Shifting the discourse through public scholarship
We are immensely excited to feature a conversation with Associate Professor Antero Garcia of the Stanford Graduate School of Education on the value of public scholarship and how to begin engaging with it. Professor Garcia studies how technology and gaming shape youth learning, literacy practices, and civic identities and has used his research to inform numerous public-facing projects outside of academia. We are grateful to Professor Garcia for sharing his time and perspectives.
Jacob Ramirez (JR): Dr. Garcia, looking at your website, I noticed that you have a whole section dedicated to “writing for general audiences.” This seems highly relevant to the Public Scholarship Collaborative (PSC)’s goal of connecting with scholars and putting their research out there in a way that is more accessible and digestible to the general public. And so the question I’d like to ask to get our conversation started is, can you tell us about the ways in which you've engaged in public scholarship?
Antero Garcia (AG): My background comes from being a classroom teacher for a long time in Los Angeles, and that is still a large part of my identity and of how I affiliate around here. Before becoming an academic, I was writing for teacher audiences pretty often, in places like Rethinking Schools. Even today, I try to write the standard academic article, and then alongside write the article that is for teacher practitioner audiences. This ends up in places like English Journal, which is for secondary English teachers, or Kappan, which is like a broad teacher magazine. I also come from a journalism background. Before becoming a teacher, I was a music journalist, like going to concerts and writing about them, but just couldn't pay the bills doing that, and so I became a teacher. I've always liked writing and I like what writing can do in terms of my theory of change, and just the ways that words might connect to people.
Lately, I've been trying to do more op-eds and writing for public audiences. This kind of writing is harder and faces even more rejection, I think, as you get closer and closer to the public. But things like having your own blog or having your own Twitter account, or whatever it is, gives you free access to do what you want to do in those spaces. There are some risks to that but also opportunities. I think this will come up as a question, but one of the real challenges around writing for public audiences is that there is not as much of a payoff in writing publicly, especially for folks who are getting their PhD or trying to pursue further higher education, as much as there are real risks if you say something and you get pitchforks coming after you. I think that's one kind of challenge. Is public scholarship worth it? Is it valued within the academy? At least in a place like Stanford–it looks nice, but if you're not doing the kinds of regular publishing stuff that will get you a job after getting a degree here, then it's less encouraged.
JR: Definitely, that totally makes sense. So this kind of build off to another question we had: what do you feel makes public scholarship so important?
AG: I think democratization is really important. As you kind of pointed to, we make it so that the public can't access our research in a bunch of ways. One is that the way we write is pretty bad, right? We write impenetrably, use big words, and use semicolons. It’s just messy writing, and few academics are good writers. So that is one way we block out others. Two, the majority of our work is either in academic books on university presses or are just super expensive books. You can buy a Routledge book and it is like $80 for a softcover and $130 for a hardcover because only librarians buy it. These books are not stocked in mainstream bookstores, so you can't even get access to them. Journals likewise, require a subscription. So this is another way we block access from people. If our work, particularly within the School of Education, is purportedly about public good and much of it is federally funded, that's supposed to improve the world. It does feel a little ironic that we do this in venues and avenues where people can't access it, and in words that are impenetrable, even if they could access it. I think this is where part of this work is trying to figure out the ways where we can be transformative and transformational with our work, and this is my theory of change around it.
JR: Yeah, that's fantastic, thank you so much. You already guessed right that this would probably come up as a question, but regarding challenges, is there anything more you'd want to talk about?
AG: I think the big challenge is the fact that public scholarship isn't valued and it takes time to do this work. If you’re gonna write an op-ed or a blog or something like that, it's one of those things that is nice to do, but you need to get other stuff done first. As a result, a lot of us aren't very good at knowing how to do this kind of writing. So I imagined this is probably what a lot of the PSC’s work is - trying to build up a voice, communicating a complex idea in a way that the public can actively engage with. It’s one thing to make knowledge accessible but if it’s still boring, people aren’t going to read it.
I think the other big barrier is the risk of putting yourself out there around contested areas/topics in education. What are the kinds of public backlash that may need to be dealt with? How do we prepare young scholars, particularly those engaging in topics that are salient to the public discourse? How do we protect and enable writers to communicate what they want to say? When I was first a professor in Fort Collins, Colorado, I was pretty vocal about a restaurant that I thought had a racist name. This led to a bunch of threats and I felt unsupported by my colleagues. I've also done really nerdy research on tabletop role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons. It turns out when you question race and gender politics in tabletop games, the fans of these games can be vocal and pretty upset. So these are times where I was resilient. The backlash did not bother me, but I think about family and safety. When your information gets put online, there are real risks around how we do this work (for example some real physical and emotional risks) that we need to think about. There is the risk of investing time in projects for public scholarship which can take away time from completing deliverables necessary for one’s work.
JR: That totally makes sense. Then, especially for people who are taking on these risks, what would you say should be the main goal for what you're trying to achieve or attain through public scholarship?
AG: That's a good question. The reason I do all this work is because I'm hoping to get more and more people to think differently about something they might have not thought about. So, a lot of the op-ed writing I do is alongside teachers, students, community members, folks who oftentimes don't have a PhD or master's degree at the end of their names to show that they're an expert. But they have just as much expertise as everyone in this building does. A lot of what I try to do is bring folks in and write alongside them and use the social capital around me to do this work with them. So it's not just now you need to figure out your voice and write in a way that's communicating to the public, but do that alongside someone who might not be brought up with the same kinds of competence - to broaden what expertise looks like and to help shift how we understand the world. Even if we are at Stanford and not actively engaging in shifting discourse, what is the utility of the work that we do?
JR: You talked a little bit about the ways that you bring in other scholars or even non-academics to be able to do this work. I'm wondering for an early Career Scholar, what advice would you give them if they're trying to meaningfully engage in public scholarship?
AG: My advice would be to first be careful and not jump into writing something just because it is for the public. Public-facing writing should be about something that you really care for and have strong feelings about. No one wants a book report. Generally, even book reviews are only interesting if they’re engaging with something that is timely. I think my advice would be, go shorter rather than longer. Make your ideas simple. If you have a 14-point chain of logic that you need to convey with a piece of writing, maybe make that a 2 or 3 chained argument in an op-ed or something like that. That’s where mentorship and expertise could help, which I think the PSC provides for students by pairing them with experts/scholars. A number of times, an editor will look at something, not even read the whole thing before they reject it. So your writing needs to be crisp and the first couple sentences need to grab your attention. I think this is just the opportunity to be as clear and engaging as possible. That would be my advice for writing these pieces: simpler, shorter, more interesting.
JR: So what does equity in education mean to you?
AG: This is a bigger question. Equity in education is about moving towards freedom, joy, happiness. The ways we measure equity are probably incorrect. We tend to measure things in terms of demographics. For example, we talk a lot about things like the reading progress going up, or the number of people matriculating, graduating, employment increasing, as if it’s a zero-sum game. For me, equity should focus on questions such as: do we live in a world where everybody can do the thing that makes them happy? It sounds fuzzy and silly, but if my kids can’t grow up in a place where they can do what makes them happy, then I’m not sure why my work is going to be very meaningful in the first place. As someone who does literacy research with a learning sciences background and is a gamer, the point of equity is about bringing inclusive voice into learning and academic proficiency. All that stuff should be towards a bigger metric of joy.
JR: Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you would like to comment about regarding public scholarship?
AG: I think it can feel scary. My advice would be to be comfortable with rejection both in public scholarship and academic scholarship. Oftentimes folks in this building believe that we float on air, and everything gets accepted. The reality is I get rejected all the time - from grants, to op-eds to public writing for academic writing. Recognizing that rejection is part of the scholarship process can be helpful but it doesn't make it any easier. It feels awful every time I get rejected. My advice to scholars who face rejection is to take a step back and remove yourself from spaces that will lead to mental fatigue, particularly in the kind of state of the world right now.
Professor Garcia has provided us with valuable insights into the importance of engaging in public scholarship and how we can begin to do so ourselves in our own domains of interest. We are grateful for Professor Garcia’s candid presentation of the challenges and risks of doing public scholarship and his encouragement and advice on how to push forward and overcome them.
See additional work by Professor Antero Garcia:
- La Cuenta - A weekly newsletter co-edited by Dr. Garcia focused on centering the voices, expertise, and resources of members of the undocumented community.
- A list of general writing and select media appearances on Dr. Garcia's website
