How Much to Share?

As I mentioned in “Where to Start,” one of the questions I’ve recently considered is the question of, how much we should share online?

As I think through this question, I’m reminded of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work! (2014).

Published a little over a decade ago, Show Your Work! considers the question of how sharing one’s work online can boost creativity.

Counseling readers to “think about [their] work as a neverending process,” Kleon offers advice about “how to deal with the ups and downs of putting [oneself] and [one’s] work out in the world” (6).

Show Your Work! coins a phrase that I found particularly resonant: “learning in the open” (13).

As I mentioned in my previous post, what I most enjoyed about my time as a professor was the chance to do precisely what Kleon describes.

Part of my job was to practice and promote collaborative “learning in the open” in a classroom.

To some, this may seem paradoxical: after all, I was the professor.

Shouldn’t I already know it all? Wasn’t I there to deliver information?

My answer is “yes,” I was there to deliver information but “no” that doesn’t mean I ever knew everything there was to know, even about the subject (literature) that I taught.

More importantly, that wasn’t the point of “education” as I came to conceptualize the term.

I didn’t start out thinking this way. When I first became a professor, I was very aware of (what I thought was) the need to convey an “authoritative” persona in the classroom.

After all, they were paying me to stand at the front of the class.

I thought that if I didn’t at least appear to know it all, students wouldn’t respect me. They would take advantage of me and the classroom would devolve into a kind of chaos that would play out on subsequent evaluations of my teaching and jeopardize my career as a whole.

If this thought process sounds overly dramatic, it’s not: it’s the day-to-day reality of an untenured college professor. What happens in the classroom has significant consequences for a faculty member’s career.

That said, I soon discovered how wrong I was to think this way.

Instead, as months of teaching unfolded into years, I learned the value of “learning in the open.”

In particular, I made it a point to say “I don’t know” at least once a semester, usually in response to a student’s question.

If you’ve never considered standing in front of a crowd of TEENAGERS that you’re “in charge of” (somehow) and announcing that you “don’t know” what they might otherwise assume that you do (or should) … take a minute to consider doing so. (I’ll wait.)

I can tell you from experience, it’s terrifying.

And, ultimately, liberating.

What I quickly realized is that no one ever “took advantage” of my admission that I didn’t know something.

Instead, students usually seemed to respect me for it. Some even commented to that effect on my course evaluations from time to time.

I think that’s because saying “I don’t know” reminded them that I too am human. It offered a point of intellectual connection that we could build upon throughout the semester.

By definition, students always walk into a classroom “not knowing” something: that’s why they’re there.

The myth is that professors know—or are supposed to know— everything.

They don’t. They never have, they never did, and they never will.

And when you get right down to it, do any of us really want to spend an hour and a half two or three times a week listening to a self-proclaimed “know it all” tell us what to think?

Of course not.

What I also realized over the course of my career is that my students always walked into a classroom knowing a whole lot of things that I didn’t know.

The class sessions that I enjoyed the most were the ones in which we could effectively trade knowledges.

As Kleon points out , sharing intellectual vulnerability by “learning in the open” makes us more “interest-ing.”

In Show Your Work! Kleon argues that “to be ‘interest-ing’ is to be curious and attentive, and to practice ‘the continual projection of interest’” (77).

When you commit to “learning in the open,” you have to commit to being curious and attentive.

Because you are “interest-ing,” you can become “interesting.”

In a world that too often values (the surface appearance of) perfectionism, where internet trolls are perpetually poised to bait and berate us for our ignorance, my question is this:

Can we find more ways to practice and value learning in the open?