Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Constructing an academic life
Last week Professor Laurel Richardson came to give a free public lecture at Melbourne University. I would have loved to have gone but I’d already been out two nights that week so I decided not to. Then I picked up her 1997 book Fields of Play: Constructing an academic life. I am enjoying it immensely and thinking I should have gone to hear her speak. Oh well. Her defence of experimental writing including the writing of narrative and fiction to explore academic knowledge is boundary defying. She asks questions like: How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect how we write? How does what we write affect who we become? Her connection of autobiography and theory has resonance with me both as a blogger and in my Masters work where I am investigating my own practice in the classroom and reflecting on it. It is amazing how what she writes in 1997 (before blogging) has so much relevance now when bloggers do this work routinely. But there is still a disconnect between what bloggers think we’re doing and what many academics think of blogging. The lack of editors and other gatekeepers, and the lack of peer review make the knowledge production of edubloggers suspect in some people’s eyes. This is strange I think since blogging is not so much a technique, as a space where people write and are read, where readers can comment and writers review. Isn't this what learning is about?