So, not quite there on the word limit, I’m wondering if I’m trying to fit too much in here. I could maybe cut some of the second paragraph if in our “about us” section of the intro addresses some of the points I bring up here. I basically narrowed down and braided together the three posts we suggested we pull from at our last meeting for the intro. What do you think SLP?

My life is about stories. I love to tell and listen to stories, I see the value of stories, I write stories, and I would not be who I am without these many stories. To me, blogs are but one of many ways that I share, collect, and disseminate these stories that mean so much to me. I love the idea of sending my thoughts and stories out into the cybersphere in hopes that someone might stumble across it and feel a connection. This is true of both my personal blogging and my use of blogs in my feminist classrooms. I have used blogs to counter what I see as a visible gap in diverse voices in the cooking blogosphere. I created La Kitchen Chicana in July of 2009, which purposefully blends storytelling with recipes and situates my experiences as a femme, lesbian, Chicana feminist with food histories from the Southwest and the Midwest. I use blogs to speak back to or against marginalization of Chicana/Latinas. In the fall of 2008 I created a blog for the students in my Chicana/o-Latina/o Gender and Sexuality Studies course offered through the Department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota. Part of the draw for doing this was my frustration with googling “Chicana and gender/sexuality” and coming up with hardly any content of scholarly interest. Course blogging is about creating resources that serve my current students and others who may be interested in the topics after the course ended. This is especially vital in the era of attacks on ethnic and women’s studies. To me, this epitomizes the power and potential of using blogs in the feminist classroom.

I have also relied on blogs as necessary and valuable creative writing outlets for my students and myself. I have worked on incorporating blogging as a means to increase students’ confidence with writing. I love enriching my courses through blogs that facilitate connections between examples from “daily life” to the theoretical foundations on feminisms that I teach. I believe in the potential of transformative learning as a blogger, as an avid reader of blogs, and as someone who loves to bring the joys of blogging to my many communities and my wonderful students.