personal – Katie Kearns

A love letter to educational developers

A large fire in a firepit. The fire is about person-sized, with sticks at the bottom. It is bright orange.

This is an invitation for educators of goodwill to put fortitude, hope, and courage into the collective pot to share and borrow as needed. Below is what comes to mind for me today.

Changing course

A picture of a sign that says "Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory Southern Research Station, US Department of Agriculture". There are pine trees around the sign and rolling mountains in the distance. It's a sunny day. The picture is yellowed.

As much as I enjoyed living in the mountains of western North Carolina, I became aware that I did not enjoy the experiment and field work enough to keep going or do it over. The research question was important, but I needed to not be the person doing it with degree progress depending on the weather cooperating. My dissertation life had become unmanageable to me.

Asking powerful questions

My former graduate students have been stepping into their power, and I am delighted. They are keeping their fires lit. Meanwhile, I feel like my internal house has been burning down and left to ashes. I have been in my own stalled labor into elderhood. In the last five years, I have witnessed as an academic doula so many miscarriages of power and so much distressed and stalled labor among the graduate students I supported and staff I had the honor of walking beside. It hurt my heart and squashed my spirit to witness, to be a part of, and to not be able to prevent or cure. Almost a year ago today, I gave a keynote talk about professional crossroads at a national conference on grad and postdoc career development. To all of you reading who attended my talk, I’m sorry. It was my best at the time, but it was not the storytelling I am capable of when I am calm, anchored, and clear in the story that wants to be heard. I was definitely at a professional and personal crossroads. I was “knocked on [my] ass by the demands of leading,” from Jerry Colonna’s book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up (Harper, 2019, p. 47). I had left a job just weeks before that wasn’t a good fit for my passions, talents, gifts, interests, and higher purpose. An interesting thing DID happen while I was at that conference that planted a delightful seed, that ever so slightly moved me out of the deconstruction and demolition phase. That’s when the therapeutic seed was planted that I wanted the skill of coaching.

Not just a course design institute

"Imagine if you will...the academic chalk talk" is at the top of the image. There is a picture of people sitting around a round white table. A woman is standing looking at a computer screen and presenting.

“Transforming Your Research Into Teaching” (TYRIT) came about because eight people, each leading their own course design institutes for graduate students and postdocs at different institutions, thought there must be a better way to do this. We were each delivering the same course design content in workshops, and we were finding ourselves reiterating the content in one-on-one consultations about job application materials. Drawing upon previous work from a member of our team, we started asking questions about the potential design of a course institute for grads and postdocs. Most of all: What if multi-institution, flipped model, hybrid workshops weren’t just about delivering content at scale, but about supporting boundary-crossing communities of belonging and purpose?

Wonder Woman/Wonder Women

Wonder Woman is holding open the jaws of a gigantic toothy reptile. I'm sure the reptile has a name in the comic books.

One of my best friends told me that after a major relationship breakup, he listened to music and watched shows he enjoyed before he had met that person. He deliberately reminded himself of who he used to be, and he mindfully reincorporated elements of that past self into his present self after that life transition. I’m reading Jill Lepore’s book, “The Secret Life of Wonder Woman” and planning to read the comics. And I’m watching the Wonder Woman tv show.

It’s complicated

A woman in black board shorts and a life jacket is standing on a paddleboard. She is near the end of the lake, the trees behind her are green. It's a sunny day out.

During one of “try out this new skill” SUP breakouts, another participant and I were trying to make a flotilla from our boards. “Do you work for IU?” he asked. “I just left IU a month ago,” I replied. “Congratudolences?”

The meaning of water

The view from a kayak. The bow and an oar are in the foreground, the lake and the bank with trees is ahead.

Taking that 200-level ecology course was a sliding door moment for me. It changed my life trajectory, my worldview about my own power and place, and my associations and affiliations. It was the start of a new self-narrative.

Clicky pens

a package of three BIC pens with one on the side of the container. There are four scribbles on the side: black, blue, green, and red

What isn’t verifiable is my internal experience of that class. I can still unearth the sensations from layers of quiet panic related to that class. It’s a Pavlovian experience for me; if I hear the click from that kind of pen, I am taken right in my mind and body to the sensations of being in that orgo class.

Music lessons

Two clarinet cases, open, next to each other. The case on the left is brown, the one on the right is black.

Our musical communities anticipated and accepted change as a gift of the experience. Thus, passages, initiations, and transitions were opportunities to collectively honor what had been and celebrate what’s ahead. During my senior year, we created our own musical festival on a Friday night in the school cafeteria called “Wild Things,” a homegrown extravaganza including a drum circle (organized by our science teacher) and our class’ garage band, Pale Green Pants (my favorite song of theirs was “Chunky Monkey”). The cast of Annie gave me a rubber dog bone as a get-well present after I sustained a serious dog bite while working at a vet clinic that same summer after my senior year (yes, I had _four_ part-time jobs that summer of 1992).

Remembrances of my father

In the middle of the picture, a small girl with pigtails is seated on a bed looking at a book held by a man to the right. He has dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses.

My father’s work often meant trips to Washington, DC, and we occasionally went with him. I have many fond memories of exploring the National Mall, the National Air and Space Museum, and the Natural History Museum with my dad. We went up the Washington Monument at night. Those trips are part of a connection I feel with him about space-related things. I was in sixth grade when Halley’s Comet made a close pass in 1986; we woke up at 3am multiple times on his work days to hang out in dark fields with amateur astronomers and their telescopes to see the comet.