Academic writing: sometimes you need to just drive around the guardrails

After I presented my paper at the American Humor Studies Association conference yesterday, a grateful grad student came up to me and said, "I've been wanting to write about my teaching experiences, but I didn't know I was allowed to do that."

This made me both sad and hopeful: sad because of the way many graduate students unquestioningly accept the guardrails that constrain their academic writing, and hopeful because here was someone who had something interesting to say and who wasn't going to allow the traditional constraints to silence her.

I understand why grad students need to be trained to stay in their lane, to avoid the anecdotal and to ground their academic writing in appropriate theoretical contexts, but I was presenting a paper on teaching comedy during Covid-19 and I don't know how to talk about my teaching experiences without using the word "I" and offering specific examples. If those examples were engaging, amusing, or inspiring, I'm not going to apologize for that. I've reached a point in my career where nothing is really at stake, so I may as well say something that matters and that might make a difference in a listener's life.

When that student told me she didn't know she was "allowed" to write about her teaching experiences, I shared a few venues that encourage such writing. For instance, Pedagogy's "From the Classroom" section includes essays about hands-on teaching methods described with academic rigor. Further, the book display at this conference includes a number of collections of essays focusing on pedagogy, including, of course, my own collection from the MLA, Teaching Comedy.

Writing about pedagogy may be considered a second-tier pursuit in some circles, but we can all benefit from hearing about other teachers' classroom experiences. That grad student told me she appreciated hearing the insights I've gleaned from decades of teaching experience, and I told her that I appreciate hearing the insights of young people trying out brand-new ideas in the classroom--but that will happen only if someone writes them down.

Maybe she will. And someday maybe more graduate programs will function in a way that empowers students to write about their teaching without worrying about whether such writing is "allowed."