My Friend Artia

Broadened my horizons into many different avenues

Her heartfelt spiritual side helped me to reconnect with my spiritual life

Her infectious smile brightened my darkest days

Her unique vision of the world made me stretch my mind around ideas and thoughts that I had not envisioned

Her openness about her life struggles helped to make me more open to differences and sameness within cultures and people

Her loss leaves a large void in many lives

She was too young and had too much left to do but her God called her back for some reason.  I am not sure why but I will eventually.

Her family greives, her office family greives.  There seems no sense to be made but we will learn to handle them eventually.

Artia - you are loved, you are missed and you are home now.  Thank you for coming into my life, I will never forget you.

            Joe Kincheloe invited me to post a blog and suggested I maybe talk about one of the recent books he helped me get published. I really appreciate Joe’s help, scholarship, and activism, and I would like to briefly discuss a topic I think is of extreme importance to critical pedagogy. I am intending this to form part of a chapter for a book due out in 2010 (Engaged Pedagogy, Enraged Pedagogy, Springer). So I would really appreciate any comments and constructive criticism (the forums here or tmonchinski@juno.com). Let me say at the beginning that I am not striving for to be comprehensive here and am leaving out a lot of stuff that I intend to work into the chapter (e.g., the social construction of the self, legitimate peripheral participation, socio-historical development, metaphor, etc.).

 The following is an article I've recently been working on. I'm still trying to sort out what I am trying to say, and the more I think about some of these issues of reflexivity and the researcher-self, the more complicated/messy things seem to be . . . 

 The Conundrums of Reciprocity and Reflexivity