Full House in San Francisco

This Saturday, 23 up and coming opinionists joined The OpEd Project team at The Wikimedia Foundation to perfect their arguments. Seminar Leader Courtney Martin asked participants to think of OpEd as a metaphor for broader thought-leadership and explained how the OpEd pages can be a front-door forum to all kinds of amazing opportunities!

Three very special Alum Ambassadors joined us for the day: Gemma Bulos, Julius Paras, and Charlotte Fishman.

After the seminar, local alums and mentor-editors joined us for a cocktail hour – and we were thrilled to see special guests OpEd Project Founder Katie Orenstein’s parents!

We welcome these 23 to the San Francisco OpEd Project community – we look forward to reading you!

Francesca Royster talks to Left of Black about her new book

Left of Black is a weekly webcast hosted by Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal. This week he talked with Francesca Royster, OpEd Project Fellow at DePaul University, about her new book, “Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era”.

The OpEd Project at NYU

This past week, we worked with scholars, scientists and philosophers at New York University.  Among other things, we discussed the concepts and processes of inquiry, memory, skepticism and the performance of expertise.

Timeliness and Big News Stories

Some thoughts on the elasticity of timeliness and huge news stories, such as the Boston tragedy

Medical workers aid injured people at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon following an explosion in Boston on Monday, reports NPR. Photo credit: Charles Krupa/AP

When there is an enormously important domestic and/or global story that consumes all platforms of media in a 24/7 news cycle, you have to be strategic about how you jump in, with a new, relevant point of view added to the conversation.

You can enter relatively quickly like OpEd Project Public Voices fellow and Northwestern University professor, Laura Beth Nielsen, did. Nielsen had the lead opinion piece on Al Jazeera Wednesday morning. I say “relatively quickly” because quickly would have meant by 5 p.m. Monday, just hours after the bombings. And many key commentators did just that.  (Read my  OpEd Project colleague EJ Graff’s moving piece.)

For Nielsen, I chose to pitch Al Jazeera because by Tuesday, the domestic outlets already had a plethora of pieces on the topic (CNN had more than a dozen) and it would be hard to compete with that.

Here’s the thing:  there is a balance in media between appetite and saturation. So now, days following the event, as news is unfolding, simple reaction to the event itself is no longer relevant. However, analysis, insight and a longer view from a previously unconsidered angle will continue to be relevant for a stretch of time. For instance:

• You could react to the coverage of the day, the visuals from an educational viewpoint, medical viewpoint, sociologist viewpoint, even through a racial or gender lens. But it has to be what has not been said before and you must be the perfect human being to say it. I heard an NPR story yesterday about a Chicago business that makes prosthetics and it was a story about the cost and how insurance does not cover it completely. So now, it can be a business/health ethics commentary. That is just one small example of how the conversation about the bombings and our understanding of related issues can be moved forward.
• You might ask yourself: Does any aspect of this event intersect with your research, knowledge or experience? Remember, you can make just about any event or trend connect if you think abstractly, and if you are tapped into what you know and can contribute as an expert/resource.

This is not just about Boston, it is about any major news event today or any day. Think proactively and creatively about what you can contribute where you belong in the conversation. And know that you belong.

Michele Weldon is the Director and co-leader of The OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowship program for faculty at Northwestern University. This post was drawn from one of her weekly emails to OpEd Project fellows at Northwestern University. 

Ellen Wood of TWU Reflects on Her Public Voices Fellowship Experience

A guest blog post by Ellen Wood, a Public Voices Fellow at Texas Woman’s University.  Ellen is the co-founder of the Teaching Trust, a non-profit dedicated to preparing talented educators to take on the challenges of leading urban schools as principals and policy leaders.  She received an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BBA in Acounting from the University of Texas at Austin.

The experience I’ve gained from participating in the Op-Ed Project through the Dallas/Texas Women’s University has been invaluable.     We’ve had the opportunity here in Dallas to mix non-profit leaders with faculty from the University.   I’ve met wonderful women who are strong advocates for issues that matter significantly in our community and country.    Even though our last session is this week, I hope that we all will continue to share our experiences as advocates with each other.

When I decided to apply for this program, I knew the timing was perfect.     Teaching Trust, the non-profit I co-founded—where our focus the first two years has been in developing school principals—was about to launch several initiatives related to education policy, something we strongly believed had to be part of our strategic plan if we were going to have broader impact sooner.   In December, we launched a program for teacher-leaders who wanted to learn how to advocate for policies that would attract, develop and keep the best people working in education.     Our plans included helping strong teachers activate their “voice”—through speaking to school boards and legislative committees that determine the district and state policies while also writing op-eds and blog entries in various venues that could broaden their audience.

The teachers who are in our first cohort of 25 Ed-Policy Fellows are on fire (similar to my Op-Ed cohort!)    They have practiced putting their voice as well as written words on the line….and are energized by that action.    Last week 4 teachers testified in Austin to the Senate Education Committee on the teacher quality bill that was being discussed.  One teacher wrote about the experience on our new blog “Let me say first that to be taken seriously as a constituent and to be respected for your experience and perspective about your field is one of the most empowering experiences you can have.  As the four of us gave our testimony, the energy in the room was electric.”

The experience I’ve had in the Op-Ed project…through the workshops and the feedback from my advisor on writing and pitching op-eds has helped me turn around and use that to train the teachers and leaders in our programs.  I’ve never been a teacher or principal, but I feel very strongly that those who are great educators should be speaking up.    Thank you to the Op-Ed Project—Katie, Chloe, Rose– for challenging me to define my expertise, developing the teacher voices that should be the real experts at the table.

Emory Fellow Deb Houry speaks to the impact that public scholarship has on professional development

Deb Houry

Deb Houry, Vice Chair for Research and Associate Professor at Emory University’s School of Medicine, is also one of  twenty Public Voices scholars selected to be a part of our fellowship program in Atlanta this year.  Houry recently sent us this note outlining how learning about the importance of  public scholarship and engaging in public thought leadership through our seminars has bolstered her visibility and led to some unimaginable achievements. We couldn’t be more excited for what is to come of these initiatives that Houry will be leading. Congratulations Deb!

Dear OpEd Project,

I want to thank you all for turning me onto public scholarship. I gave a keynote today to the New England regional Society for Academic Emergency Medicine meeting. I spoke on “Public Scholarship and Physicians” and talked about The OpEd Project plus other social media- it went so well! I’m tweaking it and giving another keynote to the American Physician Scientists Association later this month on a similar topic.  And, for the class on violence I’m teaching- the final project is an oped for the 18 students.  Finally, I was just elected President-Elect of the Society for Advancement of Violence and Injury Research and my first column due next month for Injury Prevention journal is on public scholarship.

Professor Kim Todd weighs in on getting published in Salon after attending The OpEd Project on March 16th

Kim Todd

As I started my to-do list for April 2, my husband, at his laptop, commented, “Look how pretty the Google doodle is today.” Both writers, we often find ourselves working from home in the same room. I glanced over at the swirl of vines, decked with moths and a lizard, and recognized it as an homage to Maria Sibylla Merian, a rather obscure 17th-century artist and naturalist, about whom I had written a biography. The doodle celebrated her 366th birthday and now, thanks to Google, everyone would know who she was.

Ordinarily I would be stymied, wanting to dash something off, not quite knowing how to frame it. My computer is a junkyard of opinion pieces that never got off the ground.

But this time I knew exactly what I wanted to say. A few weeks before, urged by a friend, I attended The OpEd Project all-day seminar in New York. Through the discussions and practice exercises, I could see how much of my reluctance to finish those earlier essays had to do with roadblocks of my own making: the unwillingness to simplify an argument to fit into 700 words, the reluctance to take a strong position for fear of being criticized.

Inspired by teachers Katherine Lanpher and Jennifer Block and the enthusiasm of the seminar participants, I got out of my own way, and wrote a piece for Women’s History Month suggesting that current debates about motherhood/work conflict would gain from looking at how women in history, including Merian, had handled it. Of course, after much tinkering, then a whole-scale revision prompted by my mentor-editor, I was only able to send it out once and receive one rejection before March and Women’s History Month were over. It joined the folder of my other failed attempts.

But suddenly, it was incredibly timely. So timely, it had to be published that day. Recasting it to mention the doodle, I sent it off to Salon.com, which was West Coast and online. If all worked out, the story would arrive in the editor’s in-box at 6 a.m. An hour and a half later, I had a response from the editor-in-chief saying he would take it, and less than an hour after that, it was up. I turned the screen to show my husband the Salon site: “Google honors a feminist original.”

He looked surprised. “Is that the piece you were just working on?”

The seminar leaders insisted they were not giving us a template, but their concrete suggestions for what makes an op/ed effective and publishable helped at least one essay escape the junkyard and find its purpose.

New York public seminar participants cheering after a full-day of thought-provoking dialogue.

Kim Todd is the author of Chrysalis, Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis; Sparrow; and Tinkering with Eden, a Natural History of Exotics in America. She is an assistant professor at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.