This teacher education blog series about time and calendars is for teachers, graduate students and higher ed faculty balancing expectations of teaching-research-service with expectations of wellness-family-adventure. I offer my efforts to find a sustainable way to navigate decisions that are, in my view, deeply connected to my use of time. I acknowledge that time management and self-care are not solutions to institutional practices that see teacher labor as an expandable resource. For me, these posts are about understanding time in relation to work and unpacking the meaning of “work” in relation to my being. Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.
Understanding Flow of and Flow in Tenure-Track Being, Part 3
The third year of a tenure-track position is typically a year of reappointment, which means compiling evidence of how you’ve spent your time and making a case for it being meaningful, effective, and productive. The preparation of these materials added one more project to my weekly calendar. However, what I have come to understand about research is that the intensity ebbs and flows depending on its phase, and I was able to spend more or less time on my reappointment materials depending on the status of projects (e.g., planning, data collection, write-up, revision).
In preparing my year-3 calendar, I realized that my time spent preparing for, advising about, and engaging with teaching was fairly stable. I turned my attention to making sure my research and service made me a better teacher-educator-advocate.
Understanding research flow
I learned to track the flow of my projects using a whiteboard method I had observed in a colleague’s office. This is referred to as research pipeline by some people. I have a physical one with sticky notes and a digital one using Jamboard. Using Jamboard, I color-coded my projects, again trying to categories the nature of the work, which I am now coming to understand as mostly research that informs practice. I’d shuffle the sticky notes across the whiteboard (and then between “submitted” and “revisions due” with every round of reviewer/editor feedback) so that I knew where to focus my time.
- Blue: conference preparations
- Green: research-driven publications
- Pink: practice-driven publications
- Yellow: creative (research-practice adjacent) publications
- Orange: review work, which is more service, but I see as helping me understand the publication world
Periodically, when I was feeling overwhelmed or lost or spending a lot of time on one thing, I’d consult my whiteboard for direction. This also helped me anticipate when I’d need more or less time for these projects. Further, I recognized that we, research teams, could decide to speed up or slow down on a project. Mostly, I embraced the potential of a research team to be a community of critical friends with the capacity to nurture wellbeing, to uplift.
In this reflective work of surfacing and sorting work flow, I was coming to understand the word “work” was not sufficient in labeling the quality of experiences I was having. Spheres of my identity intersected in research collaborations– woman, scholar, introvert, partner, teacher, athlete–that made these daily “work” experiences quite beautiful.
Calendaring to set up effective flow
Popularized by positive psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura, flow state describes a feeling where, under the right conditions, you become fully immersed in whatever you are doing. I understand that I love being in flow and am frustrated by interruption and fragmented experiences. Being in higher ed has afforded me flexibility and trust to shape my schedule in such a way as to afford this way of being — in flow.
Weekly calendar work (see Part 2) continued to support my evolving understanding of time and how I could shape my experiences by attending to how I used time. (See image below.)
In this 2021 calendar, I have color-coding going on, which made sense to me at the time (September 2021):
- yellow: teaching and advising
- green: research
- pink: service meetings, which were typically only once a month, but I kept it on my schedule to review agendas or follow-up with colleagues
- orange: school-based service in the form of faculty or committee meetings
I decided to dedicate 2 days a week to teaching (yellow) and not try to write or do research or have meetings on those days. I was fully in the flow of my practice with teachers. Of course, I needed time to plan and meet with students later in the week, so yellow is sprinkled in on other days.
On Wednesdays, I was in research and non-school service meetings (e.g., Poetic Justice, Writers Who Care). This was so great to have dedicated time to be with colleagues and critical friends to assess the progress of our work and set writing goals. For me, it was helpful to spend Monday and Tuesday trying to be full present for students, and then for Wednesday to be fully present as a critical friend (which also helped me understand how to be fully present more consistently).
I tried to dedicate all of Thursday to writing. This worked well for me because of my relationship with writing. I find the flow and do not want to come out of it. Starting is difficult at times, but once I begin, I cannot stop. Dedicating a full day to this served me well and minimized frustrating attempts to write in between class or meetings Monday-Wednesdays.
And on Fridays, I accepted that there’d be school-based meetings and committee work varying week-to-week, so if I didn’t have meetings, I could choose to write or read or circle back to something or someone.
Understanding my relationship with labels
My hiring papers and annual reviews rely on a distribution-of-effort model that recognizes teaching, research/creative activity, and service as the three primary components my workload. Each faculty member is assigned a percentage of effort for each component on an annual basis according to the needs of the institution, I resume. Mine is teaching/advising (50%), research (40%), and service (10%).
In my role as a junior high teacher, I was on a PBIS committee; I was on the graduation committee. We met during plan time or faculty meetings. The idea here was that we were shaping school systems, but any service work we wanted to do within or for our professional organizations was not factored into contract hours even if it benefitted our students.
As you can see by my color-coded 2021 calendar methods (also see Part 2, 2020 calendar), service is an elusive concept to me. I don’t like to label community experiences as service. I don’t understand entirely the possibilities of service in teacher education, though I do like that time spent in community with others is an expectation of how I am spending my time. So I have coded service to organizations beyond the school (pink) and service to school (orange) to frame my role in these physical or virtual spaces. I find myself asking Why am I here? How am I here?
Notice that I don’t seem to be anywhere on weekends. Some of the sticky notes are leaning into Saturday. I have dates on these sticky notes because while I wanted to reserve weekends for rest (i.e., my eyes were strained, my hands ached from typing, my sciatic flamed from sitting) and family, I recognized that I could choose to host a teacher book group once a month on a Sunday while my partner watched golf — that it was okay and fun and a welcome, joyful activity that was not “work.” I recognized that leading a workshop with teachers on a Saturday once and a while was a privilege and also brought me joy, so I didn’t want t make any hard and fast rules about not “working” on weekends. Again, this concept of “work” was becoming problematic for me as in You work all the time or You work too much. Who decides? I do. It’s on me to define this or reframe it for myself.
This calendar work, again, is not a way of quantifying or regulating for me but rather surfacing to reflect on my engagement with time and the ways these events nurture my being, becoming and being and becoming with others.
Conclusion and an aha of experience
Across the past three blog posts about calendars and time, I have been surfacing my relationship with the “work” of being a teacher and how the trajectory of my career and life spans have illuminated my trouble with the word “work” in relation to how I live my life, mostly in teacherly ways.
I began this self-study of time management in an effort to get to a 40 hour work week more in line with the life of my partner so that we could actually be in each others lives more. I am happy to report that this project has helped us do just that.
However, this project really has not been about trying to make higher ed a 40 hour work week.
In trying to manage a higher ed workload model, I have come to understand, for me, that while the components or labels helped me name my engagements, they also undermined even minimized the aesthetic of my life.
In concluding this blog series with a revelation, I recognize there is another blog series on the horizon to unpack what I mean. So I will say that I have struggled to categorize what I do into calendar slots and labels, but in trying to do so, I have come to understand my planning of days and living of days as a series of aesthetic experiences. From John Dewey’s Art as Experience, first published in 1934, his discussion of “having an experience” demonstrates that aesthetic experience is possible in every aspect of people’s daily life and that I have been fortunate to recognize “the aesthetic” in the character of an experience rather than in a specific task or situation.
Teaching, research, and service are intertwined, and the way teacher educators thread, tangle, and stretch these is their own. Indeed, we each have the same number of minutes in a day, but how we shape these minutes is our own aesthetic that must serve a way of being that serves a life we want to live.