ThatCamp Community College: An Overview

Here I am setting up in the morning. Picture by Gina Yanuzzi.

Here I am setting up in the morning. Picture by Gina Yanuzzi.

My co-coordinators Chris Gazarra and Gina Yanuzzi did a lot of work the morning of the unconference getting everything set up as I riffed ideas from previous ThatCamps at them. Gina drew this to give directions to those who were coming in.

My co-coordinators Chris Gazarra and Gina Yanuzzi did a lot of work the morning of the unconference getting everything set up as I riffed ideas from previous ThatCamps at them. Gina drew this to give directions to those who were coming in.

After nearly a year of planning, the first ever ThatCamp Community College took place in the spring on our Mt Laurel campus here at BCC. We had a small group of about 10-12 at various times in the day (including a number of cancellations and no shows too), which led to very dense and productive sessions in the morning and then a rapid fire session to discuss proposed topics that did not receive enough votes.

Our morning sessions were about the key technological needs of community college students and how technology effects the form and logic of composition papers. I was so happy that our Dean in Liberal Arts, Nichole Bennett-Bealer, was able to sit in during the morning sessions for a bit.

After lunch we had one more session to discuss in rapid fire fashion some of the other session ideas that had been proposed in the morning. It was a small group, and mostly English and Literature faculty, so we could go into a detailed and deeper discussion.

I was so happy that our intern president David Spang was able to drop by for a little bit as well during the afternoon session. Dr. Spang has been extremely supportive since our first meeting back in August and I am grateful for his support and leadership here at BCC.

We will have information about next year's ThatCamp Community College later in the summer or early in the fall.

Feminisms

At BCC this spring, we had a nice panel discussion about Feminism(s) with my colleague Erika Baldt and awesome new Dean Nichole Bennett-Bealer. It was a nice discussion that was very broad in its topics. At one point the topic of men and feminism came up. I have for many years openly proclaimed my discomfort with men labelling themselves as "feminists." There are many power/privilege issues with that label and I think men have a different role to play in this process. This got argued around the room, with some people really not understanding what I was getting at, which was no fault of their own as I think many of them had not ever consider the point.

I tried to point out that men need to take a more supportive role in this process that does not center them, but I am not sure if I was totally eloquent about it. What I was trying to say can be summarized by this fantastic quote I found on Tumblr (and had retumbled and could not find during the panel):

Men who want to be feminist allies do not need to be given a space in feminism.  They need to take the space that they have in society and make it feminist.  That’s what women had to do in the first place, and women have fought much too hard for what little space they have to be giving it to men.