HAPPY NEW YEAR AIW FAMILY!
I wish you these simple thoughts for 2013!
1. Depend on the Power of the Collective
2. Be Organic on your journey
3. Be Authentic
4. Take Risks
These four ideas frame the Center for Authentic Intellectual Work’s Four Guiding Principles. In fact, they have always been an intrinsic part of our reform work; but in more recent months, they have moved into the forefront of our thinking and serve as a lens through which we make choices about new projects, analyze partner readiness, and examine the credibility of an organization’s AIW reform implementation. Together they effectuate change, providing a fulcrum for AIW and other related professional development that impacts learning.
So why write about them on the precipice of a New Year? Quit simply, I have a confession and a New Year’s Resolution.
THE CONFESSION!
I hate blogging. I always have, and each time I’m “required” to do so for the Center, it’s arduous in the best of times. Although I was vaguely in touch with my enmity, it wasn’t until this winter break in the midst of a holiday chitchat that I came to understand the angst more deeply.
In the spirit of holiday gatherings, I took time to catch up with old friends. In the conversation I’m referencing now, our chatter veered towards work. Tom (a professor at a prominent university) was regaling writing plans for this spring’s sabbatical and lit up when talking about catching up on the theoretical papers he had put off writing. I found this crazy because I hate writing for peer reviewed journals and said so. Tom proceeded to say that he has no problem generating text for journals but that grant writing was his nemesis. This made no sense to me at the time because I personally prefer grant writing to journal writing any day.
Upon reflection, I came to realize something very important. Tom is comfortable writing articles because he is an academician; it is the writing he formally learned in graduate school. As a professor, it is the kind of writing he reads. So it makes sense that after engulfing himself in this genre, communicating in kind would come naturally.
Tom is, in fact, actualizing the four principles:
- Writing peer reviewed journal articles is how he leverages the power of the collective, where his "collective" includes other scholars who have conceptual familiarity with his premises, as opposed the more adversarial community of grant readers and fellow scholars competing for the same funds.
- As for being organic, the scholarly journey of research is by nature organic, and as a tenured professor, you establish the theoretical questions worth pursuing. For Tom, doing research is by nature an organic process because each finding takes him to a deeper understanding, fueling a personal quest for more data, in turn raising more questions worth investigating.
- And within an academic’s world, the authentic way to share your findings is through peer reviewed journals. Tom willingly “constructs his own knowledge” and makes sense of his findings. The act of sharing a review of the literature he’s read and the methods he used to collect the data he used to arrive at his conclusions embody the essence of “disciplined Inquiry.” The “value beyond” the article is its inherent contribution to the field and other scholars' work.
- So, of course, the risk-taking involved in putting your work out there for consumption is not only worth it, it’s invigorating— if you are confident that your methods and processes are sound and that your implications help shed light on a persisting problem or have relevance for others’ research.
But for Tom, grant writing has none of these authentic qualities; it is, in essence, the professor’s equivalent of the mandatory five paragraph essay, where you try hard to tell the teacher/grant reader what you think they want to hear instead of sharing the points that hold meaning for you. In this way it is contrived, immobilizing the writer’s energy and enthusiasm for the task at hand.
The CONNECTION!
Can you see the light bulbs going off? The parallel between my understanding of Tom's aversion to grant writing and my own enmity towards blogging is best revealed by also filtering my experience through the same four principles:
When I have blogged for the Center ...
- The collective audience is invisible and broad. I feel I’m writing to no one, and in that space I feel alone, not part of a collective, and certainly devoid of any power a collective might yield.
- The organic nature of my own thinking about AIW seems at times too esoteric or personal and I become self-conscious about revealing capricious thoughts and obtuse connections between AIW and the world around us.
- So, the act of “blogging” (both in form and content) has felt inauthentic, mostly because I’m never sure if anyone will find value in what I’m writing.
- The net result is that I have been less willing to take risks. I’m still working out the implications, but I suspect that when we take risks, there is an electricity that infuses the interchange, sparking fresh thought; without it, the communication becomes tedious and stressful.
THE RESOLUTION!
My personal 2013 New Year’s resolution to the Center and its readership is that I will blog more. To empower myself, I have reframed how the four guiding principles apply to us—me the blogger and you the AIW reader:
- I trust there is a collective community interested in reading thoughts on Authentic Intellectual Work;
- I trust my own organic cogitations have value to someone reading the blog, even if only one person.
- I trust the most interesting blogs are when the text is infused with original thought, grounded in a discipline that has a connection to the outside, world or sheds light on a problem in the education reform community.
- I trust that my risk-taking will pay off with more energized accounts of AIW in the world and that the effort to communicate will be respected, not scorned.
Although I will surely have some flops, it seems better to have tried and failed than to keep silent during this telling time of educational reform.