I am re-reading an article from a past semester called “Who Fits: A dialog on the politics of ‘Doing-Being’ a scholar” (Tooms and English, 2010). In this article the authors, particularly one of the authors, walks readers through their journey of finding personal fit as a school administrator turned critical scholar and I connected personally with a lot what was shared.
It made me think of my journey. The piece starts with The Road Less Traveled by Robert Frost.
Hmmm.
Do I take the road less traveled? Why?
What does this mean for me as a researcher? As a scholar?
Am I meant to be either?
What the heck is a researcher/scholar and do I even want to sign up?
Is it a long painful process of being socialized into one way of being and one way of doing?
These are the questions that plagued me my last year and last summer of studies. I came into the program wide eyed, excited and anxious to embark upon a journey to somewhere. I never knew where that somewhere was, but was excited to go there. I felt this journey would help me define it, understand it and move toward an important direction in understanding injustice and justice better.
This is not what I found.
I found rules.
I found scare tactics and coercion.
I found one way of doing something filled with standards, quality indicators and rigor.
Rigor to me was stripped of any meaning I had constructed and replaced with narrow paths and uncritical examination. No one talked about social justice. No one questioned the quality indicators and no one pushed me to think further and deeper along my critical vein. I was bombarded with reading after reading and writing after writing. So much that I couldn’t even think. Is that what we call rigor? Is that was a scholar does? Please, get me out of here- QUICK.
As Tooms and English (2010) so eloquently explain about the unspoken expectations of the academe that drive tenure, perpetuating “the rules to ‘be’ an academic” (p.223) I too felt unspoken rules to success as a doctoral student. Isn't persuasion and coercion when, to obtain status and social capital, one is reminded daily (if not hourly) that you must be published in top tier journals to have a chance at a job, you must present at the big conferences, you must write in a certain style to get published, you must peruse top tier journals to see what they publish on, you must get more lines on your CV, you must bond with certain professors, you must take specific courses in one department and no others, you must, you must, you must?
There is a check list and nice little boxes for everything. How can you stretch boundaries and innovate creatively with your mind, your words and your actions if you have to fit in a box?
I HATE BOXES.
I was feeling the unwritten rules of conformity at every turn and felt stifled and even suffocated.
In the beginning of my travels into the academy, back in 2004, I came across a life changing text- Jonathon Friske, Power Plays Power Works. That same year I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I had never looked at my work as a teacher through this critical lens but it fit. Critical theory gave me a kick start to begin really examining the perpetual questions of inequity that plaque my sub-conscious and conscious being. I took a break from my studies to have children, but was forever changed.
Then I came to continue my studies excited to re-enter the conversation and dialogue I had started with myself, but everything was different. My assumptions and my way of understanding and thinking about life didn’t fit with the reality around me. I stayed the course. I questioned and critiqued myself like a good little scholar. I figured out, for the most part anyway, what was wanted and I produced it. Heck I didn’t get this far in formal education without serious skills in the area of figuring that out. My grades were good, some excellent, some OK. But I wasn’t thinking. I mean deeply thinking and examining critically the power and hegemony of life.
Then, along the way I was hurt by various actors- their actions, their words, and their overall lack of excitement with what I’d bravely throw on the table every so often to test the waters. Instead of supportively pushing me I was shut down. I felt alone. I still feel alone.
The more I read. The more I did. And the more I performed rigorously the more I realized that I didn’t fit.
I needed to heal.
I needed to re-find my voice.
Should I quit?
Should I change focus?
Should I find a new academic home?
All these questions entered my mind daily.
Then it hit me. Stay away. Find your own space and spread your own wings. Find those who will do their best to support, guide, and challenge you in a positive way and see what you can do.
So I didn’t leave, but I found my own space and I found my own place; school based research with real teachers and real administrators. I stopped coming into the university office. I quit my graduate assistantship and I worked from either home or the elementary school. I didn’t, and still don’t, know exactly what to do there, but it fits.
Simultaneously I found critical ethnography. It fits too. So I am trying it out this semester and for the first time since being here back at the academe I feel good about the work I’m doing. I am trying out methods in the critical methodology realm and am seeing what fits, what needs adapting and what just doesn’t work for me or those that I research with- the teachers, students, families and administrators. I research, I work with, I teach, I consult, I talk, I converse with; we have fun together and we think together. If this is the academe then sign me up. If not, then hopefully I’ll figure out what it is and how I can continue to do it.
My skills need much deeper development. My bias needs checking and my writing must improve, but all that will come in time. I can handle that and I can excitedly work on that with current pilots and beyond because now I fit, albeit on the periphery doing my own thing, but it feels good.
Now I need to find a community of critical friends to push, support, guide and critique me. I have some and I will continue to find more.
For the first time I can imagine a place for me within the academe along with the world of people working together to figure out this thing we call justice. And that’s exciting, that I love, and that, most definitely, fits.
