My consciousness has certainly expanded, especially in terms of curriculum. I've done a fair amount of curriculum development; that's the primary reason I was hired as a technology staff developer the last couple of years. Technology is a useful tool, but only to enhance curriculum. After doing the portfolio projects below, I'm armed with a variety of new insights into the many personal, social, and historical directions curriculum can go.

I've always asked students to write autobiographies in their high school English classes, but I've limited them to college application narratives or moments of epiphany and transformation. These processes resemble what I now understand to be proleptic moments, but they can go much further. Students can link their lives to the past, present anf future in ever-widening contexts. They can aim higher, beyond prescribed formulae, to social reconstruction and transformation. Their love can move beyond the personal to the universal. Their stories can teach us all.

I continue to believe in global community, even if only for my own pedagogy. I better understand now how we can move incrementally from the local to the global, from the personal to the communal, the internal to the social.

Part of my career problems (changing positions every few years, losing the Title IID grant position) is that I have never been a follower. Nor have I been a leader. I've been an iconoclast. I've marginalized myself within the multi-tentacled NYC Department of Education. Now I feel more ready to lead, more grounded in theory, less isolated.

The spider at the center of the universe spins its inexorable web. We're all inside it, but we needn't be trapped. Each strand can be eternal.