Autoethnographic reflections on composing (and being composed by) an academic career: Cultivating and navigating inner compasses within institutional terrains

By Liora Bresler

Informed by intellectual pursuits, academic journeys are as experiential as they are conceptual, responsive to encounters with people and ideas that shape our thinking and being. Even with the growing focus on professional careers, the experiential aspects of academic work-lives rarely enter the research literature. The journey portrayed in this paper (Bresler, 2022) traces some core values embedded in my early experiences and manifested throughout my career. It attends to the orchestration of the various academic ensembles in which I found myself (and later, sought actively) as well as the performative aspects of academia. While grounded within my specific circumstances and the domains of music, the arts, and qualitative research in the social sciences, the issues addressed in this article underlie academic trajectories across disciplinary and geographical cultures. It is written as an invitation for the reader to weave in their own experiences in an engaged counterpoint of consonances and dissonances.

The reciprocal relationships between creating and being created struck me when I came across Parker Palmer’s notion (Palmer, 1998) that “We teach who we are”, recognizing that the reverse was equally true -- we are and become what we teach. While teaching was clearly an expression of who I was, it also created a path for what I could become, an opportunity to cultivate sensitivities and understanding that were engaged and alive. The companionship of students on that path was integral to the journey. While I was composing and leading this journey, the journey led and composed me. In my aesthetic education courses, for example, I was moved by the encounters with vibrant artworks, some familiar, others new to me, as well as by diverse theoretical interpretations of the arts that lent themselves to ever-deepening layers of meanings; by students’ wholehearted processing of the theories and aesthetic experiences from their multiple perspectives; and by inspired artists and arts pedagogues who shared with our class wise practices and credos. The very same dynamics that operated in teaching was clearly evident in my research projects. Research proposals, like course syllabi, involved setting an intention, articulating an aspiration and composing a path towards it. I composed proposals, design and techniques, and was composed by the encounter with research participants and settings. I came to think of the unfolding understandings of my inquiry as “mutual absorption”, a term coined by art historian John Armstrong in relation to art appreciation that matched with the experience of research.

The commonalities of experiences between my engagement with qualitative research and with the arts struck me when introduced to John Dewey’s definition of art as intensified experience (Dewey, 1934). Both the arts and qualitative research provide an intensity of engagement that expands my perception, and invites me to see (and hear) more. This early realization marked a beginning of exploration of the ways that the arts presented vision and inspiration, and as importantly, provided specific tools for inquiry – listening, observing, conceptualizing, and communicating.

References

Armstrong, J. (2000). Move closer: An intimate philosophy of art. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Bresler, L. (2022). The form, rhythm, and orchestration of an academic career: Cultivating and navigating inner compasses within institutional terrains. Research Studies in Music Education, 44(1).
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Perigee Books.
Parker, P. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

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Article Details
The form, rhythm, and orchestration of an academic career: Cultivating and navigating inner compasses within institutional terrains
Liora Bresler
First Published August 26, 2021
Research Studies in Music Education

Author Details

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Liora Bresler is Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois (College of Education & College of Fine and Applied Arts), and a Professor II at HVL, Norway. Intrigued by the personal, social, and aesthetic, dimensions of meaning making, her work has centered on music and arts education in formal and informal settings, and on qualitative research methodologies, including narrative and aesthetic-based inquiry. Liora is the editor of the book series “Landscapes: Aesthetics, the arts and education” and the co-founder of the International Journal of Education and the Arts. Her work was translated to German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Lithuanian, Finnish, Korean, and Chinese, and she has presented keynotes, invited talks and seminars in 35 countries across the five continents.