Research as Play

Shifting Research to Play The Research Underlife of an Academic Staff Member

Who am I? Describe identity, job, etc.

In putting this talk together, I thought I would be telling an audience of writing faculty how how I’ve managed to squeeze in research around the edges of a 9-5 job.

But I realized that doing “research around the edges” is reality for many faculty as well. In terms of time, the edges may be different, working around classes and meetings rather than the conﬁnes of a 9-5 job, but the problem of ﬁnding time for research is similar.

Job Components: Staff Job Components: Faculty Teaching Service Service Research The biggest different between my position as a staff member trying to ﬁnd time for scholarship and a faculty member doing the same thing is how research ﬁts into a job. For most academic staff (with a few exceptions), teaching and research are not part of the job. We might characterize the work they do as service. Faculty jobs, of course, entail varying degrees of teaching, research, and service. For someone like me, who has chose to add in teaching and research, the picture looks dramatically different. While my research overlaps with my “service” work and they inform each other, my teaching only overlaps with my research; it’s work that’s done entirely outside of my “real” work. This is never true for faculty, regardless of how the three areas of work are balanced.

Job Components: Staff Job Components: Faculty Research Teaching Service Service Research The biggest different between my position as a staff member trying to ﬁnd time for scholarship and a faculty member doing the same thing is how research ﬁts into a job. For most academic staff (with a few exceptions), teaching and research are not part of the job. We might characterize the work they do as service. Faculty jobs, of course, entail varying degrees of teaching, research, and service. For someone like me, who has chose to add in teaching and research, the picture looks dramatically different. While my research overlaps with my “service” work and they inform each other, my teaching only overlaps with my research; it’s work that’s done entirely outside of my “real” work. This is never true for faculty, regardless of how the three areas of work are balanced.

Job Components: Staff Job Components: Faculty Teaching Research Teaching Service Service Research The biggest different between my position as a staff member trying to ﬁnd time for scholarship and a faculty member doing the same thing is how research ﬁts into a job. For most academic staff (with a few exceptions), teaching and research are not part of the job. We might characterize the work they do as service. Faculty jobs, of course, entail varying degrees of teaching, research, and service. For someone like me, who has chose to add in teaching and research, the picture looks dramatically different. While my research overlaps with my “service” work and they inform each other, my teaching only overlaps with my research; it’s work that’s done entirely outside of my “real” work. This is never true for faculty, regardless of how the three areas of work are balanced.

For faculty, too, research comes with rewards, either directly in terms of ﬁnancial compensation in salary increases or indirectly for tenure, promotion, or a better job elsewhere. For staff, research may beneﬁt their work by giving them new insights or knowledge, but it is almost never rewarded, certainly not directly.

RESEARCH IS PART OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY IDENTITY. --Henry Rosovsky, The University More importantly, research is part of faculty identity. Faculty often deﬁne themselves by their disciplines.

It's not what defines a staff member. Staff have titles and job descriptions that define who they are and what they do. Their workload defines them.

What I want to describe here is how I used blogging as an intellectual outlet, which turned into real scholarship and how my experience and identity as a staff member has inﬂuenced what I research and how I communicate that research.

My practices, I believe, have placed me in a strange limbo. They fall outside of typical disciplinary academic practice. And they fall outside of what's expected of me as a staff member. From within that limbic space, I can serve as a catalyst between my “day job” and my role as a teacher and researcher. The questions that interest me as a scholar and my approach to them come from an identity grounded in that “day job” rather than an identity as a scholar or teacher, but I also bring a scholarly approach to the very practical concerns of my work. It can be a bit disorienting, but it’s also exhilarating.

So this is how I got started. I started a blog. I established a readership of a few hundred (mostly) academics. I started getting emails and phone calls to talk about social software in education based on what I was writing in my blog. I taught a class on blogging. I decided to write a dissertation on the class. I started another blog. I wrote a dissertation. I gave more talks, wrote some articles, and found that I still have a lot more to say. Going back to being “just” a staff member wasn’t an option.

As a staff person, I’m required to know how-to. The questions I’m asked usually are about how to upload documents into Bb or how to make a video or how to create blog. That represents a speciﬁc kind of technical knowledge.

Communicating this knowledge requires direct language, step-by-step instructions. This is not the language of scholarship.

In addition, my rhetorical strategies in workplace writing are different. I'm never just conveying information or constructing an esoteric argument. My strategies stem from the need to vie for limited resources, to convince faculty to take responsibilities in areas where they are not comfortable, or to take our department in a different direction. Money, people, and time are often very immediately at stake. In my academic work, the stakes are more long term.

My day job also puts me into contact with faculty across many disciplines. I not only talk to them informally, but I attend their talks and their research groups, read their articles and work with their students. This work has lead me into areas of sociology, biology, and computer science. From these faculty, I have learned about their research interests, their pedagogical strategies and their composing practices, and all of this has inﬂuenced my own work.

My blog gave me even wider contacts and gave me still another way to communicate. My blog readers are teachers and administrators at community colleges, large state schools, slac, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, stay at home moms and dads, and students. They all bring different ideas and perspectives. Composing for the blog is off-the-cuff, not always completely thought out and somewhat snarky, but rich with ideas, ideas that take me beyond the realm of the how to and into the realm of why and what if. On the blog, I can explore my scholarly ideas with a group of interesting people.

And I could get feedback from people on my ideas. And I got feedback from people on my scholarly work, not just from scholars in my ﬁeld, but from economists and MBAs, physics scholars and philosophers. Even my students chimed in with their thoughts.

My situation as a staff member and the rhetorical and composing strategies I've used there have enriched my research life. Writing my dissertation allowed me to combine my multidisciplinary interests as well as the many writing practices I had developed.

For example, in my dissertation there is an extensive how-to section, which as a staff member, I know most faculty need to get started using technology. But I back that how-to with a theoretical grounding in my scholarly ﬁeld, something I don’t usually do with my explanations in my staff work.

I explore traditional comp/rhet areas such as audience and discourse communities. But I focus on how to interact with audience and how to create and engage discourse communities not just on what audience is or what a discourse community is. In turn, my theoretical grounding in these comp/rhet areas allows me to help a biology faculty member create a discourse community for his class using a blog. If I just had the technical know-how, he would get a different kind of help. And by following his class blog, I understand the discourse of science better and sometimes use that discourse in my work.

My research also explores emergence and network theory, looking at the physical structure of the Internet and what that means for new media writing practices in the classroom. These are ideas that never would have come to me without my background in working with different faculty and in different contexts.

I communicate my research in non-disciplinary settings, mostly at conferences related to my ﬁeld as a staff member. This has stretched my rhetorical and composing strategies even further, where I've had to work in different media . . . for example, creating a machinima video for a presentation on fear of technology, something I might not do if I were “just” a faculty member unless machinima were my area of specialty.

I present to very different audiences--a combination of staff, faculty and administrators--from different kinds of institutions and not even just educational institutions. These audiences are similar to my blog audience. My work there helps me know how to address people at different levels and with different goals.

This means that my ideas about social software and writing are conveyed not just to the narrow set of researchers who share my interests, but to administrators and faculty from other disciplines who may take my message back with them to reinvent their classroom, start a new program, or encourage faculty to embrace a new technology for teaching writing in their disciplines.

I come back to the idea of limbo. It's true that I straddle two professions and true that I don't feel fully accepted by either. My staff colleagues don’t always understand why I do research or what my research is. Likewise, I’m not publishing in disciplinary journals or attending disciplinary conferences.

If our job as writing teachers is to help our students gain 21st century writing skills for the 21st century workplace, then I think my limbic space is just right. I bring to my research and the classroom my practical workplace and technology expertise. And my research undergirds that practicality in a way that brings rigor both to my classroom and to my work that I might not have without it.

Research as Play

by Laura Blankenship

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