Brainstorming Sessions

I feel like a lot of my blogging sessions are like massive brainstorming sessions I'll need to keep returning to.

• Meaning making is a process, not just a final draft

This is my next thought from the Inquiry Conference that I would like to address. My quote above is from rather long post I wrote not long ago about a series of possibly unrelated thoughts I have been having about languages and language learning. I feel like that is what this academic preparation for the field through blogging is all about, brainstorming and presenting mostly unfinished thoughts or discoveries not quite made.

I also anticipate spending a lot of time piecing together all of the new things my senses will be bombarded with as I allow myself to fully experience whatever comes my way in the next five months, particularly the three starting May 7! These few thoughts about the incompleteness of blogging and the need to keep returning to what I've written before and revising it, adding to it and basically have a conversation with myself between each blog post is why I liked this thought from the conference so much.  I haven't felt like I've been producing finals drafts, the best written or most revised (often I revise them over the next few days after  first post them and sometimes never get to it again), and also my thoughts are first ideas or resurrected ideas that come up from something I read in one of my sources, hear in a class or discuss in the field prep course and they still need time to evolve.

I would like to relate this process of meaning making to one of my personal thoughts on relationships between people. I discovered that a way I was categorizing my friendships related to the way I communicated with them. I found that the people I was the closest to I would engage in a verbal meaning making process with. I would tell them things as they came to my mind for the first time, sometimes retracing these thoughts a few times with different words as I tried to work out turning the thought into articulated words for another to hear or work out if I even believed what I was saying which then results in a revising or retraction process.  A close friend allows this process to happen, they understand it, or try to, and they don't listen judgmentally or critically but recognize that the thoughts are still forming. They engage in discovering with you by encouraging, pointing out fallacy or giving any kind of personal opinion from their outside perspective.

Then there are the people I share final drafts with.  No final draft is without its flaw, or without those who will take up argument against it, misrepresent it, misunderstand it, but it is when the one who has formed it says, this is what I have to give and I'm ready to defend it as my truth, as something worthwhile, beautiful, new. Sometimes I wonder if a real final draft is every possible, revision is the way of life.  This thought going back to my last post on change as a natural process, we are always revising or changing and that is how I define life. So, as close as we get to what we call final drafts, that is what I share with most, ideas after I have worked them over and articulated them.

Blogging has not been like the final draft, and therefore in a way I am engaging with a potentially very open audience of people I am not close to in my meaning making thoughts reserved usually for those I feel the closest to, trust the most and know will help me to learn and grow.  I am hoping that others can engage in the learning process with me, and I am realizing that good teaching requires this. To be a good teacher I must have students who trust me and are willing to work through the process of learning with me as I learn right along with them. Good teaching and learning is a noble cause, I hope to spend my life doing both. Here is a post from my personal blog about teaching and learning.