In the New Year, I'll be teaching scholarly writing for doctoral students. It's a new course for me and for our program. I am excited about teaching this course, and I am passionate about writing. Since I was eight years old, I've thought of myself as a writer. No matter what else I have worked at in my life, writing has always been at the center of what I do. My research has focused on how we experience writing in schools as well as later in life; how writing deepens our thinking; and how writing shapes our sense of possibilities for ourselves. I have also been involved in research that works with kids using digital tools writing online through wikis and hypertext. I have written and published poems, stories, and essays.
I know this course--Scholarly Writing in Education--will be challenging for the students. They are going to be writing fiction, poetry, and memoir--many of them for the first time as they work to improve their academic writing. I decided that I needed a writing challenge too so that I would remember what it is like to venture into a genre where you have no experience. For me, that would be blogging and tweeting. While I have used digital writing tools like wikis before, they were private sites. I knew my audience, or at least felt I could control who my audience would be. Writing a blog and tweeting puts my thoughts out there for whomever might be reading them and it's a bit scary. But the funny thing is, as I am writing this, I realize that I never could control the audience for my other writing anyway--I just thought I could.
So onward we go, the students and I, and we'll see how the challenges unfold over the weeks to come. I look forward to hearing from you, Dear Reader, whomever you are.
