Creating an Online Persona

Because I’ve deliberately taken some time off for reflection and reinvention, I’m called to a deeper examination of my teaching style. What worked? Where would I like a do-over?

If you asked me the first thing I’d like to make amends for, I’d say my teaching persona as it relates to making connections with students. I’m not the warm and fuzzy type and not a likely candidate for a degree in elementary education, but at the time I got my degree, I didn’t have the imagination to try anything else. Like many other women my age in rural Iowa, I was foreordained to be a farm wife and the teaching degree was a back-up plan. Well, my marriage failed, and I had to go to work, a fifth grade teacher.

Keep in mind that I was named my school’s Teacher of the Year in the third year of the award and I was also Missouri’s DARE educator of the year, so I’m no slouch as a teacher, but I never felt close to my students. Imagine my sense of failure when I read this statement by Regie Routman: “We can and must bond with them all. This is not a choice but a duty and responsibility.” (2003 p.12) Wow! A duty! She includes a list of what bonding looks like and I felt like I could only give tepid answers to her questions. Well, I kind of celebrated them; I kind of knew their interests.

So I wasn’t a rah-rah cheerleader, but I did connect with students through their writing. When our fifth grade departmentalized and the job of English teacher fell to me, I found my niche. Many a student will say I helped them believe they were writers; I felt close to a student when I sat down with him or her for a writing conference.

I’ve been a facilitator for Ozarks Writing Project for the past two years, working with teachers to make them believe they are writers. A blog posting by one of the participants made me come to value what I could offer people. He wrote, “She listens. Plain and simple. Perhaps this is the key reason that her feedback is always helpful, always purposeful, and always well-received (even if it's semi-corrective).”

I’m reserved and here was someone who valued that in me. I think this kind of connection through listening and facilitating is transferable to an online writing class.

Scott Warnock writes, “…the personality we adopt to communicate textually in the electronic realm might differ from the way we customarily think of ourselves. As writing teachers, this difference can be a good thing and can help us reconceptualize ourselves.” (2009 p. 2) Imagining myself as someone whose reflective style is a suitable fit for an online writing course is indeed a good thing.

Warnock says it’s worth spending time to consider your online voice (3). Here again, I am fortunate to be taking some time off and spending my time writing online in a number of spaces: a personal blog, a professional blog, a blog and wiki for student use, Blackboard and a wiki for teachers, a wiki connected to the school website, and Facebook pages for service groups—each reaching a different audience and calling for a slightly different voice.

References

Routman, Regie. Reading Essentials. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.

Warnock, Scott. Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers English, 2009.