While preparing for Summer teaching, I have been immersed in Learning Sciences texts. Given the way I often read, which is to start with a resource (paper, chapter, website, blog, etc.) and take multiple detours and left turns as I read, while writing a few notes, highlighting sections, quoting or rephrasing them for my own writing, and digging into my past writings and readings along the way, I stumbled across Esmonde's work. Again. It was a welcome opportunity to reflect and relearn from this line of inquiry.
A few years ago, it was a privilege to attend a talk by Indigo Esmonde in our School. They are to be congratulated on the conceptualization, writing and publication of their book, Power and Privilege in the Learning Sciences: Critical and Sociocultural Theories of Learning (2017), referenced in Sawyer's (2022) Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. Early in the talk, Esmonde shared a narrative about editing for 10 hours on their couch with a beloved pet beside them. This narrative resonated with me, as did the tension of productivity in a neoliberal academy. In 2005, I finished writing my own book, often while nursing my second son in my lap, taking breaks to prep dinner, and while trying to keep one eye on my toddler who was free range doing who the hell knows what elsewhere in the house. Esmonde's (2016) work is a significant and important contribution to the Learning Sciences and the reader can uncover and discover a great deal about sociocultural learning and identity from each chapter. For example, as a scholar who aims to disrupt notions of normal in the classroom, I often wondered why we continue to call certain topics of inquiry “critical disability studies” instead of “critical normativity studies” or something else. Perhaps this question is naïve; however, it is a genuine question about how we interrogate notions of ability/disability over time; for example, I tend to align with those who regard and study ADHD and autism as super powers rather than those who consider these to be individual deficiencies. These orthogonal turns and shifts in perspectives on learning and what and who counts in learning is invited and honoured in Esmonde's book.
I found Esmonde's presentation in our School to be both insightful, because of the depth of inquiry and breadth of ideas in their book, and also provocative because of their courage in bringing forward personal stories and compelling drawings, and their use of an ethnographic / auto-ethnographic approach to examining and sharing their own experiences through illustrated narrative. Esmonde's vulnerability and trust was on display while sharing their stories with the audience; I was inspired by their visual and auto-ethnographic examples. As an extension to my research in the Learning Sciences, I am interested in exploring some of my own narratives as a female scholar who balances many roles – from mother, wife, daughter, sister and friend - who is also a female academic and female leader in teacher education. This impulse to narrate led to a 2018
blog post I wrote about being a mom on the tenure track for CSSE on my lived experience. I continue to interrogate moments and events in my personal and academic lifeline that mark my journey within and beyond the academy as well as those that both disrupt and define my identity. When I find or make the time -- the pandemic has required me to press pause on too many great ideas for writing and reflection - I continue to jot notes and make lists of moments or events or decisions that warrant some writing and thinking about. The list keeps getting longer, and I sometimes worry that all I will achieve is that list. Still, I am grateful to Esmonde for their presentation and forms of story sharing as encouragement to keep writing, reflecting and drawing as ways to explore and re-consider my lived experiences, key events and decisions, big and small, past and present, inside and outside of the academy.
I would have enjoyed the opportunity to engage further with Esmonde and learn more about their perspective and experience with the many tensions that academics experience and grapple with in the academy. For example, I observe that academics who are innovative and push the boundaries of a discipline or field of study tend to experience having to / or perceive the need to live with a foot in (at least) two worlds – the existing merit and promotion structures that emphasize research that is often defined, valued, controlled and supported by existing inequities in power, funding and privilege in particular ways, and the contemporary academic's commitment to research, teaching, service and community engagement that pushes against and critiques both the foundations and the edges of a discipline, and may offer a broader and yet also a more nuanced contribution to scholarship.
I made a brief comment at the end of Esmonde's talk about the tensions that can come from bridging two worlds. There is the joy to be found in pushing the edges, generating new ideas and designs, and demanding change, and also the reality that these choices can be exhausting and discouraging for faculty across ranks, and especially for those who are untenured and/or part of an underrepresented community. The need for ongoing interrogation, new ways of framing, and activism is clear – and individual and collective reflection and action to best support each other in bridging the existing structures in academia while remaining committed and sustaining commitment to disrupting and dismantling these oppressive structures while we designing new ones.
At the end of Esmonde's talk I shared my concerns about the many tensions and barriers that continue to be experienced by Indigenous colleagues who navigate (at least) two worlds / worldviews and resistant organizational contexts / cultures / communities as an academic – Indigenous and non-indigenous / colonialist. Indigenous colleagues have expressed mixed feelings to me - both their deep commitment and hope for change and progress, along with their well earned skepticism (we have been here before, and look how that turned out) - about their experience in the academy. Indigenous colleagues are being called upon, increasingly, to assist the students, the faculty, the university and the community to decolonize the academy, to think forward in restructuring and redesigning the academy - Indigenizing higher education - and tasked with reframing the valuing / devaluing structures in higher education, to design and teach new courses that engage students in challenging conversations (while remaining on campus versus teaching on the land, with restricted or no budgets for Elders or cultural resources and materials or travel), to engage in herculean amounts of service on committees and task forces, to bring greetings, prayers and ceremonies at events (tokenism, performative) and to invest deeply in community engagement to cultivate relationships and partnerships, all the while and at the same time, tasked with meeting existing "productivity and output" expectations for research and teaching that look like and can be “counted” and "weighed" in a pre-determined ways that perpetuate and support existing power and class structures that reproduce inequity. I purposely wrote this last run-on sentence to convey the relentless effort and resulting exhaustion that this work as a cog in the machine can entail if and when current inequitable social and academic structures are not questioned and disrupted. More on this later.
Overall, I appreciate (again, five years later) Esmonde's design challenge to rethink the academy, and wholeheartedly recommend their book for the insightful provocations about sociocultural learning and identity.
