2010 SWCA Mini-Regional Conference: Florida

Conference Program Available!

The SWCA Florida Conference session-by-session schedule is available on the SWCA's homepage. (Blogger does not allow the posting of documents for some reason.)

REGISTRATION

REGISTRATION IS OPEN: CLICK HERE!
Important registration tips and reminders:

Once someone at your institution registers for the conference as an “SWCA Institutional Member,” ($90) the registration cost for tutors at that institution becomes $30/tutor. An “Institutional Membership” recognizes everyone at that institution as an SWCA member.
An "Institutional Membership" also gets your institution a one-year subscription to Southern Discourse, a publication of the SWCA.
Early registration ends on March 1. After that, participants will have to register on-site via check.

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Proposal Submission Directions
1. Copy-and paste the proposal form below into an email.
2. Fill out items. All must be completed.
3. Use subject line: "SWCA: Florida Proposal"
4. Email proposals to swcaflorida@gmail.com.

Proposal Form
A- name (primary contact person)

B- phone number
C- email address
D- institutional affiliation
E- other participants' names, institutions, & email addresses
F- proposal type (choose one)
       -poster presentations (Friday evening)
       -individual sessions (20 minutes)
       -panel presentations (groups of 3+ presenters; 60 minutes)
       -roundtable (groups of 3+ leaders, one central topic)
       -interactive workshop (60 minutes)
       -creative presentations (please specify)
G- proposal title
H- one sentence describing proposal
I- audio visual needs
J- written proposal (200 word maximum)

We encourage interactive workshops and hands-on presentations! The conference schedule will be manipulated as needed to accommodate creative proposals.

Anyone presenting or participating in a proposal session must register for the conference.
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CONFERENCE THEME

Proposal Deadline: January 30, 2010

"Back to the Tutor"

The SWCA Florida Statewide Conference is asking this year's participants to think about our theme and get "back to the tutor."

Six years ago, the classic 1985 film Back to the Future, which won 13 awards and was nominated for an additional 23, was released on DVD with a new retrospective documentary about its making, gaining it new audiences and media attention. In the film, Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox), a high school senior, time-travels back to 1955 to his parents’ senior year to save the future for himself and his siblings, and in the end makes his parents’ lives better too.

Significantly, Marty serves as a peer tutor to his father, guiding him to become more confident to act and think for himself. Most notably, by the film’s end, we see the tangible results of Marty’s peer tutoring: George grows up to be a published writer of science fiction novels.

Coincidentally, the year the film hit theaters fell in the middle of a decade that gave rise to a wave of writing center publications, specifically texts about peer tutoring. As Harvey Kail notes in his editor’s remarks for the Fall 2008 special issue of The Writing Center Journal, dedicated to Kenneth Bruffee and the Brooklyn Project, “Bruffee publishes in the mid-1980s a series of essays that famously theorize peer tutoring as a paradigm of social constructionist pedagogy”(3). Moreover, Kail’s assertion about the essays is proved by the example of Marty and George from 1985’s Back to the Future: “Together and separately, they make a compelling argument for the value of organizing students to take each other seriously as writers and readers” (3).

As the end-note speaker at the joint IWCA/NCPTW conference in October 2008, Harvey Kail spoke of how far our profession has drifted from talking about what tutors do in tutorials and what they achieve and learn from being tutors. He issued a call to explore and recognize the contributions of our tutors.

The SWCA saw this year as the ideal one to return our focus to our tutors’ voices and experiences, and to look ahead to how their voices create our futures.

Proposal submission forms and guidelines will be forthcoming in the next few weeks. If you have any questions, please direct them to Kevin Dvorak or send them to our gmail.

We are looking for several types of proposals:
-poster presentations (Friday evening);
-individual sessions (20 minutes);
-panel presentations (groups of 3+ presenters; 60 minutes);
-interactive workshop (60 minutes);
-creative presentations.

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