Skip to main content

Values as North Stars

Higher education is a culture laden with deeply rooted values - knowledge, lifelong learning, discovery, social and technological contribution, and excellence. But it can also be a culture of overwork, competition, toxic productivity, and exploitation, especially in the case of contingent labor. 

Values matter, even though we might not think about them consciously very much. For me pre-burnout, I had fully bought into the less attractive higher ed values - the competition, productivity, expectation escalation - and they ran my life, not just my work. The work I did to come out of burnout helped me realign my priorities and begin to rebuild my life and work around the values of purpose, compassion, connection, and balance. 

I regularly talk about values with my guests on my podcast, the agile academic. Something about the act of voicing your values brings a sense of clarity to whether or not your actions and goals align with those values - or if those are even the values you want to aspire to. Katie Linder told me that her work as a values coach helps people not only define their values, but also associate different intentions and practices to live those values. 

Here’s what two of my most recent guests had to say about finding their values and aligning with their life and work with them:

Cate Denial: Kindness is really important to me, compassion in all its forms. Compassion is important to me for so many reasons; it's important because it gave me a path through some really difficult years of my life, learning how to be kind to myself and give myself space and grace and forgiveness. It then became something that I realized my classroom was lacking. Not surprisingly, right? If I couldn't be kind to myself, then my awareness of being kind to other people was also limited. I don't think I was deliberately unkind to anybody, but I didn't prioritize it. But now kindness is my default position. And I don't mean by that, that somehow I've reached some kind of weird enlightenment. I mean that, it's a discipline for me that I always ask myself, what is the kind thing to do here? What is the kind thing to do here before I send an email or make a decision or think about how expensive a book is that I want to assign or going to a meeting with my colleagues?

I often start by defining what kind is not, and it is not niceness. Those two things often get conflated, especially in the Midwest, but kindness is not niceness. Niceness has no problem with lying. Kindness is honest. Niceness will paper over cracks in our social relationships. It will paper over issues in our institutions like precarity or “rigor” and tradition that often are cover for very other kinds of concerns. So kindness is for me about justice. And it's about belief. 

Lindsay Masland: (speaking about articulating her values) I found the hardest part of the self-reflective process of figuring out, what am I doing? What is this for? was being able to distill them into those like single words that you can find on like a values list or something like that. And in fact, it wasn't until I asked other people in my life like my husband or friends, what are my values? I had things that I was hoping were my values, but I needed somebody to tell me that that was true. I'm actually kind of getting a little emotional about it because it's so powerful to have somebody you love tell you that you're doing what you want to do. So I'd say based on what people have said, that made me feel I could claim for myself, the first one's probably related to liberation as a value and liberation from structures, beliefs, behaviors that do not serve you. And so you can go any direction with that. 

(Talking about being a values-driven rule-breaker in higher ed) Don't go into rule-breaking, just because you want to break rules. Some people might have that as a guiding value and, and maybe just the sheer joy of doing what you're not supposed to could sustain someone, but I'm not that person because it does feel really uncomfortable to break rules when everything else in the world is telling me to follow the rules. And so I think you have to get a lot of clarity about your own values, meaning, purpose and have that be the driver. And then, sometimes you will realize, in order for me to live the fullest realization of these values, I'm going to have to break some rules. So if my focus is on liberation, sometimes I can have people do liberatory things, and it breaks no rules at all. It doesn't matter. And so that's what I would recommend - to get really clear on values.

What values are guiding you? Are you living according to your aspirational values? How can you better align your life and work with those values?

Rebecca Pope-Ruark is the director of the Office of Faculty Professional Development at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She is the host of the agile academic podcast for women in higher ed, and her forthcoming book, Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal, will be released by the Johns Hopkins University Press in September 2022.

Show on Jobs site: 
Disable left side advertisement?: 
Is this diversity newsletter?: 
Is this Career Advice newsletter?: 
Advice Newsletter publication dates: 
Sunday, July 31, 2022
Diversity Newsletter publication date: 
Sunday, July 31, 2022


Udimi - Buy Solo Ads from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/4EnMT8s
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Author discusses book on grad school

Graduate school is a great mystery to students, and to some faculty members, says Jessica McCrory Calarco, the author of A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (Princeton University Press). Calarco is an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University. She believes many faculty members (as well as graduate students, of course) will benefit from her book. She responded to questions via email. Q: How did you get the idea to write this book? Why did the issue speak to you? A: This book started as a tweet . Or, rather, as a series of tweets about the hidden curriculum of higher ed. Ph.D. student Kristen K. Smith had tweeted about the need to better educate undergrads about grad school opportunities, and it made me think about how opportunities in academe are often hidden from grad students, as well. Reflecting on my own experiences in grad school, I thought about the many times I'd found myself embarrassed because of what I didn't know -- the ...

Bad Education: A Movie Review

"It's not having what you want," quips Roslyn Assistant Superintendent Pam Gluckin in her Long Island accent, "it's wanting what you got." And what educators got from HBO's Bad Education was a harrowing detail of a pair of school administrators gone rogue with the school district's treasury, sacking $11.2 million before they were caught... by [...] from The Educators Room https://ift.tt/3d5LaSu via IFTTT

Tips and Strategies for Remote Learning (March 2020)

For the past four weeks, starting two weeks before our Spring Break last week, teachers, administrators and staff at our school have been preparing for “remote school” for students as a result of the coronavirus / COVID-19 crisis. On March 19, 2020, our Head of School sent out a letter to our parents including information about our remote learning plans and FAQs for parents . If your school is currently preparing for remote learning ( as all Oklahoma public school districts now appear to be , pending tomorrow’s state school board meeting vote) I encourage you to review these publicly shared documents and information. As our school’s “Technology Integration and Innovation Specialist” this year, I’ve been building an instructional site for our teachers to support remote learning, on support.casady.org , which is openly licensed CC-BY . This collaborative effort with many other teachers and members of our school staff has provided a good opportunity to curate as well as present instruc...