Me in my natural habitat: in a cafe with a notebook. I am at my happiest when I am creating things, working proactively!
For two hours on Tuesday morning, the e-mail server on-campus was down. I start my day as I suspect a lot of you do: check my e-mail inbox, respond to urgent messages, and use those very messages – their requests, their latest up-to-date information – to inform the rest of the work that day. But on Tuesday, that wasn’t possible because I couldn’t access my e-mail for Two. Full. Hours. I felt paralyzed. I had forgotten, in some ways, what it was like to start the day not in reaction to what other people wanted from me, but rather to start the day on my own terms.
Did I feel liberated from the bonds of e-mail? Away from the constant pings and notifications, did I find myself completely absorbed in productive, critical thought?
Rather disappointingly, I squandered the time. I refreshed pages to see if the e-mail client was working. I distractedly noodled around on a book chapter I’m trying to write. I kept waiting for e-mail to return, anxious that I was somehow neglecting a burgeoning request from someone out there, even though I also knew that no one else’s e-mail on-campus was working and that, realistically, not a single request could really be attended to at that point anyway. Don’t get me wrong: there was plenty in my queue to accomplish. But somehow, it felt strange to pursue anything without knowing what was in my e-mail inbox first.
It has taken me a few days to process why I felt so distraught by the disruption to my routine, why I somehow needed others’ messages to help me determine what the rest of my morning would look like. And here’s where I’ve landed: faculty developers and instructional designers need to be encouraged to build in proactive, creative development time into their daily routines.
See, here’s the thing: the more I’ve learned about the role of instructional development, the more I realize that our positionality in our institutions is determined largely by how we’re responding to crises, whether those are institutional, individual, or programmatic. Our role, after all, is support: we do not generate the problems, we solve them. The problems come to us, we manage them, we devise solutions, and we move onto the next problem that crosses our desks.
I understand this paradigm, of course. After all, every institution needs a support and response system for those who are doing the making, breaking, and creating. In the case of the university, the faculty conducting the research, teaching the classes, and leading the projects on-campus need a team to help them complete these tasks accordingly. That’s where instructional designers, educational developers, research assistants, and others (and I apologize if you’re reading this and not seeing your own role named: I see you and I just can’t recall all the possible roles that I know lots of people play inside universities!) come into play.
But what happens when your faculty can’t get in touch with you? What happens when the people that you support either a.) can’t conceive of a need for your support or, and perhaps more compellingly, b.) actually don’t need your support at all? Some problems just don’t need the support of particular players – and not every problem requires a full-on team? What, then, is the role of “the support?”
To me, the answer is clear: empower people in support roles to become not just reactors, but creators.
Everyone who has been trained in instructional design, faculty development, or other related fields understand what kinds of problems with learning, organization, and project development need to be solved. But, often enough, we are not empowered with the mindset to go in and actually fix those problems for ourselves. All too often, we need permission from someone else – a faculty member, most often. That need for permission emerges, quite simply, from the organizational hierarchy of the university, where faculty members remain the most important decision-making bodies in the university. This hierarchy exists for a reason; maintaining an active research agenda is, largely, a university’s mission, and I don’t mean to suggest that the centrality of research gets dismantled. However, I think as the roles of instructional designers and educational developers increase, and as more people enter these roles with research training and a background in teaching, we need also to trust these players on-campus, to give them the leadership and the responsibility to move forward with proactive thinking, with taking on their own research agendas and leading projects without needing always to position themselves as “support” for others. Maybe we could dismantle some hierarchies too, but that’s a conversation for another day.
We are leaders in our right, and we should be empowered to act like it.
It’s not that I am advocating for instructional designers or educational developers to become faculty. Specialized training and expertise in particular disciplines and their research methods should be valued in their own right. What I am advocating for is instructional design and educational development work that is grounded in pursuing research agendas and projects that can inform the improvement of teaching and learning at the institution itself.
I’m not at all the first to make this suggestion. Katie Linder and Mary Ellen De Stritto conducted research on instructional designers’ responsibilities and concluded that research should be a larger part of the responsibility of the instructional design job. Jesse Stommel made a call on Twitter for institutions to treat Higher Education pedagogy as its own discipline. POD, the major disciplinary organization for educational developers, has a special interest group focused on the development of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. So, I’m not advocating for anything particularly radical, but I also suspect that I am not alone in feeling like the interest in creating new projects and research is one thing, but the environment that makes that possible, that empowers us to prioritize that work, is another.
Let me be clear here too: I don’t think we should shirk away from support at all. I know that what keeps me compelled to do the work I do is helping people and collaborating with others to develop awesome learning experiences. But I also recognize that I need to find continued outlets for creative expression and critical thinking in order to give recommendations grounded in the interests our faculty and instructors have. To stay in touch with what makes good learning – well – good, I need to continue to learn and grow in my own right.
This post may make it sound like I’m blaming my institutional positionality for my reaction to an e-mail server going down. Don’t get me wrong: the ability to create, produce, and do research is very much on me! I also need to spend more time adjusting my own mindset, ensuring that the ability to think proactively, to think ahead to the kinds of questions that will come my way, is grounded in my own positive attitude and willingness to stay curious and engaged.
I think I’ll get there, but my first step is to break myself of the instant-response-e-mail cycle. Reacting doesn’t have to come first. It can come second, maybe even third. That doesn’t mean anyone will go neglected; it just means that I’ll get better at doing what I do because I’ll challenge myself at the start of my day and think proactively about teaching and learning.