To Build a Bridge: Reflections on an Academic Career in Education

by Michael S. Knapp

This volume explores how the work and career of academics in the education field can be understood as building bridges between people, ideas, and possibilities. Prompted by my own spare-time hobby of constructing footbridges to cross creeks in the Cascade Mountains, the metaphor provides a lens for examining what it can mean to engage in the scholarly and educative work expected of university-based academics. I pursue that exploration largely through reflections on my 35-year career in academia and educational research, with a focus on the practice of academic work—that is, what faculty in colleges of education do day-in, year-out as we teach (and prepare to teach), engage in research (and prepare to do so), advise and mentor students, share our work with public and professional audiences, and serve our local institution as well as the field and profession. Within that broad territory of academic practice, the book pays particular attention to what I call the infrastructure for knowledge development, teaching and learning, and community building. I also use the metaphor to underscore central purposes of education throughout the the building of bridges from people to possibilities. To be clear, this volume is not a memoir that traces my career from beginning to end. Nor is it a careful piece of scholarship that combs the literature for insights and advice on good practice for academics, though I refer to a few things that have been written on the subject. In a similar vein, this volume is not a systematic search for the way others may have used the bridge-building metaphor in academic writing. I make no claim to compre- hensiveness or uniqueness, nor do I do much to include a wide range of approaches that other academics have developed for doing academic work successfully. Rather, I use my experience as a vehicle to highlight, in the wisdom of hindsight, what seems important in our craft. Because I have participated in many aspects of this many-faceted enterprise, my experiences and the metaphor offer a useful starting point for thinking and talking about academic practice. But it is only one possible starting point. I leave it to others to suggest their metaphors, and add their insights to the conversation about what we do. It is a conversation academics engage in less than they could or should. Consider this volume one more prompt for sharing our thinking and experiences. The book is written for fellow academics, at any stage of their careers, especially at the front end, including “pre-academics”—graduate students who are considering academic work in a university or related setting. But I am also speaking to academics late in their careers or retirees like me who are trying to make sense of their life’s work. For all of us the book attempts to offer images of possibility for academic practice in scholarship, teaching, advising, and participation in a collegial community. The examples and discussion probe enduring challenges confronting academics if not all educators, especially related to inequities, and the ultimate challenge of bridging the divide between the university-based world of ideas and the world of everyday practice in schools, districts, higher education institutions, and community settings.

230 pages, Paperback

Published September 23, 2016