Writing Emerged from the Shadows to Become Main Career
From avocation to vocation
For as far back as I can remember, I have believed that in order to really know something, I had to write it down. I usually take lots of notes at meetings. When I think, I often see diagrams, whole pages, or words in my mind.
One of my rules for program development and planning is “If you can’t draw or diagram it, you can’t do it.” When I begin a new project or program, I always draw a model before I write a narrative. If I can’t draw the model, then I know that my reasoning is fuzzy and others will not understand what I am proposing. My models are often circles. Network organizations are circular, and I believe in them, especially for the 21st century. Women prefer and understand networks and collaborative, interdependent enterprises. I do not favor hierarchical box/line organizational charts. Those “command and control” organizations are more comfortable for men than for women.
The root of my preference for visual learning and for writing things down can be found in the fact that I lost the hearing in my left ear when I was an infant, so I don’t really trust what I hear as much as what I see. I have adapted pretty well to hearing with only one ear. For example, I plan my seat at the table so people are on my right, if possible. But as I grow older and the acuity of my right ear begins to fade, I must pay even better attention to what people are saying, and I read lips even more. Therefore, I must see you in order to hear you!
That hearing condition led me to become a speech pathologist in my first career, which lasted for about 18 years—from my senior year in college to age 39, when, as a mother of three, I began my career in higher education. By that time, language development and use had become very important to me. In addition to drawing models of new adult education programs, I used language as a strategy for change.
For example, when I became the founding director of the University Without Walls program at Loretto Heights College in Denver in 1971, I invented learning contracts, learning stipends, upside down degrees, advisement faculty as opposed to instructional faculty, community-based learning resources, and other concepts that I could define from the start. My colleagues across the country and I created “credit for prior non-college learning,” which relied on extensive oral and written language skills to create learning portfolios, which were extensively evaluated by individual faculty members and committees made up of both faculty and expert resource persons from the community. We developed procedures for evaluating individualized degree plans, which also required adult students to explain their plans orally to a committee, much like doctoral students do, and to write and revise their plans multiple times. We created competency-based academic transcripts, which were bulky and detailed, long before we had computers in which to store such documents. We were not the favorite program of registrars. No one knew exactly what these new concepts and documents were because they had not existed before in the academic world. So we had to explain them all in writing.
