I created this website to showcase my personal interests, as well as my academic and professional portfolios. All three sections are currently incomplete; building a comprehensive portfolio can be quite a lengthy and complicated project.
My professional portfolio is the most complete portion, featuring my résumé and an instructional unit I designed as part of my undergraduate English Methods course.
My professional portfolio will expand as I begin my teaching career; I plan to feature my most successful lesson plans and (hopefully) examples of student work. I also plan to add a section for my students to use as a resource for homework, study guides, and in-class assignments.
My personal section is currently limited to little more than a mini-biography and photo galleries. I plan to expand this to include, among other things, a portfolio of websites and website designs I have created in my freelance web design side job.
My academic portfolio is currently the least complete, featuring only a list of the courses in which I am enrolled this semester (Spring 2006). I plan to add a collection of my best undergraduate research papers and perhaps a full list of the courses I have taken, probably with reflections on several of my favorites.
JasonBearden.com's design and content embodies several of my beliefs: that each of these three aspects of my life -- personal, academic, and professional -- directly connects to each other aspect; that each aspect is equally important; that learning does not take place only in the classroom or even during one's career as a student, but continues indefinitely throughout one's life in all sorts of settings; and that a person cannot and should not limit himself or herself to a narrow range of interests and studies, but instead should explore anything which catches his or her curiosity, if only to determine whether deeper study is worthwhile.
This website's existence, on the other hand, is a testament to my very bad habit of always adding more major projects to my "to-do" list. Apparently, I can never be too busy, nor too stressed...