Clint Gardner

Squash 1 Originally uploaded by Clint Gardner As I mentioned in the previous post, during the initial sessions of the Thayne Center for Service & Learning Garden Parties (held every Tuesday at 9:00 am at the SLCC Community Garden and open to all), I distributed "gardening journals" to those who were present. The purpose of these journals is to allow space for Community Garden participants to reflect on not only gardening, but also what involvement in the garden means to them, or the impact that work in the garden is having on them. My own journal has charted a growing commitment to the garden and its purpose: "I am really stunned at how involved/committed I've become to this project. I think it is because the garden so clearly shows the fruits of our labors, and how working as a group we've done something so significant," I recently wrote. I am excited to get more students involved in the project once they return in the fall. I am currently plannin...

Bell pepper Originally uploaded by Clint Gardner At Salt Lake Community College , where I teach , I've had the honor of first volunteering with our new Community Garden, and now being the advisor for the Slow Food/Community Garden student group. For a few years now, I've wanted to do something like this, but kept putting it off because of professional commitments. I'm happy that SLCC students got on the stick and pushed this project forward. The Community Garden involves various departments and clubs on campus such as the Thayne Center for Service & Learning , the Disability Resource Center , the Nursing Department , the Environment Club, and Distance Education (to name the groups I know of.) There are other groups involved, so forgive me for skipping your group. The ultimate purpose of the Community Garden is to educate SLCC students and community members about where our food comes from, learn about our mutual environmental impact, and to provide some of ou...

-1- Chris Gallagher, in a 2005 article in JAC titled "We Compositionists:  Toward Engaged Professionalism" offers various suggestions on how the field of composition can, for wont of better terms, remain relevant.  The term relevant appears to bother Gallagher, however, given that he throws relevant in (mildly ironic) quotation marks in his discussion that compositionists seem to be bereft of an audience other than themselves and seem to be constantly worrying that what they are doing is irrelevant :  "And it's consisten with a whole range of efforts to make composition and rehtoric more 'relevant,' including various calls for 'public intellectuals'...the study of 'everday literacies...' and service learning....What is behind this fear of not mattering ?" (76) All of this worry about relevance seems to come from a certain worry that what we are doing as compositionists just doesn't matter; that it is unimportant; that it is a w...

Here's what I wrote over on the old College server I've been using for my WordPress blog for years now:   While my academic blog has not been the most active creature in the sea, I still wish to maintain it. The server on which the blog currently sits is getting fairly old, however, and there are no plans to replace it with a new one. Given that it holds our record-keeping database for the SLCC Student Writing Center, I think I would prefer to free up some space on the server and move my blog off site to a blogger.com blog. At least in moving to blogger, I won’t be forced into upgrading WordPress ever week or so (I’m not kidding.) Maintaining PeerCentered on blogger.com has been relatively worry-free, after all. The new spot is clintgardner.blogspot.com . Eventually I will auto-forward from this page to it. I’m still contemplating being all ego-maniacal and buying up clintgardner.org while it is up for grabs. Long may she wave. And yes, I do notice ther...

I am curious to have community comments on this Wordle constructed from approximately 33 mission statements freely provided to me by WC administrators from various institutions. If you aren't familiar with Wordle (http://www.wordle.net), it crunches texts and represents the most prevalent terms appearing in the text by size. I don't believe color or position has any statistical significance, and is mostly chosen by the person who creates the Wordle based on her or his aesthetic sensibilities. In the following Worldle, I have removed "writing" and "center" as terms. I did this simply because those terms, quite expectantly, were ubiquitous in all the mission statements and, therefore, took up a lot of Wordle screen real estate: Available from http://www.wordle.net. (Corrected version.) While I am drawing my own nefarious conclusions from this smash-up for my CCCC presentation, I just wanted to hear what the WC community thinks; that is why I haven...

While I was away attending the T YCA Southeast Conference in Chattanooga, the faculty/staff discussion group for the 2010 Writing and Social Justice Conference met to discuss Michael Berube 's Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. I've been told that the discussion went quite well, and I had a few moments this morning to discuss Berube's ideas with one of the Student Writing Center tutors, Lori. As she is a person with a disability herself, I found her insights into the book profound, and useful in helping me to understand the broader cultural ramifications that Berube discusses in the book in the context of individual experience. 1) It would seem that many of the things that become so problematic about the treatment of the mentally disabled since the late 19th century is that such treatment were often "for the best" or had "good intentions" and were based on progressive thinking. In other words, the manner in which all...

This year's Writing & Social Justice Conference's theme is (Dis)ability. Sponsored by the Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) English Department in partnership with the SLCC Disability Resrouce Center, Family & Human Studies Department, The Thayne Center for Service & Learning, the SLCC Community Writing Center, SLCC Student Services Art & Cultural Events Committee, Art Access Utah, and the SLCC Student Writing Center, the Conference is open to all undergraduates in the state of Utah (USA). The deadline for submissions is March 12, 2010. The conference will be held on April 10, 2010. WSJC2010DisabilityverSPRING