Lukiv's Educational Stew, Ingredient 4 of 5:
Poetry: The Teacher
  Dan Lukiv

Electric heat and humidity
Assault me
This morning
In my classroom,
Both leftover from yesterday's
Coup d'etat of summer.

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Against the Grain: Teaching Multicultural Literature to Middle Class Values
  Myra Mendible

Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) iopened its doors in 1997 with approximately 2600 students. Even before construction was completed new faculty and staff began relocating to the area, many from cosmopolitan cities, transforming the face of this mid-size Florida city forever. Tasked with developing the English program, I engaged firsthand in a project that would stimulate not only educational and economic development in the region but also cultural and social changes. This essay shares some of my experiences as a founding faculty member, focusing on our efforts to implement a multicultural curriculum in a predominantly white, middle-class community.

Designing a literary studies program for a new university posed special challenges, both in terms of late-C20 cultural politics and in the context of Southwest Florida. "Culture wars" of the 80s and 90s had transformed how university English departments defined themselves and their missions. Multicultural and inter-disciplinary approaches were replacing the segmentation of knowledge that had traditionally structured university curricula generally and expanded the scope of English department study and research in particular. Our choices would play a significant role in the region's cultural machinery: our decisions would help shape aesthetic tastes, legitimize certain authors and grant authority to their texts, inform or challenge ideologies, and establish student learning outcomes and goals. We also knew that the word "multiculturalism" still elicited knee-jerk reactions on campuses and at dinner tables across the country.    full text >>>

Fiction: Aqua Alta
  Josh Parker

When we arrived at the Marco Polo airport my bank card wouldn't work in the machines, and you said you wanted to look at the colored pastas in the gift shop, so we didn't notice the weather at first. It wasn't until after we paid for our bus tickets and were standing out on the platform that you said, "Oh, it's raining," and I looked out and hesitated a long time before answering. It was dark, and sure the street was wet, but, I said, it was probably a sprinkler system.

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