Month: July 2016

(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.

I left academia at the end of the fall semester of 2011. Starting in 2013 and then returning in 2015, I’ve been working on a lengthy story project that involves archiving and processing my life as an academic, first as a student, then as a teacher.

My project is not intended to be just an example of quit lit, a public declaration of being “burned up and burned out” by the academy. But I started it just shortly before essays about quitting academic jobs began to proliferate and it is partly motivated by a desire to give an account of why I left the academy. It would be easy to read or write (or write-off) my accounts as just another, among so many, “goodbyes to all that”. But it’s not. At least, I hope it’s not just that. While my project includes several public declarations of my leaving and it includes critical assessments of toxic academic values that led to my leaving, I’m also trying to do something else with it.

But what is that “something else”? As a preliminary way to answer that question, here are two lists to compare: List 1: What can quit lit do and List 2: Why am I doing this?

List 1: What Can Quit Lit Do?*

• Offers a public explanation (a because) of “why I quit teaching”: because of demanding students, poor salaries, unnecessary bureaucracies, limited opportunities for creativity and self-actualization
• Enables writer to be seen and heard after years of feeling ignored, devalued and dismissed
• Allows writer to be a role model for others thinking about leaving and allows them to destigmatize the process of leaving/quitting and debunk myths (you just weren’t good enough, success can only be found with an academic job) surrounding it by making their experiences visible
• Functions as a public rejection of the Academy and a refusal to perpetuate its toxic practices: a public statement/critique/condemnation of the AIC

*Info about Quit Lit, also known as “goodbye to all that,” “why I quit teaching” and “fuck you, AIC,” was gathered from these Sources: The Atlantic, Inside Higher Ed, Slate, Vitae.

List 2: Why am I doing this?

• To give an account (and an explanation) of my academic life and to tell a story about why I left and what I’m doing for anyone who is interested (which hopefully includes family members and friends)
• To take my experiences seriously
• To confront the haunting questions that living and then leaving the academic life generated within me
• To do something creative and playful that resists and troubles academic rules
• To undiscipline myself
• To scavenge through my past, sorting out and keeping the bits (tools, ideas, methods, theories) that I found helpful, discarding the rest. And then, to use those helpful bits to experiment with new ways of teaching, learning and being a thinking, feeling, troublemaking, educating SELF

While there is some overlap, much of why I’m doing this project fits under “something else.” At least, I think it does.