Bringing my Authentic Self - Barriers to Storytelling

I don't know how often I've tried drafting and redrafting different versions of this post because, I try to use my blog as a space where I can collide different thoughts, ideas and experiences in an effort to find out something new.  In doing so I find myself asking the question: "How authentic is this?  Are you being honest with yourself?  Are you being honest with your readers?  So, I find myself adopting different voices.

("Speak up, make your voice heard" by HowardLake is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.)

Sometimes I find myself using the objective, scientific voice.  Like the kind you might find in Critical Incident Analysis (Tripp, 1993 as cited by Mohammed, 2016) where you step out of yourself and out of the situation and look at it from an observers standpoint and by relating the context of the situation to literature and knowledge you arrive at some transformational realisation (Szenes et al., 2015).  

Other times I try to vent my sheer emotional frustration at the injustice of events that I've witnessed or been subject to.  But when I do that I often wonder how people perceive me.  Would such expression be seen as somehow "substandard" or "unprofessional" despite the emotional labour involved in learning and teaching (Tsang, 2011).

I think I'm starting to learn that there is a place for both voices, as Ellis and Bochner (2016) put it, a marriage of the Father and Mother tongue in order to produce a Native tongue.  Their work in autoethnography really interests me because it recognises and legitimises the place of both voices in research.  It gives credence to the fact that research is a relationship building process in which our intelligence, our emotions and our conscience all have a part to play.  But how much should we share?  As in marriage, would it be right to share intimate details of our married lives with the world?  As a single man, that's not something I can relate to, but I would imagine most people are selective about what they put online in that regard.

("park intimate" by pabak sarkar is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)

But autoethnography also challenges me because it encourages me to think of myself as a storyteller.  I had never considered that as part of my professional identity before. In my first supervision meeting with the amazing Dr. Azumah Dennis, she encouraged me to think about the narrative that would enable me to bring my readers with me on a journey.  I'd heard the golden thread metaphor before, finding the thread that holds your argument together.  But I'm learning that a narrative is different.  It's about me extending an invitation to my reader to become part of the story, to hold a conversation with my reader and, in doing so, remind them my readers of their responsibility to be as reflexive as I am since they're as much a character in my story as I am (Ellis and Bochner, 2016).       

In a few years I will have written my thesis and, with a bit luck and a lot of hard work, hopefully earn the title of Doctor of Education.  But how awful would it be if that knowledge was simply kept on a shelf and never read.  With that in mind, how many papers and theses simply never get read because the narrative is boring and the language is inaccessible?  All that knowledge locked up in prison of academic tradition, convention and hegemony.  

The writing of Maha Bali (2015) remind me that it's not possible to ever fully know someone whether in a virtual space or in a face-to-face situation.  But how much more difficult does that process become - the process of relationship building in order to share knowledge and experience become - when we stand at a distance, the objective observer who only takes and never gives of themselves?  It would be akin to a Doctor watching as their patient falls ill purely to objectively document their symptoms without taking the time to provide support, care or treatment.

("Blog With Authenticity Without Getting Fired" by Search Engine People Blog is licensed under CC BY 2.0).

But here's the catch - I'm not as authentic as I would like to be online.  When I began blogging, I think back to a model that I constructed that I hoped would guide me in my blogging mission - to write about the relationships between my life, my learning and my work.  But I'm discovering now that concept is naive because the reality is that there are people out there who read my work - I've seen thousands of visits to my blog now, but I don't know who any of them are.  Could be friends, colleagues, bosses, relatives, academics, or just random people from the other side of the planet who thought my blog looked interesting.  The identity that we portray depends on the situations we find ourselves in and the people we interact with.  But when your audience is completely unknown, and your workspace is completely boundless neither constrained by place or time, how do you know which identity to portray (Schwartz, 2021).  Put simply I'm not ready for the level of vulnerability all at once.  I've learned the merit of being selective and choosing how open I want to be.

But therein lies the rub!  As a researcher, how do you balance your desire to shine light on injustice and point to the need for social change when your very means of communication is so constrained.  It reminds me of the words of Dennis et al (2016):

"Morality exists insofar as we are able to choose.  Freedom to choose is its ontological precondition."

So how does one make the right choice in a world filled with so many constraints?  I find myself in a position where I might have a lot to say about a lot of things.  But I'm struggling to find a voice amidst so many constraints.

You can follow me on Twitter @McintoshMclean

References

Bali, M. (2015)  Because Virtual is also Real: What's Authenticity Anyway? [Online].  Available at:  https://blog.mahabali.me/parenting/because-virtual-is-also-real-whats-authenticity-anyway/ (Accessed 15th November 2022)

Dennis, C. A., Springbett, O. and Walker, L. (2016). Further education colleges and leadership: Checking the ethical pulse. London Review of Education, vol.14, no. 1, pp. 116 – 130.

Mohammed, R. (2016) 'Critical incident analysis: reflections of a teacher educator', Research in Teacher Education, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 25 - 29. 

Schwartz, O. (2021)  Sociological Theory for Digital Society [ereader], Cambridge, Polity Press.  

Szenes, E., Tilkaratna, N & Maton, K. (2015) 'The Knowledge Practices of Critical Thinking', in Davies, M. & Barnett, R. (2015) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 573 - 591.

Tsang, K. K. (2011) 'Emotional Labor of Teaching', Educational Research, vol. 2, no. 8, pp. 1312 - 1316.