Welcome to “Academically Speaking,” the “official” blog of the Academic Literacy Project at UC Davis.

Before I go any further, I must confess that this is my first time writing a blog, and so I ask that you bear with me as I negotiate this new genre. But even as I write that, I sort of have to laugh since I know that so many of my former high school students are proficient bloggers or proficient consumers of bloggers. I, on the other hand, am neither of those. And I find that rather ironic since, as a PhD student in Education about to complete my first year of the program, I would consider myself proficient in academic literacy. It makes me wonder if one of my former students might be writing a blog about the struggles of teaching newbies like me how to blog, while I write a blog about how to address the teaching of academic literacy. I can imagine some of my more web savvy students–always reluctant to spend time on their class writing but eager to show off their websites–serve as advisers to me now.

But then I begin to wonder if the genre of blogging is as nebulous as the field of academic literacy. From the few blogs I have perused while trying to get a sense of what I’d gotten myself into, I have a hunch that it may be. I know that I have an old friend from college who was an “official blogger” at the 2004 Democratic Convention, but when I visit his personal blog, I find daily updates with more information than anyone really needs about his two dachshunds. On the other hand, when I went looking for some blogs related to education, I found everything from daily updates on classroom life, “hipteacher”, to daily updates on current policies related to education, "edspresso", to blogs on how to use blogs in the classroom, "Odds and Ends". So that then leads me to my next question: what really is a blog?

Deciding to follow with my web exploration, I headed to "wikipedia" to see what definition was provided there. At the time I looked, this is the definition I found:
A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.[1] With the advent of video blogging, the word blog has taken on an even looser meaning of any bit of media wherein the subject expresses his opinion or simply talks about something.

As I suspected might be the case, the definition of blog is far more comprehensive than I could have come up with on my own. And I have to confess, knowing how much it entails actually makes this idea of keeping a blog a little bit more scary than if I had a clearcut definition, a cookie cutter pattern sense of what I am supposed to do.

At the same time, what I have come to realize about academic literacy is that there are about as many definitions out there as there are people to define the term. And the more I learn about what academic literacy is, the more nebulous the term becomes. Which is a large part of why I was so thrilled to become involved with the research related to the School of Ed's Academic Literacy Summit last February when I saw the first research question for the day listed as this: “What are the current and emerging conceptions of academic literacy among educators from several school sites at an event in Northern California in 2008?”

True to form, the responses on the questionnaires collected at the Summit varied from person to person. Reponses ranged from “The difference between social and schoolbook academic talk” to “The language of a discipline used by practitioners in academic or professional settings” to “Ability to understand & manipulate abstract concepts in language & math.” The more time we spend with this data, the more realizations we have about the diversity of responses. I’m looking forward to being able to share some of our findings on this website soon and to receiving your feedback when they are posted.

And so that also leads to why I am excited to be beginning this blogging adventure. I hope that, through this blog and your responses to it, we can work to some deeper understandings of what academic literacy is: what the term means, what it looks like in practice, how we classify someone as being “academically literate,” and what it looks like when we work with our students on improving their academic literacy.

I would like to end this blog entry by giving you a little bit of background about me and sharing some of my hopes for what I will accomplish with this blog.

As I stated above, I am currently a PhD student at UC Davis in the School of Education with an emphasis on Language, Literacy and Culture. Prior to this, my work in education has been affiliated with Lodi Unified, a suburban school district of about 30,000 students serving the communities of Lodi and North Stockton in California’s Central Valley. I worked for one year as a Curriculum Coach for secondary teachers of English Language Arts. And before that, I taught high school English and journalism at Tokay High School. Additionally, I am a Teacher Consultant for the "Great Valley Writing Project". Through this role, I have been involved with groups of teachers exploring academic writing.

My plan for this blog is to write about issues related to academic literacy as they emerge in readings, conversations with other educators, research in which I am involved, or current policy. I do hope that this blog will also be interactive. My hope is that you will share your thoughts and questions with me so that we can engage in a dialogue that will help us construct and reconstruct our understandings of academic literacy. And I hope that, along the way, I will begin to become proficient in the genre of the blog.