President

• B.J. Zamora, Cleveland Community College

• Jo Ann Buck, Guilford Technical Community College

• Barbara Rusher, Central Carolina Community College

• Barbara Taylor, Cleveland Community College

• Carol Marion, Guilford Tech

• Rick Lewis, Sandhills Community College

• Melissa Byrd, Lenoir Community College
• Deborah Doolittle, Coastal Carolina Community College
• Sharon Mills, Carteret Community College

• Anne Helms, Alamance Community College
• Michael G. Spinks, Piedmont Community College
• Open

• Tom Hearron, Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute
• Jessica Saxon, Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute
• Brett Wallen, Cleveland Community College

According to the CEI Constitution, the duties of a regional rep are as follows: "Regional Representatives will communicate with faculty within their respective regions; represent faculty within their regions; attend regularly scheduled Executive Board meetings, as well as annual business and regional meetings; work with the Board to nominate representatives when vacancies arise. " If you would like to fill one of the open positions, please contact B. J. Zamora.

Greetings to everyone! I hope that you've had a great summer and are looking forward to returning to the classroom. This brief newsletter is only a taste of what is to come for 2007-08. I hope to publish a monthly issue so we can all keep track of what's going on around our state. You can help by communicating regularly. The primary responsibility for this will fall to the regional representatives, but I encourage each individual member to send information, announcements, news, trivia, curiosities, events, projects, plans, goals—whatever you think might be of interest to our members. If you want to have any kind of regular column(s), we can do it. Ideally, I'd like to have a monthly report from each college, but if that's asking too much, then at least a monthly report from each region.

My challenge to you is to send info by mid-month so we can publish around the first of the following month. You can e-mail me at the address above; if you prefer, you can call me at 336-334-4822, ext. 2204. Let me know what you want to see. Here are some suggestions to get you thinking:

• Definitely a good article on the fall conference (Tom, BJ named you as a potential volunteer!).
• Perhaps an article recruiting new members (BJ suggested sending the newsletter directly as an attachment to ALL English departments at all the colleges...). Any volunteers for this one?
• Perhaps an article on the state of English in the community colleges? Are we seeing any major changes? Do more students have to take developmental courses first? How have all the plant closings and layoffs affected our teaching loads and courses? How well are we working with our local universities? Any new and innovative programs? This would probably be a compilation of info from our respective colleges. If you send your data, I can pull something together here (unless someone is keen to write it).
• What are you reading for pleasure or class? Which books rock and which are schlock?
• What's happening with your full-timers? What about your part-timers? New buildings? New programs? Progress in the "Learning college" project? Who's traveling, writing, presenting? Any awards?

CEI Fall Conference
Refuel your enthusiasm in October! The CEI 2007 Fall Conference, will be held at the Broyhill Inn and Conference Center in Boone, October 21-23. Perched on a hill high above the mountain town of Boone, the Broyhill offers a tranquil place to get away, with delicious food and time to visit with your colleagues before and after a dozen sessions of thought-provoking presentations.

On behalf of the Board of CEI, I want to thank all of our members for your contributions and efforts toward both CEI and our profession. As English instructors, we stand at the portal through which all college students must pass as they move toward true independence and success in life. Without the skills in both the written and spoken word that we provide them in our classes, those students would not so easily take their rightful places in society. Of course, such responsibility makes us also targets for scrutiny and review more than many other college instructors. That is why CEI must continue to act as a support system and as a repository for ideas we all can access in order to do our work well. Providing that tradition of scholarly camaraderie and intellectual stimulation, as it has for the past 35 years, is what CEI is all about.

But CEI needs you! We need you to volunteer to present synopses of your work and innovative ideas at our Fall Conferences. We need you to volunteer to serve as regional representatives and members on our Board. We need you to suggest more ways in which we can help you out in your classes. We need you to tell us what CEI can do to further improve and serve its mission. We want you to help us recruit new members so that every college and every English department in North Carolina has a voice in CEI. Finally, we want you to feel comfortable and welcome as members of the best state academic organization in North Carolina: CEI!

Let us all work together to meet the challenges facing us as college English instructors in North Carolina. Together we all can truly make a difference in the lives of our students, our colleagues, and ourselves. 

NCCEI President,
B. J. Zamora, Cleveland Community College

Carteret Community College

• Louise Brimmer and Sharon Mills opened a chapter of Sigma Kappa Delta, the English honor society for two-year colleges. They already have thirty-five members from across disciplines.
• We celebrated April as national poetry month. Every day one of us e-mailed a poem to everyone in GroupWise. Often others sent out more poems as responses.
• We had successful "Evening of American Poetry" in April, too. Students and faculty read poems by American poets starting with Anne Bradstreet and coming up to the present.
• Louise and Sharon both received a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to attend a week long workshop in Boston on the Lyceum Movement. They are planning to offer a presentation on the experience at the fall conference, so look for their session.

• The Faculty in Training (FIT) program continues to be a big success, drawing applicants from a variety of disciplines. Mac Frank heads this venture, with the more-than-able assistance of our very own Jo Ann Buck.
• We have hired two new FT instructors in English and would like to welcome Steve Taylor and Michael Brock. Don't worry. We'll be sure they sign up for CEI!
• We are also developing an online degree program. This will be offered fully online – no face-to-face classes. We'll keep you posted.

• Communicaton, English, and Humanities Professor Ron Layne has been named Dean of Instruction. His term will begin January 1, 2008. Ron plans to continue to teach one or two classes per semester.
• Bruce B. Rutherford served in the Marine Corps for twenty-six years as a pilot, including two tours in Vietnam. He is now retired and teaches ENG 111 and 112 at Sandhills. His recent memoir, First Mission, is published in the Summer 2007 issue of Whistling Shade.

• Three English and humanities instructors at VGCC (Dr. John Beck, Wendy Frandsen, and Aaron Randall) have published Southern Culture: An Introduction. Published by Carolina Academic Press in July 2007 specifically for HUM 122 Southern Culture course (HUM 122), "this book examines the origins and evolution of the region's culture and focuses on six key patterns that have defined it: agrarianism, class relations, race relations, gender and family traditions, evangelical Christianity, and political traditions.
• Click here for more information, including the table of contents and introductory chapter (30-page PDF). You will also find a link for ordering a complimentary copy.

Call for Papers

Do you ever reach that point in the semester when you wonder why your students are in college? When you wonder if their desire for a degree is fueled only by their desire for a job with a high salary? Do you ever idealistically wish for a classroom full of students who love to learn the way we all did when we were children? Why do some students lose that love? What can we do to reawaken it? For thirty-five years, CEI presenters have shared their knowledge, ideas, projects, assignments, and enthusiasm. If you have any ideas you would like to share with your fellow/sister English instructors, now is your chance! If you want to make a presentation at the CEI 2007 Fall Conference, please review the Call for Presentations.

The Open Door

The summer 2007 issue of The Open Door, the in-house publication of the North Carolina Community College System, is now available. For back issues from 1999 through 2007, please click here.

On the Cutting Edge

The summer 2007 issue of On the Cutting Edge, the summer 2007 edition of the North Carolina Community College System's Virtual Learning Community, is now available.