“Disruption” of the best kind

This the ninth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

I dropped my grades the second possible day I could in the middle of December and began my sabbatical with three weeks of not working on anything.

Well, that was the plan anyway…

A little context: I haven’t taken three weeks away from working since before the turn of the century. The myth of the open summers where educators frolic carefree and workless? Sure thing, Boss.

See, I had this plan. Unplug completely for three weeks. Spend the break my wife and kids had in their schedule with them and nothing else pulling me away. Then another week with just myself to recharge a little. Maybe play some video games. Maybe a book for no other reason than I liked the cover.

I jokingly posted this on the first day of sabbatical. Secretly, though, I kinda hoped for a little more of this than the first month provided me.

It was a good plan. Then I pulled the sucker’s card. I opened my email to check on something completely unrelated to work, only to realize I had a deadline I’d forgotten about. For an academic essay I’d pitched months earlier. And had accepted. And then promptly filed in the “I’ll Get To It” file.

About that…the deadline was just a couple weeks away when I opened the email.

So my third week of coasting, the one for myself, became a bit of a mad dash to pull myself together, lay my hands on some sources I needed but didn’t have, and bang out the essay. I haven’t felt that much like the daily journalist I once was in a long, long time.

Fortunately, the topic was a present concern of mine, something I had spent a good deal of time thinking about in the recent past and for the several years before that. So, at the end of the week, I had a good version of what would become “Toward Disruption Creation in Digital Literature Instruction,” a brief exploration of one of the more fanciful flights I’ve taken pedagogically in my almost 20 years as an educator.

You can read about the specifics here, but the gist of it is this:

What if the future of learning is in turning over the majority of control to the students and then consistently disrupting their work—creatively and for their own good, of course—over the length of the term until they make something together for a public audience?

I know, right? It’s the youngest child’s fantasy work environment!

Turns out, though, that my theory seems to have some merit. Also, it’s just a fun class. Don’t take my word for it. Check with my #DigLit crews who likely have something to say about the matter and are more active on the socials that I am. 

I finished up and hit send and then read the fine print. Not only was I writing a piece, but I was part of a truly collective effort to crowd source edit the 11-article journal edition I was going to be a part of.

In specific, I got to be the first-round reader of two of the other pieces. Which, because I’m the type of nerd I am, was fascinating. It was also work I’d not planned on doing during my time away, so it also felt like a bit of an imposition…until I started commenting and receiving comments on my work from two other scholars in the field.

I can honestly say this was the smoothest and most collegial academic editing process I’ve ever been a part of. I benefitted from all of the conversations I had about my article and feel like I was truly able to help the authors I worked with move their pieces toward the expressions of their ideas they wanted them to be. #unicornedits 

So, yeah, I had to “give up” some time on the novel. But for this kind of an experience, I’ll take it. Check out the results here in the full volume of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies.