It has been quite a year, and I know that some of you feel like robot zombie on-line teachers who cannot even remember the idea of research, let alone the process and feelings associated with that side of your scholarly identity. So how are you to try and reclaim the researcher, the scholar, the writer that has been left by the wayside?
First Principles
Rest. Rest. Rest. Book time off, take it, and I mean really take it. Remove your email from your phone. Do not connect into anything academic for a whole two weeks. Unless you are a surgeon, nothing is urgent. Literally nothing. Just stop and rest and do things you used to like doing. But mainly, rest.
When you are rested, I want you to remember. Remember what your research profile had looked like before the pandemic. What were your rhythms before then? What excited you about research, your project or article? Are there half finished pieces of research in the drawer? Can you rescue some of it, and should you?
Take a hard look at reality
Take your diary and cross through every day of marking resits, resit exam boards, the rest of your vacation days, and the two weeks (yes, you heard me) that you will devote to teaching preparation for next year. Decide now whether in fact you want to devote the precious little time you have left to pointless meetings and University open days. How many actual full days do you have left for research? If your answer is 3, or 5, or 10, then that is your answer. That is your reality and it is just better to know that now, then to wake up every day with the silent dread of once again not working on your research and berating yourself.
Writing every day that is not a vacation day
On my course, I equip people to continue writing when they are grading, when they are teaching, when they are doing admin, but I encourage them to be ruthless with their scheduling. So graduates of this course will not only have 3, or 5 or 10 days to write this summer, because they write every single day. The only time that is free of writing is vacation, weekends and outside your working hours. If this seems like a fantasy, please take the course. It works, and it will free you from the idea that you have NO TIME. You have time, but it might not be as much as you would like to have once those vacation days are in. Just like you have time to teach because it is scheduled, similarly you have time to research. Just not big blocks of time, or free days or weeks, or the biggest myth THE SUMMER. But you do have some time. The question is, what will you do with it?
Dramatically lower your expectations
There is no way to really describe the hell of the last year, so I won’t try to. Let’s agree, it has been difficult. We are not the people we were 12 months ago - it is going to take a minute to reclaim that scholarly identity.
Take control
Don’t wait for your employers to give you permission, or [laughs hysterically] encouragement to re-engage with research. Some may do just that of course, and that is wonderful. But some universities have realised this robot zombie teaching thing can be quite the moneymaker, and might not in fact be enthusiastic about supporting you to return to your research or life as we knew it pre-pandemic (if indeed that reality was one in which your research was supported). REF is done - it is another 5-6 years before research will be cared about once more by the higher ups. It is not their job to connect the dots between support now and research output later - they just don’t work that way.
It is up to YOU to decide to not allow this part of you to be taken away.
Reflect and remember
Schedule some time to have a think about how you have been treated in the last 12 months by your employer. Just think about it. Marinate in it.
Now, make some decisions.
Decide now the kind of scholar you are setting yourself up to be in the future, independent of what your external environment screams at you is URGENT URGENT URGENT every single day. Decide now to reclaim your research identity, your scholarly identity. You are not in fact a teaching robot zombie - this is not why you went through hell to get a PhD. There is just so much more to you than that.
Remember.
Then decide to do things differently.