I have something neat going on in one of my classes, and I wanted to post about it. One of the papers I wrote this summer was about the critique I believe is implicit in a couple of the creative projects I worked on with students in 2008-2009 — a comic book about the Goose Dad phenomenon, and a faux-documentary critiquing the cultishness of English education (and of the TEFL industry) in Korea. My argument is that while the narratives my students created was explicitly a discussion of the effect of TEFL on Korean society, it also contained a parallel, …
Tag: academia
Monash Utopias 4 Conference/WorldCon 2010 (AussieCon 4) Review
Most of what was great about this week in Australia was personal stuff — seeing (however briefly) old friends, spending time, meeting new cool people, and of course having a brief bit of time outside of Korea, because it was about the time when I was needing a break. Also, Melbourne has some really good beer, and I highly recommend the Belgian Beer Cafe Eureka, which is down near Dockside. It was amazing. (More about that latter place in posts yet to come.) Most of what was good about the conference and convention had to do with regular conference/con stuff: …
One Down, and…
Well, I gave my presentation on The Host the other day. I didn’t read a paper, just spoke, which of course is a little risky sometimes, though usually I’m fine when I do that sort of thing. This time, the risk caught up with me, though, and there were a couple of lapses, but worse, because previous prresentations had gone overtime, I started out with less time than I ought to have had, and had to summarize the last third, on top of that essentially skipping the final chunk (about the ongoing duel between right-wing technophilic/globalization/developmentalist/minjok discourse and left-wing environmentalist/anti-American/resistance/minjung …
Write-a-Thon Results
Well, as I announced about six weeks ago, I participated in the Clarion West Write-a-Thon again this year, I think the first time since 2007. I pledged something insane: to write three academic papers in six weeks, to the point of them being ready to send out at the end of the six weeks. Well, the result was: close, but not quite, but I’m still quite chuffed by what I did achieve, and a few things got thrown into the mix that I didn’t expect, so I’m overall quite pleased with what I did manage: The first paper I worked …
Strangely Like Oulipo
So, I’m taking a break from a paper that’s almost done. Something distressing happened the other day, and while it’s sort of looking resolved, I’m still having trouble focusing. It’s interesting, though: I’m sort of performing a narrative analysis of a couple of independent creative projects that my students did in some classes I taught back in 2008-2009. The narratives of their creative works can be read not just as a generalized social critique of TEFL and its impact on Korean society, but also as an encoded, implcit critique of particular gaps in mainstream classroom TEFL practice, as well as …