There are times that we are called to pave our own paths by being rejected from the mainstream paths. This is what happened with my PhD. I wrote a PhD about how dissonance can be a disruptive force that either encourages dissonance reduction strategies (staying on the path of habits and routines), or paves a new path of reflexivity, breaking out of existing assumptions and breaking open to embrace others’ perspectives. In the work, I showed and analyzed the learning process for those students who were able to take the alternative path. I showed how, through a facilitation of dissonance and a focus on process, students could be held and guided to embrace the dissonance and allow it to disrupt their own understandings of themselves. I shared their words and reflections, including their insecurities and confessions, the way they landed in uncomfortable truths, or just shared the discomfort of not feeling like they landed in any truth. The stories were very different, but each corresponded to the way they were able to undo a particular dissonance reduction strategy in themselves.
The assessment committee repeatedly rejected my research (three times), and with each rejection, I had my own dissonance reduction strategy to observe. Ultimately, the overarching pattern to undo was the fight towards having a committee validate this work. This fight was done by trying to conform, then trying to rebel, and finally putting down my weapons to surrender. That surrender made it possible for me to follow and carve a different path, an unknown one, which has no expectations and no guarantees. But it is time, and I am not the only one. I see a lot of people realizing that their struggle to fit in the mainstream may be the greatest opportunity to lead in the type of change that their hearts have desired for a long time. I often feel like gathering these people together in one room, but for now this blog post will have to do that work.
Some may still be wondering – why did the committee reject this work? What was their reasoning? This is a story that has a lot of different perspectives and dimensions to account for, if I want to do it justice. So for the purpose of this blog post, I will offer just one perspective, hoping the reader will keep in mind that this is only one way to see it. The PhD was done in a business school, with its own frameworks and trends of what constitutes original research. What appears to be the trend these days is to flip the good and prove it is actually bad. Studies that take something we appreciate – sustainability, humanitarian aid, digitalization – and show the darker side of these phenomena seem to gain the most traction. I have learned a lot from these studies, and I am not slamming this approach, because it also dislodges a belief system that helps us grow. My research was rather unfolding a learning process, instead of showing its darker side. But the committee wanted me to show the limits of reflexivity, or to show how the facilitation of reflexivity reveals an oppressive power struggle, where students could be manipulated or forced to be reflexive. They stated:
“Another possibility was to do a critical analysis of the power relations at play through the corporeal and affective politics of the facilitator-student relations in and beyond the management classroom; how the ways of facilitating reflexivity define what and who counts as ‘good’ in certain practices, about what expressions and emotions get recognized as ‘reflexive’; how that subjugates students in performing themselves as reflexive in forceful ways, and how that might teach them to think, act, and perform reflexivity and ‘negative capability’ along those specific lines outside the classroom – both as intended, but maybe also with unintentional side-effects (e.g. manipulation or ‘faking it’).”
Because of these suggestions, also stated in previous assessments, I included more reflections in the work on the possibility that students could fake their reflections in order to get a good grade. But I could not, with integrity, refocus the findings on these type of reflections, because I did not believe they were central to the research. The assessment committee rejected this work because they claimed they could not learn anything new, but in making these suggestions, they ironically demonstrate what they would consider ‘new’ learning. They critique my work for not having surprising findings, but they offer what they would consider surprising – would these really be surprising? Or simply fit into their framework of what is new and original?
As I see it, the assessment committee rejected my work because they were tied to a certain framework of what constitutes learning. This is also what I continuously stress to my own students, when I facilitate the workshops, that the learning process in this classroom may be different than how we were conditioned to learn, where after every class, you can clearly say what you learned. The course was a process of observation and reflection, the learning hidden in subtle shifts of reflection focus. It is this process itself that is the learning, not meant to be checked off as testable learning outcomes. The way that students increasingly paid attention to the process is the way they learned. And in this way, the result of the PhD is perfectly aligned to demonstrate this – the result failed so that the process can shine. And now I feel all the more emboldened to carve this alternative path of learning, instead of giving power to existing frameworks and then being forced to defend my stance. This fight is over.
- Tali Padan, PhD, EBD (Everything But Defense)