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Professional Identity: Towards the "Scholarship of Professionalism"This section considers ways that the resources of technology--particularly the visibility and archival capacities of the Web--can be put to the service of building a professional record that shines light on the complex processes and value of technologization. The approach culminates in a new type of scholarship--the scholarship of professionalism--which draws on the Carnegie Academy's notions of "community property" and the "scholarship of teaching"--but with a twist. Because of the chaos and guilt of professional issues involved in technologization, the scholarship of professionalism calls upon the assessors of professionalism, much in the spirit of reader response theory, to supply the context, meaning, and value of the professionalism of tecnologizing academics. So conceived, the scholarship of professionalism would be a fully interactive mode of pursuing, understanding, and valuing professional academic development. The problems of career vis-à-vis technology beset all professionals, whatever their career stage--and not just in academe, but in every profession and occupation. The perpetual change and complexities of technology and the growing demands for technological fluency can be a source of career anxiety, but the composition/pedagogy scholar has an advantage here, in the form of certain remedies intrinsic to our field's disciplinary study and predispositions. Specifically, I'd like to share my ironic good luck: The study of chaos theory has produced a very orderly state of calm in me. I found it very empowering to learn that a system's apparent chaos, or complexity, need not necessarily imply the conditions of disorder, but rather point towards subtle, more sophisticated, more recondite types of non-linear, or immeasurable, unpredictable, even "illogical" types of order. Michael Fullan describes the role of chaos theory in a way relevant to the concerns of educational reform, technological implementation, and, as I would suggest, writing theory: Complexity and chaos theory are the same thing, but I prefer the former label because it is more accurately descriptive. This new science of complexity essentially claims that the link between cause and effect is difficult to trace, that change (planned and otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways, that paradoxes and contradictions abound and that creative solutions arise out of interaction under conditions of uncertainty, diversity, and instability. (Change Force: The Sequel, 4) Chaos/complexity theory provides a friendly "scientific" veneer for an attitude about the writing process long held by scholars of composition and rhetoric. In my less scientific mode, I have adopted a cryptic slogan that I share and explore with my writing classes when we study the creative, metaphorical, "magical" aspects of the writing process. The slogan is "inhabit the sprawl." Only when a writer has opened her mind, I say, to the fullest, most inclusive arena of ideas and images, can the possibilities of connections--metaphors, forms, associations, systems--begin to assert themselves. Synonymous slogans might be to "inhabit the chaos"--or . . . "inhabit the context" . . . . In the Scholarly Identity section, I have tried to analogize the terms "context" and "chaos." Here is an additional view of the analogy, offered to point toward the issues of career, the topic of this section: Common sense would suggest that writers involved in producing a composition need to focus on the concerns of "text"--that's what they're doing; that's their assignment, to write a text. But the realities of the writing process dictate something quite opposite: Successful writers are those who have learned to negotiate the needs, resources, networks of meaning--all the "stuff"--behind and around and beside the text, the "context." Rhetoric is in the context. Similarly, when an educator would implement technology in a course, common sense would suggest that the task is the learning of the tool and the implementation of it. But the realities of successful technological implementations are far more subtle, broad-based, and diffuse. One finds the right tool not by studying the tool so much (consider how little, for instance, a mechanic's ability to use a wrench would be enhanced by his/her knowledge of the type of metal alloy used to forge the tool), but by two things: 1. studying the job, and 2. having been immersed (before the start of the job) sufficiently in the nature of tools qua tools, that the job itself will summon the tool tacitly, often from the deep background of attention and awareness. Successful technology-enhanced academic work requires, I maintain, an inhabitation of the chaos that yields the state of "tool immersion" whereby one can stop attending to the tools and instead focus more deeply on the job at hand (learning goals), albeit in the context of the tools-to-be-summoned-as-though-unbidden. But it's even more complicated. Be it agreed: Properly conceived, tools are a means to an end; they should not distract the user from the task at hand to such peripheral issues as the nature of the implements themselves. But "tool immersion" can be a kind of lifestyle that carries its own trajectories. Tools are "systems," in the sense that the use of any tool is part of a larger network of purposes, a "system" greater than the narrow functions of the implement in a given situation. Tools are artifacts saturated in the ethos and aesthetics of design, and thus are forever in danger of becoming ends in themselves--objects of study, speculation, promise, burgeoning systemization, fetishization, radio talk shows, etc. And then, beyond tools themselves, there are all the distractions that one's expertise in tool use will engender, a condition I'll call handymanosis, the way one's competence in fixing things keeps one forever busy fixing things--the vexations of fix-ation . . . that lead, if ignored, to a broken spirit. In any event, the danger of this type of immersion, which I have characterized as the deliberate pursuit of chaos, is the threat of professional incoherence. In this section I wish to point out a possible remedy or redemption for the career chaos of the geek-scholar-teacher, as offered in the possibilities of a new type of scholarship--something we might entitle, with a knowing glance to the Carnegie Teaching Academy, the "scholarship of professionalism." What does it mean to make your profession, and all its complex facets, interrelations, disintegrations, conflicts, and serendipities, the subject of study, community review, and shared knowledge? The relatively new genre of research, the scholarship of teaching, paves the way here. In her book, Making Teaching Community Property, Pat Hutchings outlines the rationale of the scholarship of teaching in terms of three corollaries, which bring a scholarly dimension to teaching through formal involvement in:
The idea of viewing teaching as community property originates from Lee Shulman, who explains, Too often teaching is identified only as the active interactions between teacher and students in a setting (or even a tutorial session). I would argue that teaching, like other forms of scholarship, is an extended process that unfolds over time. (5) As a complex process that "unfolds over time," teaching itself may be a fertile field of for the type of inquiry, collegial exchange, and responsibility that Hutchings identifies as the criteria of scholarship. The "scholarship of professionalism," though not a term used by anyone (at least according to Google), was invented--in my mind at least, which Google can't index . . . yet--on January 22, 1999, in Randy Bass's keynote AAHE address, "Discipline and Publish: Faculty Work, Technology, and Accountability." I was in the audience listening to Bass's talk--not knowing at the time that the story he was telling would become renowned in the academy and infamous on my favorite listserv, ACW-L (the Alliance for Computers and Writing). Nor did I know at the time that Bass was outlining for me a professional program--or at least the necessary attitude around which such a program might be built. But as I listened to Bass, his remarkable Crossroads project, his more remarkable courage and scope, I felt the inklings of a method growing in me. The theme of Bass's talk that took a hold of me was his suggestion of ways we might convert the liabilities of technology (e.g., the Web's potential to leave our work exposed and vulnerable to unfriendly evaluators) into assets (e.g., the Web's ability to enable professionals to document and share the scholarship of teaching). Drawing on Lee Shulman's criteria for the scholarship of teaching (that the work be "public, . . . susceptible to critical review, and accessible for exchange and use by other members of one's scholarly community") Bass shared powerful examples of ways the Web could be used (even exploited, I asked myself?) to make visible the strengths and full record of our teaching--and thus provide a fuller, more accurate representation of one's work, and enable a fairer assessment of its causes and effects, and foster a deeper respect for teaching in general as a scholarly activity. I was an instant true believer (probably to a degree that might dismay Bass). What if, I thought, I provided Web access to all my work? What if I found ways to answer individual technology questions as though I were writing to the entire faculty or world? What if I wrote every memo as though I were presenting the case to the ultimate multiple audiences that might have access to it via the Web? What if I presented proposals, White papers, reports, all online? To what extent could the individual duties of professional life be made public, the source of reflection, and ground for further work and connection? To what extent, in essence, could the "portfolio" possibilities of the Web be employed for the sake of sketching the new professional identity, whatever that identity was to look like? I didn't have these questions so well formulated at the time--I think I was just excited about the possibility of treating the problem of the Web's visibility as a stratagem (rhetoricians like that sort of thing). No, at the time I was groping in the dark for some principle of validity for work I inchoately felt was important. Bass gave me an attitude to hang my work on--and a growing scholarly tradition to plug into. After Bass's talk, I became involved in faculty development, and that work has led me to some powerful syntheses, often but not always involving the role of technology. More to the point, I've come to see a strong relation among the literature on the scholarship of teaching, assessment, and professional development. I saw powerful connections in recurrent emphases of these areas, each of which seemed to stress in its own way, the importance of gathering data, analyzing them, and submitting the results for peer review. All well and good. But also some uneasiness began to set in. Despite unmitigated commitment to the Bass principle of visibility and method, I began to grow uncomfortable with a certain slant in the literature that seemed to enforce a linearity and overly-conventional research design. This slant, particularly present the assessment literature, implied to me what we in composition call a "product" rather than "process" orientation: Know what it is you're seeking to measure; then measure it. Schematically, I would characterize the overlapping orientations of the scholarship of teaching, assessment, professional development literature along the lines of the following sequence:
As in all product-oriented models, the appearance of rigor and order in this schematic provides a strong, persuasive aura of common sense and inexorability. But from where does Step 1, an awareness of goals, come? When immersed in chaos, how does one plan and adopt methodologies? How does this sequence jibe with Michael Fullan's view that "change is a journey, not a blueprint" (Change Forces, 24). Fullan articulates some alternate emphases: Premature visions and planning can blind. . . . Visions are necessary for success but few concepts are as misunderstood and misapplied in the change process. Visions come later . . .; under conditions of dynamic complexity one needs a good deal of reflective experience before one can form a plausible vision. Vision emerges from, more that it precedes, action. (Change Forces, 28) The five-step schematic above does not allow for the discovery side of chaos. Contrary to the schematic's containment of uncertainty and "blindness," Fullan openly advocates an embrace of problems and confusion as the optimal process environment for change. "Problems," understood or not in the early phases of the research program, "are our friends." Similarly, John Saul advocates a type of inhabitation of confusion, in recommending we face confusion by "increasing that confusion by asking uncomfortable questions until the source of the difficulties is exposed" (535). What I offer in this section, in the list below, is a very tentative alternate model for the scholarship of professionalism. Rather than enforce the linear machinery of goal setting/result reporting, I offer a model whereby the entry-level scholar begins listing stuff and "telling a few stories" without overly formal attempts to rationalize the work in a complete package. Respondent scholars, on the other hand, perform an important partnership role in this scholarship. They read with an eye to supply relevant contexts and possible meanings to the work. The respondents bring their critical machinery to ferret out the story's principles, its logic, implications, connections, design, value, and future applications. The writer has the responsibility of presenting process pieces, and the responsive reader has the task of "productizing" the process presented. If the work is on the Web (with, for instance, interactive bulletin boards), the collaboration can be ongoing and broad-based, with the full community of scholars presenting and extending critical reflection both within the author and readers. By giving the reader such a crucial role in completing the meaning of the author's work, the scholarship of professionalism would be collaborative in a way that seems appropriate to the realities of professional development--a central reality being the need to recognize that professionals at different career phases are different kinds of beings. The scholarship of professionalism would exploit the possibilities of this difference and create new scholarly entities out of it. But most of all, the scholarship of professionalism would draw on the lessons of reader response criticism as a way of organizing the chaos of the important preliminary, but undervalued, groundwork and innovation of professional life. And then, once the process cycle has run, the more traditional, linear, goal-oriented type of scholarship can be employed. "Vision and strategic planning," as Fullan says, "come later" (Change Forces, 28). The scholarship of professionalism, so conceived, should not merely be a fancy name for a resume or list of activities as my list below might suggest. The Latin term, however, for an academic resume, "c.v.", curriculum vitae--"the running of one's life"--does provide an adequate scope and concept for the scholarship of professionalism I am promoting here. How is the life run in its totality? What course (logic) has that life taken/been driven to? As always, a Burkean Flowerish best suggests the ambiguities here, the uncertain dialectic between agent purpose and scenic determinism: "The driver drives the car, but the traffic drives the driver." In telling the story of one's "running" (to/from/around), the scholarship of professionalism would give the reader the opportunity to infer an integrated form to the scholar/teacher/professional--the whole professional person--behind all the individual duties, tasks, initiatives, assignments, intentions, failures, and successes of one's work life and trajectory. It would provide the context to all the disparate, chaotic involvements of "professional development" in the full range of that term's significance. It would make versions of development public, provide models to the community of scholars, and offer opportunities for the critical engagement of definitions of what professional/scholarly development is, should be, could be, is becoming. It would provide a powerful means of assessment, and alternate and competing (rhetorical) assessments, to be sure. In all, the scholarship of professionalism would open the question of what it means to be an academic professional in the current milieu (whatever that happens to be), a milieu that draws on such and such traditions, that is constrained by such and such conditions, that is tensioned by such and such conflicts, etc. It would definitely look different for professionals in different career stages, but it would always provide a comfort zone for process thinking, with the proviso perhaps that the process thinking would lead to the promise of traditional research agendas. Such a scholarship of professionalism might offer junior professionals a salve to the demoralization of "dissipation" Burke first analyzed in his Grammar of Motives (318), but expressed most poignantly in his Flowerish: "In a world full of problems, he sat doing crossword puzzles" (Collected Poems, 88). For during all the activity I list below, as I put out one technology fire after another, I felt I was dawdling, toying around with puzzles. When I wrote my self-reflection for my
annual review for the 1999-2000 academic year (the first
year of the English server's operation), I felt aglow in the
Bass principles of his AAHE talk. I wrote the statement in
hypertext, full of links to make visible all the exploding
chaos around. In my evaluator's response, the form or
content of my statement was not addressed--a major
disappointment to me--but I've since come to believe that
the evaluator was in a bind because of the lack of precedent
for an online, hypertext annual statement. There existed
little scholarship to validate a presentation such as this
as valid or worthy of attention. The absence of
encouragement here (and the critique implicit in the
response) laid the "crossword puzzle" effect on me in a big
way, and I feared that my experiment was risking too
much.
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Kairos Issue 7.3Kairotic TechnologizationAbout the Structure
of this Hypertext Angelo
Bonadonna
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