learning spaces

I've always imaged studying at university was about learning new things, being challenged to consider differently, to shift and change how you think and act. This drive to learn more, understand better, became the impetus, driving my pursuit of learning until I got to the PhD - the pinnacle of academic learning. A year after been deemed successful at achieving this learning 'outcome' I wonder where the true learning spaces are in academia. Are they created in the conferences, symposia, colloquiums and seminars we are encouraged to attend and participate in? Are they found in the classrooms we facilitate and manage? Or maybe they are lurking in the corridors, staff common rooms, colleagues' offices or noisy coffee shops - the informal spaces were fellow academics, researchers or teachers combine personal catch-up stories with reflections and ideas about theories new and old. Increasingly I'm finding the formal university space rather barren and void of learning. While the informal, entanglements of the unlikely, often peripheral spaces where those imagined notions of learning, that brought me to where I now find myself, are becoming the real, the authentic sites.

wasted

Its getting close to that time of the year when things start to slow down - students are finishing off their final lectures and the department shifts into final exam mode. The final push to mark and submit marks and then, the academics in my department relax and wait for the year to pass. For me, this period is increasingly representing a time when I write in the open. When no one is watching me. When no one in very interested in doing anything much and I sneak-in my writing. Make it mainstream, instead of that thing I try to do on a Thursday away from the office or on Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons. But, unsettlingly, in plotting forward towards this period, I've had to take stock of the past year. It's depressing as I feel I've done so little intellectually engaging work. I have so little to show for the year past. My first post-PhD year. On my desk sits some of the books I bought over the past 10 or so months. Many haven't been touched, thumbed through. Some I've only managed to read a few pages, maybe a chapter. Reading is meant to be the lifeblood of what I do as an academic, what defines me, what I actually enjoy. And yet I feel as if I haven't even succeeded at it. It's easier to justify not having any writing outcomes, but no reading? Well that's another matter.

reclaiming my research day

At the institution and especially department where I work, there is this mythical thing called a research day. The institution, who is keen to show the outside world that it is serious about having a strong research culture and is supportive of its fledgling researchers, is keen in it's official discourse to acknowledge this thing called a research day. Once inside the department however, this 'thing' is more elusive. So I have a research day. But it's something that's said in a whisper and acknowledged almost half-halfheartedly - like some who smiles deceptively when they say 'sure everything is ok'. Since the start of the academic year all my other work and administrative responsibilities have all but swallowed my research day. I had hoped this special day would allow me to stay connected to all things conceptual and provide the antidote to the impoverish intellectual environment of my day-to-day work environment, where the concept of 'the academic' is a expletive concept at best. Today, however, I reclaimed my freaking research day - well almost. I went to work, but at 12 pm I left the building and came to sit in one of my favourite and productive places for all things academic. I managed to revise an abstract for a regional colloquium I'm involved in. Today I've also been reminded that I have to take charge of the pathway I want to construct for myself and if there are particular 'tools' at my disposal it's up to me to use them to service my own needs. But this attitude also requires strength of will, especially within the context of my current position, and I will have to work hard to keep my strength up.

erratum

I'm sitting in the cafe in Obs. I sit here most Sunday evenings, trying to write, trying to reconnect with my 'academic' self, drinking more cappuccinos than I suspect is good for me. I've been trying to write a rough draft of a section of a chapter I'm meant to be construct with my supervisor. I'm late with getting the draft together, yet the more I work on it, the more the argument I'm trying to construct seems to slip away from me. I haven't been able to selfishly block off time during my 'working' week to attend these 'academic' type tasks. I'm frustrated by my inability to organise my 'working' life so that I can accommodate and nurture my 'academic' self. These frustrations morphing into self-doubt about my ability to have or indeed cultivate an 'academic' self. Last time I noted how I actually might enjoy writing, provided I could accept that it was a long, slow process. Somehow the 'slow' aspect that is so revered in cooking and design has become twisted in my brain, representing all things negative.

Working on this chapter means working through my thesis and picking up the stupid, silly, downright careless mistakes that now appear to litter my thesis. Each time I find one of these irritating little reminders of my carelessness I curse at all the checks and balances and quality assurance measures I put in place to help avoid the very situation I now find myself in. I know there is a moral to this story - 'there is no such thing as a  error-free thesis' - but for now I just want to kick that freaking moral in its teeth. Yeah, yeah I know, ahimsa but I get some warped sense of satisfaction imagining that I could effect some pain on this inanimate thing causing me all this frustration. But all I can realistically do, is sigh, a long, deflating sigh and add yet another embarrassing entry to 'that' list I will take along to viva room on 13 November.

write even when you don't want to

I was thinking about my last post a few days after I'd written it, reflecting on the fact that while I'd been conscientious in maintaining this blog I had completely stopped my journal writing. I've been journalling in one or other form since my early 20s. But I stopped about three years ago. The personal is too personal to write about. In my head the blog is for my PhD experiences, the ones I am able to share with the invisible but every present audience. My paper-based journals meant to occupy a more personal space reserved only for me and whoever gets to read it one day when I'm too old to care or dead. I know the reason why its been harder to write in my journals - because what I have to express is too immediate, personal, too painful - the kind of stuff I don't want to reflect on because by reflecting, it all becomes too real and I'd rather it be tucked away in the recesses of my mind. But for that very same reason I also know how important it is to write about those very things I want to forget or turn away from. You need to write even when you don't want to. Here my personal writing and my academic share a common connection. A few weeks back I spoke about being inspired to write. I haven't done anything yet, but the urge and push is becoming stronger. I want to write, even though I don't really want to and I feel this urge is driving me forward. The urge is so tangible that even though I know whatever I'm going to write will be crap, in the first instance, I don't care. The desire is there to do it anyway. I'm on a short break from work for the next week and hope I will concede to the need, desire to write, to create time to spend in my calm, familiar writing and research place. Push myself to do what certain parts of me don't really want to do. In this way the academic writing always has some leverage over the personal. If only it were so simple to rouse my personal writing genie.