“You are here” anticolonial practitioner’s journal

Full guidelines, here. Links to an external site.

Our growth as teachers happens in the classroom, but also when we are engaging with linguistically diverse people in community spaces, at stores, while taking the train, etc. Our students and us bring all of these experiences to the classroom, expanding language repertoires beyond normative frameworks as they learn a language. Therefore, you are encouraged to document “aha moments” and reflections that shape your teaching practice in and outside of the classroom. Perhaps something clicks with you while you visit a museum or witness enriching language practices in community spaces. 

An important part of our work as anticolonial English teachers is to continuously wrestle with the systemic oppressions we have inherited in the profession, and yet, we continue to cultivate connection and growth . Teachers’ praxis is essential to create spaces and opportunities to resist these oppressive structures that affect us and our students and to foster joy, justice, and transformation. It is important to document these moments and how we navigate them to generate knowledge collectively. 

Other possible topics for journal writing include, but are not limited to:

• What are you grateful for? Working your way through this quarter, what blessings are you aware of, are you reminded of? 
• Write a letter to a thing, idea, person (Taranath, 2010) (Dear Language. Dear English. Dear Frustration. Dear Nativeness. Dear Translingualism. Dear Grammar.) 
• lists: goals, dreams, relationships, critical moments, triumphs, interests, ideas, skills, activities, amusements, fear
• What you observe of your students (their progress, limits, interaction patterns, when they seem interested/bored)

• What happened in a class (classes you observed or taught); who or what caught your attention; what happens outside of class and how it influences your pedagogy? Or what kinds of non-normative community knowledges do your students bring to the classroom to assert themselves and continue learning? 
• How you feel about your apprenticeship (progress, small victories, challenges, frustration, complaints)
• What embodied reactions do you experience? What colonialities are resisted and/or reinforced in specific moments? What do we learn from unexpected encounters and moments when we realize expansive language practices are possible? 
• How do we and students negotiate changing circumstances and intersectional identities? What connections and disconnections do we experience as we teach/learn language and literacy? 
• How do different social relations, spaces, and material objects, the environment (the trees, the air, the water, your pets) shape us and our anticolonial work?
• How do joy, collaboration, and community enhance your teaching and students’ learning? What makes students’ resonate with the class content? What distracts them from it?
• What activities worked and what didn’t, and why
• How you would revise lessons you taught or observed
• conversations you had with others (teachers observed, other teachers, students, classmates in Practicum) and ideas you derived from them?
• What you imagine could work in the future;

Some logistical considerations to get you started: 

• It often helps to approach journal writing very differently from formal writing, essentially as a think-aloud process. Write whatever comes to mind, in the order it comes. Don’t worry about revision or editing. You don’t even need to spell check. 
• Some people enjoy writing bullet journals in bullet form. Others are more comfortable writing in a narrative format (i.e. in paragraphs) or using a mix of modalities.. Your journal should not be a list of activities you carried out in class. Journal writing is about reflection on ideas, not fact listing. 
• Often you write, it usually helps to set aside a time to write on a regular basis. Ideally, you should sit down to write an idea strikes you as important. 
• There is no ideal length, and long entries are not necessarily better than short ones. What is more important is that you keep a record of your ideas and reflections in sufficient detail to support your reflection, your ability to notice patterns over time, and your analysis. Anything that catches your attention is worth recording, even if you don’t understand its significance or meaning at that time.
• Make sure that for each entry, you record the date and place of your writing. 
• If you wrote entries on napkins,, audio notes, etc. provide the images and/or links to the reflections themselves so that we can see/read/listen to them in class. 

You should upload your updated journal every week on Canvas, or as regularly as you can to avoid losing track of your work and ideas. I will check in with you weekly, but the entire project is due on March 17th at 8 am.