as Reflective Practitioner

On this page, I've included excerpts of daily write-ins/-outs to document my reflection on writing (instruction) and development at the Institute. At the end of this page, I've included my peer reviews for the hyperdoc (digital lesson plan) assignment.

Write-in

Prompt: What is your story as a teacher? How is your narrative changing or layering as you are adding to who you want to be as an educator? As you add your information to the Padlet wall, what do you most want your colleagues to know about your narrative?

Response: I started teaching composition by utilizing my experiences as a creative writer and journalist. I tried to incorporate the skills/processes/techniques I’d picked up over the course of my writing experiences to make pedagogical decisions. These experiences had shaped how I understood myself and the way I situated myself into the world. I wanted to facilitate this kind of discovery in my classroom. I thought the best way to do this was to focus on creative expression, but – I’m learning – not everyone in the field agrees with this approach. My understanding of the classroom is changing a bit as I learn of composition’s (historic) position in the university. There are multiple, often-competing views on the way this class should be run, its content, structure, etc.

Write-in

Prompt: If You’re Not From Bosnia

"If you’re not from Bosnia, you don’t know Bosnia. You can’t know Bosnia. You don’t know how they talk. You don’t know what their stores look like. You don’t know how our money looks. You don’t know what our streets look like. You can’t know our streets. You don’t know the watery blackness---the hardest stone. You don’t know the city. You can’t know our city, the ruined, the broken, the cracked city."

Response:

If you’re not from Florida, then you might think all we do down here is hang out with alligators on airboats while we smoke bath salts. You might believe we all live at the beach or the swamp or a retirement community or Disney World.

You might even call us Florida swamp creatures to our faces as a man from New Jersey recently called my boyfriend without a hint of irony and – not to be rude – but isn’t it ironic that someone from New Jersey would call him that?

You might say everything weird happens in Florida or we should cut it off from the rest of the state. We could sip rum runners as we watch it drift far, far away!

Write-out

Prompt: “The details matter. The details link actual beings to actual response-abilities. . . . Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing get some aerobic exercise. Such exercise enhances collective thinking and movement in complexity. Each time I trace a tangle and add a few threads that at first seemed whimsical but turned out to be essential to the fabric, I get a bit straighter that staying with the trouble of complex worlding is the name of the game of living and dying on terra, in Terrapolis.” (Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble 29)

Response: It’s essential for me to allow myself to think/write in long, winding ways and lean into associations or connections that may not immediately seem like they make sense but for some reason feel as though they do.

This is almost counter to the way I feel most comfortable. I’m someone who likes to be prepared and orderly and get things done in a linear fashion (although I know this isn’t how things happen – it’s how I almost wish they would).

I’ve found messiness helps me get to the tastiest meat.

I fight this messiness, of course, because reflection takes time and a willingness to live in the not-known. I honestly do like this space – one where I think about a seemingly small problem for a big amount of time – but this process takes time o I don’t always feel I have.

I can’t separate my writing and teaching life as my writing process heavily influences the way I teach writing and shapes the core truths I hold about pedagogy.

(Also, after I wrote this and re-read the prompt (reflected!), I remembered I read an article last week about “flourishing” at work. The author pulls from positive psychology and says “flourishing depends not on the absence of negative emotion but on the strengthening of positive emotions.” The article is “Don’t Worry, Be Happy: How to Flourish as a WPA” by Carrie Leverenz in The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration.)

Write-in

Prompt:

Random Autobiography (a poem by Mary Ann Larson)

I began with a line taken from her poem.

I’ve been scared

My whole life of snakes:

the first one – a common

type – slithered into

our bathroom.

Mom & I lived in a one

bedroom near the trail

& before that we lived

by the railroad tracks

& we’d watch the circus train

pass & I imagined we

might just hop on the train

& leave town with them.

Write-out

Prompt:

Where are you as a writer and a teacher? What ideas are sticking with you as a teacher and a writer? What are your questions?

Response:

As a writer, I’m currently sitting in front of the window in my office, which used to be my childhood bedroom. A husk of a sea urchin my mom gave me sits perched on the windowsill next to a fake terrarium my friend gave me. A picture of the poet Frank O’Hara hangs to my right as does a photo of the drag queen Divine – famous for her role in John Water’s Pink Flamingos.

I love this window more than any other window.

It lets me pause to clear my head when I need a break from writing. It has also taught me a lot about the world – the way my neighbor talks on the phone when he walks his dog and lets me watch a couple stroll together almost every night near sun-down.

A bunch of birds has started hanging out in front of this window because of the foliage: palmettos, vines, bushes. I’m talking a lot of birds, more birds than usual. The other day one flew into my window as I was writing. Then, it crouched on the windowsill and looked me directly in the face. The big black bird started to peck on the glass.

I’ve always been afraid of birds. They’re dinosaurs with beaks. And mean. If you’ve ever eaten on a beach with seagulls nearby then you get it.

I’ve always been afraid of birds, but I want to be less afraid of them as I want to be less afraid of all the things that scare me.

So, I looked this bird directly in its eyes as it pecked my window. It freaked me out, but I was also mesmerized. Why was it doing this? Did it think it could break the glass? Could it break the glass? (I decided, definitely not, and if it did there was still a screen to protect me and surely, I would be able to scare it off before that).

The situation reminded me of the horror movie Hereditary where the little girl cuts off a bird’s head.

(I’ve always been afraid of horror movies, too, but I’ve started to watch them anyway).

The bird pecked, pecked, pecked. I couldn’t move. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. I’d decided to let it happen.

Then, just as quickly as the bird came, it went. I told my boyfriend about my window drama, and he asked me if it was a crow because they hold grudges – like if you piss one off, they’ll never forget it.

He told me this information as if I didn’t already know that, as if that’s not why I’m always nicest to the crows who rule our neighborhood.

This window has taught me about writing, and, by extension, teaching as I cannot separate either of them from my pedagogy. The window tells me sometimes you have to stare the things you’re afraid of in the face, even if you aren’t completely sure they won’t peck through the glass.

After we completed our hyperdocs, we were asked to review five of our peers' hyperdocs. I based my reviews on the provided guided.