Today I will write… the days rolled by, folding into weeks, which later became months. The longer I waited in-between writing on this blog, the more distant the idea of writing became. Soon enough, I found myself harboring negative feelings toward writing… This blog post is an experiment with words, images, and feelings. I composed this in a single sitting, taking fragments of texts from different encounters and putting them in conversation (or not). This is my attempt at making sense of this time of the coronavirus (COVID-19), social distancing, and remote learning/teaching.

As a second-year education doctoral student at Teachers College, I, Catherine Cheng Stahl, took my first philosophy course with Professor David Hansen. This ‘philosophy of education’ course has transformed me, my thinking with regards to my own education, and my sense of self-trust in my own writing process. Here, I share the very last essay I wrote as part of my own philosophical journey—an essay that I believe provides the foundation for my own philosophy of education to guide me into the new decade.

This Thanksgiving, I want to take a moment to give thanks to the many educators who have positively shaped my thinking, learning, and teaching at various stages of my life. I would not have had the courage or the motivation to pursue a profession in education, were it not for my own teachers. They ignited in me a love of learning and cultivated the right environment for me to experience growth. Thus, I devote this essay to my teachers and to my colleagues who are teachers.

This is me, sharing one of my last papers written during my first year of graduate school at Teachers College, writing as Catherine Cheng. Here, I reflect on the tendency of teacher preparation programs to overemphasize practice rather than to provide a rich education that supports teachers in recognizing the aesthetics of teaching. I argue for a recognition of and, perhaps, a return to an “art” of teaching that takes into account the affective dimension and emotional labor of working with students.

Drawing inspiration from both Deleuzoguattarian theory of becoming and Kathleen Stewart’s evocation of ordinary affect, this visual entry is an experiment-in-process with the raw materials of flour, eggs (and some water). Here, I share the simultaneous unraveling and entangling of these materials as they become (through manual labor) dough and eventually homemade farfalle. I will be re-turning (in a Baradian sense) and sharing additional insights as I revisit this entry in the near future.

For this first day in March, I’m sharing more reflections regarding my first year at Teachers College as a doctoral student in education. I have recently been reading Deleuze and Guattari’s works, along with that of Erin Manning on the minor gesture and will share some of my sense-making process. And as always, I’m sharing original photographs taken during strolls through New York City…

I’m sharing another original piece of academic writing for a course I took at Teachers College. As part of this course on gender, difference, and curriculum, we read a diverse set of books, articles on theory, as well as articles of empirical studies. My essay is an integrative one, in which I tried to draw on a wide range of theorists and practitioners to describe how differences are produced via school curricula, ideas of “normal”, and structures/traditions…

I’m sharing with you a curricular project titled “Queering Science Education” that I pursued as part of my coursework for a gender, difference and curriculum course at Teachers College. For this project, I am using concepts from Queer Theory to begin to re-imagine and re-conceptualize science education to make it more interdisciplinary, more inclusive, more accessible, and outside the bounds of “standard” or “normal” traditional science education….

I’m devoting this blog entry to the process of writing an academic paper—a process that involves risk-taking, which is not comfortable, but is valuable. It is a process that pushes you and actually allows you to achieve a state of clarity at the end. I look back on this paper now and I smile. I have many, many other papers to write, which feels daunting at the present moment; however, I know I can do it, because I have done it before, and it will only get easier and more comfortable because I already went through the initial stage of discomfort… In the end, I told myself that the grade would not matter, because I persevered and I learned…

So far as a first year doctoral student, I have written and submitted six papers for three separate courses… As part of the “book smarts” section of this blog, I thought it might be worthwhile for me to share my original writing from my graduate school journey, along with whatever pieces I manage to dig up from old hard-drives from my college days. Perhaps this will help you gain some more insights into the academic life as a college student and scholarly life as a brand new doctoral student in education…