Hi everyone!
TL;DR:
There is a CSD blog.
I (Dr. Lockenvitz) am now running the CSD blog.
The blog is going to feature stories and experiences from CSD people.
The blog is going to feature stories and experiences relating to CSD.
TL;DR if you want to submit something:
Type your story or experience in a Word document.
Title your Word document “LastName_FirstInitial_CSDBlog_Date”.
Keep it roughly between 500-1000 words.
You can email a submission to SLockenvitz@MissouriState.edu as an attachment.
Recently I had to come up with an idea for an anniversary present for my husband. It gets complicated because we actually have two anniversaries – one in August, which is when we got the paperwork taken care of, and one in October, when we had the actual “wedding” with people and flowers and food and a bounce house (doesn’t everybody have a bounce house at their wedding?). Anyway, I don’t even remember what I scrambled together for Anniversary A this year and it was like two months ago. Anniversary B is different.
There is a web comic called 4amShower, created by the artist Guy Kopsombut. It is, in a nutshell, cute little animals saying nice things to each other. Currently, daily. Every day. Every. Day. Guy Kopsombut takes commissions. So I commissioned a personalized comic. As I went through the process of working with Guy Kopsombut, I was impressed with the level of detail he was working at. He requested as much information as I was willing to give that makes our lives unique (you know, also without freaking me out, because maybe he’s a serial killer that is going to toy with my emotions before showing up at my house at 3:00am with a machete and an AK-47), a few reasonable reference pictures, and the final product is amazing. In the comic, he included a wall of my family pictures, with the pictures arranged exactly as they are on our living room wall, and each family member is represented by his/her favorite animal. He included two tiny wooden owls that are on our wall opposite the pictures. He included the unique Anniversary A and Anniversary B situation. And he included the concept that I love plants and flowers but always manage to kill them, sometimes quickly, sometimes after months of agonizing torture consisting of sporadic panicked bouts of over-watering but mostly weeks of the plant being excruciatingly thirsty. Guy Kopsombut asked for our story, and masterfully captured pieces of our lives that are extremely meaningful.
So anyway. I am telling you, the Missouri State University people associated with the Communication Sciences and Disorders department in some form or another, about this anniversary present because I found myself appreciating Guy Kopsombut’s attention to what I found meaningful on a professional level as well as a personal one. My research at this time is largely qualitative in nature, meaning I am currently conducting interviews and looking for emergent themes much more than I am manipulating variables and running statistics. I highly value giving people the chance to tell their stories and finding significance and maybe even patterns in what is most meaningful to them. So when at work I was submerging myself in telling participants’ stories, and at home I was corresponding with an artist who was telling my own story, I was struck by the rightness of jumping on the opportunity to resuscitate and oversee the CSD blog.
And now here we are. My intention for this blog is to continue down the track of story-telling and promoting the valuing of meaningfulness. I will be soliciting stories from our CSD community, that means anyone from pre-admitted students to faculty to staff to administrators, to send me things I can post on our CSD blog. I will develop some guidelines over the coming weeks to help you create submissions, but some of it will be trial and error and learning by doing. But in general, at this point I can tell you that I am envisioning a place to share CSD-related stories that might reach others of us who may be able to relate, or at least appreciate, each other’s experiences relating to our CSD department. Here are a few examples:
- Your instructor said something profound and you were able to tie it to a meaningful memory
- Your instructor said something not at all profound and you and everybody else in the class thought it was hilarious and collectively meaningful
- You WERE the instructor and something profound or not profound happened and you were able to make it meaningful for yourself and/or the class
- You observed a session and the clinician and client did things that you were able to connect back to meaningful tidbits you learned in CSD
- You WERE the clinician and things happened that you were able to connect back to meaningful tidbits you learned in CSD
- You were assisting or conducting research and things happened that you were able to connect back to meaningful tidbits you learned in CSD
- You were out in your REAL LIFE and you saw something that you were able to connect back to meaningful tidbits you learned CSD
I hope you have an idea of what I’m after. At the moment, I’m thinking if you want to submit something to me, put it in a Word document, and keep it roughly between 500 and 1000 words. Title the Word document “LastName_FirstInitial_CSDBlog_Date” so I can hopefully stay organized. So, if I were sending in a submission, and maybe I’ve sent in two other ones previously, I would name it “Lockenvitz_S_CSDBlog_9-30-18” and it would be helpful and great. I’ll review it, and I reserve the right to make small edits as appropriate, request changes as appropriate, reject outright as appropriate, and prioritize submissions as appropriate. These things will be figured out as we go. Here at the beginning I’m going to shoot for a post every two weeks and this will be modified, again, as appropriate.
Help me keep this active! During my preparations for this, I have learned that nobody hates anything more than a dead blog. Feel free to be creative, but tie it to CSD – I mean, I just told you about a commissioned web comic for my husband’s anniversary present. So it’s pretty open-ended at this point, and I will narrow the scope, or offer prompts to generate submissions, etc, as necessary.
Email your submission to SLockenvitz@MissouriState.edu and please make the email subject the same as the title of your attached Word document. Thanks for reading and helping make our CSD blog successful, either as a reader or a submitter!