Today, I received an email notifying me that an excerpt–due to space considerations–of a recent entry I wrote would appear in the Letters to the Editor section for The District Administration publication.

I’m an editor at District Administration magazine and one of our editors saw your blog posting about your “disappointment” shall we say, about the Renzulli Learning story in June 2008. I am going to run part of your blog entry in our Letters to the Editor section in August. It’s interesting and real.

If you’re the editor that reads this blog and saw that posting, thanks for sharing it.

One of the follow-up questions from the editor was, “What’s your District?” I immediately shuddered and experienced my own pre-flight checklist for the nightmare that assails any writer who writes professionally and whose employer might take objection to their writing. Doug Belshaw called it the Censorship and the Personal/Professional Divide. Doug shared in that entry:

I made a passing comment that compared one type of VLE to another. The company whose VLE product I did’t rate very well threatened me (via my school) with legal proceedings. 😮 The upshot was that I felt it was in my best interests to remove the ‘offending’ paragraph so as to not cause difficulties within my school.

I replaced it with one that, in my eyes, was more damaging to the VLE vendor: that they’d almost forced me to remove any criticism (however slight) by referring to ‘legal proceedings’ in their communication with my school.

Doug’s action was a bit extreme but I can understand his follow-up move is even MORE devastating.

In my case, it’s pretty easy to find out who I work for (and they apparently found out, emailing our District’s Communications Officer, and I promptly shared the entry with her), but I shudder to think what might happen if edubloggers had to face the wrath of vendor companies trying to manage their image a la Web 1.0, helped in many cases by mass production, factory model education administrators who seek to maintain good relations with vendors at the expense of interchangeable employees. It’s not a pretty thought. Fortunately, perceptions are changing and knowledge is increasing.

Here was my response:

Howdy! I’d rather my district’s name were kept out of the publication. After all, it is MY professional opinion. You may list me as an edublogger and list my web site’s address. Or, you may list me as an education consultant. Or, you can list me as a citizen-journalist or freelance writer.

When I began writing many years ago, I was proud to share my writing with my employer (a school district in East Texas). But I quickly learned that it was important to keep my employer’s name out of the big lights. Here’s why:

As time went by, interviewing with new districts and/or service centers, I kept having to listen to an expectation I wouldn’t publish anything without obtaining approval first. I decided to ignore that requirement for publication, except to let my immediate supervisor know. The formal approval process took months (no, I’m not kidding) and after trying that once or twice, I realized that a message was being sent.

It was during my work for a regional service center, where I essentially published my writing in journals in fear that I would be discovered and called before the Executive Director to answer for writing about ed-tech in Texas schools, that I committed to writing and publishing no matter what. After all, if people are afraid of what *I* write, then the state of Democracy and education is in a lot worse shape than any of us thought.

Today, I received–in a separate email–more vindication that it was important I share the stories I wrote about in published journals but that would never have seen the light of day if I’d asked for approval first. This email states the following:

I’ll add another feather to your hat…As you know, I am working on my principalship, so my current class is on Instructional Leadership and mostly it is about Technology and Technology Integration….I just thought you would be interested to know that a few of your articles have been included as required readings.

The truth, of course, is a bit harsher. I could look at that success from a different perspective. Out of all the writing done, only a few articles were authentic and reflective of the reality that resonates with professors that they included them as required readings.

In a chapter by Sara B Kajder entitled Unleashing Potential with Emerging Technologies, a student named Max shares about writing that matters (which doesn’t happen in school). Max says:

“It doesn’t matter when or where–if I’m thinking and there is something that I’m burning to share or express, I do it. I write as much for getting my ideas out as I do to see the comments and responses of those who are listening and reacting. In school, writing is about handing something in. Here, it’s about having something to say.”

Often, I think the writing we do as adults in education systems is stilted, focus on being politically correct, and without power that is enabling/empowering of others. That’s why when educators describe themselves, they describe people that are powerless to enact change, who aren’t responsible for teaching and learning, and that literacy without an attitude has to have an effect.

Sir Ken Robinson recently shared in a presentation that there are 3 types of people: 1) People who are Immovable; 2) People who are Movable; and 3) Those who move.

I’d like to think that writers, bloggers fall into the final category, struggling with their fears to write what they see and understand and share it with others…and maybe, move the world.

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