Reflections on TYCA-SE 2012

Hello out there, blogosphere!

Greg and I are back from this year’s conference of the Two-Year College English Association – Southeast (Click their logo to go to the TYCA-SE homepage). I really just can’t say enough about how important this organization is to me. Before I found TYCA, I had depended on the National Writing Project (NWP) for my professional development.  The NWP was so so great, and I will be forever in debt to the NWP as well as the Blackwater Writing Project in Valdosta, GA. But, as you may or may not know, NWP was federally funded professional development that was cut, along with Reading is Fundamental, in last year’s budget compromises. When NWP’s funding was cut last year, I was sitting in sessions at TYCA-SE 2011. Little did I know at that moment that I had already found a source of PD that would rival the NWP.I met so many awesome people then, and I hope those professional relationships continue to thrive.

This year’s meeting in Virginia Beach was another spectacular entry in the TYCA-SE history. The temperature on the beach hovered around 75 degrees all week which was awesome, even though I only got out there for a quick run on one afternoon. The conference also offered Greg and I an opportunity to meet more of our southeastern colleagues and share our work on our theory of communicative education.

We spoke in a pretty well attended, late Friday afternoon session about the work we’re doing with Habermas’s theory of communicative action and how it relates to the educational enterprise. We focused this session on establishing trust in the teacher-student relationship, which is at the heart of communicative education since without trust, mutual understanding is pretty much unachievable. I won’t repeat it all here, since you can dig into it all in the podcasts, but I will say that it was a really great conversation.

It was really nice meeting new and supportive voices in our field. I know some of you are following along with the blog now, and I’m sorry we’re dropping the ball on those special Virginia Beach podcasts. We’ve been working hard on drafting an article during our spring break, and I am definitely still playing catch-up (mostly on sleep). We will get all six (soon to be seven) podcasts uploaded soon.

And we’ll see you all next year in South Carolina!

-Shane