S started her first week at the new job, and she loves it. “I haven’t thought this much in 3 or 4 years,” she said last night. I sometimes feel the same way about the GC—sometimes, when the thing doesn’t get dominated by one personality or another, but by the real work of thinking and reading and writing and sharing.

January 10 2020

The last day of the big conference made an odd little circle that only I could see. As I followed that circle through the day, I passed familiar landmarks in my thinking, starting with the visualizing narrative workshop. That made me think of nothing more than Ehud Havazelet’s “Wedge” of plot and character. But the secret theme of the day was age.

Of course, the day ended with my friend’s wonderful workshop on nontraditional students. But age was there, too, with the old school Whartonists (both collectively an old, white room and intellectually a bunch of critics concerned with one of the most deliciously backward-looking texts on earth, The Age of Innocence.) Quite literally, an earlier workshop on age identity and literate identity brought me back to the Isabella Center–perhaps the space in New York City that I have a personal connection to that was hit worst by COVID-19.

I posed a question to my friend’s workshop about how programs can pedagogically reform their practices to be less hidebound and more active. The way this was misunderstood–to mean something purely transactional as opposed to something transformational–reminds me of how the head of my program framed my first-week question about recognizing American Sign Language for the language requirement as one about interpreter experience. Really, I just wanted to opportunity to be assessed. This is part of a bigger concern: how can a program be reformed to invite people to be novices–not just at fifty, but at any age?

“Are you allowed to be a novice at 50?” asked Lauren Bowen, a professor of English at UMass Boston who specializes in studying age and literacy. She went on to say that often, institutional structures say no. “We have to disrupt that.”

It seems to me that disrupting the idea that one can’t be a novice any stage in life is at the core of the work of making higher education more accessible and universally designed. That’s when the “real work” I describe above can begin. “Real work” requires the ego and the pretensions that can accompany inexperience to be set aside. Only when this happens can the idea, the language and genres that best express it, and the potential real-world consequences and applications of the idea for actual people be fully imagined.

In fact, last night, I had a long conversation with two of my favorite instructors about a project that might, hopefully, create opportunities for that “real work” being done across programs and in collaboration with students. At the very end, I made a very excited comment about how the content of the project connected to so many questions these days about technology, environment, and social justice. Real work–work that I hope will continue over the next weeks and months, work that I will do well to the extent that I’m able to comfortably occupy the space of a novice.

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