So far we have designed this blog, wrote a bunch of entries on it, created several about pages, and completed/posted our first dialogue on visibility. And we have met for several hours on three different Fridays. I think we have done a lot! But how can we translate all of this work into a book chapter that is due at the end of next month? I thought I would start a new category today in which we could write about possible ways to take what we are doing here and turn it into a more formal piece of academic prose. My hope is that if we dedicated some space to thinking through how to do this, it might make the whole process easier or smoother or less stressful. What do you think, KCF?
While I don’t have much to write right now (it’s 5:30 and I think I need to eat), I wanted to throw out an example that I just came across. In Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation, Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez set out to produce a “spoken” book. I hope to skim this book soon (maybe tonight or tomorrow) in order to give you more information about what Freire means by calling their project a spoken book. From a quick glance, the format seems to be an informal and free-flowing dialogue between Freire and Faundez with the opening pages focusing on their own background and a brief mention of the origins of the project. One more formatting note: there are no chapters, only sections broken up with (sometimes random) topics in bold. As I look over this book it makes me think that we might want to pose more questions to each other over the blog and then answer them (in comments, our own posts and in our in-person recorded dialogues). We might be able to incorporate those questions + responses into our formal chapter. We could do the entire article in dialogue form (like Freire and Faundez) or we could mix in dialogue bits along with some other more formal (and collective) bits of prose.
Do you know of any useful models that we might draw upon for formatting our article?
I like this idea a lot, especially as it relates to our idea of how we’ve been dialoging and diablogging, and how we might be able to better represent that in a text form (as opposed to the audio – aural? – form). I will think of some more dialogues that I’ve seen in print, most have been interview style where someone poses a question (it’s bolded) and then the response is shared. We should play around with that – I’m sure we could easily pull out what we think is the most important with each of our topics and have our thoughts on it as the dialogue in print – would love to think through this more.
Yes, let’s devote some serious attention to this issue when we get together tomorrow. My immediate thought is that we need to try and use as much of what we have already done and make it work in the written essay.