Mentoring

Good Article About the Connections Between Academic Writing and Blogging

A robust article about the connections between academic writing and blogging. It is just a reminder that there is a significant connection between the art of writing every day and the academic practice that sometimes gets pushed aside in the flurry of grading, managing students, and working long hours. 

The other important feature that isn't mentioned in the article (but I will throw it in anyway) is that blogging also gives you space to contribute and write on ideas that you might be drawing in from digital course, mentoring, and other collaborative expereinces. 

Pat Thomson is a Professor of Education in the School of Education, The University of Nottingham.

http://patthomson.net/2015/12/07/blogging-helps-academic-writing/

Reflections On Mentoring / "Only connect..."

This week, I've been thinking about the role of the mentor. I understand my official role as a mentor. But I feel like it has taken me some time to develop what I can do for students who connect. I am not the line editor, although I can pick out places where I think the writing needs work. I am the mentor who connects. Perhaps it is partly from the obsession I have with E. M. Forster's epigraph at the beginning of Howard's End that says simple "Only connect...." and he adds three pesky ellipses that just don't connect. Ugh! That idea is like a hand grenade in my brain. It is such a simple puzzle: elegant, beautiful, and sad. This relates to my mentoring philosophy. I want to find ways to enhance the likelihood of the writer writing. That is my job. 

#Rhizo15 / What I've Been Missing

It has been an interesting week and some really fascinating and creative ideas have been swirling around #Rhizo15. I can say that I am truly inspired and amazed at how powerful and connected this has been for me as an educator and a thinker.

I spend too long creating things in a vacuum. If I am creating a syllabus, a course schedule, resources, a blog, something to offer the students when they walk in the door, I have only met my own perception of what I think is going to happen in the classroom. What I've realized in thinking about content this week is that it means nothing until the students fill the class. I use to think I was a terrible teacher because after a few weeks, the syllabus, my ideas, and my connections to that "thing" I created before class was just thrown out like a piece of roadside trash. I would adapt the learning level of the class, I would spend more time on skills and conversation that I thought important. And those weeks of careful building would start to crumble.  By midterm, I was often in a state of chaos because I was the one at odds with my own content. Conversations, ideas, experiences - all coming from the students replaced my vision of the class. For a long time, I blamed myself for being caught between what I thought would and should happen and what was really happening in the classroom. And for the first time, this year, I feel like I can articulate this feeling of conflict with the content and the students. The more they infused ideas and good conversation - the more I grew frustrated that I couldn't pursue it, that I had to go back to those ideas that were created in a vacuum. 

What is and was missing was the fact that the students will be the content and the assessment, they will be the coffee, the cream, the everything - and I need to contain it (the cup). This has brought about a sense of relief and a sense of shifting into a new paradigm. 

#Rhizo15 / Week 3 / Content - Morning Coffee

This is a fascinating topic and I think it begins the root of one of my difficulties as a writing teacher. But before I ramble about that -- it is important to remember that we are the content, and what we say and what we think are diverse and complicated packets of thought. If we are the curriculum, we are also the content. We've been filling this space with content, but how it connects and how it all moves us through our learning paths and root systems, is not content but the result of the content and the curriculum moving in orchestra.

Course content to me is a dream. During my writing courses and working with graduate students, there is the content - which I always discuss in terms of coffee (content), and the cup which is everything else (form, ethos, pathos, logos, audience, time, place). I've been asked to teach courses with no coffee and all cup - and all coffee and just the mention of a cup. So, what is more important and why?

In the end, I need to give the students a cup of coffee. An empty cup doesn't serve them because they need the coffee, the caffeine, and something warm to ingest. On the flip side coffee can't happen without putting it into something or it will be a complete mess. And so the connection of these ideas have to come together. Form and content together. And let's face it - it is not all that exciting discussing comparative essays with no content. And writing about gun control without understanding how an argument works is mentally exhausting as well.

And if I might complicate matters a bit more, what if the coffee is the form and the cup is the content? What if I am the coffee and the writing is the cup? Sorry, I just get caught up in Rhizo fits of thinking.

Do I need content to talk about writing? No. But the difficulty is to explain "form" in a vacuum without content. And then explaining that it doesn't matter what goes into the cup or what the content is, as long as you understand the form and what it can do. It gets more complex when we get into creative writing.

Creative writing is about telling stories and creating emotions. Story is content developed through the writer. I don't feel like my role is to change content in creative writing unless I have a reason based in form and function. To say, I just don't like this has to be based in reason, not just my own subjective taste. My job is to ground my comments in the function of form - and sometimes that is difficult to do. That is where I need to be a better teacher and mentor. I need to study narratology, I need to study form and rhetoric in fiction and linguistic. Their content is subjective which speaks to their story and ideas. And frankly, it bothers me when people judged my creative work without a functional purpose for change. How do I make creative writers produce better writing - I talk to them about everything but their content. I even make them write journals about why they are doing what they are doing and mapping out how they work. Shaping their form and aesthetic well-being will give the best fertile ground for growing something brilliant.

Having said that - isn't it ironic that I've been hired to teach "subjects" - content and not teach in an area where I can be effective in all modes of written expression. Perhaps that is a place in our academic world that we should subvert. We are all so much bigger than the content we teach. Perhaps that would go on our subjective portfolios and resumes - the place where all the really important things are listed and never realized.