This is an act of currere, the second in a series I began years ago.
A client once commented that it was difficult to see my specific area of expertise in relation to their articles of scientific research. My response? I pointed out that I was fairly well-versed in a wide range of fields, my readiness proven by the fact I’d edited 25 academic papers that half-year. This readiness stems from my work as an English teacher at universities.
In particular, a lot of that year’s work had been in biology (and, as particularly as possible, in botany). True, it might hardly seem related to any expertise of my own; my published works are dedicated to the social science of education. But that’s where I might begin to answer the question: Why biology?
My grad-level work introduced me to research methods that might be used in any social-scientific field, and while that may include statistical analyses of various kinds, I have dug deeper than that. On one side of that, anyway, I have dug into the messier matters of what goes into qualitative research. Messy because even qualitative research faces the challenges of being received as valid, robust or otherwise relevant and applicable for its target audience. Currere itself is a name I take for my continued activity, but one I have borrowed from my preferred way of thinking on methodology in education.
Within education, curriculum studies is where I have done my own research and publications. This is a multidisciplinary form of work, drawing on everything from psychoanalysis to political theory, and what I have made of it reflects how I got into grad school in the first place.
Going back to my undergraduate studies, I am truly a generalist and no specialist at all. Starting out, I didn’t just attend a small liberal arts college. While my peers were working on their majors or double-majors, I pursued an extremely unusual thing called a multdisciplinary honours programme. (Pardon the Canadian spelling; the college I attended was in Halifax, Nova Scotia.)
I have already written a little bit about my three (yes, three) majors, in classics, English and German—to which I added enough courses in art history and French literature that each of those could be counted as a minor field within the scope of my BA. In place of a specialization, therefore, I worked on a generalist foundation. I couldn’t even have entered my MEd degree, or any other graduate degree, without some form of work beyond that particular BA. It seems like destiny, now, that my continued work would be in education, as a committed teacher. I decided to go abroad and apply my BA, to work as a language teacher.
I thought I would start with Japan and keep moving from one country to another, but in Japan I found a whole life to live as well as too many fascinations, not to mention a good few distractions. So I stayed. At length of five or six years I was beginning to take on work at post-secondary institutions, and it felt like high time to get an advanced degree, to make sense of my claim to any “professor” sort of work. (By this time, my visa-eligibility status in Japan had gone from Specialist in Humanities to Professor.) In this way, most of my teaching across the last fifteen years has been at universities.
As happens for many in my position, faculty members around me to whom English was a second or foreign language had approached me for help with their papers, making me their editor. One researcher in particular has met with me on a weekly basis for twenty years now. He happens to be a botanist.
Meanwhile, my best chance at working as fluently and efficiently as I can for my clients lies with my strongest expertise—and now I have outlined that those lie in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, with some fluency in life sciences. Having taught English as additional language in Japan and Canada for nearly twenty years now, I know my grammar inside-out. I can always find a way or an example fit for the situation when some explicit instruction seems necessary, even at the most detailed level of mechanics, modalities, semantics and so on. If I seem prepared to apply this skill as an editor for a wildly diverse set of areas in the humanities and social sciences, even life sciences, it’s because my interests have always been that broad.
In a clever analysis I absorbed from a mentor many years ago, if the specialist’s education consists of learning more and more in an increasingly limited scope, the perfect end of such education is knowing everything about nothing. The other side of what my mentor said is roughly the path I have taken: towards the perfection of having learned nothing special about absolutely everything.
I acknowledge that nobody is perfect, and our life depends on all kinds of checks and balances. In that light, I have come to be a person who knows a little bit about all kinds of things. That’s my generalist side.
