galiciablackman professional

Considering the slow academy

It’s been almost 10 years since Berg and Seeber wrote The Slow Professor, and I wonder if the value in slowing down has crept into the halls and habits of our postsecondary contexts. Perhaps the revolution is honouring its own kairos, the right action for the right time. 

Meanwhile, the winter solstice is around the corner.

In this season, when the shifts in temperature and vitality signal a winding down, at least a little, I invite you to acknowledge where your energy is being called. What does the body say in this season (Shahjahan, 2014)?

Do you have a little pocket of time or space that you guard, for you to take a breather, applaud your accomplishments, and decide where to strengthen next? Is there a dedicated space to reflect AND recharge? As the semester closes and we prepare for another, the practice of quiet time to restore the vitality of teaching and professional practice is not a luxury, but a necessity for ushering and sustaining the vitality that allows us to offer our best. For me, it is the urge to read something new or revisit something familiar, not only with a cup of tea, but with a soft, warm scarf. To linger over a page, not rushing to finish to get to the next. Luxuriating in a line by Mary Oliver.

“And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow…” From Evidence (Oliver, 2017, p. 81)

But beyond viewing regeneration solely as a return to readiness (Shahjahan, 2014), what might it mean to pursue the slow academy as an attentiveness to teaching and learning, in an honourable, ethical, and meaningful way? The metric might simply be feeling rested and better able to provide measured and meaningful guidance to learners, in the new year. What would the metric be for you?

“When we experience timelessness, we are creative…” (Berg & Seeber, 2016, p. 27)

The slow revolution, has it come around yet? I would hope it is more than a wish and that it can be part of practice.

“We need, then, to protect a time and a place for timeless time, and to remind ourselves continually that this is not self-indulgent but rather crucial to intellectual work. If we don’t find timeless time, there is evidence that not only our work but also our brains will suffer.” (Berg & Seeber, 2016, p. 28)

What is the most suitable word for taking a little extra time to turn things over on all sides so that they can be seen a little more fully, perhaps optimistically, a little more clearly? What other words, in other languages, in other ways of being and seeing time do you use for slowing down? The spanish, con calma, feels just right for responding with attentiveness and attunement to what shorter, cooler days elicit. Going slower, immersing fuller.

That too is teaching.

That too is learning.


Inspirations

Berg, M., & Seeber, B. K. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. University of Toronto Press.

Shahjahan, R. A. (2014). Being ‘lazy’ and slowing down: Toward decolonizing time, our body, and pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(5), 488–501. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2014.880645

Oliver, M. (2017). Devotions. Penguin Books.


galiciablackman professional, research

Reading SoTL: Professional mindfulness for teaching

When I decided to pursue graduate studies in educational research, it was with the hope that scholarship would strengthen pedagogical practices in the humanities. That inquisitiveness also led me to the scholarship of teaching and learning. It seemed to me that if teaching and learning are to be informed by scholarship, research should emerge from the places where the learning takes place.

In my current role, as an educational developer, I often return to that early conviction with renewed clarity. Each semester, I am reminded that teaching is not static but a living, shifting, deeply relational practice. And when faculty look at their habits of head, heart, and hand, to examine their teaching with curiosity rather than judgment, SoTL is not only an academic project but a rich form of professional mindfulness. I see that mindfulness each time I see a faculty member pausing to ask variations of the following questions: What’s happening in my classroom that I haven’t yet seen or can’t see clearly? How can I make the necessary changes that will make the most sense for learning? And how can I know?

There are no quick-fix responses to some teaching-related questions. Professional mindfulness requires some dwelling with the questions emerging from the peculiarities of the learning contexts. Gadamer’s ideas about interpretation and understanding have grounded my research in the humanities, and lately they have resurfaced with poignant force. In The Hermeneutical Imagination, Jon Nixon argued that Gadamer’s ideas may provide insight into what we are trying to do as educators and what learners are experiencing. I am inclined to agree and that’s why Gadamer’s notion of verweilen (dwelling) has captured my attention again.

I call “whiling” [Verweilen, tarrying, lingering], a lingering that occupies this presentness and into which all mediatory discourse of interpretation must enter. (Gadamer, 2007, p. 189)

And that’s where I think the early engagement with SoTL truly begins. Not necessarily in a research project that arrives crisp and defined, but in dedicated immersion to the complexities and niggling questions about teaching and learning. SoTL work may benefit from dwelling with the questions to be able to ask the question that really matters. 

It begins with noticing. 

It is noticing where students lean in, where they hesitate, where learning strains against the edges of what we once assumed about teaching. It is recognizing that evidence does not always arrive in neat tables or tidy graphs. And with the questions that flutter in the consciousness, it is going back to that initial experience of noticing and then dwelling with the readings, and the conversations with colleagues. And on a rare occasion, the conversations with a stranger on a line in the supermarket, telling you something about their child’s learning experience, leading you to consider a part of the question that you’d not included. (a valuable unplanned digression, a necessary meandering)

The temporal structure of tarrying [with an artwork] …It is not a doing of this and that, first this and then that; it is a whole that is present in the seeing, and in the considering that one is immersed in—or if we prefer to listen to the deep wisdom of language: in dem man aufgeht—“in which one is absorbed.” (Gadamer, 2007, p. 211)

There’s a strange effect of dwelling with the development of a research question, for me. I start to see it everywhere. I see its delicate filaments in all sorts of unexpected places, firming up, loosening, and then firming up again. Then the question becomes its own living breathing entity. Yes, I might be steering, but the topic is also pulsating at its own pace, until I begin to see it as a companion to thinking about teaching or learning. It is akin to the hermeneutic address.

An address functions to interrupt or unsettle our everyday taken-for-grantedness of things. This is why it arrives typically in the form of a question or set of questions. (Moules et al., 2014, p. 7)

Gadamer also asserted that “the essence of a question is to open up possibilities” (2013, p. 310). So it’s not surprising that I am compelled to turn to other SoTL for more companionship, to explore possibilities for teaching and learning. Reading other SoTL or other scholars who have addressed some threads that are woven throughout my own queries helps me stitch things together. Reading SoTL, then, is not simply surveying literature and preparing a literature review. Reading SoTL is a dialogue, and it is an attunement practice. More dwelling.

As a journal editor, I’ve put together a brief list of SoTL readings to help me be better able to draw from the thinkers that can help me situate projects in conversation with the SoTL community. You can find it here if you need to dwell with others for a while.

There is a slow, deliberate quality to SoTL that appeals to me, especially in a time of information overload and acceleration, and quick pedagogical fixes. Ciccone said that one of the conditions for a good SoTL question is that it “should raise more questions than it answers and thus invite further research” (2018, p. 19). Ahh, that’s right, possibilities. SoTL asks us to linger. To dwell. To look again. To notice. Not always as steps, but a threading within the complexities of teaching practice.

And perhaps this is why SoTL still beckons to me after all these years. It reminds me that pedagogy is not perfected; it is practiced. It is not a random collection of techniques, but an attunement. And in returning to the SoTL literature, I find myself returning to the very heart, head, and hands of the work: to curiosity, to learning, and to inquiry. Noticing, reading, dwelling.

Inspirations

Ciccone, A. (2018). Learning matters: Asking meaningful questions. In N. L. Chick, (Ed.). Sotl in action: Illuminating critical moments of practice (pp. 15-22). Stylus.

Gadamer, H.-G. (2007). The Gadamer reader: A bouquet of the later writings. Northwestern University Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (2013). Truth and method (2nd rev. ed.) (J. Weinsheimer, & D.G. Marshall, Trans.). Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published 1960)

Moules, N. J., Field, J. C., McCaffrey, G. P., & Laing, C. M. (2014). Conducting hermeneutic research: The address of the topic. Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. https://doi.org/10.55016/ojs/jah.v2014Y2014.53242

Nixon, J. (2017). Hans-Georg Gadamer: the hermeneutical imagination. Springer International Publishing.

galiciablackman Uncategorized

Working and writing in a generative AI time

How did I get back here?

As a higher education professional, I spend a significant amount of time writing. Generative AI has certainly helped, especially for brainstorming, creating outlines, rearranging my original material, and creating accompanying visuals. I’ll admit, there are areas where I’d like to make greater use of gen AI. But my selective use is not from dissatisfaction or trepidation with its outputs. I lean heavily into its use for topics that I feel comfortable speaking about, because I trust that I can spot its shortfalls. However, as an educational researcher, when I’m exploring something relatively unfamiliar, I turn to reputable, trusted scholars and databases.

I’m not sure how relatable this is, but some of my output slows down in the rewriting and polishing stage. I can see why a sentence or a word does not work, but I sometimes stumble over the fix. That’s why human editors are so valuable in producing quality work. I trust feedback from my colleagues far more more than I would a machine editor. Even as I am writing this, the built-in AI grammar tool is overexuberant with its suggestions for my post, but its suggestions don’t work for what I want to say and how I want to say it. With the advent of generative AI, I have become more forgiving of the flaws in my writing. A hiccupy, stuttering human-generated sentence does not always have to be fixed.

My current position (and this is subject to change) is that if a sentence sounds clunky, then I am going to release the temptation to agonize over how to rearrange it. I am certainly going to try to fix it, but I will resist the temptation to make it as flawless as possible. It may mean sitting with sentences or expressions that do not sound polished. I’m speaking specifically about writing as inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) or writing as discovery. For me, the flow of discovery is stunted when I am caught up in the imperfections of a first draft.

And that’s why I’ve found myself returning to academic blogging in an age of generative AI. There is an abundance of content and output created and shaped by generative AI, and this has made some processes easier for me. Generating images to illustrate my text, I lean heavily into that. But I don’t want my writing as inquiry voice to be cleaned up by gen AI. Just as I love reading work that sounds like there is a person who composed it, with a style and cadence that evokes a living, breathing, imperfect human on the other side, I want to embrace that imperfection in flow and expression, especially in the inquiry stage of a project.

The following is the gen AI rewriting my post to make it pithy:

  • In my current position, I’m working in a time where generative AI is becoming more and more common and useful. Gen AI is great for brainstorming and creative exercises, and its outputs are so diverse. It has been very helpful for my writing, especially for brainstorming, creating outlines, rearranging my original material, and creating accompanying visuals. There’s been some trepidation from some people because of the high potential for misuse of this kind of technology, but so far it seems mostly trustworthy and I like the results.

I can say I definitely do not like the results. It’s not what I sought to say. At all. For writing as inquiry, exploring and understanding, a run-on sentence, a sentence fragment, faulty parallelism, and misplaced commas, I’ll make a welcome peace with the imperfections of the first draft outputs and try to obsess less over the clunky mess.

Inspiration

Richardson, L. & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 959–978). Sage.

galiciablackman Uncategorized

Getting back up on my literary feet again

Although I am reluctant to add the the volume of content in the blogosphere, unless it is to say something that has not been said yet, I find myself blogging. This is actually my second foray into blogging. I abandoned my first (see Caribbean Steppenwolf), not unlike some of my creative writing projects that I orphaned. I am looking at all the metaphors I have mixed into this first “return” post and my teacher sensibility wants to edit, edit, slash, and burn. However, I will leave the slashing and burning for the writing projects which I will go back to, as the prodigal parent. In my recent write-up of my literary auto-biography, I had to self-interrogate as to why I kept my writing under wraps. The discoveries were disappointing, but now that I am less apprehensive about being seen, warts and all, perhaps this blog will stick to my feet. After all, I am not hiding behind the pseudonym of  Steppenwolf. I am claiming my name.