I’m in my MSW, right? (Master of Social Work – LMSW leading.)

And I’m who I am.

These posts I have written about these experiences have been mine, all mine. The parts that weren’t based on my experience and educational background knowledge weren’t.

GCU (Grand Canyon University; CSWE accredited), took a stand for disability rights. And it was done under proper ethical standards and rights within systemic changes.

And that, my friend, is where we begin our story today.

For the past 8 weeks, I was enrolled in a public policy course. I loved the research and stated in the opening sequence “I have been a victim to many of the systems we are going to discuss in this course,” maybe not so clearly to others – but maybe that was unclear to others, the true meaning of it to me.

I stated a good portion of my educational and academic background.

It seemed clear to me that a 26-year-old in a junior executive program and systems assessment and management role is not someone who is speaking from cursory knowledge and life experiences. (My assessment and management are process improvement policies centered around qualitative data collection within HR, data visualization improvement in executive staff meetings for CEO analysis, customer satisfaction/needs implementation, and subject matter expertise evaluating 508 needs/compliance/accessibility across print/web media.) My role is not something the average 26-year-old could accomplish, and thats not only OK, it’s helped us grow.

I assumed that many students could grasp that “I took 15-person graduate seminars and statistical analysis” conveyed that my economics classes begin somewhere in the upper division undergraduate levels of others and the 400 means 700 in other domains. But I also misunderstood many of them never took the special interest lectures.

But then I understood another perspective issue – I was a data scientist, a term that when combined with an instructional designer, makes people all confused at you. People don’t know what my degree credits actually show a school.

Throw in a 250-credit undergraduate degree, 180 credits of which were upper-division (I’m assuming), and around 66 credits of those were the “these are really 700 level introductory doctoral research within the field,” and wow, talk about education.

I learned some of the best insider research from professors who I never would have known to talk to. I was 20 at the time, throwing questions at the professor on the minuta of the research and talking about that. Was I getting it wrong? OH, definitely at times.

And yet, it taught me to stick to my side and find the research that demonstrates my argument better than before. Maybe it was my data and not my commentary. Some professors said my presentation on paper was so different than my debates in class, and it made for a great researcher, they were telling me.

Then add in 24 clinical credits, 12 theology credits, and 18 finance credits at a documented 500-700 level. Now we’re cooking with gas – with a firehose on the end.

Learning from professors who have really cool research areas helped fuel my desire to ask the questions we really, truly needed the answers to.

As a data scientist, I learned that background knowledge in instructional design applications serves to share a narrative. I was in policy analysis, and my stated positionality statement at the beginning was really rare, I think.

Not for lack of respect to me within their communication or from me to them within this, but my experience is atypical. All around a d-12, it is atypical.

I write like a high level researcher, as I remember the technical knowledge very well. I can cite a lot of data at someone, and often have utilized it so frequently the level of papers I now see it cross-referenced within are way too high level for social work policy analysis.

I write like a data scientist who cannot figure out which audience perspective we’re going for based on someone’s stated position. I try to answer a lot of assumed questions and problems in my “how-to” style guide. Many times within my policy analysis class I would respond back to data with my stated positionality and experience. To my professor, I think she acutally referenced back my introduction and realized I was simply confused.

Part of me realized that policy analysis to them was different. They hadn’t taken graduate microeconomic theory and international policy and managerial economics. Where my brain could talk about economic implications all day, these students couldn’t. I didn’t mind one bit, though. But part of (a big part of) my professional teaching and training knowledge got the better of me and the process improvement part of me snapped.

To many fellow students, I now see their responses as their response of misunderstanding my highly stylized experience based on my knowledge of pattern recognition and trainings I had taken, to be misinterpreted not as/within/and uniquely of instrutional design and proposal writing methods and associated qualitative questions.

Where a writer doesn’t understand the plethora of questions from the reader, a 508-compliance specialist and disability access consultant does. A highly enough trained instructional designer can combine these – under the guide of a data scientist, who tells you exactly what data we need to pull. The designer makes it sound better, and the compliance and accessiblity make sure all ability levels benefit from use equitably.

I am a creative government proposal writer. One of the key deals with these proposals is speaking in their language. In a policy class, one of my underlying assumptions was that the class knew a defense contractor junior executive spoke the government language.

Throughout the course, some students would get flabbergasted at my often lengthy, in-depth responses. These would integrate an example into the research. I was using narrative inquiry (a helpful policy advocacy method) to stake my claim. I ended up being the most ethical of it, though in how I referenced only ideas of group COT sessions and my story was the only one I divulged, as it was the only ethical thing.

Writing for a government proposal is actually quite different from academic writing. This is a matter of overall holisitc metadata within informal survey collection, though. These proposals don’t need you to say “I know because of experience x/y/z” but rather need you to show through a concrete example walkthrough that you understand the task at hand.

The school, GCU, responded with feedback on how academic writing differs and integrated it into course instructions for all students to see.

One of my first experiences in the professional world (meeting people, learning skills, seeing what it meant to acquire specialized labor) was volunteering as a small group leader in children’s ministry. I learned teaching skills, that’s for sure.

My next experiences were combinations and back-and-forths of finance and money; and teaching and helping others. I have had really fancy jobs and really mundane jobs. The ones that I stayed at were ones where the boss seemed worth learning from.

When I entered the next sequence of courses for my MSW, it became really clear that a lot of students didn’t understand my job or that I write like a teacher/instructional designer with the case study mind of a narrative writer who holds clinical ethics firm.

There are times we talk about the details and times we don’t.

Thank you, GCU, for responding with proper ethics.

Allowing the feedback of “cite background knowledge, you are not an academic authority at this level” made a confused student understand well how to deal with this. Some of us think our narratives are understood as narrative and analytical comment to mimic a policy method obtained to professionally disclose such details.

When this gets lost, may we all be able to respond by asking for what we need, rather than taking the benefit away?

“Clarify what is your experience, and what is not” solved my issues.

Thank you in the response of knowing that some of us are not bad students, just ethical people whose ethics outweigh often our ability to remember the practices we must use.

The humor of it all? This began when I realized the ancillary research I was using was not something they were able to talk about and I couldn’t figure out what they did know.

It was hard to know what their academic and professional levels were.

I am still mortified I insulted many well-meaning people.

To infinity, and using the damn research others will misuse!

XOXO,

Dorothy B