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More
Conference Info:
Keynotes ____
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Keynotes for
2015
Thursday:
Storyteller-Artist
Britt Aamodt
Friday:
Under-prepared
Writer Expert
Linda Lonon
Blanton
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Thursday Lunch
Creative Writing Keynote by
Britt Aamodt, Author of Superheroes, Strip Artists, & Talking Animals:
Minnesota's Contemporary Cartoonists:
"This Story Could Change Your Life: Storytelling in (and out) of the
Classroom"
"Humans are storytelling animals. We may not all be literate, but we're
all hardwired for beginnings, middles and ends. As a teacher, you're
already a storyteller. But how do you consciously adapt the tools of the
storytelling art to the classroom? How do you pull a thread from a novel
or short story and weave it into a storytelling moment? And how do
we--students and teachers--find our storytelling voices? If we don't tell
our stories, who will?"
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Britt Aamodt has never met a story she didn't
like. That's why she ended up, against her parents' good advice, a
freelance writer, radio journalist and published author. A
storyteller, she's appeared on stages around the Midwest and, as a
rostered teaching artist, takes her stories into classrooms with the
belief that stories change lives. |
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Friday Lunch
Academic Keynote by
Linda
Lonon Blanton, Professor Emeritus of English, University of New Orleans:
"Uncommon Wisdom:
What Under-prepared College Writers (Can) Tell Us"
"Before a semester
begins, academic courses are set to go, usually designed around content
either by faculty assigned to teach them or, in the case of freshman-level
writing courses, by department committee. How else can students follow a
syllabus and keep on track? And how else can multi-sectioned courses stay
calibrated and teachers plan coverage day to day? Yet, experienced
teachers know that writing competence does not develop through teaching
set material gleaned from others’ notions of what’s interesting or how
written English works. By listening 'out of class' to struggling college
writers, we can glimpse why many are so very under prepared and
unsuccessful. What one year-long conversation tells us is the subject of
this presentation."
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Linda Blanton has spent her professional
life as a classroom teacher, program administrator, teacher trainer,
and materials writer. This life began as a Peace Corps volunteer in
Tunisia in the mid-1960s, when what else could be done with a
BA-in-English-literature graduate except train her to teach English
as a language. Since then, she has worked in Chicago, New Orleans,
Japan, Morocco, and Greece. Along the way, she earned an MA in Applied
Linguistics from New York University and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from
the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her greatest professional
struggles have been in trying to help non-standard-dialect speakers
and immigrant non-native-English speakers achieve success as writers.
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Read more about Linda at
www.uno.edu/cola/english/faculty/linda-blanton.aspx. |
Contents of this
page updated 31 July 2015
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Author
Britt Aamodt
Dr.
Linda Lonon Blanton |
