So, thanks for your generous offer of your extra 11 words but I’m glad I pushed myself to revise my intro. The first one had some weird syntax things going on and so I’ve just cleaned it up a bit here. Cleaning it up also meant that I made it within our word limit (yay!) quite a feat for me! I also made the first paragraph into two for the revision. Following your suggestion on bringing in more semicolon use I gave it a go in sentence #3 – is this correct usage? I asked ALN to help me figure that out and she and I were going back and forth as to whether this would actually be a comma or a semicolon. Let me know what you think as you’ve been the expert semicolon user as of late! I should really brush up on my semicolon use rules! Here it is!

My life is about stories. I live to tell and listen to stories, I honor the value of stories, write stories, and would not be who I am without these many stories. To me, blogs are one of many ways that I share, collect, and disseminate these stories that hold so much meaning. Blogging allows my thoughts and stories access to new audiences; in hopes that someone might stumble across them and feel a connection. This is true of both my personal blogging and my use of blogs in my feminist teaching. I have used my blog to counter what I see as a visible gap in diverse voices in the cooking blogosphere. I created my personal cooking blog in July of 2009 – purposefully blending storytelling with recipes and situating my experiences as a femme, lesbian, mestiza, Chicana feminist.

I use blogs to speak back to or against marginalization of Chicanas/Latinas. In the fall of 2008 I created my first course blog for a course offered through the Department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota. Part of the draw for 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 has ended. This is especially vital in the era of attacks on ethnic and women’s studies disciplines. 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 enrich my courses through blogs that facilitate connections between examples from “daily life” and the feminist theory that I teach. I believe in the potential for transformative learning as a blogger, an avid reader of blogs, and as someone who loves to bring the joys of blogging to my many communities and my wonderful students.