Tag: processing notes

I’m still working on archiving and analyzing my past teaching documents. Right now, I just finished finding and uploading all of my assignments to unDisciplined.  Eventually some of these assignments and my reflections about them will be included in the first part of my current book project. I’m tentatively calling this first part, Teaching Portfolio, Part 1: Theories, Manifestos, Assessments.

Here’s the tentative title of the entire project:

Making and Staying in Trouble: The Teaching Portfolio of an Undisciplined Educator

Will this title stick around? I’m not sure, but I like the idea of emphasizing making and staying in trouble in my teaching. It is central to how, why and what I teach and my investment in it has led me to a space beside/s the academy.

I also like the idea of making this book a teaching portfolio. Here’s what I wrote about this format a few months ago:

Similar to my first project in which I didn’t “properly” mimic the format of a transcript, I’m not interested in strictly following the format of a standard teaching portfolio. Instead, I want to critically and creatively (and playfully) experiment with it.

Processing Notes

What is a teaching portfolio? 

According to A Guide for the Electronic Teaching Portfolio, “a teaching portfolio is a relatively short collection of materials and artifacts selected to document, summarize, and highlight one’s growth, experiences, and strengths as a teacher.” Teaching portfolios often include a statement of teaching philosophy, courses taught, teaching goals, and teaching materials.

I envision this book project as serving this purpose (to document, summarize, and highlight my teaching), but to also play with (trouble, question, twist, disrupt, resist) what it means to be a teacher inside, outside, or beside the academy.

On Students

As I think through what I want to include in my portfolio, I keep coming back to the idea students. I want to craft some statements, manifestos, or lists on 1. students and their relationship/s to the teacher and 2. the teacher and her responsibilities to students. I also want to play around with how to present data on student evaluations and how to provide stories and moments of my life with students in my classrooms. What could that look like?

Evidence of Teaching Excellence

The other name that is often used instead of teaching portfolio is “evidence of teaching excellence.” Excellence is also used within virtue ethics. It means virtue or arete. Since virtues and virtue ethics are a big part of my pedagogy and my teaching portfolio I think it would be fun to play around (trouble, twist, distort, misuse) excellence in this book. How? Again, not sure yet.

some preliminary thoughts…I must admit that I’ve been working on this post for a few days and I’ve struggled to express myself. Too much resistance, but to what? Ugh! Although this is not quite finished, I needed to post it here. I’m hoping to build on it and eventually use (at least) some of it in my book project.

I’m in the midst of archiving all my past assignments for my book project. After feeling stuck for several days on my teaching philosophy statement, I decided to change how I was working. Instead of continuing to write page after page of notes in my green notebook, why not find all of my old assignments and review them to see how I actually taught and not how I thought I taught? This was a smart move. It’s illuminating to look back on the assignments that I chose and how I organized them.

My first reaction: Wow. I have a lot of details in these assignments! It’s a bit out of control. For example, I created a pdf of all of the course assignments for my Feminist Debates (fall 2011) course that is 9 pages long. 9 pages of detailed directions.

Why did I do this to my students?

Pondering that question for a moment, I remembered one of the earliest feminist pedagogical principles that I adopted as a women’s studies grad student, teaching one of my first courses. In a feminist classroom, students encounter new ideas that challenge their ways of knowing. And they are encouraged to not passively receive the answer from the Teacher, but actively explore how and why knowledge is produced. This is unsettling and troubling, even as it is often exciting and transformative. Students can benefit from structure to direct these new ways of learning, thinking and teaching.

Without structure, students can become overwhelmed and lose their way. So can teachers. Left unchecked, without some sort of structure to guide me or rein me in, my thinking and teaching becomes too much…for students, friends, family members and, at a certain point, me.

In reviewing old teaching materials, from syllabi to class summaries to in-class assignments to big class projects, I see structure everywhere. A highly ordered syllabus. Class summaries that are broken up into very specific parts, to be completed within exact amounts of class time…10 minutes for announcements, 20 minutes for an introduction to the topic, 20 minutes for small group, etc. And detailed assignments that encourage students to find their own ways to challenge and connect with class concepts, but that ground those challenges and connections in focused (and directed) methods.

Ah yes, the assignments. A primary way in which I imposed structure within the classroom was through highly choreographed assignments. And the primary way in which I communicated and managed that structure was through my detailed directions for those assignments.

Lots of Directions.

While I was always reluctant to introduce a lot of specific classroom rules (I despise disciplining students or fostering spaces marked by what you can’t/shouldn’t do), I never shied away from detailed directions on assignments. Why?

• To anticipate and preemptively answer basic questions about the assignment (when it’s due, does it need to be typed, etc).
• To manage/direct flow of engagement, especially online.
• To break up intimidating/difficult/overwhelming assignments into manageable parts for students and the Teacher.
• Because it feeds my love for elaborate planning–the more thinking through that it requires, the better! Is that bad? 

As my teaching became more experimental and involved efforts to challenge/resist/transgress academics-as-usual through the blending of online and offline spaces, my directions became more detailed. I made them more detailed partly because using blogs and twitter effectively requires a lot of thought and deliberate action–without guidance, students often won’t post much or will post a lot but all at once or will frequently post uncritical, superficial junk. And I made them detailed because I needed some ways to manage and mitigate (?) the resistance that some (not all) students (consciously and unconsciously) were expressing to these experiments. Resistance to new ways of engaging. Resistance to the extra work and learning that these new ways demanded. What does that mean? I need to think through it some more. 

I have much more to say about directions, but I’m tired of writing this post now. So, I’ll end with a few questions to ponder:

1. How much detail in directions is too much?
2. What are some other strategies for helping students as they engage with difficult and uncomfortable ideas and practices?
3. As I became more invested in a feminist/queer pedagogy and critical of the academic industrial complex, my teaching practices become more experimental. How much experimenting is too much? When is it irresponsible to the students and their well-being?

It’s been a busy (and sometimes difficult) month. Swim meets, band concerts, family visits, emotional meltdowns, and school holidays. I’ve been struggling to get back into a routine with this project. I’m hoping that processing my ideas will help. The following ideas come from my green writing notebook.

On Being Stuck

I’m trying to revise/revisit my statement of teaching philosophy. I have the start of a good draft but now I’m stuck. I’ve taken lots of notes (10+ pages), but I can’t quite figure out how to write this document. The only other time that I’ve felt this stuck in my book project, like I was writing in circles, jotting down the same ideas over and over again, was when I was writing about the point of being a professor. I guess I’m experiencing some resistance to taking on this role again. Or apprehension? Am I still a teacher? What do I have to offer? What can I remember about my time in the classroom? After all, it’s been 4 years since I formally taught.

The idea of being stuck, being unable to know or write, is not a failure of willpower. It can signal resistance to ideas that make us uncomfortable or that haunt us. Ideas that, if taken seriously, can transform how we understand and act in the world. In my own version of feminist/queer pedagogy, these moments of being stuck are valuable and a big part of my classes involved creating space for them and finding ways to work with and through them.

Yesterday, while trying to work through my “stuckness,” I composed a list: How to Get Unstuck, some suggestions. I think I want to add to the list with something about embracing stuckness?

21st Century Skills

What skills do students need for the 21st century? In my green notebook, on page 97, I mention how I need to discuss 21st century skills in my teaching philosophy statement. On a practical level, you need to know how to: navigate the internet, use a blog, code a little, tweet, look stuff up. On a more conceptual level, you need to learn how to: experiment, explore, find things yourself, sift through a ton of conflicting perspectives, manage and harness your curiosity in effective and ethical ways. These are digital literacy skills. I think that the Academy could help students a lot, but IFF (if and only if) how/what/why they teach is transformed. I should say more about this idea and how it was one of the reasons that I left higher education.

The Troubling Hour

At the beginning of January I wrote Early Morning Encounters on my TROUBLE blog. In the midst of writing it, I realized that I was creating another category/concept to use in my pedagogy: the troubling hour. A time and space that you inhabit on a regular basis to reflect, critique and be curious.

For the past year or so, I’ve gotten in the habit of getting up at 6:15 AM, before anyone else in my house is awake. I make my extra strong coffee and sit on the couch, scrolling through my facebook and twitter feeds. Usually I’m looking for something that sparks my curiosity and inspires me to get into a critically reflective (troubling/troubled) space.

Sara Puotinen

Shifting Strategies and Techniques

While looking through past assignments, I decided that it might be interesting to trace my shifts in strategies and techniques, like how my “critical response” assignments changed from a notebook to direct engagement blog posts. Paying attention to these shifts might enable me to trace my undisciplined teaching path, just like I traced my unofficial student life?

It’s 2016. Coming back from winter break has been a bit challenging. Getting back into the flow of planning and writing. Adjusting to the ridiculously cold weather. Coping with a child who is staging a powerful display of resistance (physically and emotionally) to going to school. Even with these challenges, I’ve managed to continue working on my book project. Here are some of my thoughts.

Lists!

From the start, I’ve been jotting down lists in my green notebook and I always envisioned that I would include them in this project in some way. Over the past week, I’ve realized that they could be central to my format. Yesterday I spent more time adding resources to the “list” category on my Undisciplined Stories page and posted a list on my Trouble blog. And this morning I read and thought about how lists work and why we create them (Umberto Eco’s ideas are particularly compelling).

In the midst of this thinking, I made some connections between lists and the syllabus:

• the etymology of syllabus is Late Latin syllabus or…”list”
• syllabi include many different lists: reading lists, assignment lists, expectation lists, rules lists
• both the syllabus and lists in general are designed to create order out of chaos, to give us focus and create boundaries and direction
• both the syllabus and lists function as a sort of “account”…and giving an account is one of my purposes in this project

How do I want to format my lists? How pithy should they be? What is the point of lists? With this last question, I’m thinking about different types of lists and their origins: treatises/manifestos, to-do lists, top ten lists, how-to lists, etc.  Random thought/question: If lists create order out of chaos, do questions create chaos out of order? I see both of these things (lists and questions) as central to my pedagogy and this book. How do they function beside each other?

A List of Lists that I’m thinking of including:

• How to Read, one Strategy
• What is an Education For?
• Toxic Academic Values
• Healthy Academic Values Made Toxic
• Academics who resist the Academic Industrial Complex from within
• What’s a Teacher?
• What I am NOT giving; What I AM giving
• Troublemaking Teaching Techniques
• How to be…some useful virtues
• How to be…a troublemaker and trouble-stayer
• Be like a…
• How-to guides: How to…cite, (not) think, tell stories online, pay attention, engage; ask questions, write, watch tv
• Rules
• Healthy Habits
• Troublemaking role models
• Ideas generated while reading in the bath

Wow. Spending more time thinking and writing about lists is fascinating and (over?) stimulating.

Super-hero Sara

For my birthday last year I asked for a super-hero version of one of my favorite pictures of myself (it was created by Sam Smith of Replace). STA didn’t have time to tweak it until I finally forced him to do it this past weekend. I really like how it turned out! I’ve already added it to my TROUBLE blog. I want to incorporate her into this book project.

Trouble, the Syllabus?

Speaking of my trouble blog, I’m thinking of creating a syllabus for reading/using it. This syllabus, which will also be included in the second section of my teaching portfolio for this book project, would be on the front page of TROUBLE. Will this work? Has anyone created a syllabus for reading/engaging with a blog?

I’m about to take a break form this project for the holidays. Before I do, I wanted to make note of a few sources and ideas to revisit in January 2016.

A Tentative Outline!

Over the past week, I decided to summarize and synthesize my work since early November. So I created an outline. I’m not posting the entire thing on the blog, but I’ll post the overall structure. I’m (very loosely) basing it on a teaching portfolio.

1. Introduction to Book and Key Question: Am I (still) a Teacher?
2. Teaching Portfolio, part 1:  Theories, Manifestos, Assessments. This section will include an undisciplined cv, past teaching materials, teaching philosophy, reflections on what a teacher is and what an education is for.
3. Teaching Portfolio, part 2: Imaginary Teaching. This section will include 3-4 imaginary (or imagined?) syllabi, with class notes, reading lists, assignments and other class related materials. 

Academic Assholes

16 Years in the Academy Made me an Asshole

Gradually, I started to resent academia, partly because I couldn’t get a permanent job and partly because of the elitism and snobbery that came with the profession—an elitism that seemed inextricable from the environment and the people in it.

Rani Neutill

Yes.

I’d been an asshole because I thought that having a Ph.D. made me special or better or smarter than everyone else, when in fact, all it made me was, well. . . an asshole.

Rani Neutill

Hell yes.

A New Book to Check Out

Teacher, Scholar, Mother