Last week I had the displeasure of having to read a very unpleasant email screenshotting my blog posts to say that they had no pedagogical value or any value at all to society. I won’t remark too much about the toll of such petty awfulness and cruelty upon my self-confidence and emotional health but I will share some thoughts I have as an educator who has taught in two countries, across three institutions and for over twenty years.
Sure, there are plenty of educational and academic blogs that have posts that are formatted as though they are academic articles. I read and refer many students and supervisees to those blogs. But that is not how I curate my own blog spaces. I believe in translational research for the social sciences and that this can take many forms. I fully believe the work that some of us educators and academics do across social media and blogs matters regardless of form. I also believe in the virtue of reflective and personal blogging. I’ve used this very idiosyncratic style of mine, for instance, to share some of the prompts and techniques I teach my creative writing students on this blog.
As for my reading blog, I share my reading notes not just for myself but to show people what a reading practice would look like and that it is okay when you have reading blocks and that it is okay just to read a little bit every day until you can read more. This is a way in which one can also encourage literacy and the love of reading — not through classist and elitist methods by using very distancing academic language but by showing what a practical everyday practice would look like. Ironically, I’ve also supervised final year projects on the ways in which BookTok and Bookstagram have had an impact on literacy. There are many ways to be pedagogical that absolutely do not have to look like an academic article. My logic is that if I wanted to write an academic article I might as well submit it to an indexed journal. I’m not going to waste the citation impact of any article or my overall H-index. Sorry to get into the metrics of things, but they do matter to academics who are forever being evaluated.
And then there’s the issue of how distancing academic writing can be. How many people do you want your research and your knowledge to touch? As I told an MA class I taught this week (because I am teaching a course on how to teach language to ESOL students): if you bring someone to the table and force-feed them a lot of food, you’re only going to make them sick. That’s the same way with knowledge. Those of us who have already been inducted into academic writing will find it as natural as breathing but not everyone starts that way. I liken teaching big concepts to undergraduates to the parenting act of squishing medicine in a spoonful of jam. Sometimes they just don’t want to take the medicine so you need to give it to them in some palatable form. That’s also part of pedagogy and how you get them to slowly expand their ZPD (Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development). Although I do like to challenge even my undergraduates to set their bar a little higher, I don’t hammer them on the head with information. It’s always about a step-by-step process until they get to the next level. Ditto, blogs. People can choose what they read or do not read. I sometimes do write slightly more academic blogs but mostly, I prefer to share my knowledge in a more personal and casual way.
The personal is important. The personal can also be pedagogical. Anyone who studies life-writing or is a memoirist or diarist would tell you the same thing.
I will continue blogging here, and perhaps I’ll share some thoughts about literacy since I’ve been teaching literacy for MA students for two years now (which resulted in my doing a deep dive on the subject). I feel the multiple and varied forms literacy takes in 2025 are being threatened because of various forces who benefit from the dumbing down of education while simultaneously holding that bar way too high. This is a trend that benefits very few and does nothing for the upholding of knowledge and of literature for future generations. As for me, I have been blogging since the 1990s. Before I became a salaried educator, I’ve been educating through my various websites and across social media in my own casual, idiosyncratic way. I don’t intend to stop. I will continue writing these posts for my readers and I know some of you have been reading these blogs of mine for decades. Thank you for being here.
Acknowledgement: I’d like to thank my lovely colleagues with whom I’ve shared thoughts about this issue over the past week. You’ve all inspired this blog post with your support and insights on the matter.