Meta: Learning or Teaching

"My “assignment” for this week was to come up with something short—less than one page—talking about what I want to learn…it threw me…first, it threw me because I’m thinking about how long the dissertation has to be, and how fuzzy my ideas have been for years, the concept of getting it down under a page seems so counterproductive. On the one hand, I know that it’s often harder to write a one page paper than it is to write a ten page paper—because to get your thoughts clean enough to fit in a page requires some serious thinking. (And that’s part of my problem; I think it’s going to take a lot more than one page to really get my ideas clean, so that’s a tough order.)

The other thing that threw me with that “assignment” was the phrase “what you want to learn”…I keep thinking about it in terms of what I want to teach my reader, or what I want to “prove”, that the idea that the proposal (and the dissertation) as a learning experience seemed counter-intuitive as well. Learning seems so freeing—the ability to explore and follow issues where they lead—I’m thinking about the dissertation as knowing where I’m going and just gathering the information to get me there (convincingly—this is a dissertation about rhetoric, after all). I’m not thinking about using the dissertation to learn something new—that’s what the work leading up to the dissertation is for (and granted, that’s where I am, so it’s not that big a deal, I suppose), and granted, there are little moments of learning all the time, but to think of the project as something with learning at its core threw me.