A while ago I asked if we have an academic equivalent of Steph Curry drills (you can substitute ‘sports drills’ with any activity a top performer uses to improve in their field)?
I’m interested in the idea that we can get better at getting better, and that ‘getting better’ as an academic is difficult. There are many reasons for this, but I think some of them are:
- There’s a long delay between when you do something and when you get feedback on what you did. For example, peer review on your writing, and student feedback on your teaching, can take months.
- We have no clear description of the process of creating, critically examining, and disseminating knowledge in our fields of expertise (which is what I think the core function of a scholar is).
- It’s hard to watch academic experts (teachers, researchers, practitioners) do their thing. Even being in the classroom with an excellent teacher doesn’t necessarily help you to become an excellent teacher (because, for example, your teaching context is probably quite different).
- If you could watch them do their thing, this often isn’t useful. Watching someone write a paper doesn’t help you to write better papers. Even going to a workshop by someone who writes good papers doesn’t help you write good papers.
So, I think it’s hard to build skills that make you a better academic. But I still think it’s possible to become better, more quickly, than the existing system supports.
Recently I came across this post by Linus Lee, exploring the idea of virtuosity in the use of creative tools, where he suggests that great creative tools:
- Allow for virtuosity and mastery, enabled by a capacity for precise, nuanced expression.
- Are open-ended and can be used in new ways that the creator of the tool didn’t anticipate.
Both capacity for virtuosity and open-endedness contribute to an artist’s ability to use a medium to communicate what can’t be communicated in any other way. The converse is also true; if a creative instrument has a low ceiling for mastery and can only ever be used in one intended way, the operator can only use it to say what’s already been said.
Lee’s post goes on to explore the idea of AI tools and their relationships to existing artistic communities of practice, which is a great read.
However, I’m going to focus only on the points above i.e. how tools enable mastery. Maybe one of the ways we could think about becoming expert scholars, is to explore our use of tools.
And I think that when we expand the concept of ‘tools’ to include workflows and processes, it’s even more clear that developing virtuoso performance as a scholar is incredibly difficult.
Do our tools enable a capacity for precise, nuanced expression? You might argue that Microsoft Word enables you to precisely express yourself with nuance. But only with text. And even then, Word is little more than a digital typewriter. What about PowerPoint? There are certainly people with far greater skill in using PowerPoint effectively, but I doubt anyone would nominate PowerPoint as a tool that enables nuanced expression. The tools we use as academics to do our work only allow for limited forms of expression, and the system we work in further acts to constrain our ability to express ourselves.
Are our tools open-ended? I don’t think so. You could argue that you can research anything you want. And you can use a wide range of methods to conduct that research. But you can’t share it in any formally acknowledged channel, in an open-ended way. You have to submit conference presentations and research papers that look a certain way. You have to teach a certain way. You have to design courses in a certain way. So I don’t think our tools are open-ended. And I don’t think we’re encouraged to use our tools in ways their creators didn’t intend.
Higher education systems and the research industrial complex don’t allow for nuanced expression, and they aren’t open-ended. It’s hard to work within the existing system, with it’s constraints and administrative processes, in a way that enables you to develop expert performance.
Virtuosos attain their level of intimacy with their mediums from extensive experience and a substantial portfolio that often takes a lifetime to build up.
What are our mediums for working? What are the creative, open-ended portfolios we’re building over a lifetime?