RESETTING MY RELATIONSHIP WITH TIME: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY OF A GEOSCIENCE PROFESSOR WITH A LEARNING DISABILITY

My learning disability (LD) was diagnosed when I was in elementary school. From then through to the completion of my doctorate, I associated my LD with my student identity. The LD had significant impacts not only on my experiences and sense of self, but also on my decisions like choice of college and career aspirations. In 2015, when I started my position as an assistant professor of geology, I committed to disclosing my LD to my students. And I have. Except that I told my students, “I was a student with a learning disability”—past tense. Eventually, though, I found I had to consider that my LD is still a part of me. It is part of my identity as a scientist and as a teacher. This recognition has inspired a fundamental question. As a student and as a professional, I have thought of time as a kind of bully. Indeed, too often the time bully has been imposed on me by others, and even by myself, as a measure of success, one by which I have usually fallen short. Those failures have taken a toll. I realized that if I wanted to persist in this career, I needed to reset my relationship with time. But how?

I became aware of the qualitative methodology of autoethnography. It involves using one’s own "insider" perspective to examine and to challenge cultural norms and values. Autoethnographies depend on thoughtful investigation of the connections between the scholar and the society of interest. Importantly, autoethnographies provide opportunities to make sense of personal experiences through the act of writing. In this presentation, I share how I am using autoethnography to help me reset my relationship with time. Through this work, I am developing new language for how my learning disability is a source of strength and power. I now ask my students questions when they apologize for needing every minute, and I challenge their sense that success is primarily for those who finish fastest. And I will task the community of scientists that studies the Earth with its many scales of time to consider that our ability to contribute to the discipline is not defined by the pace of our thinking. Rather, our potential is derived from how we harness our individual rhythms, whether we have a learning disability or not.