Dear friends, I am still here. 😅

My last blog entry (excluding the intermittent publication announcements) was posted almost exactly a year ago when I achieved tenure and where I reflected on that process and my emotional experience. To be frank, I am feeling quite guilty about losing touch with writing blog entries here because this site has been an outlet through which I enjoyed thinking about my personal & professional life using words and more. Since being a graduate student, blogging has been a way of processing my thoughts and feelings about the academic life. I have previously written about my teaching methods, research projects, travel experiences, and more. Yet the academic life seems to consume, slowly, my reflexivity… in a way that makes me feel less compelled to pause and contemplate on life recently.

Thankfully, I get the opportunity to do so this semester through a reading group that has yet to convene but about which I am already feeling excited.

Long story short, my new department chair initiated a faculty reading group project last year and a colleague of mine in technical communication & rhetoric organized a book club focusing on the teaching life. I signed up and we are now reading Parker J. Palmer’s The Courage to Teach and Rachel Sagner Buurma & Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive. For the record, I have never been one to volunteer for reading groups, for several reasons. One, I am a slow reader. I feel if I were to be among other members of a book club, I’d always play catch up. Two, I haven’t been reading for pleasure in a while. Even in this case, wherein reading is literally an assignment for the book club, the fact that it isn’t a compulsory exercise by administrative means makes it a non-priority on my everyday routine and thus making completing the assignment a difficulty.

Yet so, I have pledged myself to a different attitude toward such an activity this time.

My first reason for doing so is because I am feeling a bit of an uphill battle toward teaching topics I am passionate about. Students at my university are smart, resilient, and persistent. They would exchange nothing else for academic success. Sometimes, however, my experience in the classroom has been stale and lifeless, no matter the efforts I put into lectures, discussions, and learning activities. So I ask: Was it me? Do my students not like how I spoke, what I wore, or the way classes were organized? Could it be the post-COVID pandemic syndrome, where students might still be re-adjusting to pre-pandemic expectations?

To be fair, most of my classes are awesome. But if you’re a teacher, you’ll certainly zoom in on the ones that were less than lively, like I did.

Second, I am trying to re-envision my teacher-scholar identity. Pre-tenure, it was all about getting the number of publications, research accomplishments, teaching evaluations, mentorship outcomes, service capacities, and other unquantifiable-yet-quantified metrics to prove my worth for the university. Today, I want to use my position for the “greater good,” as leaders in my field have advised. My first question is: how can I be a better teacher? Thus, what I hope to get out of the reading group is some tips, methods, and actions for reinvigorating my pedagogy. Palmer, in chapters 1 and 2, addresses this concern via the conversation of identity/integration and the fear of teaching. As I read chapter 3 tonight, I was reminded on the dangers of a single-sided story of success (Palmer is suggesting a more critical look on the binaries of our lives).

At this time, I am unsure of the outcome this reading group nor my ability to change my teaching scenes. Students might still be tired and distracted. I might still be feeling like an imposter who should have just failed my PhD examination. But I remain optimistic about a community of support through the reading group and a spirit of regeneration––to rethink what I have been doing and what I could do in the future.

More to come, hopefully!