Some thoughts on blogging as educational activism

[Context: This is one of the many blog posts that somehow missed the moment when they were called on-stage and hesitated in a moment of I-am-not-yet-ready-for-this and shied away and stayed hidden in a folder. And as we all know, once you’ve missed your line in the school drama, other actors take over and continue without you. #YouSnoozeYouLose.

I started this blog at the end of August 2016. This is my attempt to rework and expand the original draft and bring it back to life #ReadyOrNot].

On finding my (own) voice

In my previous blog “A blog on (not) blogging” I shared some thoughts on my own practice of (not) blogging – sharing feelings of being overwhelmed and resembling a hummingbird in torpor. Written between these lines is the issue how difficult it was and still is in finding (and accepting) my own voice in the context of not only the increasing noise and number of voices in the field of education, but also the awe and respect I have for bloggers like Audrey Watters,  Kate Bowles, Sean Michael Morris, Jesse Stommel, Tressie McMillan-Cottom,Bonnie Stewart, Frances Bell, or Sherri Spelic to mention but a few. I am on record to have stated, on many occasions, that “When I grow up, I want to write like [insert name]”. I’ve said this so many times that it is possible these statements may have become shallow or are seen as a cheap form of I’ll-pat-your-back-and-it-will-be-nice-if-you-could-reciprocate. In stating that I wish I could write like [insert name], it often refers to the way s/he craft/tame words, create narratives that haunt me for long after I closed their blog. My respect may also refer to the way they witness, translate, contest, re-claim, and confront. And often my admiration also refers to the frequency of their blogs; the way [insert name] finds the time or just makes the time to respond to a current issue while I was still thinking about the title for the blog and the most appropriate image for the blog-to-be.

I often feel like a sloth in the company of cheetahs. Stuttering. Overwhelmed. Much too slow.

Thinking like this, I realize, is a trap – a trap that most probably originates in our current age’s obsession with grit, champions, awards, rankings and competition-as-virtue. In the race for citations, performance criteria, research grants and strategies that will protect us from becoming part of the increasing number of the precariat, we were/are seduced in thinking that there is only one form of engagement, activism, being witness that counts (sic). I may have fallen into the trap thinking that my voice, my way of being blogger, activist, and human is not good enough, not effective enough, not visible enough, not making a big enough difference.

So this blog is an attempt to think about my blogging practice as a form of educational activism.

Defining educational activism

So, what counts as educational activism? Who decides? What are the criteria? And then there are issues such as: What are the costs of being or aspiring to be an educational activist? What are the ethical issues in educational activism? How do educational activists sustain themselves?

In August this year, I received a Fellowship to attend the Digital Pedagogy Lab hosted by the University of Mary Washington (VA) in the United States, 8-12 August. There were four possible tracks namely an Introductory, Design, Praxis and Action tracks. I selected the Action track based on a number of considerations such as the fact that I was no longer intimately involved in instructional and curriculum design and I currently have a fairly limited teaching role. My main focus is on doing research in open and distributed contexts and networks and I see myself increasingly moving into an activist role – whether with regard to human rights, gender issues, surveillance and privacy, and issues pertaining algorithmic decision making and accountability. Another reason why I opted for the Action track was the fact that it was facilitated by Audrey Watters, one of the scholars and activists in the field of educational technology that I hugely respect. It was a dream come true to have had the opportunity to engage with her over the period of a week.

The Action track sub-title was “How do we privilege ‘action’? What types of actions ‘count’?” In the context where I am confronted on a daily basis with being measured and my citations and scholarly impact being quantified and counter, I was immediately hooked. As a researcher, my scholarly outputs are determined by often (mostly?) unquestioned assumptions regarding what counts as ‘scholarly endeavor’, ‘action’ and ‘impact.’ Though I speak from a position of white, academic privilege, the cost of being continuously measured makes me realize that it is no longer a question of ‘publish or perish’ but more likely the reality of ‘publish and perish’…  In this mad rush for citations and outputs, there is just not any space for ‘not acting’ or inaction and I battle with the demon of the shallowing of my own research as I scavenge every data set for yet another article, another output, another possibility to be cited… Welcome to the ‘shallows.’

The goals of the Action track were as follows:

• To explore the politics of the digital and to consider what “action” looks like with and through digital technologies
• To challenge dualisms – thought/action, thinking/building, making//writing, digital/analog, public/private, action/inaction, “real world”/classroom – that permeate our cultural expectations of (digital) scholarship, (digital) pedagogy, and (digital) activism.
• To ask what role “education” might play in critical/digital engagement.
• To become more comfortable with constructing and deconstructing “ed-tech”

Over the course of five days we deliberated the distinction between ‘action’ and ‘inaction’ and spaces where not-taking-action may actually be classified not only as ‘action’ but may be the most appropriate form of ‘activism’. We discussed the role of intention in moving an ordinary activity from being ordinary to activism. For example, if I am trans or cisgender, the act of using a public toilet becomes a form of provocation and activism. When I am a black scholar, entering white disciplinary spaces become a form of activism.The discussions I had with Remi Kalir (@remikalir), Chris Gilliard (@hypervisible) and Autumm Caines (@Autumn) enriched my understanding and I am forever indebted to them for the way our conversations shaped my thinking.

We also designed and built Domains of Our Own as a form of claiming back spaces, identity, and action. Some of us created Twitter bots to disrupt, to question, to play. We also considered the need to care for one-self and for one another when venturing into (more visible) forms of educational activism.

Since August this workshop, the discussions and the issues that were (not) discussed, stayed with me, haunted and invigorated me. In wrapping up this blog post, let I want to think aloud and share some tentative pointers for thinking about a typology for educational activism.

Pointers towards a typology of educational activism

#ToBeWoke

When we think about educational activism, it is easy to fall prey to thinking about the more spectacular forms of educational activism – to keynote and/or blog like [insert name]. While their keynotes and blogs are indeed mind-blowing, these visible and vocal forms of educational activism are not the only forms of educational activism. There are also actions that come from a quieter, possibly more subversive form of activism namely to be woke, to witness, to sleep with your eyes open. This form of activism resembles the sentries on the walls of ancient cities who were constantly on the lookout for approaching armies, visitors, signs of approaching danger. I therefore have a suspicion that informing and sustaining the blogs, the narratives, the ‘spectacle’ of educational activism, is, and need to be a profound awareness, ‘wokeness’, sleeping-with-your-eyes-open. The educational bloggers I admire all share this quality of ‘wokeness’, of being curious, sleepless-in-Silicon-Valley, constantly warning, sharing, alerting and informing. Most probably this, for me, is the basis of all forms of educational activism.

To amplify, retweet, re-blog, reiterate

It took me a relatively long time to consider my retweets and dissemination as a form of activism, possibly less spectacular, but just as important. This is a role or form of activism that I particularly enjoy. I was born curious and in trouble and nothing has changed since then. My daily practice of systematically working through four to six hours of tweets has become a major influence in my own scholarship and activism. As I systematically work through the tweets, I follow the links and if I consider the information as valuable, I share the link/information on my Facebook, Linkedin and Minds.com pages. And for those of my colleagues who are not on social media, I would send information via email. In refusing to let a particular tweet just disappear unnoticed, I retweet it and my retweet gives it another chance of being noticed. I know it is not spectacular, but it provides me much joy.

To translate, to give voice

On Friday I found this amazing blog by Lina Mounzer “War in translation: Giving voice to the women of Syria” – it was and still is a blog that left and leaves be heartbroken and in a strange way, energised and more committed than ever before to try to make a difference. In her blog Lina relates how the act of witnessing and translation affects her, changes her, and in ways emotionally destroys her. In translating the voices of women caught in the Syrian conflict, the translator enters “into the most intimate relationship” with another’s text where

“Neither the translator nor the text emerges from the act unscathed.” She states that translation “is not just about transposing words from one language to another. But transplanting a feeling, a way of seeing the world, from one vocabulary of experience to another. I think of the verb, to transplant. A seedling from soil to soil. But also an organ from boyd to body.”  There are, however, “still no guarantees that anything will take root, or that the new body will not reject the new organ for being foreign.”

In this act of translation, of transplanting, the English language is a tool,

“as available to raw beauty as it is to hegemonic violence. And I know the only way to redeem it for all of us who it marginalises is to fight our way out of those margins and insist on being part of the text. But my English is a war wound. It is the result of the roughshod amputation of my mother tongue.”

Despite the costs of communicating in a foreign tongue, Lina writes

“it is the best form of resistance I can imagine for a world scarred with forbidding, categorical borders. … The only way to make borders meaningless is to keep insisting on crossing them: like a refugee, without papers, without waiting to be given permission, without regard for what might be waiting on the other side. For when you cross a border, you are not only affirming its permeability, but also changing the landscape on both sides. You cross carrying what you can carry, you cross bearing witness, you cross knowing that you are damageable, that you are mortal and finite, but that language is memory, and memory lives on.”

To speak/write out

While it may be tempting to disavow the formal channels of academic scholarship as viable forms of activism, I do think that would be unfair. Yes, while there are legitimate concerns that a huge percentage of academic publishing consists of crap that nobody reads, I’ve read peer-reviewed, academic articles that contest, that question, that disrupt, and expose. I’ve read academic, scholarly articles that are nothing but activism-in-print. While I would agree that open forms of scholarship such as micro-blogging and blogging and open publishing do provide (more) exciting spaces for critical scholarly activism, I think we should not discount editorials, op-eds, opinion pieces and journal articles whether in scholarly or popular publications. As a form of activism and protest, I am increasingly committed to only publish in open, peer-reviewed journals, but I do not discount the potential for activism in journals that are pay walled.

To protest/disrupt

In the current South African higher education landscape this form of activism is almost too easy, too natural, at least for our students… with many scholars, researchers and faculty assuming a very critical stance on the student protests and especially the blatant celebration of violence, while forgetting the equally blatant and often inter-generational violence sustaining and perpetuating structural inequalities. While many academics (including myself) who find the current impasse and the death of compromise frightening, we’ve become comfortably numb and ignorant to the gross inequalities in South African society.

To be quiet, to hospice and not do anything

And then there is the comment of Simon Ensor on a blog by Maha Bali Cognitive Stack Overflow: Unpredictable behaviour in which she shares her feelings that she is “at my breaking point here. Seriously. Right at the edge of overflow.” Simon reminds us that

“The systems in which we work and live will break us. They are insane.

Activism also includes inactivity, peace, play, silence, sleep.”

In my reflection on #AmIAnEducationalActivist I realised that we see activism as interventions, as blogs, articles, keynotes, taking action. Not doing anything is almost unthinkable.

Not-doing-anything does not, however, indicate inaction. Not-doing-anything can be a very active space of engagement and contemplation. It is looking and resisting the temptation to look away. It is looking into the eyes of the beggar on the street corner and not looking away. Not looking away means allowing yourself to witness (as verb), to be a witness (as noun), to be overwhelmed, to not allow yourself to forget.

de Oliveira Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew and Hunt (2015), reflect on various strategies to engage with the potential and challenges of realising postcolonialism. They mention strategies that qualify  as ‘soft-reform’ such as increasing access and dialogue; ‘radical -reform’ that includes specific strategies to address racism, capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy and nationalism and potential strategies they categorise as taking place in the ‘beyond-reform space’. In the latter they mention imagining alternatives, hacking and hospicing. I find the notion of ‘hospicing’ as verb very interesting. Hospicing as verb entails accepting the death/decline of a system and accepting that due to various factors, that you cannot directly intervene/act, but you also don’t allow yourself to walk away. In hospicing as activism, you remain involved, caring for a system in decline to the extent that the system allows you to care for it, nothing more, nothing less. In the broader context of South African higher education, my participation and activism in the transformation of the sector is most probably restricted to the intentional caring and hospicing as a form of activism.

But activism most probably also requires a letting go, a critical self-knowledge of your own locus of control, and things beyond your locus of control. Activism involves self-care, allowing the community to care for you, to shield you, to hide you, to allow others to speak on your behalf.

To hack, leak and bot as forms of play

I must confess, play does not come naturally to me. I was born serious. I was born an old soul carrying the testimony of many prior generations in my soul.  Personally, play as educational activism involves being creative in the choice of images for a PowerPoint, or a blog. Play as educational activism think about narrative strategies and metaphors. But play as educational activism may involve more serious forms of play such as the creation of a Twitter bot that disrupt, that poke fun, that reproduce nonsensical gibberish that ape the latest claims of disruption in higher education or to hack the sites of those in service of disaster capitalism

(In)Conclusions

I’m a sloth in the company of cheetahs. I am a hummingbird in a state of torpor. I am overwhelmed. I am slow. I think slowly. I write slowly. But I think. I write. I see. I witness. I translate.

I must learn to judge my forms and practices of activism for the unique shape it takes, for its evolution, for what it is and not for what it is not. I am not [insert name]. I am. I love. I trust. I care. I share.  I am.