I finally did it! Feeling like this took years to do, I am really valuing the flexibility of blogging (which is not a topic we’ve really spoken about) but how a blog will always be there for you when you’re ready to post! Thank you Diablogical for helping me get t his out, and SLP for allowing me to do it on my time! I am going to plug these into our article and then also spend some time thinking through the rest of our assignments (hopefully tonight or tomorrow) by our meeting on Friday. Also, I haven’t had a chance to look at your responses really so I want to do that and make some comments! I’ll be trying to do that in the next few days as well!

Community:

Establishing community through authenticity and accountability

Part of my pedagogical approaches every course I teach involves the creation of some type of community within the classroom. In Women’s/Gender Studies it seems that this is an imperative for ensuring ample room for new ideas/different perspectives to emerge. Establishing and fostering a feminist community through blog space allows for more opportunities for virtual consciousness raising to occur. In this way, students are able to access their feminist selves in multiple venues – in class, online, in the context of course work, and in connecting/applying coursework to their own lives. They might also be able to have a variety of venues within the context of the class to share different “selves” – their feminist self, their writerly self, their student self, their activist self (etc.) – in a more fluid and integrated ways, thus dissolving the borders between students’ “real life” and their “school life.” In terms of my own blog, I create the community in which I want to belong through the way that I write, what I write about, and how I choose to share that writing with others.

Engaging in shared knowledge production

Blogging allows for students and teachers to create knowledge together. While posts may initially come from one writer the process of engaging with a blog (through reading, writing posts/commenting) create opportunities for new shared knowledges to emerge. I enjoy how blogging allows for multiple voices to be heard in conversation with one another and how the use of course blogging further facilitates dissolving the usual binary of theory-maker/theory-reader. While most of my blog assignments ask students to individually post and be in conversation with one another, I also see the potential power in asking students to do group work together on blogs which further instills a sense of communally produced knowledge. The great thing about blogging is that there are so many different ways to implement it into a course so that the instructor can really pick and choose what might be the best combination of assignments to encourage shared knowledge production in both explicit (group work/posts/comments) and implicit (reading, individual posts) ways. Producing knowledge together through course blogging also empowers students to create alternative (cyber) forms of community with peers, instructor and within the greater interconnected webs of the Internet as well as valuing feminist principles of non-hierarchical knowledge production.