My secret to writing

"Many people who want to write are unconsciously seeking peace, a coming together, an acknowledging of our happiness or an examination of what is broken, hoping to embrace and bring our suffering to wholeness." - Natalie Goldberg, May 2015

Many found it incredible or even wrong when I told them the secret behind my Masters thesis. Yes, it was written to advance knowledge of the field and yes, it hopefully was of some benefit to education and teachers, but mainly, I did it for me. I wrote it to explore an area I was having challenges in my personal life and to bring healing, firstly, to myself.

That area I was struggling with was that of authority. My thesis was also about authority. The authority I was struggling with in my life was church authority - the authority of my thesis was government authority. Every time I wrote about government authority, I was drawing lessons for myself. Every time I drew lessons for myself, I changed the object and the context, and I was writing about government authority. By the time I finished my thesis, I had an answer for the educational world, but also for myself. It was alright to challenge authority, all sorts of authority, even scholarly ones. And I should be afraid of no one.

This experience was powerful. It taught me that by using intuition, abstraction, analogies, and simply the power of making connections, I can write about something I did not have direct experience with. I can draw upon my emotions and knowledge in a personal area of my life and apply it into a professional and academic setting. It taught me that academic work and writing can be a seeking of truth and a journey of healing. It was a powerful experience.

So this time round, I'm going to try something like that with my Ph.D. I hoped to tap on something even more primal, that innate need to tell our stories, and the ability of stories to heal - narrative therapy... But professionally, it will be about pedagogical content knowledge, how the teacher transforms her knowing into a telling, such that students can receive the telling and it becomes their knowing. It's a child-centered and progressive way of education, provoking students to think, because stories can yield rich meanings, both for the teacher and her students. And for me. :)