An added on bit

This bit is meant to follow the previous post:

My Experience
My current predicament about my future has had a long period of gestation but there are a number of relatively recent triggers that I want to focus on for this text. They can be summarised as follows:
The failure to get the post of Head of Design at UWN
A disastrous period as Academic Leader at my current workplace
A continual eradication of autonomy, respect, value and creativity at my current workplace
Looking at the first trigger it is still somewhat of a mystery to me as to how I actually became a lecturer rather than a practitioner. As a second generation Asian with a very strict orthodox upbringing it is certainly evident that drummed into me from an early age some occupations carried more gravitas and worth than others – teaching was among these although certainly not in the top half of desirable careers. I had immense hopes for my undergraduate study but this turned out to be a complete disappointment and one of the biggest regrets of my career. I was actually offered a research post combining an MA and paid teaching on the postgraduate programme at UWN immediately but so disillusioned was I after my undergraduate experience and the organisation itself that I turned it down.
The feeling for me was that the workplace could not possibly be any worse than the education setting. In this sense it could be argued that my approach to the decisions about staying in education was clearly based upon the feeling extreme of the processing continuum of Kolb’s model in that the way I felt about my experiences governed my approach to decision making in the light of those experiences. Furthermore, experiential learning proponents might argue I rationalised the meaning of my experience and made it useful through feeling and thus allowed myself to justify my decisions. In another sense one could argue that a nascent world view was being formed here based upon a misreading of the experience and that misreading was then amplified through the cycle and resulting in generalisations that ultimately were not personally useful or even accurate. For example, as a result of my experience I was convinced that all education was now a lie based upon elaborate performances.
Goffman would argue here that I could be classified either as ‘knocker’ or ‘wiseguy’ or perhaps more charitably a renegade, in that I was determined to protect my belief system and was happy to take a moral stand arguing that it was better to be true to the ideals of the role than to the performers who falsely present themselves in it. Curiously Goffman might also refer to me as a ‘deviant’ who is ‘said to let the side down’! Certainly in my experience of lecturers they had the necessary equipment of their performance roles but it became evident to me that they were simply not qualified or authorised to perform that role. Yet here they were. The same could be said of my experiences with managers at UWN. I had difficulty reconciling the fact that the only thing that mattered was ‘looking the part’. As Goffman suggests, “Similarly executives often project an air of competency and general grasp of the situation, blinding themselves and others to the fact that they hold their jobs partly because they look like executives, not because they can work like executives.”
However, the above statement raises again the concern of whether or not these models, tests and theories actually have any real significance and furthermore whether or not celebrated theories and models have any higher value than generally accepted wisdom or oft maligned systems such as horoscopes or the “R U love matched” text in options for teenagers on digital music television channels.
On a more serious note, the recent catastrophe in the banking sector which mirrors financial struggle in the education sector is the result of decisions made by performers who agree not to give the game away as it were. Given the distress, heartbreak and loss this has caused can we really afford to be so complacent about the people who we authorise to perform key roles?
I set about trying to gain work by contacting companies, talking to establishments and advertising my work on the nascent web platform and pushed the benefits of my multimedia ideas. This was one of the most soul destroying periods of my life and the result of rejection after rejection was a decision to take up a part time teaching job – at UWN of all places - simply to pay the rent. Was I simply not an adept performer? Or was it more that some of the paraphernalia of my performances were so outlandish and new that the definition of those interactions could never achieve a ‘veneer of consensus’?
Hence I ended up in teaching!