tell looking at UW's enrollment 2013-2014, around 14% of its students come from these under-represented groups. If these numbers are wrong, someone please tell me.

The emphasis on community integration, and the sense that I am living and working in the community I am ostensibly here to serve, is stronger here than it was for me at Madison, though I don't fully subscribe to the town and gown perspective that people often take in relation to research institutions. I value and think there is communal value in academic research of all sorts, from the practical to the more esoteric, and what I'd like to think about more in these coming months is how that belief in research, and in particular humanities research, and in even more particular esoteric humanities research, might play out in the community college classroom. For now, the same emphasis on form - that formal considerations are useful and relevant across academic and popular culture - that guided my research continues to guide my teaching; the same commitment to the public humanities pushes me to orient my classroom as an introduction to the community as much as to academic writing. But that's all just at the level of motivation and intention right now - I don't know how it will play out in the coming months, but I hope to figure out a way to think about it and to write as things move along.

But I also hope that I am able to think more precisely about how the relationship between the humanities and the community college campus goes both ways, that while the humanities have a place in the education and administration of community colleges, community college education has something to teach research institutions about community integration rather than outreach, and what it means to approach your daily work as if it is always already part of a broadly public conversation. And yeah, I did throw "always already" in there. I think it fits.  

A Strange Land

Over the last few years, on my trips home over the Christmas holidays, my nephew and I have started taking trips to Oklahoma state parks. The main point is to travel with the nephew, because, well, it's fun, but the secondary goal is to experience the area in ways I haven't. Growing up, it was easy to think of this area as a land without history and without interest. The first assumption is obviously false, fraught with political and racist underpinnings; the second is just lazy. So, I've slowly started moving around, looking for things that are interesting, different, or unusual.

Last week (at my aunt's behest), I attended Marian Days in Carthage, MO, a city of around 14,000 that lies 130 miles NE from Tulsa. Marian Days is, according to my mostly Wikipedia-type sources, either the largest religious pilgrimage and festival in North America or simply the largest Roman Catholic festival in the United States. Either way, it's big. Over the first weekend in August, it brings over 50,000 Vietnamese American Roman Catholics to Carthage to honor the Virgin Mary and to reunite people from around the country, many of whom have been making the pilgrimage since 1978.

The festivities, which began as a one day retreat, take place on the 28-acre campus of the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix, land that used to house Our Lady of the Ozarks College but which was purchased in 1975 by an order of Vietnamese priests and nuns "who came to this country after fleeing Vietnam in fishing boats at the insistence of their founder, a day before South Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975."

Following the fall of Saigon, thousands of Vietnamese refugees ended up at Fort Chaffee in Western Arkansas, including the 170 priests and brothers of the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix who were split between Fort Chaffee and Camp Pendleton in California. Over the next few years, people ended up all across the region, including tens of thousands of people who were relocated to Oklahoma City; Cardinal Bernard Law, then Bishop of Springfield – Cape Girardeau, sponsored all 170 members of the Congregation, allowing them use of a college in his diocese that had been closed for years. That group evolved into the congregation that still worships there today. 

And, for these few days every year, this small area becomes an orderly tent city, housing people in individual tents, large group tents with rows of cots, camper-trailers, and all the city's hotels.

I have to admit, I'm not sure about attending a religious celebration for a faith that I don't follow. I did feel weird at first, wandering through the temporary lanes that wound around the campus. But, while the festival is centered around liturgy, there are also a number of other events that are more open to the general public, such as the county-fair-like atmosphere of the adjacent food/drink/cotton candy area.

And so, I ate.

A lot.

And I walked around.

And I marveled at how much has gone on around me without me paying much attention. And it's not for lack of mention - my grandfather used to tell me about the thousands of people flooding into small-town Missouri, but I dismissed his stories as exaggeration tinged with xenophobia. It just sounded like paranoia and, besides, how big could something in Carthage be? Well, I was wrong, about Carthage, and my grandfather, and my own sense of worldliness that convinced me that nothing that interesting could be happening nearby without my travel-experienced mind paying heed.

The Long Way Around

Sooner or later, we all go home. That's the message pop culture often throws our way. The Salvatore brothers return to Mystic Falls. Ed heads back to Stuckeyville. Raylan Givens is exiled to Harlan Country. Odysseus finally lands in Ithaca. Lebron eventually goes back to Cleveland.

And then there's me. After finishing my undergrad degrees at the University of Oklahoma in 2001, I left the state to attend graduate school, first in England and then in Wisconsin. I left for many reasons, but it mostly boiled down to the fact that I wanted something different. I didn't know exactly what that difference was or should be; I just knew it was something different than what I had. 

And so, I left.

But I also returned, time and again, for equally complicated and simple reasons: my family was there, many friends were there, and, in many ways, I was still there. I loved the land and the wind, I bristled at the politics, and, regardless of where I was, I still thought of myself as Oklahoman.

Still, 13 years went by. I finished my Master's in Women's Studies and English literature in England. I traveled and waitressed and worked at Star Trek conventions. I was on the academic job market for three years. I kept waitressing. I finished the PhD in Literary Studies at Wisconsin.

And, after three years of applying for jobs across the academic spectrum (visiting and tenure, research and teaching, state universities and liberal arts colleges), I've now accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English at Tulsa Community College, where I'll be teaching composition. I grew up outside of Tulsa, in a place called Broken Arrow. I went to high school here, I went to church here, my parents and siblings still live here. In fact, I'll be living, first, at my parents' house (in my same middle-school room) and then, presumably, on my own. I'll shift from teaching one course per semester at a 4-year research institution, writing a dissertation in contemporary American literature, working as a public radio producer, and waitressing at a chain American Chinese restaurant to teaching five courses a semester at a community college, attending soccer and baseball games, and doing research as my schedule allows. It's going to be different.

And so, I decided to start this blog, to track my experience of returning to Oklahoma and to consider how humanities research plays out in the community college composition classroom.
 
In his essay explaining his decision to return to Cleveland, Lebron James gives an account of a reckoning, a departure whose purpose was to teach him the value of home:

"Before anyone ever cared where I would play basketball, I was a kid from Northeast Ohio. It’s where I walked. It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried. It’s where I bled. It holds a special place in my heart. People there have seen me grow up...I want to give them hope when I can. I want to inspire them when I can. My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball. I didn’t realize that four years ago. I do now."

Odysseus puts it more dramatically: "I long - I pine, all my days - to travel home and see the dawn of my return."

Dorothy puts it more simply: "There's no place like home."

All of these folks make a compelling case for returning home. They leave, swept up in a whirlwind of circumstances, returning only when fate allows, after they achieve greater self-knowledge. For all of them, experiencing the global is a necessary but transient step in appreciating the value of the local. 

But as for myself, I have always been less certain about narratives that tell us that its better to go home, that our reasons for leaving are understandable but short-lived, that, upon exploring the world, we should want to bring those experiences back to the place we left. I don't know if the goal of leaving is always to return. 


My skepticism about stories of return, however, is at also at least partially rooted in the fact that I am drawn instead to narratives that tell us it's good to break free, that setting out on your own is a desirable choice, that, as the Dixie Chicks explain, taking the long way around is, in fact, the way to go.

In other words, I've always thought that education was my way out, an opportunity I embraced, but now education has brought me back. And so, this blog is also an attempt to wrestle with the stories we tell ourselves, of who we are and what we want, of what makes for a valuable life.


Well, that's the goal. I'll probably also talk a lot about TV. We'll see how things shake out.