For me, it all feels a little messy and hard to wrangle in right now – which it has all along, but I think I expected that to change a bit as time went on. I have really struggled with getting this post up this week – I have been stuck by getting stuck. What is fair to ask of students at this time? How far to push colleagues? How far to push colleagues to push others? Who can help us gauge this? Our deadlines for the semester feel aggressive in the face of the emotional labor we are asking of our students. How could I have not realized that for the sake of the students and also the sake of our group? Our team has been wonderful – but I am struggling not to see some degree of my own failure here. On the other hand, our intention is something we trust and the students who have understood it have expressed a sense of empowerment at the idea. Is it right to ask/push (what is the word) for work from the students I know best? What would be wrong about it? And if there is something wrong, is that absolved by driving outreach to those I don’t know personally? There is something larger to be asked here. Before this project goes wherever it goes after this semester, I am going to have a long, hard look at how we ask what we do of students and how we engage them after they have submitted work. I am also struggling with why, in the face of all of these questions, I am still having a hard time scaling back the vision of how far to reach this semester, which has just a few short weeks remaining. I wish we had 4 more weeks…at least. This is perhaps also complicated by good news, which is that we may have confirmation from a school in Peru, our first global connect. And as another possible outreach angle, I have anonymous work (word clouds and digital images) to share from a teacher – having asked her students the questions from our student submission form. Another possible angle to bring to our group.

At a more process-oriented level, we have been sorting through work flow and diagraming our internal processes for the next round of submissions and/or if we scale to one more level/prepare to scale after the term is over. Our students currently live in NYC, upstate NY, Vermont, Texas, and Virginia – a really nice start of geographic distribution. Their work has made me pause, think, and step back. Some of it is hard to let fully sink in. All are moving in different ways.