Seeing the Message

Dean Braden welcomed President Obama to NC State.

Braden signed for the president.

Creating a literary culture

How do you enhance the literary culture of North Carolina? A culture that encourages aspiring writers from all over the state to contribute their imaginative best? The short answer: contests. Since the beginning of NC State’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program seven years ago, the program’s fiction and poetry contests have been discovering good writing across the state.

“Major league teams have their farm teams, colleges have their talent scouts. This is our way of shaking loose some of the talent in the state,” said Wilton Barnhardt, associate professor and past MFA program director. (Barnhardt is pictured above.) “Almost every year we find someone writing in isolation who we try to reach out to and make part of our community.”

The number of contest entries received each year just keeps growing. The writers come with a variety of skill sets—from graduate students at established university programs to fledgling writers in tiny towns. Three prizes in as many categories are awarded: $500 for the best longer story (20 pages or less); $250 for the best short-short (5 pages or less); and $100 to the best undergraduate effort. For the poetry contest, one of the largest free-entry poetry competitions in the South, the top winner earns $500.

For both contests, writers must be North Carolina residents, and there are no entry fees. However, the contests themselves incur expenses for the program; in addition to the prizes, there are costs associated with promoting the contests. Barnhardt couldn’t stand to see the contests plagued with money woes, so he dug into his own pockets—and reached out to family—to help fund the 2011 contests, creating the Barnhardt Family Fund.

“We have a longtime family connection to the university and my mother—who has been my own greatest encourager in my writing life—decided we would support the contests, poetry and fiction, because it could be the first bit of praise or encouragement a writer gets.

“It could start a hopeful contestant on the path to writing or, at a minimum, allow us all to read a really fine poem or story we might otherwise never have seen,” Barnhardt said. “I was lucky to have my supportive family and lots of encouraging English professors along the way. Maybe these contests will be that catalyst for a writer who barely suspected there were others who would love what they write. How wonderful that NC State can be part of that discovery.”

Objective judges lend credibility to both contests, said John Kessel, also a professor and the MFA program’s first director. “Since the final judging is done by an impartial outside reader who is a distinguished national writer or editor, the contest brings our local writers, including some from our MFA program, to the attention of a wider literary audience and increases the prestige of our program,” said Kessel, who expects more than 200 entries in the fiction contest this year.

The 2011 poetry contest, held in March, drew more than 500 entries from across the state. The guest judge was Thomas Lux, poet-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College. In 2012, Barbara Ras will serve as judge. Her poetry has won her awards from the Academy of American Poets and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. Ras directs Trinity University Press.

The 2011 fiction contest will be judged by Ron Rash, a well-known poet, short story writer and novelist. Winners will be announced in November, and Rash will be on campus to hand out the prizes and read from his work. Rash is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. His 2008 novel, Serena, was a 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller; his latest release, a collection of stories, is Burning Bright.

Over the years, both the poetry and fiction contests have grown. “We started out local, with undergraduate writing classes filling the box outside my office door,” Barnhardt said. “Now we advertise in more than 50 papers and send posters and contest information to 40-plus colleges and universities in North Carolina. We have hundreds of entries each year from all the major writing programs in the state. Many come from UNC-Wilmington, UNC-Chapel Hill, and UNC-Greensboro, but we also get contributions from writing circles in every corner of North Carolina.”

By Christa Gala
Photograph by Marc Hall

Interactive Art Exhibit Features CHASS Faculty, Students

Tunnel Vision will be on display.

A cutting-edge interactive art exhibition is opening at Raleigh's Contemporary Art Museum, and faculty and students from the college's interdisciplinary Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM) doctoral program are among the artists.

ID:ENTITY is a group exhibition that explores the complex dichotomy between the public and private versions of “self.” Radical changes are emerging at the technical, cultural, and aesthetic intersections of contemporary life due to the speed and prevalence of digital media. The exhibit looks at the changes that occur between the boundaries of the self and the world.

Making its museum premiere is CRDM doctoral student David Gruber and English Professor David Rieder’s Tunnel Vision, an interpretation of Mark Strand's poem, The Tunnel. Their piece uses a web cam with motion-tracking software that enables viewers to experience an externalized projection of themselves on the screen--selves that become linked to the words from Strand's poem. The work contributes to a type of experimental writing known as cybertext. Strand's poem and a scholarly essay about their work will be displayed alongside this interactive work.

NC State's College of Design and its Department of Art+Design are also involved in ID:ENTITY.

An opening reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 18, from 6:00–9:00 pm in conjunction with CAM Raleigh’s Third Friday event. The reception is open to the public and free with museum admission. The exhibition will run from Nov. 18 - Feb. 13, 2012,

Tell a Story, Win a Prize

Got a story to tell? Enter it in the creative writing program’s statewide short story contest.
Monday, Oct. 17, is the postmark deadline to enter your work of fiction. Competition is open to North Carolina residents who have never published a book and are not tenure-track faculty in the UNC system. This year’s guest judge is Southern author Ron Rash.
The writer of the best story under 5,000 words will win $500. The prize for the best story of less than 1,200 words is $250.
For submission information, visit the contest page.

How People Feel About Diversity And ‘Neighborhood Schools’: It’s Complicated

The Wake County Board of Education has been the subject of intense scrutiny in recent years as it debates issues related to diversity and “neighborhood schools,” and voters are preparing for board elections October 11. But researchers from NC State have found that the issues are more complex than media outlets have made them appear. This is a guest post by those researchers, Dr. Toby Parcel, professor of sociology, and Dr. Andy Taylor, professor of political science.
 

Media coverage of Wake County’s assignment policy has been intense since the last school board election in October 2009. During that time, the county’s long-standing diversity policy has been discarded in favor of a yet-to-be-announced policy that will give more weight to parental choice and neighborhood location. One superintendent has resigned over the issue and another has been hired specifically to formulate a new policy.  More money is being raised to fund the candidates’ campaigns this year than has ever been raised for a Wake County School Board election before. Everyone agrees there is much at stake, and that the education of our children is critical to the progress of our community.

Much of the local discussion has centered on whether parents, citizens and candidates favor “diversity” or “neighborhood schools.” These two possibilities have typically been framed as polar opposites. The stark contrast clarifies the issue nicely and gives its politics a tribal quality: people favor either one or the other as a basis for assigning children to schools. There is little room for subtlety or compromise.

Since October 2010, we have been studying attitudes about Wake County schools and the policies that govern them. We have interviewed current and former school board members, community leaders on both sides of the assignment issue, and members of the business community. We have conducted focus groups where citizens explain their varying views and react to one another’s opinions. We have also conducted a survey of a representative sample of over 1,700 Wake County adults in an effort to obtain more detailed information on attitudes towards school assignments, and to gather demographic and other data that might explain why people see these issues the way they do.

Our research shows that the values surrounding school assignments are more complex than they first appear. For example, in addition to having opinions regarding whether diversity or neighborhood schools is the best principle to shape children’s assignments, citizens are concerned with three other things. First, they worry that reassignments for children create challenges for both parents and the children themselves. Second, they worry that reassignments are a threat both to children’s friendships and their learning. Third, they dislike the uncertainty that has been associated with the sometimes lengthy processes through which reassignments have been discussed and eventually decided. These findings suggest that concerns regarding reassignments go well beyond the simplistic notion of favoring a global policy of either “diversity” or “neighborhood schools.”

In addition, we have found that the diversity and neighborhood schools policies are not considered poles of the same single dimension. Our findings suggest that many people prefer neighborhood schools. At the same time, a sizeable subset of these people believe that children learn best when they are in schools and classrooms that are socio-economically and/or racially diverse. Although there is a tendency for those who favor diversity to be less supportive of neighborhood schools, and vice versa, this is not a particularly strong relationship. In short, many people support both concepts – and might even argue that any board assignment policy can and should reflect this.

In the months ahead we will provide additional detail to our findings including who is most likely to favor certain school assignment policies over others. In addition, we will be discussing the kinds of citizens who are most concerned about the challenges and uncertainties of reassignment.

In the meantime, we believe that debates regarding policies guiding student assignments in our public schools should take into account that citizens’ sentiments are more complex than they may have appeared. For the longer term, policies that acknowledge the complexity of these sentiments stand a better chance of enduring as our county faces the important challenge of educating children in the 21st century.

Pro Bono Service Pays Off for CHASS Grad

If you've ever wondered how an unpaid service-learning experience could ever possibly pay off, meet Jake Gellar-Goad.

Recent CHASS graduate Gellar-Goad (MPA, 2011) was no stranger to volunteer work when he chose to take Professor Branda Nowell's service-learning course on program evaluation. In addition to volunteering as a coordinator during Mark Kleinschmidt’s campaign in 2009, he also participated in unpaid service-learning experiences with United Way of the Greater Triangle and as an office intern for Chapel Hill’s Mayor Kleinschmidt in 2010.

So when taking Professor Nowell's course the opportunity to work with the non-partisan organization Democracy North Carolina arose, Gellar-Goad, who considers himself an advocate for good government, grabbed it.

During this service-learning project Gellar-Goad collaborated with his classmates to evaluate Democracy North Carolina internally and figure out how to improve its efficiency. As Gellar-Goad and his peers worked to accomplish this goal, they not only gained an invaluable first-hand experience, but also enrichment.

"Any class with a service-learning component is useful," said Gellar-Goad, who participated in four such projects over the course of his MPA studies. "It enriches you by bringing in experience, and also by the fact that you're making something or producing something that's meaningful in the real world."

Gellar-Goad’s service-learning experience also stoked his passion for working to improve the political arena, particularly in his home state. When Democracy North Carolina posted a full-time opening, he applied.

Although Gellar-Goad already had a sense of the value of his contributions to the organization during this experience, he got full confirmation when during his interview the research he had contributed was used as a major point of discussion. They had taken his work seriously and used it to better the organization. Needless to say, he was hired.

“Hands-on classes in the MPA program—like Organization Change Management and Program
Evaluation—were critical to my education,” Gellar-Goad said. “They were also key to launching my career. NC State's service-learning courses are some of the best.”

By Jennifer Jernigan, CHASS Communication Intern
Photo provided by Jake Gellar-Goad, pictured above on graduation day with his colleagues from the Democracy NC Program Evaluation Project, Caroline Bixiones and Jodi Swicegood.

History Professor's Award-Winning Book Explores Kentucky's Frontiers

If you’ve been looking for some critically-acclaimed reading material on the darker side of Kentucky’s history, look no further than Professor Craig Thompson Friend’s award-winning book Kentucke’s Frontiers.

Friend recently won the 2011 Kentucky Governor's Award for Kentucke’s Frontiers. The prize is given once every four years for that state's best book related to Kentucky history.

The book exposes Kentucky’s little-known transformation from a democracy that offered opportunity for all to a patriarchy that supported the rights of white men while limiting or eliminating those of white women, African Americans, and Native Americans. In Frontiers, Friend explores political, military, religious, and other public records to recreate the story of how Kentucky abandoned its dreams of egalitarianism in favor of white male privilege.

by Jennifer Jernigan, CHASS student intern

CHASS Names New Members to Advisory Board

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences welcomed two new members to its Board of Advisors during its fall 2011 meeting. Both are alumni of the college.

Carol Rahmani (BA ’71, MS ’75, PhD ’81, Psychology) Rahmani worked as a school psychologist and administrator of student support services in the Wake County Public School System for 29 years. Although she retired from her position as Senior Director of Counseling and Student Services in 2007, Rahmani maintains her licensure as a practicing psychologist in the state of North Carolina and remains active in the field by supervising psychologists in private practices and providing her services gratis for those in need. In memory of her husband, Rahmani established several endowments at NC State. Those endowments include scholarships for students of CHASS, the College of Engineering, the Wolfpack Club, and North Carolina State University’s Encore Program for Lifelong Enrichment.

Steve Bullard (BA ’85, Economics) Bullard earned his undergraduate degree in CHASS before the Department of Economics moved to the College of Management. Bullard later earned his MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Bullard is Corporate Banking Manager for BB&T’s Corporate Banking Group in the Triangle Region. He leads corporate business development for BB&T by servicing publicly traded companies, large private companies, hospitals, universities, and other large organizations.

The CHASS Board of Advisors supports and promotes the welfare and development of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences through advocacy, fundraising, and service.

by Jennifer Jernigan, CHASS communication intern

Psychologist Helps Evaluate Special Ed Assessment and Accountability

Assessing educational progress in schools has become increasingly important since the passage of No Child Left Behind, but significant questions remain about the best way to measure schools' effectiveness when it comes to working with children in special education programs. North Carolina State University will help address those questions as part of a new federally funded research effort targeting special education assessment and accountability.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences is providing $11.6 million over the next five years to create a National Center on Assessment and Accountability for Special Education (NCAASE). The University of Oregon is the lead institute in the initiative, and will be working with NC State and Arizona State University. NC State will receive $1.6 million of the funding over the next five years.

NCAASE is launching with two main goals: to better understand the academic growth of students with disabilities, and to determine which accountability mechanisms do the best job of accurately reflecting a school’s impact on students. Academic growth, in this context, is defined as a child’s improvement in reading and math skills over time.

Measuring academic growth is important because it reflects the amount of progress a student has made, rather than simply showing how a student is performing at a single point in time.

Currently, most accountability systems don’t track individual student growth. Instead, the performance of one year’s cohort is compared to a second year's cohort. Schools are then expected to show increases in achievement from one cohort to the next. “Imagine if you measured the height of one student in grade 3 in one year. Then, in the next year, measured the height of a new third grader to decide whether the first third grader had grown,” says Dr. Ann Schulte, a professor of psychology at NC State and leader of the NC State component of NCAASE. "There are some situations where comparing results from one cohort with results from a previous cohort provides an accurate gauge of a school's improvement, but many situations where it does not."

Schulte’s team at NC State will initially establish a baseline understanding of academic growth in students with disabilities by examining data collected by the N. C. Department of Public Instruction from 2001 to 2010. North Carolina was one of the first states to implement a testing program that allows growth to be assessed, and has one of the most robust datasets on academic growth in the country.

“Once we’ve established a baseline, we can better assess the performance of various schools,” Schulte says. “And then we can compare the schools’ actual performance to the way they were assessed under various accountability models. If the accountability model results are not consistent with a school’s actual performance, something is clearly wrong.”

by Matt Shipman, NC State News Services

Head for the Hill

An internship on Capitol Hill changed her life. Alumna Sandra Latta wants to give current students the same opportunity.

When Sandra Latta (Political Science ’84) first came to NC State in the early 1980s, she was certain she wanted to be an attorney. She even helped found the Pre-Law Club at NC State. Deep down, though, there was something else she really wanted to do.

“I wanted to work on the Hill,” Latta confessed. “But to me, that sounded analogous to saying I wanted to go to Hollywood and be discovered.” Today, she serves at the Pentagon as Deputy Chief of Legislative Affairs for the U.S. Department of the Navy.

You might say politics was in Latta’s genes. Her mother was the first woman ever elected to public office in Mocksville, NC. Her dad, J. Edward Latta (NC State, Agronomy, ‘50) was a WWII vet who was also involved with town politics. In high school, Latta took her first steps into the halls of government herself when she spent a week serving as a page at the state legislature.

As a junior, she wrote to Congressman Bill Hefner to try to secure an internship, but the positions were filled. The congressman wrote her back, however, encouraging her to apply again at the end of her senior year. Latta did.

“Fortunately, Congressman Hefner’s office carved out the stipend from their office budget,” said Latta. “My internship was everything to me. Without it, I’m not sure I would have ever realized my dream of working on Capitol Hill. I don’t know that I would have even had the courage to try.”

Her one-month internship turned into a 14-year job with Hefner and, so far, a 27-year career. Through the years, Latta began to fully appreciate the importance of her internship. At an NC State function in Washington, D.C., Latta met Rick Kearney, director of the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), and asked him if there was any money available to help students with internships. There was not.

Latta promptly established an endowment fund called the Latta Washington Internship Scholarship which provides $1500 each year for a student who has applied and been accepted into an internship program in Washington, D.C.

“Sandra feels it is a tremendous advantage for students to be able to intern in the nation’s capital and she knows how expensive that is,” Kearney said. “Most Washington internships, unlike the ones here in Raleigh, do not pay. You’re up there on your own. Housing is extremely expensive, and transportation is tough. You can’t afford to have a car there. Everything’s expensive.”

It’s an all-too-common and discouraging refrain, and Latta was tired of hearing it. “I just came across too many people—both here in Washington and in North Carolina—who said, ‘Oh I would love to have interned in Washington,’ but they couldn’t afford to come here. It broke my heart to hear it,” Latta said.

Hayden Bauguess, a sophomore majoring in Political Science, is the first recipient of the Latta Washington Internship Scholarship. From May 16 to June 3, 2011, he interned for Congressman Howard Coble of North Carolina’s 6th Congressional District. Bauguess is pictured here with the congressman.

“I really wanted to do an internship in Washington, and felt lucky to be accepted for one in Congressman Coble’s office,” Bauguess said. “However, the internship was unpaid, so the scholarship meant that much more to me. I did all kinds of jobs, including running errands, answering the phone, and giving tours of the Capitol. The money I received helped cover the financial strain that was put on my parents during my time in Washington.”

That’s the point, said Latta: to make it easier for kids to pick up and go get real-world experience.

“For somebody who’s struggling to be in college, to take a month away to be up here and, at most, break even, that’s a tough financial commitment,” Latta said. “I wanted to help take the financial pressure off a little bit. It also gave me a way to honor my past. It’s my way of giving back.”

Although it’s the money the recipient needs and that Latta provides, the real gift is the chance.

“To me it’s all about opportunity,” Latta said. “I was given that opportunity, and there was a lot of luck involved. This endowment is helping someone else have a little bit of that luck, a little bit of that magic.”

By Christa Gala

MFA Student Wins Second Nebula Award

A poem for 9/11 by NC State's Poet in Residence

A Finger
by John Balaban
NC State University Poet in Residence

After most of the bodies were hauled away
and while the FBI and Fire Department and NYPD
were still haggling about who was in charge, as smoke cleared,
the figures in Tyvek suits came, gloved, gowned, masked,
ghostly figures searching rubble for pieces of people,
bagging, then sending the separate and commingled remains
to the temporary morgue set up on site.
This is where the snip of forefinger began its journey.

Not alone, of course, but with thousands of other bits not lost
or barged off with the tonnage for sorting at the city landfill.
A delicate tip, burnt and marked “finger, distal” and sent over
to the Medical Examiner’s, where forensic anthropologists
sorted human from animal bones from Trade Center restaurants,
all buried together in the Pompeian effect of incinerated dust.

The bit of finger (that might have once tapped text messages,
potted a geranium, held a glass, stroked a cat, a lover’s face,
tugged a kite string along a beach) went to the Bio Lab
where it was profiled, bar-coded, and shelved in a Falcon tube.
Memorial Park, that is to say: the parking lot behind the ME,
droned with generators for the dozens of refrigerated trucks
filling with human debris, while over on the Hudson at Pier 94
families brought toothbrushes or lined up for DNA swabbing.

As the year passed, the unidentified remains were dried out
in a desiccation room--humidity pumped out, heat raised high--
shriveled, then vacuumed sealed. But the finger tip had
a DNA match in a swab from her brother. She was English.
30 years old. She worked on the 105th floor of the North Tower.
The Times ran a bio. Her friends posted blogs. Her father
will not speak about it. Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan.
In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored.
Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.