Personal Blogs

I've had a few days of not writing nor spending my initial hour or so in the day working on scholarship, and the ghosts telling me I cannot do this have started to emerge. 

To rid myself of them, nothing better than writing about them. Confronting them. Riding them. I'm echoing advice I read yesterday regarding panic attacks. I'd never tried to ride the panic attack, carry on doing my activities regardless, confronting it and telling it to go away rather than crawling away from it, forming a ball on the floor. This technique might be useful maintaining motivation at work, doing academic work. 

It doesn't matter if it's research or scholarship. The ghosts are the same. Anything that involves writing, something I'm supposed to be good at, frightens me at the point when it starts boiling. And I usually leave it to cool down, then feel bad about it and struggle enormously to go back to it if I ever manage at all. 

I need some clarity here. This has happened to me in the context of journalistic writing too. It's not just related to academia. When the going gets tough, self-doubt paralyses me and I run away. It is the thing I love the most that I sometimes find to be pointless. How is that possible? Do I care about it so much, perhaps, that I become overwhelmed with fear of failure, of not writing the best I can?

This must be what has prevented me from publishing more academic outputs, particularly journal articles. 

As I grow older I realise, more acutely so recently, that for many years, since I started to work, I've been going solo in my profession (and in life more generally). 

I can see that this is the result of my temperament and certain life experience in my childhood and teenage years. As I reflect on my professional failures, such as not being able to implement an online language programme at university while I was based in Mexico, I realise that a significant contributing factor was my lonely approach to work, a one-man-show attitude that caused me significant suffering and the incipient programme, in this case, its life. 

There are a couple of anecdotes that have shed much needed clarity for me on this. A few weeks ago I was helping my wife to apply to a job with one of the big retailers in the UK. I was simply translating the questions from English to Spanish as we went through the required online tests pre-interview, to make sure that she was understanding properly. I couldn't help commenting on some the questions and the options that I would choose, certainly influencing my wife to some extent. 

When we finished and were told that she had failed the tests, the automated feedback that we received revealed that my individualistic, goal-oriented approach to work was largely to blame. Consistently, she would choose to collaborate with others, ask for help and offer help whereas I thought getting on with the work on my own was the best option. 

The other critical incident relates to a time about a couple of years ago when I helped my sister-in-law to move house. She could only afford to pay for one person using a small pick-up truck, which meant we had to work all day doing countless trips taking furniture and other stuff from the old to the new house. For the whole day, I was struck by the way the removals person kept asking us again and again for our opinion when we had to make choices about how much more furniture to load, how to position it, tie it, protect it... He was clearly the expert there, having done hundreds of removals before, but that did not stop him from getting us involved and letting us make the decisions. 

I have since tried to emulate his style when I work on something with others and the refreshing reflection I take from it is that the process and the results are much more satisfactory... and failures less likely and painful. 

Today I’m attending a writing retreat. First off, we’ve been told about the upcoming REF (Research Excellence Framework) 2021. I found the presentation both inspiring and daunting. In my head, I have moments of thinking I can do high quality research and moments of thinking I can’t do this. So I was swinging from one extreme to the other throughout.

During the presentation, something caught my attention that I’d like to share here. ‘REFable’ work should reflect ‘scholarship of teaching’ rather than ‘scholarship for teaching’. I think I understand the distinction and it seems to be a valuable one: practice-based scholarship is seen as being more valuable than for-practice scholarship. I’m not sure but the idea seems to be that the significance of scholarship should go beyond the classroom and the institution and be useful for practitioners more generally.

This is related to the need to answer the oft-cited ‘so what’ question. Whatever we do as scholars, ideally, should have implications for others in our field. A less often used question is ‘and then what’, which I am taking from my preparation to claim Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy here in the UK, meaning what is to be done about the knowledge gained through our scholarship work.

Throughout the presentation I kept thinking about how scholarship sits within this research framework. We were told, and I believe this was said in good faith, that scholarship counts as long as the work is significant and original in our field, and has been done rigorously. For instance, the seminal 2009 Worton report of modern languages in the UK would now get four starts, the highest ranking.

And, since I’m at it, what is my field? The presenter described hers very clearly as being at the crossroads between inclusion, educational technology and special needs. Mine is  languages and education, though I’m interested in so many other things (leadership, translation, counselling, technology…). The ingredient I’m missing, I was told at the end of my one-to-one mentoring session, is confidence.

I went to primary school because I had to but actually once there, notwithstanding the social and educational issues that I didn’t like, I found many reasons to be in school. I’ve loved reading and writing for as long as I can remember. And there were plenty of opportunities at school to do that. They didn’t have to ask me twice because I took a lot of pleasure from it.

For instance, I remember the day we were asked to take a newspaper to school. I have vivid memories of going to the old newsagent’s in my town, queuing, buying the newspaper of my choice for the first time, smelling it, feeling its warmth. I couldn’t stop reading it in class, in all my classes. And I never stopped reading that newspaper pretty much every day for the next thirty years. 

Later on, still in primary, I wrote a science fiction book, which I was asked to read aloud to some of the groups in my year. In my teens, I started writing for a regional newspaper, and writing news items that I would read for the news bulletins in my local radio station. 

Today I’d like to comment on this quote: 

“… What writers do should free us up, shake us up. Open avenues of compassion and new interests. Remind us that we might, just might, aspire to become different, and better, than we are. Remind us that we can change.” - Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches.

I identify with this quote quite easily. Freedom, shake-up, compassion, difference, change… These are words that resonate with me. Writing for me too is liberating, emancipatory… I can grow in ways that I cannot using other means of expression. Writing is my way of expressing myself. 

I do like being provocative when I write but not confrontational or offensive. For instance, inflammatory posts on Twitter offend me, even when I wholly agree with the content and position. Shaking up gently works for me. The responses tend to be more useful. 

Compassion feels like a desperate need, for me, for others perhaps. Almost like the air we need to breathe. Though I associate compassion more often with ‘listening’ and ‘reading’. Giving voice to others in writing doesn’t seem compassionate to me – it’s a tricky sort of appropriation. At the moment, I’m more interested in ‘doing’ compassion than ‘expressing’ it but I’m aware that this is just where I am now.

Difference is simply the most important concept in education and scholarship. Learning and teaching is all about working with difference in the broadest possible meaning of the word, as far as inclusion. 

Finally, change is for me the best evidence of learning something new. I would even go as far as saying that if there is no change there is no learning at the risk of overgeneralising. 

I'm taking a great Early Career course with FutureLearn. 

Today, I want to reflect on what I have learnt so far. 

My strengths

• I really enjoy my postdoc job. It fits all my academic strengths
• But there are things I like and I feel that I'm not good at, such as engagement and impact, leading others ( I feel insecure), networking (I enjoy it but I feel insecure), giving and receiving feedback and interacting with others (I feel insecure because I used to be too harsh and can still be, but harshness is masking my innate shyness), using statistics (I love them but I don't feel confident)
• And these are things I don't like but have to do at work: critically analysing my work and that of others (I feel vulnerable in both cases), presenting my work to a critical audience (vulnerable), staying enthusiastic, confident and resilient in the face of difficulties (this triggers procrastination in me)

My values

• Given my family commitments, I need job security but my current job is on a fixed-term contract, which makes my future uncertain
• Helping others and society... matters to me and my job is not giving me this yet
• I enjoy learning and I do that both in and (mostly) out of my current job
• I am not interested in competing, fast-pacing myself and being under pressure; I prefer peace. Warning: I will have to supervise others in future (I should prepare myself for that)
• Academia matches the following values for me: recognition, being an expert, taking on challenges, communication and community, creativity, friendships, independence and time freedom, making decisions, working from home or nearby, precise work, building a routine but taking occasional risks, a good combination of working alone (most of the time) and working with others (occasionally) without attending long, draining meetings (that's why I don't want to go into administration)
• I also value academia because I think it promotes higher psychological functions (e.g., solving problems, using and creating tools, creating new knowledge) as opposed to natural psychological functions (e.g., perception, movement) (Vygotsky, 1987). It's about doing the best you can as a human being.

My personality

This is how people see me:

• calm
• kind
• responsible
• hard-working
• intelligent

This is how I see myself:

• calm
• kind
• observant
• self-conscious, shy
• sentimental

And these are potential aspects of my personally that I could (and would like to) develop:

• loyal and trustworthy
• loving and caring, compassionate, empathic
• congruent
• resilient
• honest

And a marginal note:

• I can be funny

I like words and I keep befriending them––or rather they befriend me. 

Today, I came across reify. 

It refers to making something abstract more concrete. 

For instance: