Hi all! My name is Eden, and I’m a Secondary English Education major. Usually, that is regarded as a fairly boring introduction – and it is. But, in regards to this assignment, and introducing myself as a member of this classroom/writing community, I find it to be fairly substantial. At the framework of my first “Teacher’s College Experience” last semester with my cohort was the idea that “Those who teach writing must be writers themselves.” If I hope to make a meaningful and lasting impact on my future students, the biggest favor I can do for them and my future self is to continually and tirelessly hone my writing skills. My identity as an educator-in-training has tapped into almost every aspect of my life. My journey as an educator has informed my identity as a student, as my development as a writer has impacted my perception of the world around me. I’m passionate about writing – I’ve loved coming into my own as a writer, and am always intrigued in the ways in which I can improve.

My writing has become a means for communicating clearly and explicitly with others – this developed due to my pursuit of professional growth as an educator, and is a fairly new component of my “writing” identity. My writing has also become an extension of myself, whereas I am providing others with a window into who I really am – vital both as an educator to my students, to my colleagues, and to my family and friends. My writing has also been my creative outlet. I find writing to be frustrating, intoxicating, relaxing, dutiful, perilous, joyful, and rewarding – it is from my own writing that I have learned the most about the ways in which I think.

Additionally, I continually surprise myself when I take the time to sit down and write. This often comes across as arrogant – I hope to convey that I don’t mean I surprise myself as in “Wow, I’m so incredibly philosophical and my thoughts could change the ocean tides.” I simply mean that when I feel as if I’m misunderstanding a concept, or stuck in a rut considering a text, taking the time to sit down and blurt out every thought that crosses my mind usually reveals an insightful thought that I otherwise wouldn’t have discovered within myself.

From my reading of Harris, I define community as a central hub that informs and pushes our discourses with the world around us. These particular dialogues that take place within a community that fuel our thinking also shape “what [we] can and will do” (12). The term community is wearisome in that it may be seen as “sentimental,” according to Harris – but it can also be a powerful term, one that indicates a shared purpose and effort. Belonging to a community is something that we, as humans, are ultimately and undeniably drawn to… In this way, our existing in communities is unintentional, which makes it all the more interesting to examine our active roles within our communities, and having the ability to further analyze ourselves. Our participation within a community is most assuredly inevitable – we exist in multiple communities, and as Harris states, we may never fully feel whole to one in particular. But this multi-faceted aspect of our own identities from existing in various communities is what helps to inform our writing, and what shapes us in the end.

Considering my own communities, I would list the following as ones in which I currently exist: family, friends, acquaintances, professional networking, Greek life, educator, student, Husker, woman, significant other, feminist, employee… The list is incredibly long, I’m sure, in the end. As I was writing this, I found it curious that my communities are established through the label of a particular identity – something that has struck me in my academic endeavors is the concept of identity acquisition existing as a recursive and multi-faceted process – quite similar to the belonging to various communities. This isn’t necessarily an “Aha!’ moment, so much as it is a truer understanding of the term community, and the ways in which my understanding of “community” itself has informed my understanding of my own identity as a person and as a writer.