We are 6 weeks into the semester; it's time to start seriously thinking/talking about how we want to make our blog into a public resource site. With that in mind, I thought I would start an open thread about it. What's an open thread? One person (me) posts a blog entry as a way to start (or continue) a discussion/engagement. Others (readers, particularly but not exclusively class members) post their responses/reactions/questions via comments.
So, here we go. I am inspired to start this thread by rhetoricqueline and her recent post on a blog-as-feminist-pedagogy. In this entry, she concludes with some great questions for us as we think about what to do with our blog:
Raised Questions
- What are other examples of "public" feminist pedagogy?
- How is what our blog accomplishes different from those like Clay's? What can we learn from those distinctions?
- Ideally, who is the audience for our class blog?
- What blogs could/would we potentially collaborate with?
In my comment to her, I added these questions:
- Do we want to collaborate with other classes? Departments? Universities? Public intellectuals?
- What sort of resources do we want on here?
- Do we need to do more research by looking to other blogs, etc?
- Do we want to provide practical advice for other teachers on how to use feminist pedagogy?
- (How) do we want to practice our own feminist pedagogy on this site?
What do you all think? What types of things do you want to include? In a recent tweet, @Brit_Lewis mentioned wanting to create a syllabus. Should we put some of our syllabi online as part of it? Could we create a public syllabus for a class taught outside of the U? Syllabi for classes at the U?
Please post your thoughts as comments.
This are the notes/ideas I read in class:
-Here are questions you can ask when constructing a feminist syllabus?
-Here are readings/resources we suggest for X topics/themes:
-Here are some example syllabi…
Sara also asks:
-What about a definition of critical thinking?
I ask:
-What other definitions would be useful? I doubt we'd all offer a monolithic definition of feminism or pedagogy. We could offer definitions.
I got some advice from my partner (who does web stuff for a living) about putting pdfs on our blog. He suggested finding the original sites where they are posted and then linking to those sites instead of putting the actual pdfs on our site.
I think if we do that we are:
-Protecting ourselves and the site from those Big Rules that won't let us offer pdfs.
but also
-Limiting the public accessibility of the documents, since you usually have to have a university affiliated position to log in to the various databases that we'll inevitably be linking to.
I'll be honest, if it were my blog I'd just offer the pdfs. But this isn't my blog, it's Our blog, and a university affiliated one at that -- so I understand completely if we can't upload directly.
I was thinking that we could use our blog as a resource for lesson plans/activities/ideas. For example, the Global Race, Ethnicity, and Migration project has this site of teaching modules: http://www.globalrem.umn.edu/teachingmodules/modules.php
Perhaps we could develop a few like that that are either ways to kind of engage with feminism(s) in classes not purportedly about gender at all, or that are flexible activities and ideas for facilitating any class that embody feminist pedagogical practice.
In today's class intro you mentioned what you would like technology to be used for: praxis and experimentation. I like the idea of collaboration or at least interaction with other spaces. I was wondering if it would be possible to disrupt other blogs which are not necessarily feminist and engage in a dialog through our comments. I don't know if it's possible to link these dialogs on our blog or whether these dialogs can encourage other bloggers to visit ours.
@skeptic: I really like your idea! We could strategize about how we want to connect/dialog with other blogs--in what spaces do we wish to engage? How do we want to engage (as critical intervention, drive traffic to our blog, open dialog, make trouble)? Other thoughts?