Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future

This is a fascinating time to be an educational researcher. As I look around, I see so much knowledge, new and old, that can be used to make our world good (not just better, but good), with meaning, purpose, and joy for all. Diverse ways of knowing abound with energy, emotion, passion, creativity, intelligence, wonder, happiness, and hope.

Excited as I am by the opportunities for my work to contribute a small but positive difference, I am also concerned by the taken-for-granted, narrowly reductive, rigidly categorized, and solely analytical forms of thinking that are often privileged as scholarship with the greatest currency. As a grad student, the dominant melody line that I hear (over and over) reinforces the notion that I need to more-critically argue my research into existence, for what really matters most are the clear-eyed empirical distinctions that I am able to delineate.

Part of me agrees with the resounding ideologies ”out there, dominating and clanging” as I want my work to be valued by a diverse audience. Another part of me questions: how might I align my empirical research (on how girls learn by design) with core humanistic values that love and respect people and the planet? Empirical evidence is essential for figuring out how to improve the quality of education and life in a more-than-human world. As such, how might I attend to both logical/ factual/ analytical interpretation AND holistic/ relational/ empathic understanding? These questions are increasingly relevant as we move from the Information Age (researcher as knowledge-worker, a well-educated manipulator and deployer of rhetoric) to the Conceptual Age (researcher as meaning-maker, an activist for real-world problems).

As Daniel Pink (2005) writes in his best-seller, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future:

We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.

It’s undeniably difficult to embrace “goodness” and wholeness in research, including mindful expertise, ethical convictions, and felt experience, but I do believe that writing informed by both “heart” and “head” has transcendent worth. Conforming to well-established traditional research orthodoxies would allow me to bypass my current struggles with integrating and legitimating an evocative, empathic, reflexive, relational, inter-connected, and creative scholarship, however, a passage from Oprah’s Commencement Speech at Stanford University (2008) inspires me to keep leaning into my knowing and being:

“What I know now is that feelings are really your GPS system for life. When you’re supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know. The trick is to learn to check your ego at the door and start checking your gut instead. Every right decision I’ve made—every right decision I’ve ever made—has come from my gut. And every wrong decision I’ve ever made was a result of me not listening to the greater voice of myself.

If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. That’s the lesson. And that lesson alone will save you, my friends, a lot of grief. Every doubt means don’t. This is what I’ve learned. There are many times when you don’t know what to do. When you don’t know what to do, get still, get very still, until you do know what to do.”

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