Reflections on Four Years of Blogging

It’s hard to believe that it’s been just over four years since I started this blog! To celebrate, I’d like to reflect on this experience, as well as share some previous favorite posts, according to visits and to me!  

When I started this blog four years ago, I was mainly interested in it as a form of public scholarship.  I’ve always enjoyed reading blogs, academic and otherwise, and wished there were more in my areas of critical approaches to study abroad and world language learning.  So, after thinking about this for years, I decided to just start! As I wrote, my posts expanded beyond public scholarship about my academic work to include posts about productivity and organizing my life (and eventually an Organize Your Language Teacher Life course!).  They’ve also been a valuable way for me to work through new ideas, in both teaching and research.  

The biggest challenge of course is time, particularly when it comes to writing more in depth posts.  This is nothing new of course, and probably also why I write so many productivity and planning posts, it’s a never-ending challenge for me with all of the interesting things there are to do in a lifetime! 

Despite this challenge, I’ve managed to be fairly consistent, publishing every 1-2 weeks for the last few years, and taking the summers off.  So, in celebration of these four years I thought I’d share my top four posts in terms of page views (cumulatively from 2018-2022).

  1. Using Trello to Organize Teaching (September 2018): This post is actually linked from a Trello template, which I think explains it’s spot in the highest number of views! In it, I explain how I used Trello to keep on track of all of the components that go into teaching a class, and making sure I’ve completed them on time.  
  2. What is language? The Multilingual Turn and Translanguaging Pedagogy (April 2018): This was one of my very first posts on language ideologies, and one I used to help me think through multilingual language ideologies and how to apply them in my teaching.  Since then, I’ve done quite a bit of research, teaching, and presenting on this topic, so it’s fun to see how it’s developed since that early post.  
  3. Language Ideologies in the Wild: Duolingo (April 2021):  This post was linked from a popular blog and podcast, which probably explains why it is up there.  I’ve really enjoyed the language ideologies in the wild series as a way to raise awareness of the pervasive nature of language ideologies in our everyday lives. 
  4. What is language? Functional Theories (April 2018).  This was another post in my early language ideologies series, where I was working out the various theories and approaches I’ve learned.  I’m actually not sure why this one is among the more popular, but I’d definitely encourage everyone to learn more about functional theories of language!

I’m not sure these are my personal favorite posts as an author, but perhaps that’s a topic for another time! 

So, what does the future hold for this blog? Probably more of the same–I enjoy writing through my thoughts here, and I just keep doing it, and before I know it four years have gone by! I do take topic requests though, so if there’s anything in particular you’d like my take on, just let me know!


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