RE: History
worthenh who-is-at garnet.berkeley.edu
Tue, 14 Nov 1995 08:36:12 -0800
I would like to add my voice to the discussion of the role played by
one's personal life story in the evolution of one's intellectual and
academic consciousness. For about half of the years that I was teaching
(in community colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area and at the University
of San Francisco) I worked for the California Federation of Teachers,
the labor-movement affiliated teachers union. I had various positios,
some elected, some appointed. As an elected person, I had a duty --
a duty parallel to the union's duty of fair representation -- to
represent the faculty who had elected me -- that is, to study and
interpret the ambitions and conflicts they were conscious of in their work,
and to try to express them in terms of fairness, and to do something about
them -- that is, use the powers available to myself as part of the
union collective to work for the benefit of the people I represented.
During those years (this is quite recently; I stopped teaching to write my
dissertation and prepare for my orals only last spring) I probably worked
with hundreds of faculty individually, and thousands if you think about
classes of faculty (full-time, part-time, tenured, non-tenured, etc). One
consequence of this was a profound training in thinking about how the
working conditiosn of faculty influence what they can do. Another was
an ineradicable conviction that implementation of any kind of reform comes
bottom-up. There are others: For example, I can't read any report of
research, written by an observer, without hearing the voices of faculty
who have had to put up with researchers in their classrooms. Some
welcome it, some tolerate it,some resent it dreadfully but don't dar
complain -- I know this, from having spoken with the people whose classes
have been "studied" -- but these are things they'd never say to the
researcher directly.
Here's the problem: this is not knowledge that I've come by from reading
books. If I tried to do a literature search to rationalize this knowledge,
I'd wind up with mostly stuff that is produced by unions -- not just the
AFT but industrial and trade unions where people talk about being watched
and studied -- at any rate, the sources would be advocacy-type sources,
not legitimate academic sources. So how do I, in an academic situatio,
justify this knowledge? There actually was a moment during my orals last
spring where I began talking about the difficulty of accomplishing change
in a system like the California community college system, where so many
faculty (two thirds) have not only no tenure, but no job security, and
therefore are unwilling to take risks -- one of my examiners asked me
if I had come by this knowledge through reading, or through personal
experience, and I had to admit that it was not through reading -- yet
is organizational experience that comes from having represented hundreds
of people in a position to which I have been elected merely personal
experience?
If I were to try to write an article for an academic journal about this,
how could I leave out my organizationally-constructed knowledge? Yet I
sense that this knowledge, because it is "advocacy", is illegimiate; maybe
not because it's advocacy, but because it doesn't come out of other
articles in other journals. Yet for me to write anything without uding
this knowledge feels like a mockery of serious intellectual work, to say
nothing of a betrayal of all the people I've worked with.
Helena