Welcome to Constance Kampf's Cyberhome!I am currently a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, focusing on Computer Mediated Communication, Intercultural Communication, and Grantwriting. This site is a work in progress to share my activities as I work on completing my degree. My history in academia can be seen in my CV. My academic worklife includes:
TeachingMy teaching philosophy in based in mastery learning. I believe that all students are capable of learning how to write and speak effectively, and that we don't all do everything right the first time. I believe that group interaction in the classroom, detailed feedback and opportunities for improvement help students learn, retain, and link the course material to the world around them.
I am currently co-teaching Rhetoric 3671: Visual Rhetoric and Project Management I am also a member of the teaching teams for CE 4101: Project Management, and CE 4102: Capstone in the Civil Engineering Department at the U of MN. I teach the students about connecting their engineering proposals and reports to audience, purpose and action. The students in these classes are usually seniors about to graduate, and they really appreciate gaining a clearer sense of audience, purpose and action as they write. I have also taught the following courses in the Rhetoric Department at the University of Minnesota from 1999-2002:
My M.A. degree is in Teaching English as a Second Language, and I have also taught courses in Pronunciation and Oral Skills for non-native speakers of English at the Minnesota English Center. In addition I spent some time teaching for the T.A. English Program which helps International TA's with both their pronunication and their need for adapting to the cultural expectations that undergraduates have at the University of Minnesota.
ResearchCurrently, I am working on several projects that all will eventually connect in the area of intercultural communication.The cybersword cuts both ways is a project that I started in the spring of 2000. I was, and am still fascinated by the amzing number of sites dedicated to indigneous practices, artifacts and technologies. The question of are these technologies being appropriated or diffused, and how these cultural artifacts and technologies are influencing cultures around the world fascinates me. I am presenting this project in Maastricht, Netherlands in October 2002 for the Association of Internet Researchers Conference (A.O.I.R.) Learning how project managers acquire their skills is a project that I am working on with a team of researchers based out of the Civil Engineering Department who are working with MnDOT. The Prinicipal investigator is Karl Smith, and the team includes Brandon Pierce,Lori Engstrom and myself. We are doing a literature review of best practices in Project Management, focus groups for Project Managers in MnDOT to both evaluate the effectiveness of the current training for Project Managers and to collect information from expert project managers about how they acquired their skills. We hope to find evidence of communities of practice and more insight into how these communities work for MnDOT project managers. Integrating intercultural communication into the Technical Communication classroom is a project and passion of mine. As we speak more and more about localization and globalization, I hope we can find a way to adequately prepare our students to work effectively in a multicultural world where localization means learning how to work with and for audiences and writers from different cultures. I presented some thoughts from this project at the International Professional Communicator's Conference (IEEE) in Portland in both 1999, and 2002. Understanding intercultural communication issues in distributed work teams is another project that I am just beginning with Dr. Bernadette Longo in the Rhetoric Department, and Valarie Griep, a project management industry consultant. We are currently working on developing a framework for identifying and better understanding the role of intercultural communication in work teams that are distributed across several countries. PublicationsGrantseeking in an Electronic Age is a book that I am currently co-authoring. It will be published in Sam Dragga's Technical Communication series for Longman, and is scheduled to be released by Fall 2003. The first author is Victoria Mikelonis of the Rhetoric Department, and the second author is Signe Betsinger, a professor emeritus from the University of Minnesota. The chapters I contributed most to were on using the internet to find data to support your problem/need statement, and to find funding sources, as well as a chapter on using project management software as a planning tool.Other recent publications include:
ServiceSpending most of my adult life in a land grant university, I value service to the university and to the community.I have served the university by participating in promotion committees for the Center for Teaching and Learning Services, and co-presenting Grantwriting workshops with Dr. Victoria Mikelonis. I have also served the unversity as part of the PORTAL team from 2000-2001, a group that created a CD-ROM designed to help university employees think differently about sexual harassment, and nurture a unversity-wide culture that acknowledges diversity and creates a safe environment for everyone. PORTAL stands for the Power of Respect to Affect Lives. Finally, my service to the community comes out in the teaching of my favorite class,The Grants Class. This class encourages students to envision their piece of the world as a better place. I have been co-teaching this class with Dr. Victoria Mikelonis since January 1999. Our students really do change their world. One of the students in the most recent class received funding for a new roof and cooling system for a mission hospital in Pakistan. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to e-mail me at kampf001@umn.edu. |