IDEAS: Integrated Disciplinary Education for Academic Scholarship: Symposium 2014

Sing, Act, Engage: A Workshop on Performance Pedagogy and Professional Development Across the Disciplines 

 Nassau Community College’s 9^th Annual IDEAS Symposium

Friday, November 7, 2014
CCB 252-253 

8:45 AM - 2:45 PM

Get in touch with your interpersonal, musical, and bodily-kinesthetic intelligences. Develop multi-modal pedagogies to inspire your teaching, engage your students, and foster your professional collaborations.

 The full day, 9^th Annual IDEAS Symposium will introduce and actively explore a variety of performative exercises including:

• adopting analytical approaches to karaoke to rethink voice, rhetoric, and collaboration
• developing improvisational and classic acting exercises as invention strategies
•  listening rhetorically to popular music as a means of critically developing pedagogical personae
• performing dance as a means of visual rhetorical analysis and a channel for kinesthetic intelligences.

 Please join us for a day that promises to generate new IDEAS for your teaching as you do what you love!

*Participants are asked to bring with them a copy of a favorite inspirational song (that has lyrics) downloaded to their phone, laptop, or other digital media device.

Session 1: “Teaching to the Killer Riff: Writing as Beats,” begins with the sharing of music as participants reflect on their own chosen songs that invoke aspects of their pedagogy.   We then examine surprisingly rich rhetorical connections between the bedrock five-paragraph essay/research project and the foundational “Bo Diddley beat,” which has been both limiting and freeing for Western musicians for the past fifty years.  David Hyman (Lehman College, CUNY) and Bob Lazaroff (Nassau Community College, SUNY)

Session 2: “Embodied Rhetoric: Improvisation and Invention,” introduces participants to various techniques that derive from improvisational acting, liberatory theater, and process drama.  These techniques, which include theater exercises, tableaus, and role-play, offer ways of engaging students and teachers in deep explorations of invention, rhetoric, and visual and kinesthetic learning.  Lauren Esposito (Stony Brook University) and Shawn-Marie Garrett (Friends Academy)

Session 3: “Get Outta Yo Mind: Dance as Rhetoric,” addresses everyday body language to draw on participant’s intuitive kinesthetic intelligences. We will practice simple dance exercises as a means to understand body movement and the rhetoric of dance.  Participants will then analyze the “arguments” made by dancers’ bodies in the popular reality competition show So You Think You Can Dance. Finally, inspired by the popular website Dance Your PhD, participants will be coached through the process of “dancing” a lesson or scholarly argument. Faith Kurtyka (Creighton University) and June Griffin (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

Session 4:“The Influence of Anxiety,” puts together kairos and karaoke, offering heuristics for teaching rhetorical analysis and awareness of self, audience, and purpose in contexts that shift in real-time and are influenced by ownership, originality, and their attendant anxieties. Peter Khost and Nicole Galante (both of Stony Brook University)

Breakfast and lunch will be served. 

If you are not a member of the NCC Community, please download and complete the registration form on this document.

Program Agenda

8:45 – 9:20 am Registration / Breakfast

9:20 – 9:30 am Be Here! Reveling in our “Going In” Songs

9:30 – 9:45 am Welcome and Opening Remarks

Dr. Kenneth K. Saunders, Acting President, NCC
Melanie Hammer, Dean, Arts & Humanities
Professor Suzanne Liff, IDEAS Coordinator

9:45 – 10:30 am Teaching to the Killer Riff: Writing as Beats

David Hyman, Lehman College, CUNY
Bob Lazaroff, NCC


10:30 – 10:45 am Todaysmeet.com

Nicole Galante, Stony Brook University

10:45 – 11:00 am Break / Light Refreshments


11:00 – 12:00 pm Embodied Rhetoric: Improvisation and Invention

Lauren Esposito, Stony Brook University
Shawn-Marie Garrett, Friends Academy

12:00 – 12:45 pm Lunch 

12:45 – 1:30 pm Get Outta Yo Mind: Dance as Rhetoric
Faith Kurtyka, Creighton University
June Griffin, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

1:30 – 2:15 pm The Influence of Anxiety

Peter Khost, Stony Brook University
Nicole Galante, Stony Brook University

2:15 – 2:30 pm Ending Ceremonies:
The Wheel

BYOD: Bring your phone, laptop, tablet or other wireless device downloaded with your favorite motivational song and lyrics.  Be ready to sing, act, and engage as you enhance your pedagogical designs in active, joyous, personal and memorable ways.