"This is going to be a wonderful ride" -- Liz Harrison

Last night, as I was putting our three-year-old daughter, May, to bed, I started to cry. I don't think she'd ever seen me cry before. She asked me why I was crying and I told her that I was sad. Then, of course, she asked me why I was sad. I wasn't sure how to explain and so, in the end, I just said, "Because Mommy's friend died." May looked at me with concern and repeated, "Mommy's friend died?" And then, she shook her head and smiled at me and said confidently, "No she didn't!"

May then went on to tell me which bedtime stories she wanted, secure in her belief that she had made everything better.

And of course, in an important sense, May was right. Even while we are feeling bereft, our dear Liz Harrison is alive in all the people who love her. And she is alive in the TES Project. In March this year, Liz sent me this reflection on her participation in TES (with her "humble apologies" for a late submission):

"I have enjoyed the energy of the combined group workshops and revelled in the growth that I’ve seen in the participants. I’ve personally benefitted from the supervisor workshops, because the discussion of the challenges unique to self-study supervision. It has been enlightening to learn from more experienced supervisors and to be able to compare our strategies for supporting our students. Trying to articulate these challenges in academic terms  and to share them through conferences and papers, in collaboration with other supervisors in the group has resulted in my growing confidence in the methodology to develop ethical, confident and critical researchers."

Even when she was very ill, Liz embodied the energy and growth that she highlighted in this reflection. And in her very humble way, she continually challenged us to "move out of 'stuckness'"(as she put it).  An example that is fresh in my mind is the activity that she led us in at the start of the self-study writing workshop in March this year. Liz  asked us to each respond in writing to this question: "How does your writer-self want your life to be?"  She then asked us each to give our writer-self a name. The next step was to interview someone else about what she or he had written and then to write our own piece to introduce our fellow writer to the group. Participants then shared what they had written about their fellow writers and we had a whole group discussion about our reflections on the writer-self  activity.

What really struck me was how almost all participants seemed to have said that they didn't think of themselves as "writers". When I looked through the participant evaluations, I noticed how  people commented on the power of naming and facing the writer-self -- they seemed to find it unsettling, provoking and illuminating. What struck me was how tentative and uncertain many of us seem to be about our writer-selves. While most of us seemed to be quite comfortable with our practitioner-selves and some of us with our researcher-selves, paying attention to the writer-self seemed to evoke a sense of unknowing, vulnerability, dissonance -- the writer-self appeared to be the self we all seemed to feel most uncertain of or vulnerable about -- as these participants' written comments suggest:

"I really enjoyed the session trying to figure out the notion of the writer self, even though I found it very difficult....How to understand and articulate my self as writer is something I have to really think about."

"I learned I had a ‘writer-self’ that I am not very sure of, and don’t particularly think is integrated with my artist/researcher/teacher self."

"I found today 'hard'. Kind of a bit 'above me' conceptually because I am only just starting to accept that I have a 'writer-self' that I am not quite familiar with." 

My written comment on the writer-self activities and discussion was:

"I learned that fears and anxieties about meeting expectations and ‘getting it right’ often constrain us in our writing / in being the writers we’d like to be."

(And I was including my writer-self in this observation...)

And Liz herself emphasised this sense of vulnerability about our writer-selves in her TES reflection:

"At some level the biggest challenge I face is being able to advise my postgrads on whether  their writing is “good enough”(Wisker, 2009)....I find my students often become ‘stuck’ between our very regular meetings. My challenge is to help them focus on one issue at a time, more importantly from my point of view is knowing what the catalytic focus might be based on their lives and aspirations."

And I think that there Liz captured the essence of TES -- Transformative Education/al Studies -- our studies are transformative -- they change us (and our world) -- when they are based on our lives and aspirations and  when we are constantly engaged in responding to the question: "How does your writer-self want your life to be?"

Two days before the self-study writing workshop, Liz emailed:

"This is going to be a wonderful ride."

And it was. And it will be.