THROWBACK TUESDAY: On learning to say no, and to feel good about it too!

Friends! It’s READING WEEK here in Southern Ontario. I’m overwhelmed with stuff that bears no relation to my courses, so I’m glad I don’t have to teach this week; it frees up time for all the other crap on my plate.

What better time, then, to reblog this popular, collaboratively-sourced post on how to say no and like it, originally published in July 2016.

I’m still broadly very in favour of all the advice shared here, and I also commiserate with the me who wrote this post – I’m sure she would laugh sardonically to know that I’m still having problems, well, saying no.

However, I have one addition to the suggestions below around when and how to say no, and it comes from the fact that I’m now a full professor.

Being an FP means I can pick and choose where to put my labour, a privilege I do not take for granted. Which is why I now choose, above all, to put my labour places that can support the advancement and promotion of junior colleagues, including grad students, with a primary emphasis on supporting junior women and those from not traditionally privileged backgrounds. This is a really easy question for me to ask when any request crosses my desk: will someone whose work and presence in the discipline I value and admire benefit from my yes? If so, the answer is clear.

Whether or not you’re on reading week too, enjoy! And do share any yes/no wisdom, as ever, in the comments.

***

There’s an analogy I used when my mom first got sick, early in 2014, to help my dad realise that taking care of her was, of course, a good thing, but that he also had to take care of himself. In fact, he had to take care of himself first, so that he could also take care of her properly. It comes from that thing every air traveler loves to ignore with gusto: the safety briefing. It’s the bit that says: secure your mask before assisting others.

I’m very big on self care – in theory. I am very well aware that I’m of no use to my students when I’m sick or over-tired, or worn down emotionally (although do I cancel class? Nope). I also know that if I want to ride my bike faster (which I always do) I need to rest properly. (I write about cycling for Fit is a Feminist Issue if you want to learn more). So I would like to think that, in the event I was in a plane-travel emergency, I would absolutely, totally follow instructions and secure my mask first, before looking around to see whom I could help.

I’d like to think so, but I doubt it.

I’m a perennial yes-sayer. Ask me to do shit; chances are I’ll say sure, of course! Usually with enthusiasm; somehow I convince myself in the moment that it’ll be fun/good for me, so of course, bring it on! Sometimes with covert frustration, but firm in the belief that saying no would bring very unwelcome consequences indeed. What these are remain abstract, but I’m sure they are lurking in the underbrush, ready to bite me in the shins.

Where does this urge come from? Part of it has to do with cultural socialisation: women are socialised to say yes – or rather, we are socialised not to say no, except under extreme circumstances. (And, incidentally: the fact that women are socialised to say yes most of the time is part of what makes debates about sexual consent so tricky, the obviousness of “no means no” so hard to make stick.) Historically, women are the helpmeets, the obedient ones, the ones who clean up the shit with a smile so that everyone else in the household still feels good about themselves afterward. Ever notice how women who take care of themselves well by firmly insisting on their rights – to their own time; to their own bodies; to their human rights – are often labeled sluts or bitches or worse? Or trolled mercilessly online? These are the women who have learned against the odds to say NO, to set their own boundaries independent of patriarchal expectations.

But a big part of this urge to say yes, for me, is also down to the social lessons the academy teaches us, from grad school onward: that we always need one more publication, so if someone asks you to write a chapter for their obscure forthcoming collection of course you say yes; that we always need to earn the next round of glowing course evaluations or else be branded a bad teacher, so of course you make yourself available to your students 24/7; that we need to be seen to be team players, so of course you do that committee gig on overload. The academy breeds imposter syndrome; all the measures in place to judge our impact are designed to help us feel, consistently, not good enough. And that feeling creates the panicked urge just always, always to say yes, even when the yes drips with years of accumulated resentment.

I was warned at the start of my academic career to guard against being constantly asked to do stuff, and to learn to say no as often as yes in order to protect my time and my own best interests. (That is, to preserve enough time for me to do the 40% of my job that is research and publishing-driven. We’re not talking lolling on the couch eating bonbons, friends. I wish!)

I knew there was absolutely no chance I was going to become one of those people who doesn’t get asked; those people are demonstrably a) incompetent, or b) assholic when on committees. I am highly competent, more’s the pity, and I’m allergic to being mean to people (just one more way I have been well socialised as a woman in the workforce, let me say). But I figured, early on, that there was a fighting chance I could learn to say no and mean it.

Alas: somehow, along the way, I did not manage to acquire this crucial bit of academic survival kit – or perhaps I got hold of it, but never properly internalised it. Anyway, I didn’t recognise how seriously I’d misfired on this one until last year, when a handful of extremely large things (a book; the organization of a large conference; the launching of a new academic program) I’d said yes to over a period of about 18 months all came to a head at the very same time. Suddenly, I was living through the profoundly exhausting consequences of three separate yeses. And it occurred to me that no way could these consequences have been worse than what would have happened if I’d said no.

So, emerging from this self-imposed trauma, I decided I was going to teach myself how to say no and like it. Feel relieved and gratified by it. Feel not guilty about it!

To do this, I turned to a handful of my best loved and trusted colleagues, all women, and asked them these questions:

• when was the last time you said no to something that really made a difference to your work-life balance and/or mental health? How did saying no “go”? (IE: how did you do it, and were there repercussions?)
• when was the last time you WISH you’d said no to something? What would you do differently this time around, if you had it to do again? (Or: HOW would you handle it?)

I told them they could feel absolutely free to ignore the request; I did NOT want to add to anybody’s workload! I explained that I was crowd-sourcing ideas for this post, and that they should let me know if I could quote them, or paraphrase them, and whether or not I could identify them. (Most chose anonymity, but were happy to have me share their thoughts.)

I learned a lot of great stuff thanks to this exercise, and I’m eager to pass it on. Herewith, then, the distillation – plus a list of top tips you can pin up above your computer (I know I will).

***

One colleague at a similar stage in her career to mine noted that the biggest challenge, when it comes to saying no, is managing the temptation. Do I NEED to do this thing, or do I WANT to do it? And what exactly do I mean by these terms? Where do I place the distinction between them? She wrote:

As I think about it I realize that saying no feels pretty privileged. It is like the CV of failures. Privileged to say no because I don’t NEED to do that thing. But part of that I think is also calibrating what we mean by ‘need.’ My child-self mixes up ‘need’ and ‘want.’ Saying yes sometimes is a want rather than a need. Saying yes brings warm fuzzies of validation and achievement. … But beyond system imposed needs, I do think that the hardest thing is to self-calibrate those needs and wants. If I think about saying no as a privilege then saying no can feel pretty good too. I am fortunate that I get to say no.

These reflections on “no” as a privilege – one we need to be willing to grant ourselves, which is not often easy, but which remains a privilege nonetheless – coincide with the thoughts offered by one of my senior mentors, someone whose career advice I trust almost without fail. She noted that we always, always over-inflate the consequences of saying no, especially once we are at the very privileged stage, in North America, of having tenure:

In my experience, there aren’t repercussions for a ‘no’, beyond some generally short-lived grumpiness … saying no doesn’t ever mean you won’t be asked again … and again … in the months and years ahead.  Probably the most important thing to teach oneself is that it doesn’t have to be you – there’s always another person on the “ask” list.

Maybe that last statement is the critical one: there’s always someone else. We might not like to think we are dispensable, or replaceable – oh god, my imposter syndrome is calling! – but of course we are. Maybe embracing that reality could be, should be a good thing!

This leads to another key insight, offered by another senior mentor and friend. She struggles with health issues that impact her ability to work on a regular basis, but rather than making an issue of it she finds herself overcompensating by saying yes too often. For her, the struggle isn’t saying yes or saying no, but knowing her own body’s limits and respecting them, rather than trying to cover them up by repeatedly transgressing them:

The ‘how to’ isn’t hard: there are usually enough things on any academic’s plate that we can say ‘I can’t manage it at this time,’ or ‘I can’t manage it until x is done’ or ‘until we get a replacement for y who left’ or ‘there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.’

It may be that the question is ‘how much is enough.’ I mean that. And I recognise the absurdity in saying it when I write it, but I think it’s there.

“How much is enough for me?” “What do I mean when I say I need to do this thing?” Or, as a couple of respondents noted, will I enjoy this?

This last question is actually not superficial, but crucial. It’s directly connected to this one: will this thing, a lot of work or not, nourish me in a way that will allow me to do it well? That will allow me to learn from it and not resent it, and encourage others to do it well? As another peer noted very succinctly, I don’t do X because I hate it, and lots of people don’t hate it and would rather do it. I do Y because I love it and do it well; it’s a trade-off and one we should feel confident making. If everyone pulls their weight by doing (largely) the stuff they love, we will actually discover most of the bases will cover themselves.

To end, I’d like to share an extremely sensible list of things to consider before saying no, shared by my senior mentor with the iron-clad advice. This is a keeper, folks!

1. Don’t say yes or no immediately.  Keep to a 24-hour rule.
2. Ask yourself:  will I learn anything?  Is my voice necessary/useful?  Will it be fun (at least some of the time!)?  Could a colleague/graduate student benefit from this opportunity instead?
3. Think about time: if I say yes, how will this fit in my schedule?  Do I need something in order to make it work (money, course release, grad assistant, stepping away from another committee or whatever)?*
4. Good to remember: saying “no” might be a huge nuisance to the person asking, but it is never fatal.

(*She also notes: If you are being pressured for a “yes,” even when you’ve given a “no,” then ASK FOR SOMETHING that will help! If you don’t get something in return, then your contribution isn’t that important to the person asking, and you can say no secure in the knowledge that you made your willingness but also your needs clear.)

My thanks to everyone who replied to my request for thoughts on saying no, and especially to the beloved friend who wrote this, and made me laugh out loud:

Hi Kim,

Sorry for the slow response. This is a fascinating topic for your blog but I’m afraid I must decline writing at this point due, in large part, to the time needed to devote to the many other things I’ve failed to decline. Sigh. Happy to discuss strategies in person at some point, though.

I look forward to reading the blog.

And yes, we plan to chat it out – over drinks, natch! – sometime soon.

In solidarity,

Kim

On learning to say no, and to feel good about it too!

There’s an analogy I used when my mom first got sick, early in 2014, to help my dad realise that taking care of her was, of course, a good thing, but that he also had to take care of himself. In fact, he had to take care of himself first, so that he could also take care of her properly. It comes from that thing every air traveler loves to ignore with gusto: the safety briefing. It’s the bit that says: secure your mask before assisting others.

I’m very big on self care – in theory. I am very well aware that I’m of no use to my students when I’m sick or over-tired, or worn down emotionally (although do I cancel class? Nope). I also know that if I want to ride my bike faster (which I always do) I need to rest properly. (I write about cycling for Fit is a Feminist Issue if you want to learn more). So I would like to think that, in the event I was in a plane-travel emergency, I would absolutely, totally follow instructions and secure my mask first, before looking around to see whom I could help.

I’d like to think so, but I doubt it.

I’m a perennial yes-sayer. Ask me to do shit; chances are I’ll say sure, of course! Usually with enthusiasm; somehow I convince myself in the moment that it’ll be fun/good for me, so of course, bring it on! Sometimes with covert frustration, but firm in the belief that saying no would bring very unwelcome consequences indeed. What these are remain abstract, but I’m sure they are lurking in the underbrush, ready to bite me in the shins.

Where does this urge come from? Part of it has to do with cultural socialisation: women are socialised to say yes – or rather, we are socialised not to say no, except under extreme circumstances. (And, incidentally: the fact that women are socialised to say yes most of the time is part of what makes debates about sexual consent so tricky, the obviousness of “no means no” so hard to make stick.) Historically, women are the helpmeets, the obedient ones, the ones who clean up the shit with a smile so that everyone else in the household still feels good about themselves afterward. Ever notice how women who take care of themselves well by firmly insisting on their rights – to their own time; to their own bodies; to their human rights – are often labeled sluts or bitches or worse? Or trolled mercilessly online? These are the women who have learned against the odds to say NO, to set their own boundaries independent of patriarchal expectations.

But a big part of this urge to say yes, for me, is also down to the social lessons the academy teaches us, from grad school onward: that we always need one more publication, so if someone asks you to write a chapter for their obscure forthcoming collection of course you say yes; that we always need to earn the next round of glowing course evaluations or else be branded a bad teacher, so of course you make yourself available to your students 24/7; that we need to be seen to be team players, so of course you do that committee gig on overload. The academy breeds imposter syndrome; all the measures in place to judge our impact are designed to help us feel, consistently, not good enough. And that feeling creates the panicked urge just always, always to say yes, even when the yes drips with years of accumulated resentment.

I was warned at the start of my academic career to guard against being constantly asked to do stuff, and to learn to say no as often as yes in order to protect my time and my own best interests. (That is, to preserve enough time for me to do the 40% of my job that is research and publishing-driven. We’re not talking lolling on the couch eating bonbons, friends. I wish!)

I knew there was absolutely no chance I was going to become one of those people who doesn’t get asked; those people are demonstrably a) incompetent, or b) assholic when on committees. I am highly competent, more’s the pity, and I’m allergic to being mean to people (just one more way I have been well socialised as a woman in the workforce, let me say). But I figured, early on, that there was a fighting chance I could learn to say no and mean it.

Alas: somehow, along the way, I did not manage to acquire this crucial bit of academic survival kit – or perhaps I got hold of it, but never properly internalised it. Anyway, I didn’t recognise how seriously I’d misfired on this one until last year, when a handful of extremely large things (a book; the organization of a large conference; the launching of a new academic program) I’d said yes to over a period of about 18 months all came to a head at the very same time. Suddenly, I was living through the profoundly exhausting consequences of three separate yeses. And it occurred to me that no way could these consequences have been worse than what would have happened if I’d said no.

So, emerging from this self-imposed trauma, I decided I was going to teach myself how to say no and like it. Feel relieved and gratified by it. Feel not guilty about it!

To do this, I turned to a handful of my best loved and trusted colleagues, all women, and asked them these questions:

• when was the last time you said no to something that really made a difference to your work-life balance and/or mental health? How did saying no “go”? (IE: how did you do it, and were there repercussions?)
• when was the last time you WISH you’d said no to something? What would you do differently this time around, if you had it to do again? (Or: HOW would you handle it?)

I told them they could feel absolutely free to ignore the request; I did NOT want to add to anybody’s workload! I explained that I was crowd-sourcing ideas for this post, and that they should let me know if I could quote them, or paraphrase them, and whether or not I could identify them. (Most chose anonymity, but were happy to have me share their thoughts.)

I learned a lot of great stuff thanks to this exercise, and I’m eager to pass it on. Herewith, then, the distillation – plus a list of top tips you can pin up above your computer (I know I will).

***

One colleague at a similar stage in her career to mine noted that the biggest challenge, when it comes to saying no, is managing the temptation. Do I NEED to do this thing, or do I WANT to do it? And what exactly do I mean by these terms? Where do I place the distinction between them? She wrote:

As I think about it I realize that saying no feels pretty privileged. It is like the CV of failures. Privileged to say no because I don’t NEED to do that thing. But part of that I think is also calibrating what we mean by ‘need.’ My child-self mixes up ‘need’ and ‘want.’ Saying yes sometimes is a want rather than a need. Saying yes brings warm fuzzies of validation and achievement. … But beyond system imposed needs, I do think that the hardest thing is to self-calibrate those needs and wants. If I think about saying no as a privilege then saying no can feel pretty good too. I am fortunate that I get to say no.

These reflections on “no” as a privilege – one we need to be willing to grant ourselves, which is not often easy, but which remains a privilege nonetheless – coincide with the thoughts offered by one of my senior mentors, someone whose career advice I trust almost without fail. She noted that we always, always over-inflate the consequences of saying no, especially once we are at the very privileged stage, in North America, of having tenure:

In my experience, there aren’t repercussions for a ‘no’, beyond some generally short-lived grumpiness … saying no doesn’t ever mean you won’t be asked again … and again … in the months and years ahead.  Probably the most important thing to teach oneself is that it doesn’t have to be you – there’s always another person on the “ask” list.

Maybe that last statement is the critical one: there’s always someone else. We might not like to think we are dispensable, or replaceable – oh god, my imposter syndrome is calling! – but of course we are. Maybe embracing that reality could be, should be a good thing!

This leads to another key insight, offered by another senior mentor and friend. She struggles with health issues that impact her ability to work on a regular basis, but rather than making an issue of it she finds herself overcompensating by saying yes too often. For her, the struggle isn’t saying yes or saying no, but knowing her own body’s limits and respecting them, rather than trying to cover them up by repeatedly transgressing them:

The ‘how to’ isn’t hard: there are usually enough things on any academic’s plate that we can say ‘I can’t manage it at this time,’ or ‘I can’t manage it until x is done’ or ‘until we get a replacement for y who left’ or ‘there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.’

It may be that the question is ‘how much is enough.’ I mean that. And I recognise the absurdity in saying it when I write it, but I think it’s there.

“How much is enough for me?” “What do I mean when I say I need to do this thing?” Or, as a couple of respondents noted, will I enjoy this?

This last question is actually not superficial, but crucial. It’s directly connected to this one: will this thing, a lot of work or not, nourish me in a way that will allow me to do it well? That will allow me to learn from it and not resent it, and encourage others to do it well? As another peer noted very succinctly, I don’t do X because I hate it, and lots of people don’t hate it and would rather do it. I do Y because I love it and do it well; it’s a trade-off and one we should feel confident making. If everyone pulls their weight by doing (largely) the stuff they love, we will actually discover most of the bases will cover themselves.

To end, I’d like to share an extremely sensible list of things to consider before saying no, shared by my senior mentor with the iron-clad advice. This is a keeper, folks!

1. Don’t say yes or no immediately.  Keep to a 24-hour rule.
2. Ask yourself:  will I learn anything?  Is my voice necessary/useful?  Will it be fun (at least some of the time!)?  Could a colleague/graduate student benefit from this opportunity instead?
3. Think about time: if I say yes, how will this fit in my schedule?  Do I need something in order to make it work (money, course release, grad assistant, stepping away from another committee or whatever)?*
4. Good to remember: saying “no” might be a huge nuisance to the person asking, but it is never fatal.

(*She also notes: If you are being pressured for a “yes,” even when you’ve given a “no,” then ASK FOR SOMETHING that will help! If you don’t get something in return, then your contribution isn’t that important to the person asking, and you can say no secure in the knowledge that you made your willingness but also your needs clear.)

My thanks to everyone who replied to my request for thoughts on saying no, and especially to the beloved friend who wrote this, and made me laugh out loud:

Hi Kim,

Sorry for the slow response. This is a fascinating topic for your blog but I’m afraid I must decline writing at this point due, in large part, to the time needed to devote to the many other things I’ve failed to decline. Sigh. Happy to discuss strategies in person at some point, though.

I look forward to reading the blog.

And yes, we plan to chat it out – over drinks, natch! – sometime soon.

In solidarity,

Kim

On flipping the theatre studies classroom… back again (part 2)

My last post reported on a workshop I recently co-organized with my colleagues Natalie Alvarez and Jenn Stephenson at the CATR annual conference in Calgary. The premise of the workshop was simple: it gathered teachers of theatre and performance history, asked us to think about the benefits of the “flipped classroom” model for our courses, and encouraged us to share our ongoing experiments in active learning.

Lots of great insights emerged, and I learned a bunch of terrific new things. We also, however, used the opportunity of the workshop to air some grievances about flipping, and the second half of our session turned into a really provocative discussion about the politics of the flipped classroom.

In this (second) post on the workshop I reflect on that discussion, and I end with some thoughts about the place (or lack thereof) of arts and humanities voices in the broader discourse around flipping.

***

We’d shared our research, talked about Grahame and Jenn’s blended learning experiences at Queen’s, and 90 minutes had come and gone. We took a break, and when we resumed it was time to talk about challenges we’ve encountered with the flipped model. (God, does Moodle ever suck! And students are crap at posting to WordPress.)

That’s when one of our auditors raised her hand and said…

“How is assigning readings beforehand, and discussing them together in class, different from ‘flipping’ the classroom?”

Then we all burst into fits of giggles, nods – and tears. (Well, not literally. But almost!)

What’s a flipped classroom? It’s a classroom in which students come having done pre-prep, reading or listening to content in advance. It’s a classroom where various kinds of group discussions and problem-solving activities take place, live, between us. It’s a classroom in which students are invited actively to engage in knowledge production, to use their embodied minds to test ideas on their feet, and to work collaboratively to challenge status-quo assumptions.

In other words: it’s a typical arts and humanities classroom.

More than that, in fact: it’s a very typical theatre and performance studies classroom.

It’s not every A&H / T&P classroom, of course: I’m not suggesting that rote instruction, lecturing, and gob-smackingly boring sage-on-stage stuff doesn’t happen in the arts. On the contrary: I was subject to plenty of it myself when I was an undergraduate student, and I have seen it in more than one classroom I’ve peer-assessed as a tenured professor.

But let’s face it. Arts and humanities teachers invented the flipped classroom, and theatre and performance, along with all the other fine arts practices taught at college and university level, pioneered embodied learning. Whether we’re talking vigorous class debate about medical ethics on display in a contemporary British lit class discussing Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, improvisation in a directing class exploring the fate of the murdered wife Desdemona in Othello, or experiments with found objects in a creative writing class focused on contemporary poetry, the pedagogical basis is the same. Student labour is framed as thinking, writing, speaking, and sharing in the room on the day. It often involves in-class collaboration. It regularly involves play. There’s often a chance to report back, to create something to share, or at the very least to get up and move around.

Which is why our workshop quickly moved on from sharing our (rather dry) findings from the flipped classroom “lit review” that opened our session to sharing best practices already in our collective teaching repertoire. As Jacqueline Taucar helpfully observed, we need to ask whether it’s the “flipped classroom” – the shiny new model, complete with how-to kit – that gets results, or the active learning component at the heart of the flipped classroom that really fires students up.

Our hunch was the latter. And around the table, numerous terrific (and fun!) examples of great active learning exercises came to light.

• Jenn talked about her first-year theatre history students exploring the concept of “historiography” in a practical way as they worked in teams to compare and contrast the assumptions framing two different chapters in their textbook;
• Martin Julien shared a task that saw students interviewing one another about their understandings of feminism, then reporting to the class on their findings;
• Tony Vickery wowed us all with a description of his performance studies class on fantasy and cosplay, where students build their own board games (strictly low-tech!) and then play one another’s offerings to test their effectiveness. (The board games are all based on one or two of the theories/practices read for class);
• Marlis Schweitzer shared our colleague Richie Wilcox’s hilarious scheme for teaching complex performance theory, in which students get to create a retelling of a well-known fairy tale in the style of a theory “ism”. (Little Marxist Riding Hood: bring it on!)

Notably, virtually all of these examples involved minimal or no technology.

So why, you must now be wondering, did we all get together to talk about “flipping” our classrooms if we’re already experts and our teaching practice is already flip-friendly?

The answer is simple, frustrating, and symptomatic:

Because what we have long been doing has now got a name, outcome stats, administrative momentum, and a budget line.

We’ve all been told from above that this thing called “flipping” is something we need to know about. Students are consumers, and we need to offer best practices that lead to strong outcomes. (Duh.) Data (typically based on teaching in the sciences, which has recently discovered flipping and wants to share it with us) shows active learning works better than passive learning. So we’ve been instructed by our resident teaching and learning experts, and encouraged by our gung-ho administrators, to learn, all over again, what it is that we already know – now neatly packaged into a model that can be easily sold across disciplines and around the world.

Or, put another way:

Arts and humanities instructors have had our teaching mansplained to us by the neoliberal university.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying flipped classrooms are bad things. They have many, many virtues – though they also have some significant blind spots, like assuming that the internet is a panacea as opposed to a massive time suck, that all lecturing is bad and uninteresting, and that all students learn better within “activity” frameworks. (All of these things are, um, not true.)

I’m also not suggesting that T&L centres and senior administrators are wrong to support active learning (not at all!), nor that I resent the discovery of active learning’s value in the sciences (holy mary jane, of course not!).

I’m also not trying to imply that teachers like me have been awesome at gathering data on our own classrooms and shouting about the success of our models. We do this, sure, but probably not enough; it’s obvious we need to do more of it, and perhaps do it better. Some of this problem is on us, and we need to get busy.

What really bothers me, and many teachers like me, though, is that our own universities rarely bother to notice the entire faculty (faculties, in my case) of “flipping” experts on their doorsteps. They don’t visit our classes, I doubt they read our teaching publications (check out the top theatre pedagogy journal in North America here), and all too often they don’t think to invite us to present on panels related to active learning models.

(Last autumn I was asked – thanks to my forward-thinking colleagues Aisha Haque and Nanda Dmitrov – to host a session on community engaged theatre and its classroom applications at Western’s big fall teaching conference. This was the first time such a session had been offered; a number of key people, very skeptical when the session was first floated, were surprised at how well it was attended and received. Again, I say: duh!)

Nope, we don’t routinely get asked or read or invited. Instead, we are routinely told:

• that studying the arts can’t get students jobs;
• that our research lacks “impact”;
• that we work on obscure topics without enough practical merit to encourage students and their parents to invest time and money in our classes.

So here’s my provocation. Could it be that, in the arts and humanities, our “impact”, our “value”, and our “interest” to students in search of both learning and jobs (yup, both of them, folks) might lie in the exceptional classroom experiences we can offer, as well as the remarkable pedagogical models we have pioneered and are eager to share with students and peers alike?

Could it be that as teachers we might inspire, change lives, redirect interests, and model excellent pedagogy – and not just for future teachers, but for current teachers across the disciplines as well?

If this is a “creative” economy, after all, our active(ist) arts classrooms are where creativity comes to life.

And yes: if you ask us, we’ll very happily talk about our awesome, crowd-shared, long-tested models with you. We’ll even make you get up on your feet! Just ask.

Please.

Kim

On trying to be a “public intellectual”

While many elected officials would rather sloganeer and posture than collaborate, the country languishes in the residual effects of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression: inequalities persist in pay, social advantage, and education; the gap between the few who have and the many who have not grows ever wider; the possible apocalyptic effects of global climate change increasingly appear inevitable. The public pleads for compromise, solutions, and leadership only to witness political theater. However, the leadership vacuum that exists in this era of corrosive cynicism and partisanship creates an opening for the hard work of civic engagement. Academics must seize the moment to assert higher education’s primary role in the democratic work of the country and collaborate with the public to address society’s core challenges. We must lead by assuming roles as public intellectuals. We must fill the leadership vacuum created by political intransigence and obstruction.

So write Nicholas Behm, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen in a recent article in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). I read their provocative and timely piece last Wednesday on the Tube to work, crushed in an overstuffed Northern Line carriage, feeling (as all too often during my commute) like It Just Isn’t Worth It. Needless to say, Behm et al appeared in my inbox at just the right moment.

“Public Intellectuals” are everywhere these days: they trail around like “creative economy” indicators (as in the case of the ever-present “creative city” guru Richard Florida), debate politicians at marquee events (I’m looking at you, Niall Ferguson), or ARE politicians at marquee events (Michael Ignatieff! Condoleeza Rice!), and of course appear ubiquitously on radio current-affairs programs and TV chat shows. But what is a public intellectual, honestly? And should we, on reflection, aspire so to be?

I am both completely invested in public intellectualism as a model of twenty-first-century academic engagement – it is, after all, part of why I started writing this blog almost a year ago – and yet also profoundly skeptical of it. Many “public intellectuals” strike me as opportunists, brand-building ideological entrepreneurs of the most cynical order; rightly or wrongly, I get the impression that the Floridas and Fergusons of our world are simply chasing a kind of elitist public fame, rather than aiming to make their research part of a true community discussion – by bringing the wealth of what they study and have learned to a constituency that can then put it (with or without them) to further use. So while I’m very much on board with the call to public intellectual action, I find myself nevertheless urged to ask this question: when professors seek to make their knowledge “public”, who exactly benefits, and how?

According to Behm, Rankins-Robertson, and Roen, the talking heads we see on TV or read in high-profile features in the newspaper may only partly qualify as public intellectuals, for a substantial part of public intellectual practice involves thinking carefully and critically about whom one seeks to reach, what one hopes to share with that community, and what one hopes to learn in turn from that community, acting as both a collaborator and a fellow citizen rather than an “expert” sharer. For Behm et al, true public intellectualism is nothing less than an extension of democracy: “a way of being in and acting on the world” in a fashion that bridges the perennial gap between college and community by moving both college and community toward one another in an act of mutual (and sometimes uneasy) encounter:

Publicly active scholarship is inherently messy, involving intensive, reciprocal partnerships with communities whose members hold diverse values and beliefs. It requires that research be situated within a local community’s social and power dynamics. It frames society’s core challenges as interrelated with rather than distinct from social and cultural factors like race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. As Lorilee Sandmann, a professor of education at the University of Georgia, has argued, publicly active scholarship is embedded within and negotiates these social and cultural realities, requiring academics to reconceptualize their traditional roles. (Behm et al 2014)

As a keen observer of “applied” theatre practice in my professional life as a performance scholar, I find myself tremendously drawn to the authors’ thick description of what public intellectualism as mutual public engagement might actually look like on the ground. This “messy” practice sounds a lot, in truth, like the kind of work some of my (amazing) colleagues in applied theatre at Queen Mary (and elsewhere – check out new examples here and here) are already doing. Yet, many of them are relatively “unsung” as public intellectuals, partly because, even as we hear more and more about the importance of making our academic work “public”, I fear that what the clamour really wants is more talking heads, in service of the voracious “impact show”.

I’ve written before in this space about the tyranny of “impact”, especially as it pervades the UK government’s “REF” exercise for university researchers. In the “accountability” language of contemporary Britain’s neoliberal government, “impact” means being able to show that your academic work is “relevant” to people outside of the university where you work (aka, not your students, weirdly and perversely). But: the relative value ascribed to different kinds of impact often seems arbitrary or even illogical, and rarely seems to be contiguous with a true interest in community goods (which are, as Behm and colleagues note, inherently messy, nuanced, and sometimes very hard to measure). My university wants me to count the number of times I’ve been impactful and provide evidence: so, if I’ve been on TV, or if I’ve written an op-ed, or if I’ve published 45 blog posts, that “impact” is measurable – even if nobody is really reading or watching or paying attention. Yes, of course, somebody is paying attention, and I don’t want to suggest that my exchange with that person is without value; my point, though, is that any such value matters less, for the ends of the accountability exercise, than the fact that my gesture of “engagement” in itself is measurable. The tick-box matters, not the person encountered or engaged. On the other side of the coin, if I’ve been labouring alongside community groups in the trenches for several years (as a number of my colleagues working on applied performance projects routinely do), but I haven’t generated easily measurable “outcomes” (IE: a book, article, or DVD that “proves” we’ve been working together for some kind of mutual benefit), then I might as well never have been “public” in my engagement at all. No measurement equals zero “impact” for accountability purposes.

While I was trying to gather my thoughts on Behm, Rankins-Robertson and Roen’s article, I read two other things that seem relevant to my growing anxiety over how we define public intellectualism right now, and what we seem to want it to do. The first was a startlingly cynical article by Leah Eichler (in the 14 March 2014 edition of the Globe and Mail) on why university degrees are approaching irrelevancy; the second was a series of reflections by Jen Harvie on the artist as entrepreneur in the “creative economy” (in her 2013 book Fair Play). Eichler’s article rehearses the predictable argument that students ought not to waste time at university if they want to be “trained” for a “job”; though short and in many ways unhelpfully redundant, the piece nevertheless reminds me that academics still have a lot of urgent work to do in order to explain to the people around us what university does in fact “train” its constituents to do – namely, to be thoughtful and engaged citizen-collaborators in a politically troubled and often seductively oversimplified world. Meanwhile, Harvie examines what is gained and what is lost when government policy tries to re-cast artists as independent businesses; in the process, she helps to re-cast the discussion about where and how we should publicise our intellectual and “creative” labour squarely in terms of the money market. Becoming a “public intellectual”, like becoming an artist, in this place and time means deciding if that work is to be for the benefit of a powerful financial elite (including the powerful elites that run our universities and arts councils and decide how these institutions are to be funded), for the benefit of a larger and more diverse community (or communities), or for the benefit of me, as individual academician-entrepreneur, alone.

Now, I can hardly pretend to be some kind of saintly exception to the trends I worry over above; I like getting attention for my research and I enjoy being asked to do “public engagement” stuff (like writing program notes for theatre companies, or speaking at elite venues like Shakespeare’s Globe). I want all of my colleagues to be more forcefully connected to the worlds around us, and I want that connectivity to result in more thoughtful, happier, stronger communities in turn. But I’m also beginning to realise that far more important than advocating for me and my colleagues simply to become more “public” in our labour is the altogether harder (and messier) work of advocating for us to make firm and deliberate choices about what exactly we want “being a public intellectual” to mean for ourselves, as individual scholars and as groups of scholars with shared ideals.

So how might we do this groundwork?

First and foremost, I think we need to talk openly to one another as department, faculty, and disciplinary colleagues in order to rethink existing practices of public engagement, take stock of best practices around us, and redefine our shared terms, especially as they affect us in things like workload and accountability documents. I could be dreaming, but I sense that we may be at a crucial crossroads in both the UK and North America when, post-REF 2014 and post-“crash”, we might have some small leeway to affect university-level policy over how terms like “public engagement” are understood by the powerful decision-makers who hold us to measure. Whether or not this is true, we always have the power to rally one another in local-area meetings within our schools and among our community stakeholders in order to have a real conversation about what different forms of engagement we already model, what kinds of models fit our specific disciplinary needs best, and what kinds of models we would like to see supported and formally encouraged by our peers and by our superiors.

I’d also really love to see universities take “crossover” and “teaching” books more seriously as “research”. I recall the story of a respected colleague and friend who had written a book classified as “for students” and was told it simply didn’t “count” for the REF. Why on earth not? Because it did not uphold the mystified standards of the “expert” researcher talking to his or her “expert” peers. But is this not exactly what contemporary language around impact and accountability presses us to avoid? Such Catches-22 need to be opened to wider debate; in the process I would like to see more of us advocate for the kinds of books that advance knowledge, take political stances, and yet are written in cogent language free enough of jargon and clear enough of syntax to communicate effectively to a large readership, including students and (gasp!) students’ family members and friends. Similarly, I’d like to see more academic publishers identify the potential for those kinds of books, encourage them, and then take a risk publishing them at a much friendlier price point and in much larger numbers while seeking the kinds of press and exposure for them that can attract a diverse audience. Finally, I’d like us all to encourage one another to write with greater clarity, and to seek out venues for publication that will expose us to new constituencies. This might mean publishing in popular or mainstream venues more; it might just as well mean publishing in journals not in our area of specialisation for a change. Exposing ourselves to different academic communities might be just as “public” an act of engagement as the other thing; after all, we are one another’s publics and communities too, and we are all potential collaborators in the making of new and unexpected knowledge.

I want to end this post with a call to community of my own. When I began this blog almost one year ago, I hoped it would eventually grow into a forum space, with multiple regular contributors. It’s not quite there yet, but the one-year anniversary seems a good time to begin the campaign for change in earnest. You’ll have noticed a couple of guest posts recently; I’ve commissioned a few more, which you’ll see in the coming weeks. I’d also, however, like to invite guest contributions from all of you reading: if you have something to say about the issues that broadly and eclectically constitute “activist” teaching and learning, and you think you might like to say them out loud, please get in touch. Use the comment form on my “about” page, or reply to this post, or email me at my Queen Mary address (k.solga@qmul.ac.uk). I’d love to hear from you.

Kim

PS: if you have examples of exceptional public academics who you consider to be models of the practice, please hit “comment” and let us know about them. You’ll find one of my favourite examples here: