Find Your Why and Then Your How

This is going to be another shorter (?) post from me this week as I still work through some generalized exhaustion and a lot of emotionally heavy things in my life at the moment. 

I wanted to take a moment to talk about finding your why. A lot of discourse around mental health, career goals, and general productivity is framed about finding your why. What is the purpose of what you are doing, why is this important to you? Finding your why is also pretty foundational to pedagogical design. Why do you want learners to do a specific thing, read a particular article or book, complete a certain assignment? The why should of course lead to the overall goals and outcomes of your course. If upon reflection that why alignment is not necessarily clear then it may be time to think about the goals or think about the assessment you are requiring. Reinforcing the why also helps support learning because it increases overall transparency in course communication.

Finding the why is also very much tied to ethics, be that ethical pedagogy or an ethical way of being in the world. I have been thinking about finding the why a lot this week in relation to what my city is doing to unhoused folk. I find myself asking elected officials to contemplate on their whys, why did they become politicians? Why did they support or not support a certain thing? Finding your why and having it clearly articulated to yourself first, will help you articulate it well to others when they ask. What I am discovering is that for a lot of elected folk the why of those who elected them is actually very different than the why of those elected. Drastically different, like orders of magnitude different; the difference between photo ops and actually supporting policy different. 

Those who are in the educational field often have to write or reflect on some sort of statement. For instructors it could be a teaching philosophy; for educational developers an educational development philosophy. These are foundational find your why documents. In them you have the opportunity to reflect on why you do what you do, and how that connects to who you are as a person in terms of beliefs and values. It also allows an opportunity to speak to how you show your why.

Finding your why can at times be easier than the how you demonstrate it. The how often times is tied up in systemic barriers that prevent one from truly being able to demonstrate that why. This could be institutional policies, this could be lack of funding for initiatives, and many things of this nature. So what ends up happening sadly, is the how comes out as trite statements instead of impactful actions. There's a lot that has been written about this in terms of land acknowledgements and moving from a wrote acknowledgement statement to how you will put that statement and acknowledgement into practice. How are you supporting the Indigenous folk in your community? The gap between the statement and the actionable is quite large. In fact I would argue as the pandemic goes on these gaps between statements and actionables is increasing every day.

This why and how is always a work in progress. I know for me my why has been clear since I was a teenager. I want to be in the world in a way that is ethical, I want to actively listen to the voices of those teaching us and identifying their needs, I want to amplify, I want to disrupt systems that create barriers to accessing those needs in the first place. I want to acknowledge mistakes I have made and learn from those mistakes to honour communities and people.  How this is done for me is different in different spaces (because context is a thing). It could be continually identifying a gap and pushing those with power and privilege to remove barriers. It could be giving money when I can to an organization with outreach ability to support others. It could be holding space for someone to share and acknowledging that sharing and asking  what they may need in that moment. 

As we start preparing for September it would be a great time to find the why and the how. Without these, we risk hurting folk. Without these, we risk hurting ourselves and not realizing it until much later. And if you identify things you need that would help attaining that why (be it people, a group, a resource) and I can help with that in any way, please feel free to reach out on here or on Twitter. 

Comments

Popular Posts