Paper summary:
This praxis paper is about informing one’s practice through ‘blogging’ or ‘diarising’.
As many a budding trainee teacher knows, research informs teaching, or at least from the literature one reads (for example, Roach, Blackmore and Dempster, 2001). Occasionally, however, it also leads one away from teaching. This paper will discuss in brief the evolution of The Power House from a mostly personal online diary to a blog where mostly online reflections of educational theory and women’s studies topics are discussed. Some thought will also be made with regards to womensstudies.info, a proposed collaborative blog to be shared among volunteer gender and women’s studies undergraduates past and present. The author’s hypotheses about the likely success or failure of womensstudies.info will be discussed, and how it may hinge (Reason, 2006) on ethics.
In turn, the paper will talk about how use of The Power House ‘informed’ [1] the author’s teaching, changed his career focus [2] from primary to tertiary level teaching training, and [3] how it is proposed this evolves to an experimental method of the author to encourage interstudent participation in women’s studies research, teaching and learning.
Presenter profile: Jonathan Ah Kit
Jonathan is an honours candidate in Gender and Women’s Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington College of Education. He popped his head through the door of the women’s studies department at the college 1½ years ago and never left. His paper talks in part about why he didn’t return to the teaching programme, and how he thinks perhaps his diary helped inform that.
His research interest is currently in magistrate Oswald Mazengarb’s seminal 1954 report on juvenile moral delinquency in the home of his youth, Lower Hutt, and earlier inquiries on alleged sexual ‘deviancy’ in the 1920s.
When acting as if he isn’t studying, he pretends to be webmistress of Student Christian Movement Aotearoa, a liberal Christian student group, and masquerades as the secretary of its VUW (Victoria University, Wellington) branch.