With how messy my head has been lately with acronyms and pedagogies and webinar chatroom comments, you'd think I'd lost what my teaching style IS, but I think all of these Twitter-induced rabbit holes have only reaffirmed what I'm doing in the classroom and why. Student voice and choice. Yep. Empathy built in. Yes. Creativity everywhere. Hells yeah. Real-world applications. Mm hm. PBL asks students to create their own projects and create their own daily tasks. OEP asks students to write for the open movement, the creative network of the world. It demands: "Get rid of disposable assignments!" TFT asks students to transfer what they are learning in one area to another. Punk theory says, "Give students voice and choice." OWI is all about access and inclusivity. Some tweet the other day said that we should shy away from recipe assignments (14 slides, 7 sources, 4 transitions, 2 memes) because that's bad, and <insert their pedagogy here...

Why, hello, little bloggie. It's been awhile, hasn't it? So sorry. So, since my last confession, I've taken a deep dive into OER and OEP and the open movement in general. Here's the shortest version of the story: I'm fairly certain that at a 2013 TYCA-MW conference (at a fancy conference center in Normal, IL), I was introduced to the free Writing Spaces Volumes . I began using them soon after, and I don't think I thought much more about it... Until the fall of 2015 when the campus was offering mini-grants for projects. At that point, I must've been thinking about writing our own textbook, and so we wrote up a proposal. In 2016, the mini-grant was accepted, but Anne left us for industry, and so that summer tasked Dana, Ronda, and I with creating Writing Unleashed . We used Adobe InDesign, and it's very "pretty," brief on boring content, heavy on student examples, and has a cute little nerd unit. We didn't know then - what I know now - ...