So here’s what I have for my first two paragraphs. It was tough–so many ideas swimming around in my head. Does it lack personality (or a person)? I also wonder if it seems a little too vague. What do you think, KCF?
Last summer I fell in love with blogging. Sure I had been using blogs in my classes since January 2007, but it wasn’t until I started writing in my own blog in May 2009 that I realized what a powerful space for radical transformation, critical and creative expression and community-building it is. Now it is over a year later and blogs play a central role in all aspects of my life as a thinker, learner, writer, teacher and researcher. I use my personal and course blogs to archive ideas, to document research, to put seemingly disparate ideas or representations into conversation, to offer up various accounts of myself, to build relationships with visible and invisible/known and unknown readers, to experiment with pedagogical techniques, to cultivate effective writing and thinking habits, to disrupt the rigid rules and disciplinary borders that discourage new ideas and unexpected connections, to lay bare my own thinking and writing process, to practice what I teach, to develop connections between my different academic selves, and to remind myself and others that being a thinker/learner/educator can be energizing and fun. Perhaps most importantly, writing on my own blogs and using blogs in the classroom enables me to access my feminist troublemaking self.
As a white feminist troublemaker, I use blogs to reject rigid boundaries between disciplines, find creative ways to connect my research with my life, and infuse my ideas with a sense of humor. I play with what should count as rigorous scholarship or as proper objects of study. I cultivate a curiosity about the world that is motivated by a desire for engagement and transformation as opposed to knowledge. And I invite my readers to join me in a troubling space, where uncertainty and critical and creative reflection on failure are encouraged.
Does my last sentence make sense?
SLP I think your intro is really great. I love the line, “to practice what I teach” such a clever turn play on “practice what I preach.” I think you are in here a lot, the flow definitely mirrors how you like to play with words and you’ve packed a lot of punch in this small space. I’m thinking maybe I should change mine now!
The last sentence sounds good to me – although “a troubling space” kind of sounds weird to me. As I am someone who knows why you’re so into troublemaking and making trouble others might not understand what you mean with that phrase (maybe?). I guess I am also a little thrown off by the discussion of failure just at the end. Maybe you should add one more sentence about why you find this practice valuable, because I don’t want someone to read this and then think that you’re a failure or that you’ve failed to actually do any of the key points you’ve made in paragraph one on why you use blogs. Does that make sense? I’m looking forward to talking about this more today!