AAEEBL Annual Meeting 2021

As an ice-breaker, we were supposed to create an “about me” slide… so I made one about someone else.

On July 20-22, I attended the (virtual) 2021 AAEEBL Annual Meeting. I sincerely enjoy the personalities in AAEEBL and the sessions were insightful. I expect to get a lot of mileage out of this conference… once I’m out of the flurry of course revisions that inevitably come in August. In looking back, my biggest takeaways had to do with personal branding, creative and digital literacies, portfolio research, and mindfulness.

I had worked with Amy Ciccino and Megan Mize in other contexts, so I had some idea of their insight and expertise, but their sessions were still remarkable. Dr. Ciccino’s unpacking of personal branding and reflective writing, along with Dr. Mize’s thoughts on multi-modal identity construction will prove particularly useful for both my Fall courses, and this portfolio, as I struggle to get it into some sort of shape.

Helen Chen and Tracy Penny-Light presided over the session about portfolio research, and while I felt a little sheepish for needing what seemed like such a common-sense understanding of how to structure research projects, I was grateful for the information (“forget about before… now I’m ready to go to work!”). I plan to comb through my notes slowly and carefully as I run the second iterations of both the Growth Mindset and Class Culture action studies this year.

Finally, Dr. Penny-Light’s session on mindfulness went far beyond the usual bromides, and Megan Mize’s session on self-representation was absolutely delightful. The slide at the head of the page came from her opening ice-breaker, and I got a little silly (it was the end of the conference), but it started a great discussion of identity construction and how to measure creative and digital literacy.