After another very productive meeting SLP and I have the (final?!) game plan for the rest of the month and all of the work we will be doing to finish up our chapter. We also have decided to submit a more reflective piece to Radical Teacher. See the call for papers here. Since this article is due on September 15th we will be quite busy as we finish up our first article (which is already at 16 pages!) and then move onto the next one. So, here’s a few notes on what we discussed during our meeting on Friday.

First, we realized that we needed to draw together a couple of bullet point lists for two of our topics (creating community & engagement/evaluation) that were currently missing in our draft. All of these points had come out of our conversations and are in addition to the two points that we chose to write about in our article.

Here our rough list that we made for Engagement/Evaluation. As I was the one typing and taking notes, they are of course wordy wordy, but no worries SLP says that she will revise them for us and cut out the superfluous words.

• Blogging provides access at any time, not just in the classroom, and allows students ample opportunities for out of class connections/ideas.
• Sharing on a blog create avenues for collective consciousness-raising or for creating connections between one another’s experiences.
• Blogs provide many different ways to access different ideas such that blogging allows for a form of active engagement as opposed to passive “learning.”
• Blogging facilitates multiple directions for evaluation: evaluation of students’ work, evaluation of teachers’ performance, evaluation of class exercises, evaluation of each other and our own ideas.

We also created a rough outline of some ideas for our Creating Community bullet point list, which SLP wrote down some notes about. I think she might post the list and then we can continue to work on it in the next week or so.

We also modified our structure of the article from our original plan because of word limit concerns. After writing the first two sections we realized that section three which was going to be some examples of our assignments that we’ve used on blogs was going to take up too much space in the article that we don’t have! So, instead we have decided to do the following:

Change Part III – to a list of examples on the following things –

• How we use (teaching) blog
• How we ask students to use blog
• How we use (personal) blog

Then we will have our conclusion that we will write together.

When we talked about the conclusion we thought that it would be good to try to explicitly try to tie back our theoretical terms – we want to weave together our thoughts on accessing our feminist selves with specific attention to busting binaries. In this way, we’ll be busting the binaries – using the dialogue as our writing has challenged linear writing or conventional theory/knowledge production. In other words, in our conclusion we want to stress that we’re not just theorizing the need to bust binaries but we’re doing it with Diablogical – which also relates back to modeling various processes for our students. We’re not just talking about it, we’re doing it!

Our assignments/timeline for the rest of the week!

• Post everything by Thursday at 5:00pm. So this will leave us time to review/comment on each other’s responses.
• All responses posted for section II.
• SLP will post a new page of some pre-generated lists for part III – KCF will add in her thoughts after she does this.

By Friday time we meet –

Post some thoughts or pre-outline for our new article for Radical Teacher