Academic voice
Words make meaning, Words strung together make images appear. Words crafted into sequence and story help others to learn, and, in turn, create more words.
With academic voice, it’s not quite as easy as this simplistic process may suggest. It’s a long process of putting words into some shape that make thoughts, ideas, understanding, sense-making, and critical thought come into being. This process is not going to be easy, nor without ongoing challenges. It takes time, years or a lifetime, to gain an academic voice. My challenge is to take the voice I currently have and subject it to scrutiny, share it more widely in my current scholarly communities and new communities yet to be discovered. This I need to do, despite the challenges and ethical dilemmas Richardson (2001) hints at, while shaping my words to better understand my self, my world and the “surprisingly complex, rich, and rhizomatic” (p. 34) consequences of my academic stories.
My current communities of practice may be familiar with my writing voice as a ‘practitioner’ in education. I’ve blogged as an educator for years. I model my blogging style for my students, so it is shaped by the practicalities in the field of education. This new form of writing, the academic formation, is not yet known and, I wonder how it will be recognized. Do I need to share this academic voice in different spaces and places, thus creating a binary me, or as Pallas (2001) cautions, a “dissociative scholarly identity” (p. 11). How will I manage this shift from one voice to another, or can many voices live and exist within the same individual? Will time and practice in writing create a new identity that can merge the practical, reflective voice with the esoteric academic?
My academic voice must be my own, but it will be crafted and shaped by the communities in which I share my writing. Through this process of sharing, critique, and revision, my voice will be subjected to exposure to other academics, many who have been practicing their voices for much longer. Today in class, it was encouraging to hear that the best academic writers stand on the shoulders of those with whom they share their writing, openly inviting critique. This ‘in kind’ exchange with critical friends can certainly be beneficial since this form of sharing is done with trusted colleagues. It’s the peer review from unknown sources or the academic scrutiny of a dissertation committee that currently haunts my thoughts as a novice academic writer. Perhaps I need to acquire some critical and trusted friends as a ‘gradual release’ mechanism to support my zone of proximal development (Vygotzky) as a novice academic writer.
References
Pallas, A. (2001). Preparing Education Doctoral Students for Epistemological Diversity. Educational Researcher, 30 (5), 6-11.
Richardson, L. (2001). Getting Personal: Writing stories. Qualitative Studies in Education, 14 (1), 33–38.
Wikipedia. (n.d.) Zone of proximal development. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development
Image attribution: Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash
