In addition to taking Dr. Murdoch’s course on online teaching and learning this semester (which prompted me to build this site), I’m enrolled in a class called How Adults Learn, taught by Dr. Zachary Van Rossum. One week in, I’m already seeing a good deal of conceptual overlap, so I think these courses are going to complement each other beautifully.
I’m posting here because I just read an article for Dr. Van Rossum’s class that made my pause and reevaluate how I think of myself and my hodgepodge of a skill set.
To achieve divergent thinking, it is important to have a diverse group of people involved in the process. Multidisciplinary people—architects who have studied psychology, artists with MBAs, or engineers with marketing experience—often demonstrate this quality. They’re people with the capacity and the disposition for collaboration across disciplines.
To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individual needs to have strengths in two dimensions—the “T-shaped” person. On the vertical axis, every member of the team needs to possess a depth of skill that allows him or her to make tangible contributions to the outcome. The top of the “T” is where the design thinker is made. It’s about empathy for people and for disciplines beyond one’s own. It tends to be expressed as openness, curiosity, optimism, a tendency toward learning through doing, and experimentation.
Tim Brown & Jocelyn Wyatt, “Design Thinking for Social Innovation“
The notion of a T-shaped person really struck a chord with me. The two main functions in my job (academic editing and web design) are normally performed by different people, so I’ve always had trouble explaining what exactly it is that I do. For a while, I’ve been wondering if I’ll need to specialize in order to advance my career. It’s hard to imagine someone looking at my resume and thinking I’m a good fit for anything other than the job I’m currently doing. To make things even more complicated, I recently started grad school in a field that’s at least superficially unrelated to my two job functions (psychology).
But, at the risk of sounding full of myself, reading this article made me ask: What if I stop thinking of myself as someone whose skill set makes no sense and start thinking of myself as a creative powerhouse who brings together diverse interests and generates innovative solutions? The characteristics ascribed to the T-shaped person—openness, curiosity, optimism, etc.—are positive ones and not incompatible with each other.
What if, as an editor who designs websites and wants to dive deep into an academic subject, I’m not refusing to find a niche? What if I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing?
