It's hard dammit!

Once again in the quest of #try(ing)somethingnew I find myself in a situation that is comforting in an uncomfortable sort of way.  It is comforting in that, I have felt this way the majority of the semester, so this feeling is like an old friend I get to hang out with all the time.  It is uncomfortable because I am utterly and totally perplexed by the social science behind my chosen field of study.  Is this the first time I have felt lost this semester?  No.  Is this the first time I have read something with so many big words in it I felt like I was in kindergarten all over again (learning to read)?  No.  Did I expect, at this point in the semester, to feel like I should be able to understand what I am reading in my classes?  Yes!  There, in lies the problem.

Growth and learning is not easy.  It should stretch our boundaries and make us feel uncomfortable.  Sprague tells us that people have had trouble discerning between Communication Education (CE) and Instructional Communication (IC) for years.  Why should a middle-aged-stay-at-home-mom-first-semester-grad-student be any different?  Don't lose heart!  I have my super hero grad school friends and fearless leader to save my a#% from completely falling in to the depths of despair.  Our Tuesday night debriefing is the hand that keeps me from slipping over the edge.

The last weeks' reading brought a much needed perspective to me pedagogically speaking.  When I think that textbook reading or CIA assignments should be common sense, I have a new perspective to reference.  I went in to last weeks reading with one goal in mind.  I needed to be able to answer the question, "What is the difference between communication education and instructional communication?" And after reading several articles on both subjects, the answer was not blatantly obvious to me.  It was obvious to other people, but not to me.  This lead me to feel frustrated and unworthy.  Both not very comfortable feelings.

A theme that stands out from our readings this semester has pointed to making our students feel comfortable in sharing themselves.  This last week was an excellent data point for me as a student.  What I can take away from it as an instructor is perspective.  I will #trysomethingnew in seeing frustration from a different perspective.

I find it fascinating that as I read this upcoming week's reading Critical Communication Pedagogy, that I find this concept amongst the writing of Fassett & Warren! They speak of "at-risk" students and how the concept needs to be revamped to take in to account the instructors perception of failure and what constitutes "at-risk" and "failure".  They state "The student isn't inherently "at risk" of anything exactly; s/he is place at risk by (often) well-intentioned participants in the educational system (from teachers to test designers, from scholarly researchers to voters who fail to question and revise property tax allocations to schools)" (Fasset & Warren, 2007, p. 25).  This ties in to finding the new perspective of relating to our students and reflecting on what constitutes failure and success in our classrooms.

I love Fasset & Warren's (2007) final thought in ch. 1
"If we displace collaboration in favor of "being right" or showing others how they are irretrievably wrong, we engage in violence; we reconstitute education, scholarship, and intellectual engagement as necessarily contentious, necessarily aggressive, necessarily dismissive.  Instead, we must forge this community together; forging necessitates heat, requires conflict, but must also be tempered, by understanding, by curiosity and by respect" (p. 36).

#trysomethingnew