First Post...This blog as partial fufillment of my graduation requirement

I am in the process of writing my "Portfolio" which is a cumulative project documenting my academic and professional progress as a teacher. It is highly recursive in that the very process of writing about what I've  learned is supposed to reveal to me more about my learning...navel enough for you? Not only does this assignment serve as a record of my learning through my graduate studies, but  it also asks the writer to make projections or goals about his/her future professional development. In order to keep track of this meta-learning I'm keeping a “portfolio learning log” and to fulfill my commitment to continuously reflectively teach, I’ve begun this blog. In this post, I will share with you a recent “learning log” entry.

Journaling: from private to public, from emotional to intellectual: from marble notebooks to blogs.

I began journaling when I was in the fourth grade. It was at its birth a sort of anger management. I didn’t like school when I was younger; I resented having to sit for long periods, which I viewed as an impediment to discovery. I was used to studying and interacting with the world around me; I kept track of the development of frog eggs to tad poles; I learned about art from going to museums; I learned about music from singing and playing piano. My early childhood (Gargantuan?) learning experiences were hands on and so to me sitting in a classroom made no sense (Shakti Gattengo?). This coupled with the fact that I had a rather cantankerous teacher, made me turn to writing to express my frustrations.

Later, as journaling became a way for me to understand my life. I wrote very regularly in my journal which I adamantly refused to call a “diary”. A diary seemed so demeaningly feminine and beside my tom-boy inclination, a "dairy" connoted a stream of menial entries and emotional confessions to an imaginary audience (“dear diary?”). Somehow, as a preteen, I knew that journaling was more of a life skill. My audience was my conscious, my intellect and often times, God. Writing became an exercise in clarity.

Increasingly, journaling took a much more spiritual purpose as I filled my notebooks with prayers, quotes, and questions.

            Finally, a year of grad school at the School for International Training, taught me that reflective writing, much like what I’d been doing in my journals, was a key element and discipline in the experiential learning cycle. When I spent 3 months in Morocco on an internship, blogging became a sort of public journal. I was writing not only reflectively but to inform the novice reader. This process helped my understandings according to the KASA (knowledge skills awareness and attitudes) framework, the program’s pedagogic base.

In order to track my future professional progress and consciously continue my SIT acquired skill of implementing the experiential learning cycle through reflective writing, I am considering starting a teaching and learning blog.

Blogging is a sort of continuation of the journaling discipline but I see it as a transition from private to public and from emotional to intellectual.