(also known as Teaching Statement, Part 2)
Having finished a rough draft of section 1 (I Am a Teacher!) of a Troubling Teaching Portfolio, I’m moving onto section 2 (I Was a Teacher.). This section is about what I did after leaving the academy, from Jan 2012 thought the Fall/Winter 2015. It’s about how I took a break from teaching/being an academic in order to restore myself and to experiment/write/learn more and then made a break (ran away + split from) my Academic Self in order to reorient myself and reclaim my passion for thinking, learning, being.
Since I’m struggling a bit with this section and I want to get unstuck and finish it so that I can move onto the real fun of this project (and the initial reason that I’m began it), I’ve decided write about it in this post (and probably several more posts).
Section Inventory, some preliminary thoughts in (of course!) LIST form:
- A timeline of major projects + excerpts from various projects? Should this include some narrative about what I was doing? What I learned?
- A list of various tools that I experimented with and researched
- Accounts of how I made trouble with social media
- A list of “theoretical” concepts that have informed my ideas
- Descriptions (+ list?) of ways I’ve worked to undiscipline myself
Here’s a timeline that I’ve created for 2012-2015
Timeline: This is me Taking a Break?*
2012
winter
- Applied for one last job
- Began working at Room 34, attending client meetings and learning code + finally understanding what my husband meant when he would tell me that he “developed web sites”
- Worked on conference papers, then canceled at last minute because I just couldn’t be an academic anymore
- Wrote about online education + social media + academy on my blog
- Created and Recorded Podcast: Undisciplined Room (edited by Scott Anderson)
- Started work on live-tweeting The Brady Bunch
- experimented with social media: more on twitter, tumblr, pinterest
spring
- Crafted first digital story: Student Progress Report: An Undisciplined Account
- Wrote early reflections on why I find it important to give an account
- Crafted second digital story: Stories from the UP
- Played with infographics: http://trouble.room34.com/archives/4027
- Crafted digital story introduction to TROUBLE blog, which included intellectual history
- Marked the occasion of three years of blogging on TROUBLE with a series of posts that reflected on importance of site and documented most popular/favorite posts
- Started working on Problematizes, learning how to use Pixelmatr and experiment with different ways to engage, educate and pose troubling questions
summer
- Continued work on problematizers: http://trouble.room34.com/archives/4108
- Continued to research self-help and its relation to (self) care
- Continued storytelling projects, including digital video on first runniversary
- Began revisiting video footage from farm, re-edited my dad’s stories about farm life, imagined it as third video project: http://trouble.room34.com/archives/4197
fall
- Underwent more intense reflecting on life out of school (first fall since 1979 I was not in school)
- Created story project on the meaning of home (digital stories: reimagining home)
- Began digital storytelling experiment with digital moments: the worst winter ever
- Created Undisciplined, the web site and began archiving teaching and research materials
2013
winter
- Began researching and writing Unofficial Student Transcripts
spring
- “Published” Unofficial Student Transcripts on iBooks
- Created a movie trailer for book
- Continued with digital storytelling (Driving, the Gardner, Double Vision)
- Returned to learning html, css
summer
- Edited Grandma Ines’ memoirs and published them in iBooks, w/additional materials + forward and concluding essay
- Started new site about The Farm, picked theme and coded, designed site myself
- Began analyzing interactive documentaries, doing research on how people tell stories online, documenting my process
fall
- Began another digital storytelling experiment with digital moments: Moments with Rosie
- Wrote an Interactive Media Project Grant Proposal that was not funded, submitted in December: researched, designed, planned 2 year project
2014
winter
- Continued experimenting with storytelling (including Cowbird—first story on Jan 24)
spring
- Gave invited Talk at George Hall Lecture at Gustavus, discussed my book
- Began Video Game Research and imagined an unrealizable video game about the farm, experimented with son on how to designe video games and realized that it was really, really difficult
summer
- Took my first “real” break from work. For 3 months, I was not productive, not writing and not thinking: http://trouble.room34.com/archives/4488
fall
- Decided to actually do the farm project that I wrote the grant for but didn’t get, on my own. Created the site + began writing stories and adding content
2015
winter
- Wrote first interactive story on farm (only temporarily yours) and shared it with my family
Spring
- Converted processing blog for The Farm story project into STORY (a blog about reading, crafting, telling stories)
- Re-designed (and modified WordPress 2015 theme) for all of my sites and created a cohesive web presence (a brand?)
- Turned my iBook, Unofficial Student Transcripts, into its own site
- Continued storytelling research and experimenting with different tools
Summer
- Researched and wrote about “running stories” as a web genre as part of my celebration of my fourth year of running
Fall
- Began exploring digital archiving, tentatively experimented with better archiving practices, especially for photos
- Started reading/researching/writing about memoirs
- Began researching, writing and thinking about teaching life book project
- Began #undisciplinedreading project, which involves requesting lots of books from the library and reading them to enjoy, not (always) critically analyze
*Note the sarcasm. It’s hard for me to stop working. I don’t really know how to take a break and do nothing. I have been trying; learning to do nothing is part of my undisciplining plan.