August 11, 2022

The balance that one achieves with multiple partnerships staves off the possibility of limiting oneself…

Among my early experiences that prepared me for my development as a young scholar were my departmental and university college arrangements to meet up once a month to share ideas on a specific academic resource. At the college level, it was a recently published piece of literature for children or adolescents that we were encouraged to read that month and at the department level, it was a recent research-based article that was related to our areas of specialization. The meet-ups were always at a place where we could enjoy some refreshment, entertainment and collegiality in addition to the intense discussion on the book or article. These meet-ups were my informal introduction to critical elements of a professional learning community, where academics with varying titles, years of experience in their fields and diverse portfolios could contribute to the growth of young scholars. Of course, these opportunities along with other approaches speak to the value of mentorship.

Very early in my post-doctoral career, I benefitted from being formerly assigned a mentor. However, what really helped me to continue growing was the opportunity to have other senior faculty members who had different areas of specialization that could contribute to my own teaching, research and community engagement, take the initiative to reach out to me and extend an invitation to collaborate on projects. My advice to other young scholars is that they themselves take the initiative to reach out to these experienced faculty members and present proposals for collaboration. The balance that one achieves with multiple partnerships staves off the possibility of limiting oneself to a lens into teaching, research and community engagement that amounts to a way of thinking and being of one academic influencer, rather than a confluence of perspectives attitudes and skills that would meaningfully contribute to the development of a young scholar.

There are other specific affordances that come from this decisive step to work with other researchers. Many young scholars are encouraged by faculty and peers to use the doctoral research project as a foundation on which to build their research. This certainly has value, and especially as it offers a bootstrap for publishing articles that address several aspects of the research that was the subject of the dissertation. Perhaps even publishing the dissertation as a book itself. Yet when it becomes the central and only focus of your post-doctoral work, the early scholar may find himself much like the anchored ship. Early opportunities to collaborate allow the early researcher the opportunity to burgeon out into other research methodologies and research areas, while churning out dissertation-related published material that likely require less intense periods of reviews of literature, analyses of data, whipping up findings and discussions. All of this means that early efforts to collaborate should be orchestrated well enough that the collaborators add value to your range of research skill sets. One cheat sheet that supports this is the research we do when applying for positions that we hope to fill post dissertation. Doing a search of the faculty at the university and even deepening it after securing a position can provide the insight needed to determine the founding members of the early researcher’s professional learning community.

Dr. Paulson Skerrit is a Lecturer at The University of the West Indies. His research interests include literacy and deaf education.