I work within the BC College system as an adult literacy instructor working with First Nations learners. I am also a grad student at Athabasca University.

I am interested in the exploration of edublogs from a number of various contexts, and aiding learners to develop their skills in a number of learning settings.

I think the blog is not only meant to encourage us to become embedded learners, though that is critical. It is also meant as a private space to begin to expressing oneself, engaging in storytelling, and examining our experiences. In short, blogs have a potential for transformation.

You speak about the liminal spaces. The blog is a liminal space. Moving from blogging our most intimate, private thoughts to building confidence to sharing with others our experiences and becoming autonomous learners (blogging in public for oneself, inviting comments but not being demotivated by their absence) is a threshold. I am intereated in helping literacy learners move through the liminal space between private and autonomous blogging.

Before learners feel sufficiently comfortable blogging within an embedded context (among a supportive learning space of co-learners) they need to practice publishing their creative thoughts and intuitions anonomously. The anonymous blog enables literacy learners a liminal space in which t try on ideas, engage in role plays, showcase creative work, tell stories. Once comfortable with posting to a group space, the choice would be theirs to move to an embedded learning environment. The transition the liminal space between anonymous blogging to embedded blogging is the role of an educator, acting as a learning companion (Cranton)

The majority of my learners are first Nations women who are mothers and grandmothers, and the potential for transformation is immense as long as I acknowledge that the ideology of networked individualism is removing from teaching events.

What I mean is that these learners do not generally relate to an academic career, and do not seek to build a network of peers nor accumulate social capital. They are less interested in discussing ideas for themselves. However, they are interested in personal connection with family and friends.

These learners aspire to be able to move fluidly between the various learning spaces (private/autonomous/embedded/anonomous) and participant and mentor others. Slow blogging is an example of an activity of a liminal blogger, one that transcends the expectations of learning events within formal schooling. A liminal blogger recognizes that the pursuit of change and growth is lifelong. Such a blogger is energized by swapping stories within many different communities, engaging others in a number of voices (all parts of one’s own, just “tamed” for the specific audience and context), building, facilitating, mentoring, leading, withholding, pulling back one day while pushing forward the next. A liminal blogger intentional seeks out and plans (even creates) learning events that places the person n a state of liminality. Such bloggers are quite adaptable to changes in learning context, and able to adjust expectations rapidly.

Thanks you for continuing to teach me.

bg

I hope we all weren’t such acquiescent, diploma hungry minions. You are too hard on yourself. And wrong about us, too. Or maybe just me. Because I’d like to think that my battered notebooks past and present are filled not with the “easy” stuff, but with sloppy helpings of actual sustenance. The napkins are piled up; my belly is still rumbling. The lasting impression you left on me – and I know I’m not alone – speaks not to skinny learning. My time spent in EL 170 and my subsequent follies in writing and learning and teaching (you are an inspiration, you know? a frustrating and disorienting and gleeful prompter of my ideas and my role in the larger communities, personal and professional, I now call home) are more than polite forays from a “nice” Midwestern boy. I look at the relationship and knowledge we built in Rohatyn as a fat (and phat) helping of something real and caloric, stirred from prose and poetry and the interstices in-between. (Perhaps Carver’s slim words were an attempt at a diet…though he only urged me to eat on.)

What’s more disconcerting for me is that I now model my own teaching in large part on my Great Teachers, and that means, to a large extent, my experience under your tutelage. I fear to think that you were just scratching the surface. I’m curious: what would’ve the “really challenging spaces” looked like in EL 170? I ask because, shit, if you failed, then I’m doomed. Or maybe this is just another Mad Dog moment, a question and a silence and a chance for me to fill the quiet with my own answer. I’ll speak, but know your voice is speaking too. And that’s no failure.

PS.
Hope SXSW helped answer questions and ask more. My students are half way through their digital stories. The cardinals are singing in Chicago.

Jen: I understand the feeling pretty well. You’ll find your conversation(s), I’m sure. Maybe the hard thing is accepting that it may be a different one and going through (what has been for me, in that past) the difficult process of finally letting go of the current conversations that are really peripheral to the new big enterprise of your self.

I try not to speak too much these days about inside the institution (though I was there for almost 20 years) because I tend to get myself into hot water when I do, and in leaving, I have probably given up the right to criticize. I think I am seeing this post as my goodbye to all that, to the negativity and onward to actual action through my work, i.e. less talk and more results.

Lanny,

You’re right about this being old. And that’s what is so exhausting about it all–but precisely because we have an opportunity to see this anew, to transform learning spaces and practices so that kids are not performing like marionettes but can write and think critically and deeply about their world, we must work hard for change right now. And that means revisiting the themes yet again–me from new work and new patterns, you from inside. All of us from where we are.

Some of these themes are quite old. They are the basis of the Matrix (1999), the song Les McCann made popular, Compared To What (1969), and Somerset Maughm’s Of Human Bondage, film (1934) book (1915), just to name a few sources I’m familiar with. I’m sure you and your readers can come up with many others.

On whether you can go home again – I got an unusual insight (for me) last week reading College applications of students who are applying for our Campus Honors Programs. These kids have unbelievable test scores. Their prose, however, was for the most part underwhelming. Most of them seemingly put on a veil and say what they think we want to hear. I don’t believe that veil comes off in one act of purification. It takes years. And maybe it never happens. That our structures encourage the veil to stay on, I can see not wanting to be part of that.