Seed #8: Appreciating the Growth and Smelling the Flowers
It is a beautiful thing to be able to reflect on my identity as a teacher via a medium that allows me to actually express myself as an individual. Blogging has challenged me in ways I didn't expect and helped me expand my outlook on the learning possibilities of multimodal composition. I found myself thinking deeper about our course and my relationship to the content in a way that I may not have through writing traditional responses. Having to consider outside sources, media, and image when reflecting through this journey allowed me to make personal connections and generate new ideas about my teaching.
More than anything else, I have loved being a part of this community. I feel like I've learned so much about everyone through reading their blogs and seeing reactions to my work. I think this experience has brought us closer together as a cohort and opened the door for vulnerability and creative expression.
While I love all the plants I grew, there are a few that get the farmer's market gold star:
1) Professionalism
Seed #5: Beginner's Guide to Gardening: My Experience as a Writing Coach
This is the post that I am the most proud of as far as bringing in my own experiences and laying out suggestions for working with young writers. I felt the most confident in my teaching identity when writing this post because I was able to draw off my personal successes from working with students. I was proud of the professional voice that I held in this post and thought I did a good job keeping a light, casual tone while maintaining a sense of authority and clarity. I felt the format was easy to follow and I think I did well making connections between my personal thoughts and actual research and models that backed up my opinions. I consider this post to be a prized vegetable garden: the harvest is bountiful and the produce serves a distinct nutritional purpose.
2) Multimodal Design
Seed #7: Sharing My Multimodal Harvest
While the post itself wasn't necessarily multimodal, I feel very happy with the zine I created as a multimodal response to The Attention Economy. Playing with a physical medium that encourages community, creativity, and civic engagement to discuss a social issue that exists entirely online was inspiring. I felt that using a non-digital medium to talk about a digital issue made a statement about media overconsumption simply through the medium itself. I drew upon uses of text, art, and reused paper materials in order to create my zine. I wanted to incorporate as many different art supplies I had in order to make this in order to show the power and opportunities available through physical media. This post represents the wildflowers of my garden: multimodality springs up in many forms and colors, and its chaos is a core part of its beauty.
3) Creativity
Seed #4: Digital Storytelling and Multimodal Composition
To start, I really love the tomato/daffodil metaphor that I use to kick off this post. I was happy that I could represent my relationship to filmmaking versus writing via an on-theme metaphor for my blog. Filmmaking is something that I don't consider myself naturally talented at in comparison to creative writing. It took a lot of courage for me to post my film, a project that I tend to cringe at looking back. This post allowed me to reflect on myself creatively and consider the benefits of letting myself be vulnerable and share my "bad" creative work. I don't think I followed the prompt for this post exactly, but my approach served to prompt my reflection on the benefits of sharing work I'm not proud of and practice the level of vulnerability that I'll be asking of my students. Being able to show my art and poetry in this way allowed me to bring in a piece of myself that normally exists outside of my academic identity. Despite all the talk of daffodils and tomatoes, this post makes up the sunflowers in my garden. My creativity may droop or flourish depending on the exposure to the sun, the level of attention, and whether the gardener gives them the space they need to grow.
4) Civic Engagement
Seed #6: Navigating the Attention Economy
I was happy I got to talk about a social issue that I wanted to learn more about and that I don't think is talked about often enough. We talk a lot about media overconsumption, the dangers of our digital landscape, and the impacts of AI, but I don't often hear discussions surrounding the companies pulling the strings behind the scene. I learned a lot about this issue through creating my presentation and felt I was able to give some concrete options for change. This seed has grown into the rose bushes of my garden. There are many beautiful things about the internet, but if you want to navigate it safely you must be aware of the thorns.
People's Choice Vote:
Grad: Signal & Noise
I've learned so much from Amanda's perspectives through this semester and I thought Signal & Noise dove into teaching with technology and approaches to multimodality in a way that both inspired and impressed me. Her Booktok in particular was incredible and I was introduced to so many new digital storytelling mediums through following her blogging journey!
Undergrad: The Starship: Literacy
Antonis' blog felt like a representation of the creative community that our cohort has built through this experience. His theme invited us to play with our responses and create our own identities through the log-style entries. It was a joy seeing how different people adapted his style to join in on his narrative while engaging with important conversations about teaching. The burnout post in particular spoke to me as it verbalized a struggle that we all feel in a playful and creative way. His writing spoke about creating a classroom environment free from judgement and welcoming of creativity, and his blog created that exact space digitally.
Hi Ivy! I really enjoyed reading this reflection, your “garden” metaphor works so well because it makes your growth feel both intentional and organic at the same time.
ReplyDeleteWhat stood out to me most was your point about blogging pushing you to think more deeply about your identity as a teacher. I relate to what you said about multimodal composition opening up new ways of thinking that traditional writing sometimes doesn’t reach. The way you described bringing in outside sources, media, and visuals felt like a really strong example of how meaning-making expands when students are given multiple entry points.
I also appreciated your honesty in the creativity section, especially around sharing work you don’t always feel fully confident in. That kind of vulnerability is actually really powerful in an educational space, and I think it connects well to what you said about modeling that for students.
Your “wildflowers” and “sunflowers” metaphors for multimodality and creativity really stuck with me too because they show how creativity doesn’t always look neat or linear, but it still has value and impact.
One question I had for you is how you might carry this blogging experience into your future classroom. Do you see yourself using multimodal blogging or digital storytelling with students, or adapting it in a different way?
Overall, your reflection really captures both personal and professional growth in a way that feels thoughtful and grounded in practice.