So far we have designed this blog, wrote a bunch of entries on it, created several about pages, and completed/posted our first dialogue on visibility. And we have met for several hours on three different Fridays. I think we have done a lot! But how can we translate all of this work into a book chapter that is due at the end of next month? I thought I would start a new category today in which we could write about possible ways to take what we are doing here and turn it into a more formal piece of academic prose. My hope is that if we dedicated some space to thinking through how to do this, it might make the whole process easier or smoother or less stressful. What do you think, KCF?

While I don’t have much to write right now (it’s 5:30 and I think I need to eat), I wanted to throw out an example that I just came across. In Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation, Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez set out to produce a “spoken” book. I hope to skim this book soon (maybe tonight or tomorrow) in order to give you more information about what Freire means by calling their project a spoken book. From a quick glance, the format seems to be an informal and free-flowing dialogue between Freire and Faundez with the opening pages focusing on their own background and a brief mention of the origins of the project. One more formatting note: there are no chapters, only sections broken up with (sometimes random) topics in bold. As I look over this book it makes me think that we might want to pose more questions to each other over the blog and then answer them (in comments, our own posts and in our in-person recorded dialogues). We might be able to incorporate those questions + responses into our formal chapter. We could do the entire article in dialogue form (like Freire and Faundez) or we could mix in dialogue bits along with some other more formal (and collective) bits of prose.

Do you know of any useful models that we might draw upon for formatting our article?