the joys of promiscuity in learning
Welcome to my new website - a collection of thoughts, journals, poetic musings, photographic essays, learnings…and who knows what else!
{I guess I’m REALLY doing this!}
It's spring ‘break' - March 2024 - and I'm finding this, my 15th year as a scholar in the academy (post Ph.D.), a time of deep reflection.
I went into academia traveling to reach what I thought was my horizon- a research intensive position. (I should have known, as an island child and carrier of Caribbean sea salt in my bones, that horizons are illusions…)
{For those not in the university nexus, a research intensive position means I went to school for a realllllly long time to pursue a career teaching and conducting research. It was the thing to do, I thought, as a person who wished a life of learning.}
While it may seem that remaining in a ‘role’ for 15 years provides a type of permanency, being ‘here' has hardly proven to be stagnant.
When I started working, I noticed that my learning was constrained by the standards of the institution (productivity demands) that might grant me with longevity and security in the workplace - tenure.
Feeling dissatisfied with the ‘boxing in’ of my learning interests, I, voluntarily, stepped ‘off’ (not down) the tenure track, in 2012, my third year at my ‘dream university’. The months (years, really) that followed found me struggling while trying to articulate a bite-sized ‘professional vision’. I would regularly revisit and revise my curriculum vitae (CV) to find some sort of straight line, or a curve, connecting the dots of my purpose. I transitioned to a mostly-instructional contract line in 2015 and never looked back.
(my time in the academy also brought big lessons about systemic situations that merit a different post another day)
Time, being a wise life-educator, provided opportunities for me to… yep, learn! In the ebb and flow of the invented semester calendar, I found a rhythm of soft and intense self-realizations that enabled me to notice how it felt when I lost track of ‘it’ - time that is- and was fully embodied while diving for new knowledge. It happened often in the context of my instructional visioning and pedagogical interactions, as well as in the context of learning communities. These lessons have helped me become my own version of a devotee of learning.
These years have reminded me that curiosity is play and that through play, we learn - even (especially in) the academy, elements which are cornerstones of my engagements with peers within and outside of traditional classroom spaces. It’s guided me to new names, new (disciplinary and embodied) worlds, new lenses, new problems, new questions, and new imaginations of pedagogical and existential possibilities - all of which are journeys documented on my CV today.
In effect, I've made a life in the academy doing just that...learning (reading, writing, teaching about) what I wanted to learn, when the opportunities have presented themselves, with the people who have danced in and out of my life, and from virtually anything and everything from science to linguistics, to photography, to astrology... Perhaps my greatest lesson today, 15 years into this journey, is that I, too, move with the horizon…For me - there has been value in floating with the tide of the sea and not charting a rigid journey, after all.
On the subject of newness, recently, while doing my early morning journaling, I remembered how much I like the word ‘promiscuity’ (I keep a list of words I like). I like it because it is provocative and non-committal/non-dogmatic - I remember pausing and circling it in my diary and writing the word ‘knowledge construction’ by it. That same morning, Jessica Dore - a social worker who also has a wonderful book about tarot called ‘Tarot for Change’ (w/teachings from philosophy, mythology, theology, and politics nonetheless) used the term ‘promiscuous learner’ in her newsletter, “Offerings” (you can sign up HERE for it)
synchronicities abound…
‘promiscuous learner’ —-> This is me.
(It’s no surprise that I have Sagittarius - the great explorer- guiding my life’s purpose in my natal chart) ;-)
Which, finally, lands at the purpose of the blog (because of course we had to float a bit to get here, too) - This wave is taking me to share some of my contemplation, finished and unfinished thoughts that visit my consciousness - maybe ideas. Whether they are read or not matters little… to find that I have the courage to do this brings tremendous peace to the continuously evolving me in the present. This is an affirmation that I am healing the need to avoid discomfort (or that I am going to be 50 years old in a year), and that I am finding comfort in being the promiscuous learner/ knowledge seeker/ knowledge co-builder/ epistemologist I am.
Maybe some of you need to know it's OK to be the outlier, to be porous, to exist outside the boxes, and to float as a nerd(maid) for life, too!
Thank you reading this today and keep on learning! <3 MRB
Of floating in a sea of learning…
