It's Diablogical!
A Collaborative Diablog on Feminist Pedagogy
08.25.2010
KCF’s Training Comments

Training

Being confident and excited about experimenting on blogs

Sometimes students can express some trepidation with having to blog even though we often think of students who are entering college as being very familiar with the tools of “the digital age.” However, if you spend time training students on the basics of how to use the blog it can actually become a space that is freeing for students. For instance, I have a former student who told me she was so happy that she had to blog because it helped her overcome her writing block. Not only did her knowledge of blogging increase but so did her confidence in her writing.

I also think that training students in terms of getting them excited about blogging is valuable in allowing them to access different types of writing voices throughout the semester. If they are trained in terms of how to navigate blogs, post various content (written, pictures, embedding clips, etc.), commenting, and reflecting on their course blog they can then begin to better access their “I” voice; the voice that we so often see students afraid to use. The blog also allows for creative reflection on topics that sometimes the space of a formal, academic paper might not.

Using links and tags subversively

As I’ve mentioned previously, I see knowing how to navigate and using blogs as a means to teaching students how to access new feminist studies resources (beyond the traditional text, or course lecture) and create new collaborative resources on feminist topics within cyberspace. I always have a student ask when we discuss the course blog, “Why should we use a blog?” I have responded that blogs allow us new avenues to explore course material, feminist theory, and help to create communities (within and beyond the classroom). I see using links and tags subversively as a main way of creating all of these aspects out of engaging with a course blog. I also think that in challenging the usual format of a cooking blog (usually just a recipe or quick post about what happened in the kitchen that day) my use of storytelling and applying feminist theory to my ideas helps me create subversive entries that challenge heteronormativity, white privilege, and negative cultural appropriation. Tagging them or linking my entries to other blogs/content that engage in similar ways help to direct traffic to further thinking about feminist connections that my reader might not ordinarily access.

1 Comment to “KCF’s Training Comments”

  1. SLP says:
    August 26, 2010 at 8:11 pm

    Great! I like how you discuss feeling confident and willing to experiment in relation to freedom/feeling freer. This makes me think of my interest in the value of failure. While we often think of failure as something bad, it is an essential part of learning and of being critical and creative in our engagements with ideas. When we feel freer, we can become open to failing and learning from failure. Here’s what I wrote about failure earlier on in this blog:

    To embrace failure, or to at least recognize that it is not something to avoid or conceal, can open us up to other possibilities and other ways of knowing and being. When we begin to understand that failure is inevitable and necessary, we can shift our focus away from always being right or having the right answer or even believing that there is one right answer. Instead, we can focus more of our attention on all the different ways that others could be right (or, at least not wrong). When we don’t worry so much about failing (and then being seen as a Failure), we aren’t as invested in proving that we aren’t ever wrong. This enables us to make room for exciting and inspiring conversations with others that involve much more than concluding who got it right and who didn’t. Failure also encourages us to experiment and be creative with how we approach ideas, problems and people. This is especially true when we don’t imagine failure as something that threatens to undermine us and our authority and when we embrace it as a necessary and invigorating part of the process (of thinking, writing, learning, engaging).