Archive for October, 2007
The Last Regulator of the Fictive: Making Connections and Finding Precursors to David Markson’s Vanishing Point
In this paper I weave together three short essays with reactions to and comments on the act of reading David Marksons novel Vanishing Point. Italicized sections are a dramatization of one readers attempt to puzzle out this unconventional work, which, in its simplest form, is constructed of the detritus of the lives of great Artists. The essays view the piece through a critical framework (Foucault), make an important connection between this work and The Anatomy of Melancholy, a seminal creative/scientific work from the 17th Century, and suggest a possible scientific-cultural extension of the ideas discussed, through memetics. These essays are both digressive and progressive. In its totality, the paper offers a relational, discursive, and not nearly comprehensive reading of Marksons elliptical novel, which is both experimental and traditional.
Becoming Supervisors: Tips for the Transition
Researchers have noted that trainees navigate potentially conflicting roles such as student, therapist, supervisee, and colleague (Holloway, 1984; Ladany & Friedlander, 1995). The transition from trainee to new supervisor presents unique challenges that are the focus of this presentation. We utilize current research on supervisory best practices, as well as our own early supervision experiences to provide the new supervisor with a framework to better understand their new role. We address major concerns such as setting the tone for supervision (e.g., addressing cultural issues, reviewing role expectations, managing role conflict and role ambiguity, providing summative and formative evaluations, and using what you know from counseling in supervision). Additionally, we discuss incidents that beginning supervisors might encounter in their first supervision experiences (e.g., supervising people with more experience, addressing supervisee anxiety, and how to handle resistance, parallel process and supervisee non-disclosures). Finally, we present ways to boost novice supervisor self-efficacy (i.e., using peer supervision and managing own anxiety).
Cape Town Meets the Classroom: Fostering Global Citizenship Through Writing About Study Abroad
This paper will describe our experiences teaching Global Literature to first-year students in Lehigh Universitys Global Citizenship Program (GCP). After participating in an intersession trip to Cape Town, we returned to help our students process their experiences through carefully-selected African written and filmic texts and individually-tailored writing assignments. We designed the syllabus with two questions in mind: How can we transcend the identity of the traveler and become global citizens? What can we do in our own backyards? The first addresses the process of self-reflection, evaluation, and transformation the students undergo. In reading contemporary African stories and reflecting on the trip, we hope each student will begin to understand his/her place in the world and his/her potential to impact the global community. The second emphasizes that the global citizen can apply what s/he has learned abroad to his/her own community. Our course stresses that travel is not merely a one-way trip, but instead a means of adapting lessons learned in the world to ones everyday experiences. A commitment to collaborative learning, interdisciplinary approaches, and the understanding that global citizenship is not a moral imperative informs our pedagogy; each student must come to his/her own definition of global citizenship. Our paper will share our observations of the students transformations articulated through their writing and explain the courses rationale.