BCC Reads!
Thank you to all who entered. Congratulations to the winners! Here are the winners' names, with links to their winning entries if available:
- William Mari-essay
- Jennifer Craig-essay
- Paulina Hernandez-watercolor
- Kelly Ondracek, Andrew McArthur, Lieu Nguyen and Rylan Evans-group project essay
- Armstor James Clayton Jr.-essay
For the third consecutive year, BCC students, faculty and staff are joining together as a learning community to study a common text. Selected by BCC instructors and librarians from the college and King County Library System*, it is being used as a vital platform for classroom assignments across the curriculum, book group discussions, a scholarship contest, community outreach programs, a visual art exhibition, film festival and author’s residency. The goals of BCC Reads! are:
- to stimulate interdisciplinary teaching and learning,
- to foster student scholarship,
- to strengthen the sense of community within our campus, and
- to provide cultural leadership in our community.
BCC Reads!
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Review: AsiaSource. April 20, 2004. http://www.asiasource.org/arts/julieotsuka.cfm
“Julie Otsuka’s debut novel When the Emperor was Divine tells the story of a Japanese American family forced to live in an internment camp during World War II. In five concise chapters, Otsuka presents the points of view of each family member creating an intimate and detailed portrait of people living through one of America's darkest and most shameful periods: the internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans for 3 1/2 years. Though her story centers around this tragic time in American history, Otsuka's unsentimental style strips characters to their core to create a powerful story of exile and racism that is particularly resonant today.”
Excerpt:
“In the living room she emptied all the books from the shelves except Audubon's Birds of America. In the kitchen she emptied the cupboards. She set aside a few things for later that evening. Everything else-the china, the crystal, the set of ivory chopsticks her mother had sent to her fifteen years ago from Kagoshima on her wedding day-she put into boxes. She taped the boxes shut with the tape she had bought from Lundy's Hardware and carried them one by one up the stairs to the sunroom. When she was done she locked the door with two padlocks and sat down on the landing with her dress pushed up above her knees and lit a cigarette. Tomorrow she and the children would be leaving. She did not know where they were going or how long they would be gone or who would be living in their house while they were away. She knew only that tomorrow they had to go.”
Relevance across the Curriculum with Content Addressing:
English, History, Communications, Ethnic Studies, Education, Psychology, Sociology, Business, Media, Sports and Wellness, American Studies, Criminal Justice
BCC Reads! program funders and partners include the National Endowment for the Humanities, Seattle Public Library, King County Library.
For More Information:
Please contact Gordon Leighton (425-564-6168), Alan Yabui (425-564-3083) or Diane Douglas (425-564-2550)
* Thanks to the 2004-05 BCC Reads! selection committee: Nicole Longpre, chair; Chapple Langemack; Wendy Pickering; Beverly Reil; Clay Cooper; Denise Johnson; Diane Douglas; Donna Meek; Ewan Magie; Lee Buxton; Nancy Gonlin; Paula Laine; Sayumi Irey; Scott Bessho; Tim Kennedy
The Center for Liberal Arts is very pleased to announce the selection of next year’s BCC Reads! book:
THE BOTANY OF DESIRE by MICHAEL POLLAN
Below is an excerpt and description of the book. It was selected in part because of its applicability to diverse disciplines across the curriculum—life sciences, psychology, health and wellness, sociology, business, art and art history, philosophy, English, communications, journalism and media. Faculty who desire suggestions about incorporating it into their classes beginning in summer quarter should contact the Center for Liberal Arts.
Many thanks to a stellar selection committee composed of faculty, staff and a librarian from King County Library, one of our community partners for this project. Committee members included: Nicole Longpre, chair; Wendy Pickering; Celinda Spaulding; Connie Younkin; Denise Johnson; Gary Farris; James Torrence; Lee Buxton; Mary Slowinski; Scott Bessho; Stella Orechia; Susan Hampson.
Excerpt:
"We give ourselves altogether too much credit in our dealings with other species. Even the power over nature that domestication supposedly represents is overstated. It takes two to perform that particular dance, after all, and plenty of plants and animals have elected to sit it out. Try as they might, people have never been able to domesticate the oak tree, whose highly nutritious acorns remain far too bitter for humans to eat. Evidently the oak has such a satisfactory arrangement with the squirrel—which obligingly forgets where it has buried every fourth acorn or so (admittedly, the estimate is Beatrix Potter’s)—that the tree has never needed to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with us.
"The apple has been far more eager to do business with humans, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America. Like generations of other immigrants before and after, the apple has made itself at home here. In fact, the apple did such a convincing job of this that most of us wrongly assume the plant is a native. (Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew a thing or two about natural history, called it “the American fruit.”) Yet there is a sense—a biological, not just metaphorical sense—in which this is, or has become, true, for the apple transformed itself when it came to America. Bringing boatloads of seed onto the frontier, Johnny Appleseed had a lot to do with that process, but so did the apple itself. No mere passenger or dependent, the apple is the hero of its own story."
Description:
Pollan has an epiphany in his garden: what if the plant species humankind has nurtured over the last 10,000 years benefit as much from us as we do from them? Do humans choose to plant potatoes, or do potatoes attract humans like a flower lures a bee? Ablaze with this transformational vision, Pollan intertwines history, anecdote, and revelation as he investigates the connection between four plants that have thrived under human care--apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes--and the four human desires they satisfy in return: sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. In the process, he casts new light on the legend of Johnny Appleseed. Holland's mania for tulips serves as a catalyst for a galvanizing discussion of why we wouldn't exist if flowers hadn't evolved. His refreshingly open-minded consideration of marijuana leads to profound reflections on the workings of the brain and the role psychoactive plants have played in the evolution of religion and culture. And, finally, Pollan ponders the Pandora's box of genetic engineering when he plants a patch of NewLeaf, a beetle-killing potato patented by Monsanto. Pollan's dynamic, intelligent, and intrepid parsing of the wondrous dialogue between plants and humans is positively paradigm-altering. Donna Seaman, Booklist. Copyright © American Library Association.
FACULTY SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITY
NEH Grant
In conjunction with this year’s BCC Reads! program, the College has received a special grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to offer a faculty seminar on the Japanese-American internment during World War II. Participating instructors will form a small learning community to study the internment with national and local scholars, activists and former internees. Our goal is to foster faculty scholarship and stimulate interdisciplinary teaching about this critical part of our national and local history.
| Content: | Seminar exploring the history of the internment nationally and locally and its civil liberties ramifications for today. Interdisciplinary perspectives will include political science, history, literature, visual art, ethics, economics and cultural geography. |
| When: | 32 hours (weeknights or weekend days) from November 2004-Feburary 2005 |
| Who: | 15 selected instructors from diverse disciplines across the BCC campus |
| Honorarium: | $500 plus books, supplies and field trips |
| Requirements: | Commitment to teach the BCC Reads! book selection—When the Emperor Was Divine—during Winter and Spring quarters and to participate in related campus-wide programming |
| Application Deadline: | October 15, 2004 |
| Application Process: | Submit letter of interest to the CLA Office (R-240A or ddouglas@bcc.ctc.edu) with your field of expertise and reasons for wanting to participate in this seminar. State your availability to attend sessions on 4 Saturdays or 8 weekend evenings between November 2004 and February 2005. |
For further information, please contact Diane Douglas - 425.564.2550 or ddouglas@bcc.ctc.edu or Alan Yabui – 425.564.3083 or ayabui@bcc.ctc.edu.
Faculty Professional Development Day Keynote
November 5, 2004, 10:15-11:30 a.m. (Room - TBA)
Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project (www.densho.org) is an award-winning oral history collection that preserves the personal testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II. These irreplaceable firsthand accounts, coupled with historical images, related interviews and teacher resources, are available on a website which explores principles of democracy and promotes tolerance and equal justice for all. The founder and executive director of Densho will discuss its creation and demonstrate its use as a classroom resource for teaching and learning. This session is co-sponsored by the Center for Liberal Arts as part of this year’s BCC Reads! program and is partially supported through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Tom Ikeda is the founding Executive Director of Densho. He is a sansei (third generation Japanese American) who was born and raised in Seattle. Tom's parents and grandparents were incarcerated at Minidoka. In 1996, Tom visited the Survivors of the Shoah project in Los Angeles and was inspired by its work to collect the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. For the past six years Tom has volunteered his services to work at Densho. Prior to that, he was a Product Group General Manager at Microsoft Corporation where he developed multimedia CD-ROM titles. In 2004, he was honored for his leadership on Densho by the Washington Humanities Commission and the national Japanese American Citizens League.
Faculty Professional Development Day Workshop
November 5, 2004, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m. (Room - TBA)
BCC Reads! Teaching from an Interdisciplinary Perspective
BCC Reads! Faculty Co-Chair Gordon Leighton leads this panel discussion and workshop where instructors from multiple disciplines will discuss how they will approach this year’s BCC Reads! book in their classes. Panelists will share samples of assignments, discussion topics, resources and challenges from their own disciplinary lenses. Audience participation is welcome!
Film screening of Come See the Paradise
A late 1930s cross-cultural marriage is further complicated when the husband (Dennis Quaid) is jailed and forced into the army for union activism and the wife (Tamlyn Tomita) is forced with their daughter into a WWII relocation camp for being Japanese. Alan Parker's 1991 drama includes many scenes depicting the period and its racism, the internment, the camps, and the feelings of the Japanese Americans incarcerated in them.
Friday, November 12, 2004, 4:00-7:00 p.m., room R203. The film's running time is 135 minutes and will be followed by a discussion.
Event: Phil Lucas Film entitled Vis à Vis
Date: Thursday, November 18, 2004
Time: 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM
Room: C120 A & B Continental Room
Building: C Building
Vis à Vis was produced in association with Native American Public telecommunications. Indigenous performing artists James Luna (Luiseno) and Ningali Lawford (Walmajarri) compare perspectives on life and society using dialogue via satellite, scenes of their performances, and video diaries to inform the conversation. The film premiered in New York, December 4, 2003 at the Native American Film and Video Festival. 2003, 58 min.
Admission is free and open to the public
