Central New York Humanities Corridor

We are quickly approaching the mid-term peak. This is a great time to ask your FWS students for feedback, to consider how you might support a student who is struggling, and to re-examine learning goals as to you reach for the end of the semester and final writing projects.

• FWS MID-TERM EVALUATIONS | You will find, in the Indispensable Reference for Teachers of First-Year Writing Seminars, a sample FWS Mid-Term Evaluation that asks students to consider what they find most and least successful, interesting, effective, and pleasurable about the course. Here are some ways that you might collect such information from students:
  • Students “take stock” together in an open whole class discussion (possibly preceded by a free write and/or small group discussion)
  • Students take stock together using a real time poll (raising hands, Poll Everywhere, Mentimeter)
  • Students complete an anonymous survey (Canvas quiz/survey tool, Survey Monkey, Qualtrics)
  • Students write a reflection and submit as an Assignment (just for you) or on a Discussion Board or GoogleDoc (shared with all class participants)

Tracy Hamler Carrick

Maya Mau's (ILR, '24) article "'Orientalism' in the Alhambra: Examining Western perceptions of the Alhambra and the Fountain in the Court of the Lions" will be published this Spring in Esferas, NYU's Department of Spanish & Portuguese undergraduate journal. In this piece, Mau "considers the impact of 'Orientalism' on scholarly understanding of the Alhambra, and specifically the fountain in the Court of Lions." She "proposes that 'Orientalism' has obstructed, without preventing, scholars from studying the Alhambra’s history, artwork, and poetry in the context of the culture in which it was produced." 

Mau first wrote this essay in her Fall '21 First-Year Writing Seminar -- ART HISTORY 1132: Seeing, Reading, and Writing the Alhambra with Professor Cynthia Robinson. 

Follow this link to the full article: https://knight.as.cornell.edu/spotlight-fws-student-maya-mau-24-publish-fws-essay

Working Groups: The Corridor hosts two annual CFP cycles during which new or existing working groups can apply for funding. View the latest Call for Proposals here. The CFP provides details about funding levels and the mechanics of working group formation. The next deadline for applications is March 29, 2021.

Things to Avoid (in Budgets and Planning):

• Paying students: Direct payments to students are not allowed using Corridor funding. That includes both undergraduate and graduate students.
• Paying individual people within the Corridor: The Corridor does not allow honoraria (or commissions, etc.) to be paid to employees (faculty and/or staff) at the 11 Corridor institutions.
• Websites: Creating websites for Corridor events or groups is strongly discouraged. Maintaining websites for accuracy, accessibility, and more requires a long-term plan, and Corridor funding cannot be used for continued upkeep. Instead, consider using other tools for sharing resources among your working group participants or creating a web page on an existing departmental website.

Resources for Virtual Events:

• For an invite-only group, Canvas can be a useful tool to organize event information, upload materials, and facilitate discussion. Department staff, CIT, and/or A&S IT should be able to provide Canvas support. Canvas sites can be made available to folks outside of Cornell.
• Box is a Cornell-supported tool for file sharing.
• CIT can provide zoom event support, including sending out invitations, managing entry and exit into waiting rooms, assigning people to small groups for discussion, recording the event, and trouble-shooting: (incurs fees).
• Consider accessibility services.

Cornell faculty, academic staff, and graduate students may seek travel reimbursement for Corridor-sponsored working group activities or public events located on another Corridor campus. Please refer to these Intra-Corridor Travel Fund guidelines before submitting your request to Emily Parsons at elp25@cornell.edu.

Dr. Shyam Sharma is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. His scholarship and teaching focus on issues of language and language policy/politics, cross-cultural rhetoric, international students and education, and writing in the disciplines. His works have appeared in a variety of venues, including College Composition and Communication, Journal on Advanced Composition, Across the Disciplines, Composition Studies, NCTE, Series in Writing and Rhetoric, Hybrid Pedagogy, Kairos, and Professional and Academic English (IELTS SIG). His most recent book (Routledge, 2018), based on data gathered by visiting 20 US universities plus data collected distantly from 15 more, offers theoretical and practical pathways for the advancement of Writing Studies at the graduate level, using writing support for international graduate students as a major intervention in graduate education. His next book analyzes the foundations of international education in the US in the decades after the Second World War, showing fault lines and potential futures by analyzing trajectories in the past few decades.