Thanks for the valuable insights, especially, as Lanny puts it, into the social context in which you blog. Your comments are far too helpful to stay inside the comments, so I plan a new post soon to weave together your thinking here with mine. You are still teaching me though none of you (that includes Lizi) has studied with me for a couple of years!

Lanny,

Don Murray was one of my first inspirations as a young teacher in the early 80s. He was one of the real touchstones for me in terms of making teaching of writing real, of needing to write myself if I wanted to teach writing, of bringing the good sense (and humor) of a journalist into the rather stiff halls of composition. He helped many many teachers right up to his recent death–and he wrote a heck of a column for the Boston Globe, too. Glad you discovered him! I do think, however, that more young people would find writing-to-learn, writing-to-find-out-what-they-think not only valuable but pleasurable if we teachers didn’t make writing such an onerous chore, the final delivery mode of achievement.

But I agree with you in that there are very few formats for making the connection between formal and informal learning.

Not all students want to “accept plodding through the traditional academic paper and test and report and project in the classroom in a never-the-twain-shall-meet kind of spirit after they have had a taste of something else.” But we’ve been told in so many words that regurgitation is an important skill for staying competitive in the world. We must learn to synthesize, paraphrase, and articulate the bank of information given to us. And no one disagrees that these skills are invaluable. Where people seem to disagree, or not even really disagree, but where people seem to get stuck without even really knowing they’re stuck — is in how we introduce, practice, and utilize these skills.

Time is another issue, as far as blogging. I would love to blog, but I’ll be honest, I don’t want to blog alone. Perhaps I am mistaken in making that assumption.

Sometimes I feel as if I need permission. Not just to blog, but to make connections with what I’m learning to my own life. I still can’t tell sometimes if it’s selfish, if it’s distracting to the intellectual standards of the conversation. Frankly, there is information professors must transmit to their students. Lectures and summative testing are the first two obvious ways for transmitting and evaluating that knowledge. But on the other hand, it’s like putting on a mask every time you enter the classroom–the PC mask. How honest are we with each other wearing that mask? What goes left unsaid? Who chooses not to speak? Who does? Why?

I can never tell if it’s my own personal problem when I find myself struggling with these questions. Are these reflections just a guise for my low self-esteem and the fear of failing to articulate verbally? Or the fact that I learn differently, just as we all do, from other people and it is my responsibility to acquire the skills Middlebury demands of me? Or are my reflections valid? Do they warrant a discussion of change? Even more importantly, do they resonate with other students?

But they’re all valid questions. And if they’re all valid questions, they at least deserve to be asked. And one of the goals of education is indeed to provoke questions.

Oh bother, I’ve gone on again. I plan on writing my thesis on this sort of thing, so maybe we can talk more next year. Back to my *real work.*

Thank you, thank you for such a detailed, insightful, generous comment. When students such as you and Lizi take the time to respond to my rambling posts, I feel very lucky indeed, for you provide me and other readers with your own keen observations, experiences and understanding. In fact one of the most valuable parts of my blog is the response from you all.

I have much to say in response to your comment, so much that I will write a full post, pointing to your insights once I’ve had a chance to think about them.

(I wish you were blogging these thoughts—how helpful they would be to those researching and puzzling out next steps for our schools.)

~Barbara

We’re scrambling when we’re not on the blog, and by blog, I mean, another medium to formulate our thoughts, express them, and then share and converse. I took the Creative Process with Claudio Medeiros this fall, and we developed a similar community. Adding blogging to that community might have taken it to another level, but the reason why Claudio’s class works is

1)because the class is focused on process, how we move in and out and between stages, how we balance between reflection and action.

2)because of its interdisciplinary expectations — our performances were rooted in that bridge between the autobiographical and scholarly, the person and the artist. Who we are and who are becoming–in the context of history and our fluctuating present–mattered.

3)The mediums for exploring art/creativity/self/history (however you’d categorize the “discipline”) were not limited to books and papers. No, the mediums for Claudio’s class involved our bodies, our voices, our pastel fingers, our writing, film, music, and dance.

Now of course on BannerWeb, this class is listed under the Arts Division. So of course there’s going to be ART.

Your class was a Creative Writing course, so of course there’s going to be writing.

And neither classes have the same responsibility where most of our more scholarly and regimented disciplines are held accountable. However, something both you and Claudio and Jonathan Miller-Lane (from the Teacher Education department) have–is a vision. You have a working vision of education that you reflect and respond to day after day. You make modifications based on your reflections. You obviously sought out blogging as one of these modifications, and a big one it was. You allow your vision of education to evolve. And it’s not that we forget, Barbara. Ever since your class, I’ve been struggling to define and redefine what education and learning means for me. And I go back and forth. I remember your class and the very few others I’ve had like it, and I wonder — well, maybe it was really just me. Maybe, this type of learning is only limited to the arts. Yes, Barbara’s class was great–but now I have to find a major and stick with it and follow its rules. You say the blogging stops after the class. You’re right, it does. But the reflecting doesn’t stop.

I also took a sociology course, Students in Higher Education, with Peggy Nelson this past fall. One of many books we read was Ira Shor’s, Critical Teaching & Everyday Life. I remember staying up the whole night to write my response paper on this book, because it was talking about the very type of experience that you seem to be trying to create, and that you do create. Shor is a professor at CUNY, thus he works with community college students–students who have a life beyond academia. Unlike us, many of them have families, they work another job, and obviously don’t live on campus. Shor focuses on liberatory learning, on developing critical consciousness by starting from his students’ dailiy lives. He talks about reification and how we throw around concepts in lecture, in dialogue — but without making them real first. What I find so fascinating about Ira Shor is his ability to the interdisciplinary experience. He uses a Anne Sexton poem, the history and current controversies over marriage contracts, the feminist movement, and creative writing to set the stage for a COMMUNAL PROJECT.
So I started to think — wait, yes, this type of experience is possible beyond the art classes.

Our classes at Middlebury could be like that. Departments could be more communicative. Perhaps, there wouldn’t be a need for the Independent Scholar major if we were all in fact “independent scholars.” Professors across the board could utilize blogs. We could all meet in rooms where the chairs were arranged in a circle, or Coltrane Lounge was multiplied. In fact, professors could be blogging with one another across departments about educational visions. Perhaps, there might be more service-learning; perhaps, we’d have an Education major; perhaps, student clubs and organizations would then transgress boundaries, and those perspectives might step into the classroom more fervently. Would we be more active?

But what makes blogging so special? What makes Jonathan Miller-Lane’s class so memorable? Why is it that something about Claudio’s class remains with me? Well, these questions make me think of my Jterm class, Children and the Arts with Gregg Humphrey. We’re attempting to create art integrated lessons. The average elementary day has been reduced to Math and Literacy. No wonder fo many kids are bored at school. But shouldn’t the excitement and beauty of teaching exist in one’s opportunity to reinvent his/her passions in strange, challenging, and joyful ways–and by reinvent, I mean reinvent EVERY DAY.

We go to a liberal arts school where study across disciplines is valued, but how many changes do we see in the structure of that system?

You write, “It also has something to do with blogging outside a community–they can’t imagine anyone wanting to read about or respond to what they think about their studies, and they don’t want to blog to themselves alone.”

Of course we “don’t want to blog to [ourselves] alone.” Blogging means very little when no one is listening. Reading blogs without the ability to comment is far less interesting than having the kind of communication Lizi spoke of in her comment.

I think blogging is an amazing asset in which many individuals can come to call their own, but it is definitley not the only way, nor should it be. What is beautiful about you and blogging is that you have made it your own. And your students can feel that. If it was just another script from a pre-planned curriculum, we probably wouldn’t buy it. We buy it, or I bought it, because you as the facilitator, the professor–bring to the class a living example of how your vision of learning — whatever — is possible. And you do it creatively. And creativity is critical thinking at its best, and then we as students respond in a similar manner — but one of our own that we only come to understand as we reflect and respond ourselves with one another.

I’m ranting, yes. But I’ve been going over all this in my mind for what feel like a long time, and yet it’s only been a few years. A good friend of mine reminded me the other day of the invaluable qualities of lecture-driven courses. I stumbled defensively. I agreed with him, but I wanted to say more.

If anything, Barbara, you are helping students push at their definitions of education. Pushing at those limits helps us to decide for ourselves what we believe, what we want. However, it is still very difficult on this campus to go after the education you want when there still seems to be so many barriers that get in the way.

I’ll miss you in the spring, and I’m sorry I never stopped by in the fall. Nevertheless, there’s still the blog

We sure missed you at the conference and thought of you several times (in particular, when you were quoted during the University of Mary Washington presentation, and of course when we met Bitch Ph.D). I am dismayed but not surprised to hear of your experience with the FEAR FACTOR in your classroom. And as for your little rhyme, hey I doled out “design and assign.” We’re even, I’d say!

Thanks, Lizi, for responding! Glad to see you aren’t scared to write comments–heheh–you’re not one of the students I felt was fearful, just that you hadn’t really stepped back yet to find the connections between what you were learning, that this year you haven’t really been driving your own learning. Living the experience, immersing yourself in it is important, too–there’s got to be a balance between action and reflection. What I am after is a dismantling of the factory-model of education for a networked-learner-centered approach, and right now, using social software because it is both transparent and connected, seems to me to be one way we can effect some change. There are other ways to be sure. Your observations are helpful, and your frankness during our presentation fabulous!

I didn’t feel vulnerable when I blogged because of future employers or later embarrassments, but maybe it was because I already considered to be, even in your class, a personal activity. Since we had that freedom, and we were writing personal things, I think the blogs quickly lost their connection to academia. For some reason, students (myself included) are still assuming that their projects and time are categorically divided between academic and personal development.

I don’t know if it’s technology or blogging that will bridge our lives with what we’re learning in class, or teach us to not take ourselves so seriously. But it certainly is an outlet, and, so far, none others have managed to challenge the learning traditions.

Lizi
ps I remember that last picture!

I think someday though, that there’s going to be too much information to sift through and it won’t be worth anyone’s while to find every potential employee’s blog or flicker account.

I’ve often counseled students to “blog smart,” but I think I’d add to that “blog smart, but blog your heart.” (couldn’t resist the rhyme)

I sure am glad that you are fearless…

Lanny,
I absolutely agree that it doesn’t really matter what vehicle we choose for our conversations, but as Lizi wrote in a comment here on my blog a couple of years ago, “Last week I was on my my blog, reading one of Megan’s comments about landscape. A few minutes later, I travelled over to Barbara’s blog to take a look, and Megan had commented below my comment, this time about the idea of blogging.
In a period of 10 minutes, I’d met Megan in two different contexts, and had “conversations” with her that, I doubt, we’d have had face to face. There’s links on the internet that don’t exist in real life. It’s natural on blogs to think. It’s not so natural in day to day life.”

There’s something about the letter-writing slowness of blogging, I think, that opens up the conversation in particularly rich ways…

~Barbara