Editor's Note, August 2008
Elizabeth Haller
PhD Candidate and Instructor, Kent State University
E-mail: editoraee@hotmail.com
Welcome to the start of another academic year. We invite your continued perusal and encourage you to submit articles, poetry, and fiction for consideration in future issues of AEE. Please review our Call for Papers on this site for more details on submission requirements. If you are unsure whether your contribution would be suitable under the terms of our Call for Papers, please send along an inquiry, and I will be happy to respond forthwith. As always, do not forget to check out Grist for the Mill for possible submission ideas.
“The View from Here” columnist Lynne Fukuda returns with a poem titled “An Angel with Broken Wings”. Fukuda states:
It is hard to be a caregiver, volunteer, teacher, and an altruist. Sometimes it feels as if the world does not understand or care. And yet, the daily sacrifices of everyone in the world--who work hard for a better life for their children--those in society who keep us safe every single day, those who work in the shadows to bring light to the rest of us, and many other who are just special by just being born are the people to whom I dedicate this poem.
The opening feature of this issue, “In the Beginning”, is the second installment of a poetry project that comes to us from Dan Lukiv. Please refer to the June/July 2008 issue of AEE for the first installment of this ambitious work. According to Lukiv, these poems:
make poetic statements about the themes, imagery, symbolism, and people in the 50 chapters of Genesis. I plan to continue the project throughout the rest of the Bible (1139 chapters to go!). According to my calculations, I may complete the multi-volume work in about two decades.
Author Marie-Evelyne Le Poder brings us the second feature of this issue titled, “The Exchange Students in Translation Courses: Their Influence on Different Aspects of Teaching.” Le Poder states:
Currently, the Spanish university is living an internationalisation process as a clear result of the increasing development of European mobility programs, the consequence being the massive incorporation of students from different foreign Universities to courses in Spain. The University of Granada (UGR) receives more than 1,500 Erasmus students each year, which makes this institution the leading Spanish destination chosen by European university students to spend a year of study abroad. The Faculty of Translating and Interpreting is good evidence of this new reality, as shown by the increasing heterogenisation of the translation courses which are becoming more and more multicultural and, therefore, multilingual. This exchange student presence has an influence on different aspects of teaching.
The final feature of this issue is titled “Performative Student Writing in the Cultural Studies Classroom.” Author Linda Watts states:
Although most educators recognize the value of multivocal and nonlinear texts when assigned as student readings, discussions of classroom practice rarely take up in explicit ways the corresponding importance of students registering those encounters with experimental texts through their own performative writing acts. With all their claims to diversity, multiplicity, and inclusion, our celebrated new pedagogies for the study of culture seem infrequently to address the implications of these curricular transformations for educator paradigms of student writing-- whether in terms of rethinking our approaches to devising writing assignments, altering and opening our views of the forms student response might fittingly take, or complicating our notions of what it might now mean to assign, respond to, and evaluate student writing.
This month’s Poet’s Corner contribution is titled “Katrina Rain Down”. Poet Vanessa Raney states: “I was doing research on Hurricane Katrina while in Connecticut (2005-2006). After reading some experiences of those involved in the flooding, along with comments that appeared in various media, I felt moved to write about the experience of loss. . . . I felt [those in] New Orleans were particularly singled out [in this disaster], and I wanted to offer a voice steeled with my experiences of racism.”
READ, ENJOY, AND CONTRIBUTE!
You are invited to join AE Extra staff!
Send your ideas and/or writing sample
to the Editor-in-chief:
Elizabeth Haller
Kent State University (e-mail: editoraee@hotmail.com)
Academic Exchange Extra invites reader response to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.
