Spent the last two weeks feeling completely overwhelmed - that's a word that gets used too often, but I think it is the best word for the experience. It started when I got sick. Usually I can just keep going (with a fair bit of whining) and power my way through a sickness but this time I was in bed for two days - I even missed a hockey game.It was then that I realized how little margin there is in my time. I have spent the last two weeks trying to pick up the dropped balls in all areas of my life. That put me behind in reading and writing assignments for my PhD classes.I had a hard time getting everything done for church. I made a promise that I wouldn't carve time out from my family to do my studies and it was very tempting to go back on this promise. They are the easiest people to rob time from - but they are also the most important and so I fought the urge, handed in some papers late and kept playing catch-up.

For the first time in a long time I felt good about my productivity yesterday. I locked myself in the home office and plowed through several articles and finished off a couple more papers. Part of my problem is that I forget about time when I am interacting with the material I am studying. Much like a jogger who loses track of the miles when 'runner's high' kicks in, I can literally have the day evaporate when I get immersed in a text (sort of a 'reader's high'). Lately I have been totally geeked on the post-structuralist writings of Bonnie Norton (who I saw at TESL 2009), Homi Bhabha, Claire Kramsch, etc. Of particular interest is their (re)conceptualization of identity and the creation of a third place when cultures intersect.

In another class I have been reading Chinese philosophers Suntze (The Art of War) and Laotze (The Tao Te Ching) and waxing elequently on their advice to leaders. I have read The Tao Te Ching before, but I was younger and didn't get it. I decided to come back to it when I was older and had a better shot at understanding it. Well, I didn't get it at 15 and I am still fuzzy at 39 so I guess I will try again at 55 or so. One of Laotze's big things is this idea of Wei Wu Wei (action without action) or just letting stuff take its own course. I was thinking about it this last week in how it might connect with modern living and one of the guys on my hockey team gave me a great illustration of it (although to be honest he never actually referred to it as "an exemplar manifestation of the Taoist concept of "wei wu wei"). We won our game and so everybody was a little chattier in the dressing room afterwords and talked about the pucks that went in and the numerous near misses. That's when John said "The problem with the last chance was I had too much time to think about it...if I would've just shot it I would have scored. I always play better when I just play and don't think about it" I was about to point out how that lines up with the Tao Te Ching's teaching, but decided to just keep unlacing my skates. It would've been another case of 'too much thinking.'

Migwec,
Ehkosit.

It is all lining up...

Since September I have been trying to figure out how to make everything fall into alignment - how do I make my PhD bring benefit to (1) my work as a pastor, (2) my background in linguistics and TESOL and (3) introduce an original contribution to the academy.

On Oct 2 I ran out to the TESL Canada Conference because it was in my backyard (well technically in Banff but I have a pretty big backyard). The keynote for the day was Dr. Bonnie Norton. She presented on Identity and Language Learning. It was amazing! She was answering questions I was trying to formulate on multiculturalism and the multiple identities L2 learners hold. One of the thinkers she referenced was Homi Bhabha from Harvard. I have spent the week working through articles from Norton and Bhabha. Both authors talk a lot about the Third Space that gets created when cultures come together - in a society (Bhabha), in a classroom (Norton), or in church (c'est moi).

I finally have a sense of what my research will look like. I want to look at the way that we 'translate culture' in a third place context such as a ethnically diverse congregation. The leadership question is how we architect this third place so we don't default to the hiving tendencies of multiculturalism which can create as much ethnocentrism as it dispels (kinda like a fridge creates cold but puts off a lot of heat to do so). I will look at the role of the teacher/pastor in this as well as the unique people that will 'sign on' for this kind of community. One of the benefits of studying at Eastern is that they have a number of top notch scholar/practitioners. Among them is Dr HeeWon Chang (she has done a lot of work on autoethnography in education) and I am looking forward to studying with her in the next on-site as she brings a strong anthro background into the mix. As I dig up more resources I will post on them. I am genuinely, academically, ecclesiologically excited about this research!!