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This paper is a result of an action research project that the main author designed with the aim of transforming her practice. In the last five years, my university has been talking about evaluating lecturers’ performance. For me, the question is not about an outsider determining my teaching performance but about the need to explore ways of being productive, accountable and contribut[ing] to my professional growth. The project was motivated by what Bell Hooks (1994) refers to as 'learning to enter the classroom whole' and not as a 'disembodied spirit' (p. 193). This meant rejecting what Aronowitz and Giroux (1991) terms as 'a cult of knowledge, expertise, and disembodied rationality …' (p. 89). The project was also informed by Slattery’s (1995) argument that 'we can no longer remain ahistorical, detached, impersonal and ‘behaviorally objective'' (p. 66). This meant working against the grain because the cultural context within which public universities in Kenya are based does not promote pedagogical relationships between university students and lecturers. I, the main author, initiated journal writing as a procedure of giving meaning to the relationship between students’ lives and school knowledge, which gives way to 'pedagogy of empowerment' (Slattery, 1995, p. 98). The paper is therefore a sharing of the students’ reactions to journal writing and the challenges the main author encountered as the lecturer and researcher.