Why We're Bloggers: Utilizing Blogs and Social Media to Influence Education Policy Conversations and Decisions

• In Event: Maximizing the Policy Relevance of Research for School Improvement

Abstract

This presentation discusses the importance of blogging and why these authors blog. One researcher, a prolific blogger, posts multiple times a day and understands her purpose as political to push the world in a certain direction. Another academic, an occasional blogger, began a blog after receiving tenure because of university administrators’ warnings about adversaries to public stances on equity and education policy. He now has a far-reaching blog, with occasional posts, which has had breaking news, provided rapid scholarship, and counternarratives. Finally, a third faculty member, a sporadic blogger, had his first publication of his master’s thesis as a blog post. He understands his scholarly work as a commitment to both publishing in peer-reviewed journals and publishing in public platforms. These authors discuss blogging as an extension of traditional academic work and as grounded in academic data. Blogs are a medium for knowledge mobilization in public discourse.

The lack of innovative knowledge mobilization has limited the impact of educational researchers, faculty, and graduate students in the public discourse (Vasquez Heilig & Brewer, 2019). For example, research on peer review has found that one-third of social science and more than 80% of humanities articles are never cited (Remler, 2014). Furthermore, while the number of academic books rose by 45%—from 43,000 to 63,000—between 2005 and 2014, the average sales per title fell from 100 to 60 (Jubb, 2017). Considering these dismal findings, it’s incumbent for scholars to find ways to mobilize knowledge beyond peer-reviewed journals and books to make knowledge more readily available to the public.

Blogging is a medium that most scholars resist because of perceived time limitations, but it is actually a conduit by which they can bridge distance and place. In some cases, publishing work that does not carry a traditional understanding of academic work can also seemingly present obstacles for faculty members—particularly junior faculty who may worry about navigating a tenure landscape if they perceive there are political components to such reviews. What we recommend is that blogging and op-eds should be grounded in the academic work and the academic data. When this is done appropriately, the work—while written free of jargon—should still be understood as an extension of traditional academic work. Moreover, if the work is grounded in data and theory, this type of public and forward-facing work bolsters, in our view, a faculty member’s application for tenure as the work can be seen as grounded in data, not politics, but provides a valuable contribution to society beyond academic journals. Blogging can create national and international connections in a free and readily available public discourse that has never been possible in history before the current technological and information age. Vasquez Heilig and Brewer (2019) argued that this approach is not a this-or-that proposition, but instead is a this-and-that proposition. Scholars should continue many of the traditional ways of approaching research, scholarship, and service (i.e., peer-reviewed journal articles and books). However, with blogs, scholarly insight enhances purposeful knowledge mobilization in the public discourse.

Authors

• Diane Ravitch, New York University

• Julian Vasquez Heilig, Western Michigan University

• T. Jameson Brewer, University of North Georgia