Written in White Ink
A Reflection on Writing, Teaching, and Bravery
For the last six years, I have been searching the deep woods of academia for my voice as a writer. At seven years old, I boldly declared I would be an author. I spent my freshman and sophomore years of high school working on their literary magazine, Vital Signs. While my undergraduate studies centered on film and art, I never lost my passion and enthusiasm for writing. This longing to write soon evolved into an interest in publishing and, finally, teaching.
When I decided to go to graduate school, I had been working in higher education for about seven years. Starting as Blackboard technical support, I quickly moved into a position creating graphics and multimedia for online courses. It was during this time that I began to develop as an instructional designer as well as teaching workshops on student engagement and interaction. Through these experiences, my fascination with gamification, flipped learning, student motivation and engagement grew.
At first, my interest in graduate school was just about improving my existing writing skills while solidifying my writing goals and routines, but I had also been toying with the idea of ebook publishing. Taking my graphic design skills into consideration, I thought having a background in digital and traditional publishing seemed like an attractive career goal, so that became the focus of my graduate studies in the Department of Rhetoric at UA Little Rock.
I decided to apply for a teaching assistantship within my graduate program because I thought it would make me a better instructional designer if I had some teaching experience. Also, I was excited about actually applying the techniques I taught about in my workshops, which was mostly theoretical for me since I wasn’t a faculty member. Looking back, I’m glad things worked out the way they did for a number of reasons: I received a phenomenal education in my master’s program, I was surrounded by really awesome educators, and the classes were so interesting, they actually made me want to become a full-time instructor myself. I developed a love for rhetoric and teaching I never even considered, let alone imagined was possible.
More than a Portfolio
I wanted to create something that would be more than just a graduate portfolio. I wanted to make a resource for educators that think like I do; the kinds of educators that like to experiment and do innovative new things in their classrooms. I started by looking at other students’ portfolios. Luckily, the program coordinator and faculty in the Department of Rhetoric are really great about sharing examples from previous students—I talk about this some in “Here There Be Monsters” regarding teaching materials. As I looked through the other student portfolios, I noticed that almost none of them were actively being maintained. Once the students had completed them, that seemed to be it. The more I considered this, the more my idea started to take shape.
The Laugh of the Medusa
A while back, my brother came up with this really cool name for a website—Jennovate. It’s a pretty awesome name, but, of course, it was already taken. For months, I anguished over this name situation and honestly thought I would just use that name anyway. I bought jennovate.net at one point, but the more I thought about it, the more I hated the idea of using a name someone else already owned. I wanted something unique. I came up with countless names, but none of them were quite right. That was until I read Hélène Cixous's essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” in a course on language theory.
In this language theory course, the class was divided into groups and each group had to select readings for class discussion. One of the women in the class was a high school English teacher and she was the one that chose this essay as one of the readings for her group. This was the second French essay I had read in the program—the first being an excerpt from Roland Barthes’ book, The Pleasure of the Text—but I was immediately struck by two things: 1) the French seemed to love comparing writing to sexual pleasure and 2) that Cixous was really on to something with this essay.
As I read “The Laugh of the Medusa,” I was enamored by her descriptions of female and feminine writing, specifically her allusion to women writing in white ink. At the time, I had just started teaching and her essay really resonated with the way my students engaged with writing in the classroom. Like the women in Cixous’s essay, I felt like my students’ voices were being suppressed by a system that preferred academic conformity over genuine creativity. This was something we talked about a lot in two of my previous courses on rhetorical and composition theory.
My students were afraid of writing. They didn’t feel comfortable writing academically, and a lot of them seemed to have trauma from previous writing experiences in grade school. Whether this was from being told they were bad writers or from earning low grades, they approached writing and reading in my class with trepidation and, sometimes, outright disdain. This, of course, was not true of all students. Some of my students loved writing and had developed a healthy relationship with academic writing. I wanted my other students to feel the same way.
As I thought about Cixous’s essay and my students’ struggles with writing, I found the name for my portfolio: White Ink Diaries. What started as just a clever nod to those familiar with the essay soon evolved into a whole ideology about education, and writing education in particular. It also became something of a manifesto for me; a personal statement about finding your voice as a writer, an educator, and an advocate.
Inspiration Abounds
With my name and my mission clearly set in my mind, I started scouring the internet for design inspiration. From teachers to entrepreneurs, I wanted to see what other people were doing with their blogs and websites. I really didn’t like any of the teaching websites I found with the exception of one by Dr. Nadine Muller. Dr. Muller’s website was much more modern than the other sites I researched and I liked the way she labeled and tagged her posts.
Not finding additional design inspiration among other teaching websites, I decided to see what independent bloggers were doing. A lot of these websites had resources about the best way to structure a blog including navigation layouts, how to write your about page, and what elements to feature on your homepage. As I combed through hundreds of blogs, I found a couple of stand out examples that I kept going back to over and over.
Smart Passive Income
I took a lot of my design cues from Pat Flynn’s SmartPassiveIncome.com. He has a really interesting website in general, but I loved his design. When I was looking up ideas on how to layout my pages, several other blogs referenced the good things he was doing on his website. My main takeaway from Smart Passive Income was the arrangement and style of the blog posts, particularly the boxes on the blog list pages, the Start Here page, and the color blocks used with some of the headers.
The Middle Finger Project
Once I found The Middle Finger Project, it soon became my go-to site for inspiration. I love everything about her website from the name to the design to the tone of the writing. Ash Ambirge, the owner and CEO of The Middle Finger Project, inspired me to take a big risk with the tone of my own website.
Academia isn’t know for being edgy and most of the unconventional educators I’ve met are still pretty straight-laced. While I knew I was taking a huge gamble with the language on my website—which openly criticizes my field in a vernacular that is decidedly unacademic—I had read enough blog posts on Ash’s website to value uniqueness and truth over mediocrity and following the status quo. After reading “Wanna Be Successful Online? Stop Bullshitting. Tell Your TRUTH,” I knew if I wanted to do White Ink Diaries the right way, if I wanted to embrace the message in Cixous’s essay, and if I wanted to honor my own truth, then I had to write in a voice that was more authentically me.
So I decided to put myself out there and take a risk. To quote from Ash’s post above:
Do you believe in something yet? Truly? Has the world touched you enough, and poked you enough, and ripped open the seams of your soul enough for you to flinch? To push back? To create a chasm between the big, glossy bullshit and your truth? Find the chasm. Find the depth. Find your own meaning buried under the rock. And then tell it to us. Tell us your truth with the conviction of a mother standing up for her babies. Tell us what you know, and tell us in a way that is so raw, and so honest, and so real, that we cannot possibly ignore you.
I had found my mama-bear truth, and it was that the modern education system is doing these students a disservice. When I see students reacting negatively to learning, it’s because I know they’ve had bad experiences somewhere in their educational career. When a student comes from a background that doesn’t value education and they enter the educational arena—and sometimes it is just that, an arena—where they have to face scrutiny because they don’t live up to the expectations of a flawed standardized exam, it is little wonder they come to dislike, or even hate, learning.
I want to change that narrative among students. I want to give them an environment where learning is fun, creative, and over-ripe with possibilities and experimentation. And you don’t get to that place by being afraid to say the system is fucked up.
A Fine Line Between Brave and Brazen
This website has become more than a portfolio for me. It’s become a declaration; an ode to the educators who won't be held down by convention and tradition. It's for the individuals who want to enact real change in not just the realm of academia, but they feel like they don't have the voice to do that. This is for those teachers that are desperate to be heard, desperate for their students' voices to be heard, and feel like they're not. I want to encourage these amazing mavericks of education to be brave, even in a system that feels indomitable or impossible to fix, because nothing is impossible when enough voices speak together.