Bridging Models on a Grand Scale

Beyond the opportunity to expand relationships forged of respect and collegiality with "pod members" within my department and the chance to establish associations centered in productive interchanges with new friends and co-partners from Port Elizabeth, South Africa, this Sharing Cultures Project has cleared space for inquiry that encourages me to interrogate and attempt to transform elements of my teaching practices.

I was one of the first teachers to participate in the Sharing Cultures Project when it first started. Since the spring of 2005, I have not been an active member of the Columbia College Chicago Sharing Cultures Project teaching team and I am in the process of cycling out of the day-to-day teaching of the project. The nature of the project encourages individuals from related disciplines to cycle in and out of this innovative teaching community in order to maintain a flow of fresh ideas. Though I will miss the heady dynamics of interacting with colleagues, students, and others supporting the project, I have banked skills that will surely influence my philosophy and provide me several directions into the research of teaching and learning.

My exodus from the program places me on a reflective high ground that provides distance and a measure of clarity; in turn, these allow me to begin saying something about the nature of platforms, staging areas, and framing devices-key conceptual tools that figure mightily into various contexts of my teaching and learning relationships with the project.

One of the most exciting and rewarding aspects of participating in this project over the last three and a half years has been the opportunity to travel to South Africa two times. Having done so has left me with a great deal of content to sort through, digest, and use with my students. I feel privileged to have been selected to be a part of the first team, to travel to South Africa, to return reshaped by the country's recent developments, and to hazard a fledgling knowledge that what we are doing is nothing less that creating bridging models on a grand scale. I come away from this particular moment in the life of the project with expanding practical skills in the teaching of composition and writing and a lifetime of questions.