meta: automatic writing; topic: book pitch

As an eighth-grade teacher, I used to have students practice their writing skills by doing timed writings. I would give them a length of time (generally short--five or ten minutes most times) and tell them that they had to be writing that entire time. If I saw them stop writing, I would tell them to write anything, even if it was "I don't know what to write" or their name over and over again, and (with the exception of the students who thought it the greatest act of rebellion to spend the entire time writing their name for the entire time) for all students, even the most stuck, the simple act of forcing something out would eventually bring them around to writing something; so much so that at the end of the time I would tell students to put their pencils down and they would continue to write, begging me for long enough to finish the sentence, or for one more minute.

You would think that I would be smart enough to recognize that the same technique can work for dissertations; but you'd be wrong. For some reason, even though I can pitch a pretty convincing argument in the paragraph above for just sitting down to write, I can't seem to actually sit myself in front of any verbal recording apparatus long enough, or with enough consistency, to actually write something. So this post is an attempt to force myself to practice this art--what Jack Kerouac called "automatic writing" (though for him, it was more a Zen-like experience about creating a narrative without using the conscious mind).

I don't know what to write; I don't know what to write; I don't know what to write (I have to admit, there is a certain, perhaps Zen-like, beauty to just repeating that sentence.) I feel like my thoughts about the dissertation have been a more elaborate variation on that exercise--"reformulating my question" again and again, but essentially, each time coming out with another version of "I don't know what to write." So in attempting to try to get out of the trap I think I'm setting for myself, I'm trying to think of the dissertation, not as a "research question" or "what I want to learn" but as a book proposal: what am I trying to pitch to my committee (as a "publisher") to convince them that there's an audience for.

In that spirit, Ch. 1 would be about "who cares" or "why does this matter", where I would talk about how 1) most policymakers haven't studied education; 2) most people feel that because they experienced education, they're qualified to make judgments about its proper execution (ignoring the concept that things may have changed in the thirty years since they experienced it); 3) most people's experience with education policy is through the media; 4) that most journalists are more concerned with fulfilling the norms of journalism than with explicating the philosophical worldviews inherent in different policy prescriptions; 5) [note how I'm focusing on just keeping writing--this would be a rather unwieldy first chapter, no matter how structured] 6) there is no six; 7) therefore, the way media talk about education matters.

Ch. 2 would talk about how the way we talk about things matters (either the theoretical orientation, or maybe the lit review--since it's about who's involved in this conversation). So there I'd want to cover some of the basic stuff like Frank Luntz's points, as well as some of the more abstract philosophizing like Gramsci.

Ch. 3 would then try to show how what's out there in the media is presenting an inadequate version of education policy: one way (maybe in a chapter all to itself) could be to do "reframings" (something I've done a time or two before where I try to basically adhere to the tone of a typical newspaper story and cover the same event from various perspectives--highlighting some things and minimizing others). Another way could be to show how the same perspectives keep getting all the play and how competing perspectives are silenced (either "quantitatively" by pointing out the number of times and ways a given perspective shows up, or "qualitatively" by talking about what rhetorical structurings make it more powerful in the debate or less so--or both...but how much is too much to bite off here?) Another way could be to do a different type of "reframing", one where I take a current, non-education issue, and I frame it in the terms of current education debates (ex., a parallel to NCLB's achievement testing in the medical field would determine if the hospital was a good one by the state of all the patients on a given Tuesday in March at 10:14a.m. Hospitals with too many patients in the ICU would be seen as not working hard enough to get those patients well--"because all patients can recover", and anyone who doesn't believe that is simply abandoning hope on our most vulnerable patients and causing them to lose out on the "high standards" of care that they deserve. To prevent that, we would strip hospital funding if everyone in the hospital wasn't healthy by 2014. And so on...). These "thought experiments" (if you will) can help non-policymakers understand the issues policymakers are really facing without forcing them to follow an elaborate constructivist worldview argument.

OK, time's up...how's that?