Diary of a Process (with a little theory on the side)

I have so many ideas that I want to explore and feel compelled to explore that I don't know where to begin and what's worse – I don't know how to talk about the ideas without them being sounding too essayish. That's not what this blog is about. So what is it about? It's about my research and my practical experience with, through and about this project. It's also a diary of my process. So where am I right now with all of these ideas? I feel very scattered. I feel I have too many things I want to read and yet I've just re-read one teeny tiny article that I must have sped read this year because I got so much more out of it this second time it was almost as if I barely scratched the surface initially. Uh oh, just thinking of this article my mind goes again, launching into theory and critique and essay verbiage. Stop it, stop it now and come back to us Stacey. Whew, that was a close one. So this time, instead of looking for the best quotes to use in my essay to support my theory, I read the article to see what the author was talking about. What a concept. I still enjoyed her ideas about walking as part of her practice to both stop and be present in the world and connect to herself, but I also noticed how much she quoted other theorists. In some paragraphs she had nearly every other sentence attributed to someone else. Of course she's not alone in this kind of writing, since I've read loads of articles this year with this same style. But what resonated most with me were the personal words she shared about her own experience. Even in the writing we do as art educators, it seems we've bought into a system that minimizes the value of our own voices. So in this blog I'm taking some writing licence...and sometimes, for my own needs, like I did somewhat in the last post, I'll need to write with that essayish sounding verbiage (you know, the one where I write pedagogy at least five times each paragraph—pedagogy, pedagogical, pedagogue, pedagogies...there now that's done). And other times, like I did with this post, I'll do some sort of stream of consciousness style writing and go off on some rift without citings or any “theoretical underpinning/positioning” whatsoever. And maybe, who knows, I'll throw in some surprise writing styles just to keep it fun.