Cancelled: 2nd Sigma Tau Delta Eastern Region Symposium

January 31: We regret that we are cancelling the Symposium. We did not receive any proposals from interested parties and don’t feel it is appropriate for this to be an event emerging only out of TCNJ and the University of Maine-Farmington. At the convention, we will regroup and talk with members of our region about events that can serve the chapter development goals for the Eastern Region.

Sigma Tau Delta’s Eastern regional leadership is eager to announce the Virtual Regional Symposium Saturday, February 10, 2024! The one-day event will be held remotely through Zoom from 9am-5pm depending on the number of sessions we have. This is an open invitation for proposals regarding professional networking, community engagement, chapter engagement, publishing, or other English-related programming that would help Sigma Tau Delta chapters foster a love for literacy, service, and scholarship. Proposals should be no more than 500 words. Although the Eastern region is hosting, submissions from all regions are welcome! Submissions from both chapter members and chapter advisors are welcome. The deadline for all submissions is January 15th, 2024; you should hear a decision by January 20th. Do not hesitate to reach out to your Regent or Student Representatives with any questions.

Felicia Steele, Eastern Regent (steele@tcnj.edu)

Zoe Talbot, Student Representative of the Eastern Region (esr@wordybynature.org)

Sofia Escobar, Associate Student Representative of the Eastern Region (easr@wordybynature.org)

Pastitsio for Beth

A Pastitsio for Beth

What?
April is the cruelest mistress,
Her eyes are nothing
Like the distance in flight
Above pipes from black hearted water.
No, I will go alone.
Openly, yes, let us consider the
Farmer who makes his way down
Thick drops whispering around me
Hemmed in by an untenable
Sadness, thinking of you.
As virtuous poets pass mildly away
Look at the stars! Look up at
My Beloved.
Blest spirit.

Future of English Symposium–Event Checklist

Checklist for Chapter Events, prepared by Felicia Steele (Eastern Regent, steele@tcnj.edu)

1) Picture or it didn’t happen. Make sure that you get at least three pictures from any event and then share them on social media so that they can be broadcast by your hosting department, school, and college. Any Instagram or Twitter post should tag your institution’s “brand management group” as well as the central office (@EnglishCon on Twitter; @englishmatters on Instagram).

2) When scheduling an event, make sure that provision has been made for a microphone. Even if your speakers have a well cultivated “teacher voice,” you guarantee accessibility to participants with hearing impairment if you amplify the speakers.

3) Come up with a plan to how to distribute information. At our institution, each building has an electronic monitor that has a Slide Show on loop. When advertising an event, make sure that the publicity officer gives the people in charge of the monitors in each building a Powerpoint slide that publicizes the event. They can add this slide into their existing PowerPoint that runs in a loop in each of those buildings.

4) When planning an event, make sure that invitations to speakers go out a month and a half before the event. Always invite your dean and college president or the director of your alumni office!

5) Find reasons to celebrate past and future members. Have any of your alumni published a book? Host a reading and a book party for them.

6) If you want to do something big, be brave about passing the cup around campus. You likely have allies in places you don’t necessarily know about. Your dean of education might be willing to support programming around teaching. Your dean of business will likely be invested in your students who are minoring in marketing or other business fields. Don’t be shy about asking people apart from your immediate dean for funding for activities or convention attendance.

7) Make sure to see how the Central Office might be able to support your events. For example, contact your student leaders to see if it would be appropriate to do a “social media takeover” during one of your events. Apply for Common Reader awards to support your chapter’s events around the common reader chapter projects.

8) Work with one another to come up with a style guide for your flyers and instagram posts. Are you all committed to using gender neutral language? Plan ahead so that you know not to use “freshmen” to talk about your first year students. You can even come up with a set of templates for particular kinds of events so that no one has to reinvent the wheel each time you hold an event.

9) Cultivate, honor, and get to know the professional staff in your English department. They know campus processes better than any faculty member does and can give you more help than anyone else in navigating the labyrinth of the contemporary college or university.

10) Give Faculty an opportunity to talk about their scholarship. Host “faculty research talks” or a “sabbatical series” so they can talk about what they did when they weren’t teaching.

11) Encourage your faculty advisor to consider service at the national level. If they have the opportunity to learn about how the scholarship process works, or how the convention submissions process works, they can give you more and better advice when you apply for events.

Sigma Tau Delta Eastern Regional Symposium (Register Here)

future of english

We have an exciting and informative program set for Saturday’s Eastern Regional Symposium. We’ll have five sessions: 1) The Future of your Professional Network (learn about opportunities with NCTE and NEHS); 2) The Future of Publishing; 3) The Future of Community Engagement (hear about a few projects led by Sigma Tau Deltans in our region); 4) The Future of Chapter Activities (this will be a crash course in all the amazing things you all have done in the Eastern Region over the last few years); 5) An Ask Me (your regent) anything session to learn about opportunities in Sigma Tau Delta, Convention Submissions, or anything else. If you have an idea for a roundtable but are short participants, I also envision this as a matchmaking session. You can come to some or all of the sessions. Sessions will be 50 minutes and begin on the hour starting at 9am on Saturday, October 30! Register for the Zoom link here: https://tcnj.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwuduuvrD4uEtMKIfakZlzPNZDGj5E0qGvH

The Future of English–Eastern Regional Virtual Symposium (Deadline Extended)

poster

Image text follows

WHEN
Saturday, October 30, 2021 9am to 4pm Eastern Time
WHERE
The College of New Jersey Through Zoom
WHY
Share ideas and best practices for leadership, recruitment, relationship building with community partners, including National English Honor Society chapters in your area! Network with other chapters to prepare roundtables for the National Convention
in Atlanta.
HOW
Send an abstract of no more than 200 words to: easternregionsigmataudelta@gmail.com
Abstract must include your name, chapter, contact information, and the symposium thread.

Hosted by the
Alpha Epsilon
Alpha Chapter of Sigma Tau Delta
at The College of New Jersey

Submissions

All Sigma Tau Delta members (including advisors) may submit a 5-10 minute presentation  around the following threads.

  • Best practices in chapter leadership and member recruiting
  • Careers for English Majors/Minors
  • Creating Community Partnerships
  • Best practices in promoting literature, reading, and writing on campus and in our communities

Due Date Extended: Oct. 15

Decision Date: Oct. 20

 

Repositioning HEL in the General Education Curriculum, Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, April 9, 2021

Preamble:

At many institutions, medievalists in English departments teach the History of the English Language as a senior-level or 400-level course, taken by students at the end of their careers as English majors. For many preservice teachers in English programs, HEL may be their very last non-education course, taken at the same time or even after their student teaching experience. At The College of New Jersey, the core faculty responsible for teaching HEL are all medievalists, both early and late; we have repositioned HEL, making it part of the first year sequence for English majors who intend to be secondary educators. In addition, the course has been repositioned so that it might serve as part of the general education or “Liberal Learning” curriculum at The College as a course that examines “Social Change in Historical Perspective.”

As a consequence, the course offers students an opportunity to see language as part of the foundation of their intellectual development as future middle school and high school teachers rather than as a “senior option.” It also requires and engages students in active learning and provides students with an opportunity to examine standard language ideologies in an interdisciplinary context. I contend that the History of the English language is uniquely positioned to reach across disciplinary boundaries just as medievalists must do in order to research and teach in our field. Faculty who teach HEL engage with history, geography, culture, ideology, and literature in ways that can capture the imagination of students otherwise reluctant to take English department courses, especially in literature written before 1800 or outside of the United States. Students in HEL courses must explore issues related to material culture and technology in ways that embrace interdisciplinarity and that engage multiple modes of learning. As a result, HEL is not just a niche course appropriate for seniors who will be teachers, who must take the course because of external certification requirements, but a course appropriate to students who seek a broad, interdisciplinary experience that allows them to explore the ways in which language can be impacted by technology, materiality, colonialism, migration, ideology, and art. As higher education across the country sees declining enrollments that result in the consolidation of departments and the shrinkage of majors, especially in the humanities, repositioning of HEL into the intellectual foundation rather the periphery will yield dividends for us, attracting students to medieval languages and literatures.

Presentation Materials:

Sewanee Colloquium Paper

Sewanee PowerPoint Slides

Links:

Open Domesday Project

Gazetteer of British Place Names

Google Maps: Kirk vs. Church

University of Nottingham: Institute for Name Studies

Key to English Place Names

Caxton’s Eynedos:

Exploring Early Modern English

Diigo.com: Bookmarking and Annotation Site

Using Canvas to Teach at Distance

Yesterday, as part of my own anxiety management, I wrote up a document that explains how I teach using the Canvas Conferences Tool when I can’t be in class. I realized that this would probably be useful outside of my own department, so I’ve made it available here for anyone who might be able to use it. It may be just as relevant outside of TCNJ as it is relevant here.

Teaching Online through Canvas

I’ve also finished a document about Canvas, cellphones, and a tiny bit about accessibility.

Options for Using Canvas without a Computer