The bag I have chosen for this task is the backpack I carry to work every day. I’m a grade 7 teacher and though I drive to work, I still prefer to cram everything inside my bag instead of carrying things to my vehicle. I’ve received a few comments on how oversized it looks!

Inside my bag are assignments to mark, planner, lunch bag, laptop, folders, wallet, eyedrops, hand sanitizer, and keys. It’s an interesting question, whether my bag would’ve looked like this 15 years ago because. . .it did. While a few things have replaced items since high school/first year university (e.g., my student’s homework instead of my own, car keys instead of my parents’ house keys, coffee thermos instead of water bottle), much of it has remained the same. I think this speaks to ways in which my “work life” has remained consistent as I haven’t really left school. It is my role in school that has changed, from student to teacher.

While this is just a “work bag,” these items, texts, represent me in ways that are unique to me. We build our identities in many ways, but I’ve noticed that for myself, I often do it through the items I own. The stickers on my laptop are texts about my interests and what I want to be associated with. Ask my students, and many of them will be able to tell you the meaning behind each BTS sticker. The decorated folder, that I have intentionally left out of the photo, reveals my interest in kpop. The coffee thermos is a souvenir I got from Hawaii last year when my friend had a destination wedding. It was also the last trip I took before COVID-19 happened. The Nintendo Switch was a huge part of my quarantine life, as I played hours and hours of Animal Crossing (again, my students can attest to just how much I talk about it). There are stories held within each item, and as such I consider these items extensions of myself. Because of that, I think the narrative of these contents in my bag is consistent with the “teacher image” I have of myself.

There are two items in particular I want to focus on: my laptop and my planner. My coworker has commented on why I rely on my paper schedule instead of going digital, since I have done that with most aspects of my classroom. There is something about the “old technology” of the large 11×17″ weekly calendars many teachers use for lesson planning that I just cannot part with. My teacher life is kept inside the pages of that planner and as such, the act of penning things down onto my paper calendar as opposed to adding items onto my Microsoft Teams calendar is so important to me.

On the other hand, the laptop has replaced a lot of the paper that I used to rely on when I first became a teacher. Most of my worksheets are PDFs and a third of my students prefer digital copies so that they can type their work. I rely heavily on “technology” (as most commonly used, referring to devices like iPads and computers while acknowledging that textbooks themselves are also technology.) in my teaching as I don’t use textbooks anymore outside of math. (Interesting discussions with students on the authority of textbooks and in what ways they are antiquated sources). The internet, databases, YouTube, and podcasts are all valuable text technologies that my students and I rely on. (In fact, it’s a challenge getting them to “research from a book”). Assignments are also slowly changing: I ask my students to learn various programs (e.g., Mindomo, Venngage, Genial.ly, Powtoon) so that they have more flexibility with what kind of work they submit. As noted in our course modules, Scholes states that “text can be thought of as creation” and as such, my laptop holds multitudes of texts that are informative, creative, and ways to disseminate said creations.