Ph.D., Northwestern University
Living Learning Academic 133
828.262.2419
wentworthja@appstate.edu

Curriculum Vitae [pdf]

This (2009-2010) school year started brilliantly with a seventieth birthday party that I relive regularly, slid downward to the death of my dear and wonderful father-in-law in late October, took a turn upward with the birth of our second grandchild at Thanksgiving, and wound up its first half with nine of us snowed in with no power for Christmas—a blast.

As I near the end of my career as a teacher, I’ve collected a stack of projects, all of which are interesting. I’d like to make some sort of contribution to interdisciplinarity, so I’m engaged with Richard Carp in thinking through the tangle that makes up “integration,” the heart of interdisciplinary work. We have recently co-authored a book chapter on interdisciplinary politics at Appalachian, in The Politics of Interdisciplinary Studies, ed, Augsberg and Henry, that used some of my current research on Watauga College and examined the overall development of the program and its relations with the rest of campus, especially administrators. We have come out of a very difficult time in a challenging, certainly not safe, but promising place in a University College that houses interdisciplinary programs, most with their own degrees, general education, now far more interdisciplinary, and advising. Check out University College when you get the chance.

Another highly interdisciplinary project came up last summer when my wife, Nancy, and I visited old friends in Turkey. We got a first-class tour, and I was asked to write text for what is mostly a picture book of selected sites in Turkey, including one, called Gümüshane, not too well known. My job is to comment on aspects of each place, so I’ve written prose and a poem (in a style appropriate to the place) for each site. Overall, in any honest way available, I’ve suggested that Gümüshane is worth a traveler’s time and effort.

Over the last ten years, I’ve been a member of the Expressive Arts Collective, a group of four founders and three additional core members, and a few others now, a group from Psychological Counseling and Human Development, Theatre and Dance, Music, Psychology, and Interdisciplinary Studies. We wrote a deeply collaborative book in 2003, and are now engaged in writing a second, for which I hope to supply the philosophical foundations. I’ve completed a draft chapter as the basis for discussion and interview of members. I’ll rethink and modify the language to fit our group. In addition to working on the book, I’m teaching a graduate class on Poetry and Therapy. That is exciting and challenging. Another aspect of the Expressive Arts work and interdisciplinarity is teaching in each other’s classes; last semester, I taught in five. That’s fun! We also do conferences and performances together, with a Happening scheduled for the fall.

I’ve begun work on a book about Watauga College, previously a part of IDS, but now a stand-alone program called Watauga Global Community. I’ve done many interviews and will continue doing that as well as looking into the history of education over the past sixty years to see where Watauga fits. I’ve read many documents about the beginning of Watauga and the career of Earth Studies, and I’ve seen many old pictures, old Mug Books and East Undergrounds that leave me grinning and groaning. Hope to be in touch with as many former Wataugans as possible.

There is also the ever-present, nagging impulse to get more poetry published. Writing it is not a problem; I write regularly and have hundreds of poems; doing the steady, tedious work of getting published is the problem. All I need to do is get going. Hummmmm, where have I heard that before?

Thus, I continue to do interdisciplinary work and did serve in a pinch last year as Interim Director of IDS, during which time I worked on the Non-Profit Management minor and certificate, which has now been approved, and on a consortium agreement among ASU, UNC-G, NCA&T, and Guilford College to create Transcend USA, an organization that promotes Peace and Conflict Resolution education and practice. That process is nearly completed. Currently I’m not teaching any IDS courses. I teach a Watauga Global Community/General Honors Junior Seminar on Japanese Literature in the spring and Poetry Writing Workshop and Myth and Meaning in the fall—both in Watauga, though I may add an Honors section in the fall. I’m no longer part of the Watauga Core, which I miss in some ways, but this gives me the freedom to design new courses like Poetry and Therapy. I’d like to teach a course called Process Thought, one called Solutions, i.e., effective ways to deal with conflict, poverty, environmental issues, and education, and one called Ecstatic Poetry because writing about joy is so hard and so wonderful.