Part One: Reflect on the value of diabloguing together and on the process of doing this project (what have we learned from each other and what we have learned from the experience of blogging/reflecting on blogging).

I love our diablog. When we began it back in June, I anticipated that it would be helpful for documenting the process of our collaborative writing project and of making it easier, with our very busy schedules, for staying on track. I also anticipated that it could enable us to expand what parts of the thinking and writing process get valued and deemed worthy of attention by the academy. What I didn’t anticipate was how central our collaborative diablog would be to the development, processing, and practicing of our ideas about feminist pedagogy and blogging.

Because we wrote our chapter, in its various parts, on and through the blog, we didn’t just use our writing as a way to document (or capture) what we have learned/what we think about feminist pedagogy and blogging. Instead, we used our writing to engage in the practices that we were striving to reflect on and theorize about. Our collaboration became less of a project that we needed to finish (and fast!-we didn’t have that much time to write it), and more of a feminist experience that we wanted to engage in.

Hmm….maybe we should rename this blog a collaborative experience with feminist pedagogy instead of a collaborative project on feminist pedagogy? It also seems appropriate, at this point, to mention (yet again) our new mantra (and the title of our manifesto): this is not a how-to manual, but an invitation to engage. We used our blog to engage with ideas, to critically reflect on our thoughts about feminist pedagogy and then to practice those ideas through blogging.

Before we started this project, I had been blogging on my own for over a year. From that experience,  I had learned a lot about the value of blogging while teaching with blogs–like how blogging while teaching encourages you to experiment with teaching strategies and enables you to continue being a scholar even as you are managing multiple classrooms. But most of what I learned was about me as an individual (writ large) scholar, thinker and teacher. In doing this collaborative diablog with KCF, I still learned a lot about my self/selves, but I also learned a tremendous amount about the value of sharing my ideas with concrete (and known) others and of creating new ideas and understandings with those others. One thing that was so exciting about this collaborative experiment is that I was able to envision (and practice) a way of collaborating and engaging in shared knowledge production that did not come at the expense of my own positionality. In fact, our collaboration enabled me to access my feminist troublemaking self more effectively; through our dialogues and diablogs, I have been able to clarify further how my positioning as a white feminist troublemaker, who strives to unsettle, disrupt and expose the production of ideas, informs my own blogging and teaching practices. And I have been able to learn how my troublemaking self (and the ideas/perspectives that inform that self) our connected to and always shaped in relation to others and their ideas and perspectives.

Well, hopefully that makes sense. As I was writing it, I began to realize that I was touching upon many of the different points of our manifesto–like praxis, shared knowledge production, and even (just a little) “serious” academic work. Did we have a word count for this section? Was it 500 words? Mine is 510.