Public Scholars & Public Scholarship

In reading Jennifer’s first blog entry in our reflection on public scholarly acts I’m reminded how much our scholarly identities impact our what we do in the classroom as teachers. Although we have scholarship that discusses how and why students might better engage with their writing when posting in a public venue, Jennifer still has decided to keep her students’ work relatively private. Based on the recent news from Georgia Tech, she might be on the right track (however, I hope not!).
However, I’m more interested in responding to what I feel are Jennifer’s main concerns in her first posting:

• Permanence and Findability.
• But what are the risks of disagreeing in a public learning space?
• Is there a risk in outwardly exposing my professional identity?

I feel that my response to the first and third issue begins to address the second issue. After Jennifer and I started these reflective blogs, ODU’s English graduate student organization asked me to talk at a presentation about going to conferences. More than once I emphasized that one of the main reasons to attend a conference was to “kiss hands and shake babies.” In other words, networking! Networking is explicitly about “exposing a professional identity” so that others make your name and face “permanent and findable” in their memories.
Although I am not suggesting that successful academics are not extremely competent individuals, I am suggesting that successful academics are well known individuals. And their reputation is not solely based on their scholarly work; it is also supplemented by how accessible they are to other scholars. Traditionally scholarly accessibility only occurred through an abundance of publications and at conferences; however, with various social networking applications (from listservs, blogs and wikis to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+) scholars are now accessible in other ways. Scholars are very interested in dialoguing with others who are currently thinking about, and ideally passionately care about, a current topic of interest. It’s why we do this stuff, right?; we love to talk about it! And in that talking, we will inevitable have different beliefs and perspectives about any given subject.
Although it is worrisome to risk disagreeing with a major scholar; however, that is exactly what needs to occur in most reviews of literature. Scholars have to carefully carve out a nitch for any given project. Part of that carving includes discussing how various other scholars didn’t quite address a specific need or concern. Research is a dialogue where scholars agree, disagree, revise, and reflect about how and why certain things function in certain ways.
I guess I’m concluding that this type of public scholarly work, even when started in graduate school, is positively functioning in two ways:

1. constructing a scholarly identity, and
2. engaging in scholarly dialogue (which includes disagreeing with those who come before you).

November 20 2011 | Posted in