I have spent a good part of my career helping other people become better educators. I’ve talked about teaching, assessment, inclusion, academic development, professional learning and, increasingly, scholarship. I’ve encouraged colleagues to question what they do, look at the evidence, share their practice and make sense of their experience.
And now I’m doing my EdD.
Which has left me with a slightly uncomfortable question:
Am I a scholar yet?
The strange thing is that I don’t feel like I’ve suddenly become a scholar because I’ve enrolled on a doctorate.
If anything, starting the EdD has made me more aware of all the things I don’t know.
There is a particular kind of confidence that comes with being experienced. You know your subject. You know your institution. You’ve seen initiatives come and go. You can probably facilitate the meeting, answer the question and work out why the thing that looked brilliant on paper is going to be much harder in practice.
But scholarship seems to ask for something slightly different.
It asks me to slow down.
To question things I think I already know.
To sit with uncertainty rather than rushing towards an answer.
And, perhaps most uncomfortably, to recognise that experience and expertise are not quite the same thing as knowledge.
Perhaps part of the problem is that I have always thought of scholarship as something other people do.
Researchers publish papers. Scholars have theories. They know the literature. They go to conferences and talk about things I sometimes understand and sometimes very much do not.
I have spent years doing something that feels different.
I notice things.
I ask questions.
I try things with colleagues and students. I see what seems to work, what doesn’t, and what makes me wonder why.
I have ideas about practice. Quite a lot of them, actually.
But when does that become scholarship?
That is the question I want to explore here.
And perhaps that is what I am beginning to realise.
Maybe becoming a scholar isn’t a switch that gets flicked when you register for a doctorate.
Maybe I have been doing some of this already.
The difference is that I am now paying much closer attention to it.
I’m noticing the questions behind the work. I’m becoming more interested in the evidence. I’m thinking about why something seems to work, for whom it works, and what I might be missing.
And I’m beginning to see that there is a space between “I do this because it works” and “I want to understand this well enough to contribute something to what we know.”
That space is probably where scholarship starts to happen.
And, for now, that is where I’m going to put myself.
So this blog is partly an experiment.
A place to think in public while I work out what kind of scholar I might become.
I want to write about the things I’m reading and learning, but also about the things happening around me in educational practice — the conversations, frustrations, ideas and small discoveries that make me stop and think.
Some of those thoughts might go nowhere.
Some might become conference presentations. Some might develop into SoTL projects, papers or parts of my EdD.
And some might simply help me think more clearly.
I’m quite comfortable with that.
I don’t think everything has to become a publication to be worthwhile.
Perhaps the point is to create a space where ideas can begin.
So, am I a scholar yet?
Honestly, I don’t know.
But I think I’m beginning to understand that perhaps that isn’t the question I need to answer just yet.
For now, I’m going to read, question, write, get things wrong, change my mind and try again.
I’m going to pay more attention to the ideas hiding inside everyday practice.
And I’m going to see what happens when I give myself permission to call some of that thinking scholarship.
Maybe I’ll look back on this post in a few years and cringe slightly.
I hope I do.
Because if I do, it will probably mean I’ve learned something.
For now, though, I think the answer is:
Not yet.
But I’m becoming.
