Metaphors I teach by

My daughter opened her bedroom door this morning, and with it a world of opportunities. She’d snatched at the handle before but never quite managed to turn it. Happy and fearful in equal measure at her achievement, she turned to me and reached for my hand before taking a step out into the dark hallway, like the world’s cutest bunny about to set foot on the first sheet of white snow of the winter.

So, a doorway into a world of opportunities. “A metaphor. Things are looking up” to borrow words (and another metaphor) from Spooner in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. I read No Man’s Land at secondary school (and loved it, not least for the brilliant swearing) but didn’t begin to understand it until much more recently. I also learned about metaphors at secondary school, and have also only recently begun to give them more thought.

At school I learned the difference between a metaphor and a simile. A metaphor is when you say that X is Y; a simile is when you say that X is like Y. My daughter opening up a world of opportunities is a metaphor, but when I compare her to a cautious yet excited rabbit, I’m using simile. This distinction is useful if we want to point out the shortcomings of others, since nothing could make us feel more intelligent than smugly telling a friend or colleague “that’s not a metaphor — it’s a simile”. If we want to try to be even smarter, though, linguistic analysis provides a further distinction between a metaphor and a metonym. A common example of a metonym would be when Wall Street is used to refer to US financial markets (a place representing what goes on within it) or when we are told potentially bizarre pieces of information like “I’m parked in the multi-storey”. Rather than respond with “No, you’re not, you’re sitting here in Café Rouge with me” we understand that the speaker is using the controller of an object (“I”) as a representative of the object itself (“my car”). Here we are in the realm of metonymy, because in context, there is a salient link between the driver and the car. Suggesting that the traffic outside Café Rouge is crawling past would also be metonymic (since movement is a property of traffic and crawling is a slow form of movement), but to suggest that our lunch hour was crawling by with all my tedious talk of semantics would be a fully-fledged metaphor, since physical movement is not a property of time. Now, if like me you’re ever-so-slightly confused about the difference between metaphor and metonym, you can perhaps stop acting like a smartarse because you know that neither of them is a simile.

Semantic distinctions are perhaps as tenuous as they are tedious. If my opening sentence had been “this morning my daughter literally opened a door to a world of possibilities” then I would expect a herd of pedants to quite rightly (not to mention literally) jump down my throat. But when we use metaphor we are obviously not really saying that my daughter’s bedroom door is the portal to Planet Potential in the way that we might say a spade, say, is a spade. Rather we are drawing a comparison using a particular stylistic approach.

Infinitely more interesting than the definition of a metaphor is its purpose. I don’t remember this purpose ever coming up at secondary school, but I do understand if any of my inspiring English teachers simply couldn’t bring themselves to construct a question as clumsy as “what’s a metaphor for?” Now as an educator myself — a Lecturer in EAP no less (a job title that never really quite fits, but that’s a topic for another day) — I find myself (and my students) encountering the word ANALOGY more frequently than SIMILE, and I find, to bend a sentence from Lakoff and Johnson (1980), METAPHOR pervasive in my everyday working life, “not just in language but in thought and action”.

As a language teacher I try to encourage learners to make connections between collocations encountered within and a language, and metaphors prevalent in the culture or ideology of its speakers. The MacMillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners features neat little METAPHOR boxes to highlight salient concepts and relationships within the language. The entry on OPPORTUNITY reads thus:

For anyone who wants to write with style and panache, each expression here may look worrying like a cliché, a label that can certainly be applied to my reference to opening the door to a world of opportunities in the opening sentence of this post. I could have avoided the cliché by instead choosing “my daughter took a step towards a mountain of possibilities” but this would have jarred, and the clash between message and the reader’s expectations may have hindered my attempt to communicate. And of course, the importance of communication cannot be overstated in language learning, where the pursuit of fluency and accuracy inevitably favours the learning of clichés over stylised and nuanced prose. MacMillan’s metaphor boxes are therefore a welcome resource for me and my learners.

Something that has surprised me in my teaching career is how universal some metaphorical concepts appear to be. If an expression like “window of opportunity” arises in a class, I’ll ask questions like “do you use the same metaphor in your first language?” and “does your first language have a similar collocation?”; responses to the former tend to be positive, and may help to bridge a linguistic gap where responses to the latter are negative.

In English for Academic Purposes, we walk a (metaphorical) tightrope between encouraging our learners from noticing and learning useful language in their reading, and discouraging them from copying it verbatim in their own writing. With an eye on Michael Lewis we may urge our learners to memorise chunks of language, but with an eye on academic offences committees, we worry about how they might regurgitate it. Participating successfully in an academic context, however, involves an interplay of behaviour and practices that goes far beyond the merely linguistic, and I often find myself relying on metaphor as I attempt to help students gain a clearer understanding of what this means.

EAP discourse is, unsurprisingly, full of metaphors. Some worry me, like when “practitioners” employ metaphor to elevate the status of the field. There are many who claim that EAP Lecturers are gatekeepers to academia, which always seems a stretch to me. This is partly because I’m not convinced that even the majority of my students genuinely seek to inhabit “academia”, but mainly because there are far more powerful groups of people who can open or close the “gate” at will. In my context these include UKBA, my university’s International Office, and anyone who works in Admissions. I feel less like a gatekeeper and more like a black cab driver offering his services outside the arrivals hall at Heathrow. I know my way around, I know what I’m doing, and I can take you on a route that will help you to understand where you are. But sadly I’m more expensive than the unlicensed guy next to me with a beaten up Peugeot 406 and Google Maps, who will probably get you to where you need to be anyway. Of course the scariest sight is when I see the new arrivals walk past us both, either reliant on a friend to do everything for them, or worse still an error-filled map they’ve downloaded from the Internet with a tweeted endorsement that it’s all they’ll ever need.

As a teacher who regularly employs metaphors in the classroom, I am troubled by a niggling suspicion that metaphors are less effective in teaching than in preaching to the converted. Anyone who works in EAP and shares my mindset will have nodded in recognition at my “cab driver” analogy in the previous paragraph. But the colleague who truly believes in our “gatekeeper” status might not get it at all, and I have frankly little hope for the IELTS cram-school teacher in China who tweets about how using words like “cacophony” and doing tedious gap fills will help everyone get an IELTS 9 and “achieve academic success”. So should I not also be concerned with metaphors that I use in the classroom?

EAP coursebook writer and all-round charming and well-informed gentleman Edward de Chazal recently visited my place of work and gave an excellent talk on EAP and its influences. He’s an erudite and persuasive man who really does have a gift for presenting, and I was pleased to see him employ the metaphor of a frame for reading and interpreting academic texts. Better still, he brought with him an empty picture frame as “realia” (we need a term for metaphorical realia) which really brought the concept of framing texts to life. I think the frame is a brilliant metaphor for reading and discussing texts, and indeed it’s a fairly normal concept within academia. Every international student I teach knows the word MOREOVER; they don’t all quite know what it means or how to use it appropriately (thanks IELTS cram-school teacher in China) but they’re certainly more familiar with it than the word FRAMEWORK, which they are likely to meet as an important concept when they come to apply theory to their own research, thinking, and writing. Take a look at the British Academic Written English Corpus, however, and you’ll find that instances of FRAMEWORK outnumber correct or incorrect uses of MOREOVER.

I’m not sure, however, that all of my students understand the metaphor of the FRAME. EAP students are typically set summary-writing tasks, and many such tasks difficult to approach. First attempts at writing a summary are often just flat accounts of whatever the source says without making reference to what the source is, who wrote it, or why it was written. In other words, student summaries often fail because they lack a sense of FRAMING. In class I liken writing from sources to curating a gallery (without, of course, really understanding what gallery curation truly involves). It’s not enough, I say, just to put a picture or two up on a wall. You have to think about what kind of frame to put around them (I guess curators don’t do this, but never mind), about how you will label them, how the room will be lit, and how each picture will be positioned in relation to other pictures. This metaphor clearly resonates for some students, who may nod enthusiastically or say “yes exactly”, but there’s always at least one student who struggles to write from sources with any sense of framing, even after four or five attempts and weeks of coaxing, poking, and prodding through feedback. Certainly there’s room for improvement in EAP task-design that may help the learners, but it does seem that there might be something wanting in my choice of metaphor.

A couple of years ago a Saudi student confessed to me that whatever I was saying about FRAMING was lost on him. He was confused, he told me, about what his own contribution should be when writing from sources. If I’m just summarising what other people say, went the concern, isn’t it the case that I’m not saying anything myself? Since the student’s confusion was not abated by my excited response of “good question!” and reassurance that this was a controversial issue for all sorts of people, I tried another metaphor. Or simile, as it happened. Academic writing is like architecture, I said. Who is the “author” of a building? Whose contribution to creating a building is most important? The room agreed that it was the architect. Good (and a sigh of relief that nobody else had read John Ruskin on stonemasons and Gothic architecture). More questions: does the architect lay the foundations of the building? No. Does the architect bake the bricks in a kiln? No. Does the architect make the windows? No. The cement that hold everything together? No. The slate on the roof? No. Does the architect put any of the parts of the building in place? No. Is the influence of the architect present in the finished building? Yes. Academic writing is like that. You are the architect. You think about materials, certainly. You understand them, you know how they will work, and you know how they can be used to create your vision. You don’t produce the materials or put them together, but you provide the design and structure. You guide the building process. The completed building is your work. “Yes!” a Phd Literature student in the room exclaimed. But my Saudi skeptic was nonplussed. “No, I don’t get it” he said.

Not long after my architecture metaphor toppled, I read a neat little book called They Say, I Say: the Moves that Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. Its influence can perhaps be spotted in my over-use of the verb “say” in previous paragraphs. Graff and Birkenstein seek to make engagement in academic discourse more accessible by presenting it in terms of a conversation. The core premise of the book is set out in the preface thus:

Good argumentative writing begins not with an act of assertion but an act of listening, of putting ourselves in the shoes of those who think differently from us. As a result, we advise writers to begin not with what they themselves think about their subject (“I say”) but with what others think (“they say”). This practice, we think, adds urgency to writing, helping to become more authentically motivated. When writing responds to something that has been said or might be said, it thereby performs the meaningful task of supporting, correcting, or complicating that other view.

Again the metaphor — academic writing as conversation — works for me, and is not a particularly controversial concept. In my own teaching I find it equally important to bring in the verb “do” and, particularly at the beginning of an EAP course, ask students questions not just on what a text SAYS but what it DOES. The matter of what a text DOES regularly appears to be the more problematic question, although this might SAY more about the kind of training my students have had before I see them. Many have embarked upon IELTS training before they could competently converse in English, and tend not to have ever really thought about the purpose of a text. But even students who have been through whatever stages it took to get onto MA programmes can struggle with the question “what does this text do?”. Last year I worked with a group of Management students who had been asked to read a Steve Jobs obituary and to analyse its content using a theoretical framework (there it goes again) from their course. They didn’t have a problem with what the text SAID, but what it DID appeared to be a mystery. Nobody in the room had read an obituary before (in English, or apparently in any other language), and half of them didn’t know what an obituary was even after reading and “understanding” the text. The text contained praise from Jobs’ rival Bill Gates, and I asked the students for their thoughts on this. What did Gates say? And what was he doing in saying this? Blank looks. It took a question as blunt as “do you think Bill Gates would say ‘I’m glad Steve Jobs is dead’ to a journalist, even if he meant it?” to get the students engaging with the subtleties of the text type they were supposed to be analysing.

My favourite metaphor for academic discourse can also be found in They Say, I Say but it originates with the philosopher Kenneth Burke. Graff and Birkenstein cite Burke’s explanation of his assertion that academic discourse is like a conversation at a party (and yes I know that’s a simile):

You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about…You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you…The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

This heated discussion at a party has become my metaphor of choice, and it appears to resonate quite effectively with my learners. Once they’ve got the concept, I find I am able to ask questions about academic texts in terms of the metaphor, starting with “who’s in the room?” (i.e. who are the key figures within this text — the authors and anyone that they refer to?) and leading onto any number of the following, which I am constantly refining with the aim of using “who’s in the room?” as a framework for reading, writing, and thinking about academic texts:

- Who in the room do the authors agree with?

- Who in the room do the authors disagree with?

- Who’s the most influential person in the room?

- Who started the conversation?

- Who was the last person to speak?

- Where is the room?

- Who is hosting the party?

- Who is paying for it?

- Who is doing the catering?

- Where do *you* stand within in the room?

Earlier this year I team-taught with an inspiring colleague who lectures on Management and Organisational Studies and was interested to see her doing the same thing but with a different question. As part of a discussion of a case study on an orchestra, she asked her students about the people present in the case study. She soon elicited all of the names within the text — the musicians, the conductors, the administrators etc. — but despite her best efforts, was unable to coax out the name of person who had written the case study (its architect, no less). I wondered if she might also try to elicit the fact that we as readers were somehow present in the text, framing it with our own perspectives, but this remained an avenue unexplored — in that session at least. But I felt reassured that this brilliant subject lecturer had a similar concern to me, the guest EAP guy. We want our students to understand that texts are authored and constructed in relation to other texts and other authors, and it is only by recognising this key aspect of academic discourse that our students can begin to open the door to a world of learning opportunities. If that takes a metaphorical curated painting of a building in which a party is being hosted and within which a heated discussion in a room has broken out, so be it.

Graff, G. and Birkenstein, C. (2009) They Say I Say : the Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. W. W. Norton & Company

Lakoff, G. and Jonson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press

The first in a four part series

Two percent. Just 2% of code separates us from our Chimpanzee brethren. Yet that small difference has lead to humanity’s migration, the rise and fall of civilizations, and the creation of vast works of art.

Small differences matter.

Much like our genetic code online reading and traditional reading share many similarities. The differences, however, create a layer of complexity that mirror the vast chasm found in the cognitive abilities of chimpanzees and humans. Yes those students who have the prerequisite social practices to succeed in traditional academic reading tasks do outperform peers in online reading environments. Yet these shared cognitive skills and social practices do not explain all the differences in performance when we measure online reading comprehension.

New and more complex skills and practices are required to read in online environments. This 2% (an analogy not actual data) represents the set of skills and practice that allow some learners to take online texts and reshape the meaning for future learning.

Michio Kaku in his book The Future of the Mind describes the difference between primate and human consciousness in terms of simulating the future. Kaku wrote (2014, chapter 7, 24:26):

Human consciousness involves the ability to create a model of the world and then simulate the model of the world in order to obtain a goal.

For Kaku intelligence should be a mark of how divergent thinking allows some to create more complex models and more frequent simulations of the future.

I see many parallels with definitions of online reading comprehension. When reading online more successful students do not simply assimilate information as traditional definitions comprehension would have us believe. Skilled online readers “manipulate and mold information to achieve a higher goal” (Kaku, 2014, chapter 7, 24:26). Based on my dissertation research and classroom observations I see three critical shifts: strategic text assembly, socially complex texts, and multimodal design.

Strategic Text Assembly

For the brief amount of time that book reigned in human history the reader did not have to build her own texts. An editor, publisher or author had the power of creating and shaping the texts we read. No more. Skilled online readers engage in strategic text assembly which I define as the ability to read for meaning while flexibly applying both navigation strategies and comprehension monitoring strategies.

Navigational Strategies

In my research navigational skills was a key difference between successful online readers and those who could not accomplish an inquiry task. The students who could manage multiple tabs, navigate search engines, and move between multiple sources did better. These are the easily quantifiable and teachable differences as we shift to reading online.

Comprehension Monitoring

Comprehension monitoring, or checking your own levels of understanding has always been recognized as an important skill for meaning making. Here online reading and traditional comprehension share much of the same DNA. Students who succeed in online environments skimmed more websites and spent more time engaged with sources when they judged them to be relevant.

I also noticed an intersection of background knowledge and working memory.A lack of background knolwedge did not phase skilled readers. This I documented in my work as very few students knew much about the domain of my inquiry tasks (American Revolution). I also noticed but did not have the data to fully support the thesis in my dissertation, that these skilled readers seemed to have a more robust working memory. They seemed to hold more information in their working memories that they could later mold into new meanings. They could quickly use the information they read and check it against their understanding of texts they visit in three or four clicks.

Socially Complex Texts

I believe the participatory nature of online texts requires a fundamental shift in how we define texts. Socially complex texts, concurrent arguments that unfold in print and social media with varying degrees of authority and amplification, now dominate our online reading environments. Basically socially complex texts are authored by opposing forces discussing an issue with equal passion and often mutual disdain. This requires a new set of reading skills to detect clickbaiting, astro turfing, and real grass root efforts. Accomplishing these goals requires readers to put a much larger emphasis on not only sourcing skills but also analytics.

Sourcing Skills

In my work, and in the research of those much smarter, we have established adolescent and adult readers do not attend to sources. I found very little evidence of readers evaluating websites. I asked students to identify authors, evaluate an author’s expertise, evaluate a publisher, evaluate bias, and evaluate sources within a source. Few students could identify an author let alone evaluate other markers of credibility.

We must teach students greater sourcing skills. We need them to engage in multiple source readings. More importantly we cannot decontextualize sourcing skills. A checklist approach, or a third step in some inquiry cycle will not work. Credibility judgements interweave through out the meaning making process and change based on the reading of tasks.

Analytics

I have argued that analytics is the most important literacy skill that no one is teaching. At least not in the field of literacy. Definitely not at the K-12 level. Analytics involves so much more than click counting. By examining how an idea travels, the frequency of times readers and authors mention an idea, and tracing it back to its source all require analytics. These skills are even more critical when we begin to think about writing in multimodal spaces.

Multimodal Design

Design matters. Readers must understand how multimodal choices affect the meaning process. This is the reason I love Medium. Just seeing my words in that beautiful font and layout makes me feel like a real writer and not a “mindless blogger.”

As part of our Teaching Internet Comprehension to Adolescents grant I worked with a seventh grade urban classroom in the Northeast. We discussed how design affects meaning making. We looked at three websites about Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Philadelphia man who contests his death row conviction of killing a police officer. The first text used an informational text structure and tried to inform the audience. The second two, one from Abu-Jamal supporters and one published by the police union took argumentative stances. We discussed and examined how the font and color choices impacted meaning and tone.

I can teach students to write argumentative essays in online environments but I could never account for the impact of design using pencil and paper.

Small differences in code matters. I have not done a full analysis but if I examined the wizard behind most webpages I am sure the majority of text is copy. The HTML and CSS probably account for a smaller percentage. Yet just as our intelligence and consciousness is contained in just 2% of our DNA code, this small amount of code has changed reading and writing forever.

Reflecting on my conversation with Katie Grant—Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow

In my other work-place we work closely with a Writing Fellow: The lovely Katie Grant. Who generously agreed to have a meeting, so I could understand her role and have a chat about writing. This post briefly reflects on her tips for paragraph-writing, and I have her permission to share her paragraph-matrix with you.

Building the bridge between academic writing and non-academic writing

I always wondered about the view professional writers take on academic writing. Today, I had the chance to hear an opinion. I asked Katie if she had any tips from the perspective of a writer. She told me that writing, and particularly academic writing, is a technical exercise. A perspective I do not fully appreciate. I always understood writing as a different form of cognition—of thinking things through.

After some deliberation, I came to understand that writing as a technical exercise can work as a bridge for students to access academic writing in general, and structures, and style in particular. One of the key aspects in academic writing is building paragraphs. The traditional way of teaching paragraph writing is to tell the students, the most common structure of a paragraph is:

1. Opening (or Topic) Sentence
2. Main Part (or Supporting Sentences)
3. Closing or Linking Sentence (sometimes called Conclusion)

There is actually a rather useful Wiki with some downloadable templates you can refer to.

Tips from the Writing Fellow

Here is what Katie developed instead and coined the paragraph matrix:

Assertion

Evidence (for instance, i.e. …)

Discussion/Analysis (however, …)

Punchline (How does this relate to your Essay Title?)

Link-Line

Katie Grant, Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow (30/03/3014)

Opening the paragraph with an assertion that lets the reader know, what is to come, what argument the writer wants to make. This is then backed up with evidence, critiqued and eventually contextualized (punchline). The punchline should, so Katie’s advice, link back to the assignment title.

When I talked to a colleague about the punchline, we were wondering, if we wouldn’t be overdoing it, having one in each paragraph. We eventually came to the conclusion that it is probably more about context and ensuring that the paragraph actually contributes to the overall discussion. The punchline is (in my understanding) the ‘So What?’ of the paragraph. It is the why do you provide this information? How does it contribute to the overall argument and theme of the assignment?

I am going to adopt this ‘paragraph matrix’ as a way of teaching paragraphs. It provides more clarity and structure, particularly for the ‘main part’ of the paragraph, and I can see this version being especially helpful to international students.

On writing Paragraphs was originally published in Academic Literacies & Academic Practice on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Great (& Somewhat) Pointless Debate

Recently assigned to explore “cellphone policies in schools” and write up some findings, I trained my perpetually strained eyes on academic research of youngsters, college students and adult learners in the U.S. and abroad.

A dozen random articles in, I began to sense an inverted correlation between age or perceived maturity of students and the alarmist heights to which voices were raised about cellphones in learning environments.

Also, the further away the learning experience was from institutionalized school, the greater the enthusiasm for mobile technology in learning.

With youngsters and young college students, researchers I read seemed most interested in how cellphones affect learning. Conclusions reached generally framed technology as devices of distraction and cheating.

With adult learners (and college students treated in their learning environments as adults), researchers I read seemed most interested in how cellphones enhance learning. Conclusions reached generally pointed to widespread adoption, more creativity and increased learner engagement.

These differences in research focus and outcomes lead me to suspect the questions asked and issues covered have more to do with the goals of educational practitioners in various learning environments than with the actual learners in those environments.

In 2011 & 2012, a consortium of European researchers took a practice-based approach to exploring mobile technology in adult learning via a collection of multi-day, activity-driven learning workshops with adult participants in Belgium, Italy, Germany and the U.K.

The 7 workshops included: teaching young adults at a vocational college to incorporate cellphones into their formal learning; training job-seekers to use mobile technology in crafting their professional stories; and educating teachers on the integration of mobile technology into their secondary and higher education classes. All workshops incorporated the hands-on use of mobile technology. None were delivered solely via mobile technology.

From this 2-year undertaking emerged MyMobile: Education on the Move, a much-needed handbook of scenarios, practice implications and policy recommendations for mobile technology in adult learning, an area of scant research and wide-ranging opportunities.

Bowing to cellphone saturation and representing a qualitative exploration not intended to systematically gather empirical data or develop theory, this handbook of chapters from university faculty and educators is a collection of insights and guidelines for mobile devices as adult learning resources.

Rather than constrained learning rooms, researchers encourage educators of adults to think in terms of learning space and to design curriculum as dynamically interconnected activities instead of calcified, stagnant classes.

Learning space is both a physical and philosophical “open context” where learners contribute to their learning paths. Dynamic activities are building blocks of open learning architecture. Ideas and content contributions from learners shape and evolve these activities into learning that is immediately reflective of and responsive to their experience and needs.

Since mobile technology is inherently portable and flexible, mobile learning makes it possible to “teach about the world” as learners encounter content and curriculum in a “completely contextual manner” (p.43).

Mobile technology strengths, based on learner and educator workshop experiences, include opportunities to widen and connect various learning contexts, e.g. bringing user-generated content into educational settings. Resulting outcomes for learners and educators include broader capture of informal knowledge, skills and information in learning and greater sharing both among and between learners and educators.

Challenges to utilizing mobile technology in adult learning included lack of digital competency and a resistance, especially among classroom educators, to incorporating into their formal work settings a technology they viewed as a tool primarily for entertainment and interpersonal communication.

Which brings us back across the pond, where academics of late have questioned cellphones’ impact on learning in college classrooms using technology and learning surveys, and simulated classroom experiments.

Researchers Baker et al. (2012) quantitatively analyzed questionnaires from 882 students (75% were 22 or younger) and 96 faculty members (80% were 40 or older) at colleges in New York, North Carolina and Texas about their perceived impact of cellphones on learning, confined to classroom lecture-based formats.

With a nod to Prensky’s (2001) digital native/digital immigrant dichotomy, the researchers confirmed expectations that students view their cellphones as “integral factors in everyday life” and faculty view cellphones as “take-it-or-leave-it devices that are unnecessary in the classroom” (p.277).

Asked to rate their level of agreement or disagreement, 87% of faculty members expressed some level of agreement with the idea that using a phone to send text messages or check email in class is never appropriate, Less than half the students surveyed agreed with this statement. While 48% of students supported quiet cellphone usage in class, only 13% faculty members were on board with this idea.

Unsurprisingly, faculty and students hold significantly different views about the degree to which cellphones are more or less likely to disrupt or assist in the learning process. Also unsurprisingly, student are notably disinterested in lecture-driven classes with PowerPoint presentations as the only (overly) utilized technology. The researchers mentioned student perception of such formats as authoritative, retrograde barriers to learning:

Classroom education has long been criticized for being disjointed from the real world. Millennials believe that classrooms without an abundance of electronic devices are even more unrealistic and artificial (p.277).

Unfortunately, the prevalent negative perception of technology-bereft, lecture-based delivery does not seem as relevant to some academics as perhaps it should be.

Case in point, to investigate texting’s impact on student performance, researchers Froese et al. (2012) set up prerecorded narratives accompanied by 6min auto PPts. With no hint of irony or critique, the researchers state:

“The presentations simulated classroom teaching” (p.327).

A 10-item fact-recollection quiz following the presentations purported to measure student learning performance. A random selection of 21 male and 19 female college students gathered for two presentations on pre-selected books none of the students had previously read. During the presentations, students on one side of the room could send/receive texts, while students on the opposite side of the room could not. Each student participated in both a text-allowed group and a text-free group.

In keeping with notions from cognitive load theory that our brains can only process so much information at any given time, texting students’ quiz scores did indeed drop by 27% compared to their nontexting classmates.

Not only did texting disrupt fact-gathering as classroom learning, students expected texting to disrupt said learning but texted anyway, a revelation in the data that led the researchers to ponder why students “pay to become educated, yet choose to engage in counterproductive behaviors” (p.330).

Inherent in the researchers’ question is the presumptive bias that students do indeed experience the classroom lecture format as productive learning worth the money they’re paying.

If Prensky’s “Digital Native” descriptive is to be believed, students in the past 15 years haven’t changed incrementally. They’ve changed radically. Their educations, for the most part, have not.

Even the design of research on mobile technology and learning (research questions asked, conclusions reached) too often indicate disproportionate focus on the symptoms (digital distraction or cheating) rather than the problem (antiquated 19th Century classroom and instructional design).

If learning participants can’t help twiddling their thumbs across their devices, educators may as well draw that habit into learning. Yes, it means bidding adieu to long-form lecture formats. It’s a long overdue farewell.

As an educator in professional adult learning environments, the research reviewed here (and my critique of it) validates my goal to engage learning participants in performance for understanding without obsessive focus on outcome. Whatever technology my learning participants are using in their lives, I should be utilizing in their learning. The MyMobile handbook is a happily stumbled upon trove of methods and activities I plan to mine.

I’m also challenged by this research to break free of a “learning rooms” mindset and spread into learning spaces, where I have the wide open world to work with and where learners can attach concepts (e.g. leadership) to context (photo or video samples of leadership in action) for learning that’s personalized, meaningful and memorable for them.

☼ ☼ ☼

(Tammy is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow who designs learning programs for professionals in the U.S and abroad and researches technology and learning for executive, managerial and Digital Age professionals at Florida International University in Miami. She welcomes comments, critique and conversation.)

References

Baker, W., Lusk, E., & Neuhauser, K. (2012). On the use of cell phones and other electronic devices in the classroom: Evidence from a survey of faculty and students. Journal of Education for Business, 87(5), 275-289.

de Jong, T. (2010). Cognitive load theory, educational research, and instructional design: Some food for thought. Instructional Science, 38(2), 105-134.

Froese, A., Carpenter, C., Inman, D., Schooley, J., Barnes, R., Brecht, P., & Chacon, J. (2012). Effects of classroom cell phone use on expected and actual learning. College Student Journal, 46(2), 323-332.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6.

Ranieri, M. & Bruni, I. (2012). Mobile learning in adult education: Lessons learnt and recommendations. In MyMobile: Education on the Move. European Union Directorate General for Education & Culture.

Rankin, M. (2009). The twitter experiment — twitter in the classroom on Youtube.

Redmayne, M., Smith, E., & Abramson, M. (2011). Adolescent in-school cellphone habits: A census of rules, survey of their effectiveness, and fertility implications. Reproductive Toxicology, 32(3), 354–359.

On Scholarship as Manual Labor

The following is an essay originally written over 10 years ago, in Swedish for a book on writing your PhD. I later translated and edited it for a book I wrote on the academic career, a book that today feels a little dated and is difficult to get hold of. This text has aged a little too, but as I still get comments on and requests for it I thought I should make it more readily available.

The biggest mistake people make when they talk about research and academic work is that they portray it as an ethereal endeavor. The image of the scholar as a person ensconced in a utopian world, engaged in thinking, and detached from the mundane reality of manual labor is persistent but also dangerous. To dispel this notion, let me point to some of my own experiences.

One of the things I’ve learned in academia is just to write, quick and dirty- like. It might sound like a little thing, but it really isn’t. It took me years to learn just to sit down in front of my laptop, open up a document, and just write. It took me years to learn how to just let the text flow and to write down what I was pondering, what amazed me, and what I had seen around me. I had to learn to weave arguments together and to edit and rework. I now know that it’s unnecessary to count the pages of a document. The computer’s “word count” feature does it for me. I’ve also learned that a standard book manuscript is about 80,000 words.

I now know that it is my job to produce words. Simply put, I’ve come to understand what Lawrence Block meant when he said, “When I hear people talking about writer’s block I only get annoyed. You write, that’s it. Do you think plumbers get plumber’s block?” At first I thought this comment was funny, then I thought it was wise, and now it is kind of a koan for me. It sums up what I think about writing, both as an activity and a craft. There isn’t anything mysterious or ethereal to it, just work and more work. It might not be the kind of work that makes you sweat (except for deadlines, perhaps), but in many ways it isn’t that different from cleaning or building a house. Text doesn’t write itself, and nothing happens unless you actually sit down and write.

When I started writing seriously, I also started to realize that the more I wrote, the better my thinking became. Thoughts seemed to take on a life of their own as those words spilled onto the page; those words, in turn, then jostled new thoughts and created new connections. I found this absolutely fascinating. I realized, that when I had written ten pages, I suddenly saw fifteen new pages that I could write. Thoughts I had treated as separate entities became combined when placed upon a page, and as time pressures forced me to abandon intense self-reflection and self-criticism, I found I could write with something akin to confidence. Simply put, I realized I had to take a stand in my text, rather than hide behind the potential text I had yet to write. I also discovered I simply couldn’t capture everything in text. I started seeing the flaws of my thinking, the gaps in my argument, and the paths not taken. What had once felt like finalized theory showed itself on the page as quite tentative and slipshod. Those errors had to be fixed, to the extent that I knew how, and I was made aware of their constant niggling presence. When I mentioned this to my Doktorvater, he just smiled and said I had started to write like a scholar—and not a moment too soon.

As in any human activity, research is filled with clichés and shibboleths, and this goes particularly for the act of academic writing. Such writing, which academia has romanticized and even afforded an air of mysticism, seems to be one of those things scholars always have an opinion on. Some even have a motto. When it comes to writing, most “actually know how to do it,” and most are not shy to tell you. Well-meaning people say a lot of things:

Don’t get it right, get it written.
Write for acceptance.
Don’t make it too difficult.
First say what you’re going to say, then say it, then say what you’ve said.
The worst research is the kind that doesn’t get written up.
Just do it, quick and dirty.

This last platitude is of particular interest to me in writing this book. The very act of writing, which is often portrayed as a bit of boring drudgery, is both under-theorized and underrated as a highly interesting form of manual labor. The impurity, the shoddiness, and the sheer viscerality of writing, is to me far more interesting than the rather sterile world of ideas often idealized by scholars.

I wrote my doctoral thesis in about six months. Now, obviously I do not mean that it took me six months to become a PhD. What I mean is that one day I decided that I was going to write the Book, and five months later I had a manuscript that to a great extent looks like the published work on the basis of which I was awarded a PhD. The process in its entirety, from the realization that I had to write like a demon to my actual public defense (the process in Scandinavia differs slightly from the one in the U.S. and the UK), took about ten months.

Matters were further complicated by the fact that this process prompted me to completely abandon my earlier thesis plans. I literally started from scratch. For reasons that are of no interest here, I started from a clean slate, with nothing written and nothing really prepared. I had a book I wanted to write, some data collected, some reading under my belt, and a story to tell. But I didn’t have a single page of written text, unless you count four pages of scribbles in longhand. Ten months later I had a book in my hand and a PhD. Quick and dirty.

But what was it that I had done, what kind of activity did I engage in, quick and dirty-like? Was it research? That sounds very vague and far too abstract. Was it typing? That sounds… mechanic. I remember sitting cross-legged on a bed, thumbing through a stapled bunch of papers, and suddenly realizing that this (by golly) was a thesis, or, at least, a pretty good draft of one. I also remember being surprised, for I couldn’t for the life of me remember when I’d gotten it all straightened out inside my head. Still, there it was, and I recognized the words I had written. But where did the book come from?

The Only Thing I Know About Research

Research does not take place inside your head. This is the sum total of my research experience. Ignoring this, a lot of people obviously think that thinking is something that takes place within the gated community of one’s head and that intellectual work is an internal affair. Seemingly, people assume that the human brain is akin to a machine lodged in the head of the individual researcher, and that the research process is mainly about tuning this machine and feeding it the right kind of material after which research outputs are formed within the cranium of the writer. These outputs are then transferred onto paper and later fed into other machines such as reviewers and thesis advisors. This is a fallacy, and a dangerous one.

Someone who was particularly attuned to debunking such metaphysical fallacies was Ludwig Wittgenstein and much of his later philosophy was an engagement with them (Wittgenstein 1958/2001; Heaton and Groves 1996). For what is it they think exists within the skull? And on what do they base this belief? We seem to think, says Wittgenstein, that thinking is a special kind of activity, one that takes place within the head, and that we can talk about it in the same manner as we discuss eating dinner. That guy is eating, and that woman’s thinking hard, as she looks very troubled and/or constipated. The wrinkled brow and the somewhat forced breathing seemingly mean that you are thinking. And at the same time, this thinking is not only internal, it’s private, too and difficult to transfer out of the head.

—Now I know exactly what my book will look like, I got it all up here. —Don’t all those pages up there bother you? Does it hurt? —Don’t be silly, I mean I know what I’m going to write. —OK. What? —What what? —What are you writing?
—Well… OK, I’m starting with this chapter on… —How does it start? —Do you think I can recite it straight out of my head? —Why not, if it’s in there?

What does our imagined researcher carry around in his head? A manuscript written in a language only he can translate? Fragments of a text? A table of contents? What could it be, this thing that makes our friend believe “it is done”? And what makes the researcher think that the thought is analogous with a book? Wittgenstein (1958/2001) comments that we seem to make a fundamental mistake when we think that thought is a process that occurs in the head and is then translated into “language” and communicated. But what then when we think about something, and can’t remember the word for it?

Now if it were asked: “Do you have the thought before finding the expression?” what would one have to reply? And what, to the question: “What did the thought consist in, as it existed before its expression? (Wittgenstein 1958/2001, sec. 335)

What has any of this got to do with academic work? And what has is got to do with writing quick and dirty?

Suppose we think while we talk or write—I mean, as we normally do—we shall not in general say that we think quicker than we talk; the thought seems not to be separate from the expression. On the other hand, however, one does speak of the speed of thought; of how a thought goes through one’s head like lightning; how problems become clear to us in a flash, and so on. So it is natural to ask if the same thing happens in lightning-like thought—only extremely accelerated—as when we talk and ‘think while we talk.’ So that in the first case the clockwork runs down all at once, but in the second, bit by bit, braked by the words. (Wittgenstein 1958/2001, sec. 318)

Even though there is a distinct pleasure to be had in rapid thinking, the lightning-fast snap-crackle-pop of biochemical madness in the brain, and even though many a scholar is hopelessly addicted to the high this can produce, this is not synonymous with research. We could compare with the way in which more than a few writers have been inspired by a developed addiction to alcohol, sex, or drugs without this meaning that their work would be a direct consequence of heroin or martinis. It shouldn’t be surprising that a number of fledgling writers and epigones haven’t come much further in their emulation of their idols than copying their addictions.

Take Jack Kerouac as an example. His On the Road (1957/1998) has become mythologized as a kind of perfect writing, created in a single, three week, Benzedrine-fuelled marathon session at the typewriter, writing on a single roll of paper so as not to have to break for changing sheets. Later research into Kerouac has shown that most, if not all, of the book can be found in draft form in a number of manuscripts and notebooks, produced over a period of five years. This fact, however, has mostly been ignored. The mythological version simply makes for a better, more inspirational story. And, as a direct consequence, one can still find lots of nearly unreadable garbage in the form of “stream of consciousness” writing, emulating the Beat authors. Similarly one can often find researchers in various states of either ecstasy or despair, looking for the illumination they assume is the primus motor of scholarly work. They seek a thought, a theory, an idea, or whatever else they think lies at the base of research and seemingly think that writing would, in the words of Wittgenstein, become “braked by the words” this, hinder it.

All this might seem contradictory. Kerouac wrote quickly, or thought long and wrote quickly. But what does it matter anyway? My point lies in the writing. Thinking, just like all other myths, is created right there—in writing. However counterintuitive it may seem, I believe that thoughts are created in their capture, in the moment they are written down. This is also why I feel that research is primarily a case of manual labor rather than abstract and mental.

Obviously this is particularly true when it comes to gathering data or empirical observations since fieldwork can be both physically demanding and contain an element of risk (I’ve been fortunate enough to know research assistants who’ve contracted exotic diseases, and others who’ve been threatened with physical violence), but I think that the same goes for the assumedly intellectual parts of research as well. My experience in writing has never been one of brilliant insights being transferred onto paper, rather the opposite. The trivial and often internally contradictory thoughts I tried to convey to increasingly skeptical audiences became something entirely different when I, often due to sheer lack of time was forced to write them down before I’d had the pleasure of “thinking them through.” Succinctly put, if there is anything of value at all to my thinking, this value was added through the manual work of writing. See, Marx turns up in the most surprising contexts…

Jack Kerouac wasn’t a good author due to his passion for literature, or because he drank a lot, or because he had some metaphysical “it” lodged in his brain. On the Road (1957/1998) was a great book because it had been worked on, manually. It was created through a thousand attempts, long passages that simply didn’t work, and ditched drafts. Text, any text, is born in writing, nowhere else. Still we often think that academics, who work primarily by writing (or, in some cases, in labs), work with their brains rather than with their hands.

“Yeah, well,” someone might interject, “it ain’t the same kind of text!” And partly they might be right (see, however, Czarniawska 1999 on organizational research as genre). But the work entailed in producing the texts might not differ that much. The fact is that in the same way that a book becomes real in the process of writing, a thought becomes a living thing when it is created onto a page. The resistance Wittgenstein (1958/2001) describes as happening in writing is, to me, a description of what happens when thoughts work and when they, in a manner of speaking, are born.

Quick, in the sense I’m talking about it here, is not a question of who writes the fastest or about the number of words per minute you can type. Rather, it is the speed to writing I am referring to, the art of being able to put words on paper without thinking about it too much—write first, think then, edit later. To be quick to subject your arguments to the friction of the paper means that you’ll discover the flaws of your thinking faster, see where your reasoning doesn’t work, and actually save those thoughts that deserves saving.

The more you write, the quicker it goes. And I don’t mean that you’ll just write faster, even though this might be another consequence, but that your actual argumentation will develop more quickly. I’ve found that the less time I use to plan writing, the faster it goes. The only reason I actually managed to earn a PhD was due to the fact that I simply did not have time for anything except writing. Back then, if I didn’t produce enough words, I would fail, and that was all I knew. So I didn’t plan or draft or create outlines. Instead, I just wrote any and everything I could think of that might have something to do with the subject. I gathered literally hundreds of odd scraps that somehow congealed into bigger wholes. I wrote, I moved, I deleted, and I wrote even more. I wrote onward, always onward.

Writing the Impure

One of the most dominant feelings in academic work seems to be fear. Fear can take many forms, such as the fear of data, the fear of presenting research (What if they laugh?), the fear of finishing (What should I do now?), and so on. One fear that is particularly important within the scope of this essay is, obviously, the fear of writing, which comes in at least two shapes. On one hand, it is fear of the unknown, a fear of what might happen once you start writing, since actually writing stuff down can lead to new avenues, unexpected results, even contradictions. The other fear, which isn’t completely detached from the first, is the fear to write badly, the fear of producing crap.

But what is crap? In her brilliant Purity and Danger (1966/2001), Mary Douglas presents her well-known and seminal theory of impurity and the role of it in human thinking, particularly when it comes to thinking the sacred and the strive towards clarity and certainty. Developing William James’s classical definition of dirt as “matter out of place,” Douglas analyzes what it is in the category of “filthy” or “impure” that so offends our sense of order. Because isn’t this what dirt/filth/crap is, the antithesis of order, and perhaps, therefore, the antithesis of knowledge?

Thinking about it, a lot of what (social) scientists do starts looking like a form of cleaning up—a hygiene function. Organization theory looks a lot like a form of meta-cleaning, as does philosophy. Sociology and political science often try to create highly ordered images of the world, as do many of the natural sciences. In fact, many scholars think that their job is reducing the inherent complexity of the world into something more easily handled. Cleaning, cleaning everywhere (a not a thing to think). Science seems to be all about “matter in its place,” and it would seem most proper that research and the products therein should be well-ordered and structured. The problem is that we’ve then created a dangerous blend of different kinds of activities, which is an illogical and very unscientific flaw in thinking. Observing cleaning is not the same thing as cleaning up, which has been conclusively proven in an extensive study I’ve made of my desk (Rehn, ongoing). No matter how much I think about order in it, it never turns orderly.

Despite this, a lot of people are confident in their belief that research is supposed to be a hygienic activity, one where their job is to clean up not only a dataset or similar gathering of materials, but also the mess within their own head. This is connected to the notion of research as a mental activity. You input things in your brain (a little bit of data, some theory, and some spices for flavor), arrange it in the lonely room of your head, and then output the now well-ordered, properly hygienic result. I like to call it the “the brain as a washing-machine” mode of thinking. If you fail in this, if you can’t get the washer to run the right program, you’ll be writing crap. But should academic texts be purified? And purified from what?

What interests Douglas most (1966/2001, 42–58) are the hybrids, those odd things that are neither fish nor fowl, but something in-between. She looks to one of the oldest normative texts of our Western culture, Leviticus, and ponders why some things are declared impure, seemingly without an underlying logic: “Why should the frog be clean and the mouse and the hippopotamus be unclean? What have chameleons, moles and crocodiles got in common that they should be listed together (Lev. xi, 27)?”

After debating the issue, she comes to the conclusion that it seems to be a principle stating that unity is synonymous with holiness that orders this thinking. Phenomena with characteristics from more than one thinkable unity are impure. For example, the mouse, the chameleon, the mole, and the crocodile all seem to have “hands” (i.e., their paws look like hands) but use these to walk with. The division of the world can take any number of forms, such as when Foucault in The Order of Things (1970/2002) quotes Borges’s text on a “Chinese lexicon” and the way to divide animals into, “(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher.” And impurity is transcending this, or any, list of “matter in its place.”

This would indicate that impurity in academic writing might be defined by a stepping outside of the boundaries of proper science, those demarcations that separate an academic text from, say, journalism, literature, consultant’s tomes, and dirty limericks. At the same time, you have to guard the border between truth and fiction, alternatively the line between productive interpretations and foolish ones. But this is actually something different from the impurity Douglas finds, and particularly so in the social sciences.

The social might be best understood as a hybrid unto itself, and texts written on it might well contain snippets from and references to journalistic text, pragmatic statements, fine literature (Czarniawska-Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux 1994), maybe even a poem or two. There is a marked difference between the natural sciences, where one has, since Linneaus, tried to create finalized taxonomies and categorizations of the natural world (Bowker and Star 1999), and the social sciences, which try to understand and interpret a world that is, by definition, unclear and in flux. Research into the social world simply cannot create meaningful general models, at least not without becoming so general and abstract that these models cease to have a meaningful relation to the world and become a kind of metaphysical language unto themselves.

The fact is that social world is defined by impurity and paradox, and even without making trivial statements regarding the “social construction of everything” (cf. Hacking 1999), one can state that order in this world is, at best, a temporary state of affairs. So whereas theoretical physics may have cordoned off a relatively “pure” field for itself, one that excludes poetry, the social sciences are interested in a field that works differently and where truths take different forms. Taking economic phenomena, which are often assumed to be definite and easier to model than, say, social such, they quickly turn out to be impure indeed. Poetry isn’t always relevant for an economic analysis, but it can be. It may be highly relevant when companies try to convey their messages, turn up in company narratives, or when a CEO has a thing for T.S. Eliot. And, not to be ignored, it is somewhat important to companies that publish poetry. Thus it is not always the case that you can or should even be allowed to exclude poetry from social science. Nor can you know beforehand exactly what should be included and excluded, as it all depends on context, the perspective you adopt, the ideas you want to convey, and most importantly of all, the absolute fact that you never can know.

For what do social scientists study? We all have our favorite definitions, for our own favorite fields. But is this enough? To exemplify, in an essay on economic anthropology, Maurice Godelier (1978) has remarked that the separation of a specific field, such as “the economy,” by necessity leads us into a paradox. If you reduce the field to a set of functions such as production, distribution, and consumption, you will neglect phenomena that are actually needed to grasp the field, such as, the role of poetry in publishing. But if you try to adopt a more holistic, systemic view, including everything that might play a role, you will lose sight of the field of interest, and start studying “everything.” Research, in this sense, becomes a continuous balancing act between delimitation and inclusion and the task of research to “analyse both this external and this internal aspect, and to penetrate to the depths of the domain, until the latter opens on to other social realities and finds there that part of its meaning that it does not find in itself.” (Godelier 1978, 55). It is a monster, this hybrid we social scientists study, and thus writing the impure is a part of the field, a continuous engagement with our own Augean stables. Social scientists write about the impure, “always already” (with apologies to Judith Butler and G. W. F. Hegel).

In much the same way as Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (1976/1997) showed that no text can be completely free from alternative interpretations and thus potential contradictions (although he never claimed that knowledge would be impossible), no text in social science is ever complete and purified, and neither is the field. The fear of producing crap is, in this sense, a mistake, particularly if you mean an insecurity as to what can “fit” the discourse of the social sciences.

Much of my writing has been defined by my not taking the time to worry about whether what I write will fit within a predefined field and also by my assumption that part of my work, part of any scholar’s work, is to cross borders, to make a productive mess of things. In my own case, I crossed the borders between organization studies and economic anthropology as well as the borders between commodities and gifts (Rehn 2001). This, as I find that social sciences are interesting precisely because they discuss phenomena in the social world with all the impurity this brings with it. Thus the ideal in these sciences shouldn’t be an issue of creating perfect models, but, rather, one of creating interesting descriptions.

Thus text about social phenomena can never be complete, nor ever completely devoid of gaps and potential impurities. An academic can save him- or herself a lot of unnecessary grief by not even attempting to write purified scholarship. Instead, one might come closer to the phenomenon one studies by deliberately going for impure forms of representation—creating collages of quotes, notes, overheard conversations, snippets of text captured at a printer, photographs, pencil sketches, sudden asides, or moments caught in a haze.

Pierre Guillet de Monthoux once rhetorically asked me why so few researchers illustrate their own works, something he’s done with some success. Well, why not? Obviously, this is an impure method to clarify one’s message. But looking at the beautiful, teeming mass of images that exists in the social world and comparing these to the trivial illustrations that exist on the pages of research, one is struck by the fact that many a social scientist obviously believe that in order to be pure and “scientific,” texts have to be as unattractive as possible. So what should a text in social science look like? The very question is fallacious. The fields we study are neither simple nor rarified, the processes we study are messy, so the notion that research should be a question of cleaning up in the complex world into a series of more or less trivial concepts is both troubling and points to a crack in the very foundation of our endeavors. Here, our discourse can ever so easily devolve into nothing more than a scholastic nitpicking and wordplay, where one is more interested in looking the part than actually doing science.

For if one is interested in science, the important issue is not the arranging and ordering of the world, but the effort to understand it. “But that’s the same thing,” I can imagine someone shouting. And I guess you might think that, particularly if you believe understanding is a setting on your internal cognitive washing-machine. But I think it isn’t as easy as that, and there are those who seem to agree with me. Wittgenstein is one. Stephen Toulmin, with his Return to Reason (2001), and Richard Rorty (1989, 1998) are two others. Despite the sudden sense of well-being it generates, understanding isn’t a simple, straightforward phenomenon. It is rather something like an oscillation between states, a search where disparate bits of information are imperfectly woven together into a tentative whole you may have an engagement of understanding to. You understand “enough” to manage, and seldom more than that. This “enough” is what I believe is at the very heart of research, the unstable tuft on which we can precariously balance as long as we don’t stand still, petrified, for too long.

However, this “enough” is not an argument for sloppy work or lazy analyses. Rather, it is an ethic, an acceptance of limitations and the impossibility of eternally stable knowledge. It is also a symbol for judgment as a critical skill in scholarship. In order to do good academic work, you are simply forced to be able to tell the difference between the relevant and the ornamental, the form and the content, the amount of impurity needed, and the level of purity desired. And this is something that cannot be learned except through the work itself, through the act of writing and thinking, and through the crafting of a text or an argument. Consequently, the notion that there would be a Platonic ideal for the academic text may be the most unscientific thought of all and the biggest hindrance to actually doing something worthwhile in social science.

Scholarship and Impurity

So what could all this mean for social science? And what kind of connection am I trying to make between the quick and the dirty? Some might think I’m propagating a kind of sloppy pragmatism, one where only the results count and where science and the search for truth become abstract and pointless concepts. I am actually talking about the opposite, a position where humility and active engagement becomes an integral part of the search for truth.

Accepting the impurity of reality does not mean cutting corners, it means you have to reflect a lot more and think a lot harder. Churning out text does not mean one has exchanged thinking for production, but the opposite. It means working on your thinking, handling it head on, engaging with it rather than treating it as some sort of metaphysical illumination in the world. This is why I’ve increasingly started to view research as a form of manual labor. Even though it lacks the sweat and filth of a factory floor, academic work is work, and shouldn’t be romanticized more than absolutely necessary. This romanticized notion that research is the thinking of deep thoughts that are documented a posteriori, destroys people, wears them down. I was locked into this mode of thinking for a long time, and it represented an existential crisis for me. In fact it was only a depressed form of despair that finally made it possible for me to write academically.

Learning to write taught me precisely how writing quick and dirty can, in fact, be girded by a scientific and academic attitude to the world. Writing quickly didn’t mean that I compromised my science, nor were my impure techniques a way to avoid stringency. And I haven’t even touched upon my most extreme impurity, my worst break with the academic code. I never did write for publication. I tried to get what I wrote accepted and into publications, but I never did think that hard about the way a publication was “supposed to look.” Instead, I tried to do research. The difference might not seem that huge, but looking at most of the things published in the social sciences, it seems to be.

The sad fact is that most publications are rarely read, if at all, and some actually constitute environmental crimes, as the ink and paper spent on them (or even the electricity needed to power the servers they’re bunging up) clearly aren’t warranted. Often this seems to hinge on academics in their anxiety not to step over some imagined boundary of propriety writing in a style that is almost criminally stilted and uninteresting. If you read monographs written by more prominent researchers, you will often find that they are written in an entirely different manner, an observation that might be far more interesting than it seems at first. I admit that this has a political dimension. It seems like a lot of people simply work in environments where anything beyond the most stunted text is looked upon with suspicion, possibly due to personal insecurities among the senior researchers. But even taking all this—conservative seniors and the general lack of well-written social science—into account, there are still ways to enact change. Yes, it takes courage, but academia is no place for the fearful. A comment I’ve often heard that enrages me is variations of “but if you’re unsure, it’s easier to write the way everyone else does.” Easier? There is not much worth saving in science if “easy” has validity as a criterion.

The thoughts I’ve tried to handle in this essay deal with two issues: the nature of thinking and the form of science. We often seem to think that academic writing is a question of combining these two elements, pressing scientific thinking into an acceptable form. And since form is easier to replicate than thinking, the academic world often accentuates this, the notion that research is supposed to be done in a specific way and supposed to hold on to a specific look. The forbidden and the impure have great difficulties with fitting into such a mode of thinking science. So the effort becomes to imitate some ideal form for the academic text and to follow the cut of this year’s model.

The problem, obviously, is that this leads to an extreme form of hygiene, namely sterility, and a slowness like the flow of molasses, when every sentence is formed and fitted to a clumsy and unforgiving form—as if being an epigone was more acceptable when the copied original is mediocre. Research can take many forms, but one principle can never be ignored or forgotten—it is supposed to be a case of independently scientific work. That there would be a criterion of form beyond the one that is given by the science itself is, therefore, highly illogical. It is part of the very nature of science to seek its own limits, to continuously question itself, to find new ways to think and surprising ways to address problems—a mass of activities none of which are supported or helped by sticking dogmatically to form. Science is not a sterile concept, and contains transgressions and the break- ing of taboos as a matter of course. We can, in connection to this, also note that Mary Douglas states that concepts of impurity are mostly religious. Form, in its guise as something to be dogmatically followed, thus isn’t scientific even to begin with (Douglas 1966/ 2001).

At the same time, science is something that has to be given form, formulated, and communicated. Thinking that that happens in splendid, sterile isolation, as a wholly internal happening, isn’t scientific either. It can only become so when it meets the friction of the world, when it fights against the material resistance of the audience and the world. And, of course, the first and foremost material resistance, the braking Wittgenstein identifies, the very material resistance of the page, this can only be bridged by manual labor. Before this barrier is breached, you’re not doing social science, you are merely performing synaptic gymnastics. Simply put, what we have here is a dynamic notion of writing, a dialectics between breaking with form as dogma and creating form as communication. Write, but do not purify.

Becker, Howard. 1986. Writing for Social Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bowker, Geoffrey and Susan Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out—Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Czarniawska, Barbara. 1999. Writing Management: Organization Theory as Literary Genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Czarniawska-Joerges, Barbara and Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, eds. 1994. Good Novels, Better Management. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Derrida, Jacques. 1976/1997. Of Grammatology (corrected edition). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Why I took my international diagnostic imaging master students to the GOMA in Glasgow

My first Medium post is reflecting on an experimental morning session with my international master students. Thanks to their generosity I am permitted to use the pictures they send me.

The Issue

I wanted my students, to take ownership of ‘how’ they use English in their presentations, instead of just focussing on bringing content across any-which-way. As master students the class are all professionals, used to present and speak in front of peers. However, translating this confidence into a different language is challenging—I am speaking from a ‘been there, done that’ place. So when planning this morning, I tried to find a way to enable my students to take control and ownership of presenting in English and explore mechanisms of the language.

We are lucky in Glasgow (Scotland) to have free access to all public museums. The Gallery of Modern Art currently runs a powerful exhibition by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) featuring prints, some of which done for the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The prints are an interesting mix of language, forms and colours. It had the students intrigued.

Using BOYD strategy I told the students to use their mobile devices, all of them had cameras but not all had internet access, so I could not make the students tweet. I brought some clipboards and paper with guiding questions the students could use instead. I have to say, the clip boards were ignored and the mobile phone cameras went to work.

Seeing the students’ interaction with the art was amazing. Initially I was not sure if they would like it, but found that within 5 minutes, the group had dispersed into huddles around different artwork. After about 45 minutes we met up in the antechamber of the exhibition and debriefed on the experience. The artwork had the desired effect. My students engaged with language and its use.

One observation, from a student pointing to an abstract painting with dispersed blue letters all over, was that this painting did not make any sense. I asked if he had read the description next to the painting, which he of course denied. The statement offered a great prompt for me leading the discussion towards the importance of contextualizing content, and the different levels of context that need to be provided depending on the audience.

When the students wanted to know, if it would make sense, on occasion, to not give the context when presenting, I used the example from today’s session. I said: look you were wondering why we would meet in front of a museum, linking to how this engaged their curiosity and thinking about the purpose of the activity, that meant I had their attention. The students began focussing much more on rhetorical tools now. Discussion points involved the way of presenting information, some of the language that was used in the art work, and how all this relates back to the presentations the students are to give.

I am grateful for having students who are willing to embark on my somewhat unusual methods, and engage, with good humour and sincerity.

Radiography, Gallery of Modern Art, and Master Studies was originally published in Academic Literacies & Academic Practice on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.