Last week, my fellow researchers and I discussed submissions for a science communication project that we had been conceptualizing for months. We hoped to get people to write about how they had directly experienced the repercussions of global climate change.
We weren’t too thrilled with our early submissions, which had come from our college students. Some of the essays read like observations of the environment rather than stories of what the students and their community had gone through. Others mentioned making small changes without expounding on what those changes were.
Soon, my group and I were talking about social media and writing styles. One of the researchers said that much of the writing she had seen reflected how people posted on social media: a post of impulse, one that hadn’t been fully edited for flow, content, and logic before it was sent.
It was like students wrote whatever first came to mind, she said.
All for the sake of submitting something, the rest of us echoed.
It is something that I admit I can see even in my students, whether they are writing a reflection or a research proposal. Their style is the same, betraying a tendency to simply set free whatever thought is banging about in their heads.
To ask our students to discern, edit, and rewrite before finally submitting is difficult because many of them relish the adrenaline of cramming. While the rush of ideas works for some papers, the lack of planning can make major documents, like the thesis and all its preparatory work, fall apart.
For such documents, planning, discernment, and edits are paramount; for such work, intellectual and emotional input is a marathon, not a sprint.
The need to discern and spend long hours doing so is not intuitive when one is a student and in the habit of pulling all-nighters to finish tasks. But it is needed everywhere, from the government which has to plan its projects carefully, to the private sector which needs to do meticulous research before developing any product.
We in the academe also have to go through long planning and documentation, whether we’re doing multiple revisions on our research papers or assembling accreditation documents. Many will ask if all the effort of responding to every single revision and noting the content of every single syllabus is worth it, especially when we still have to do research, teach classes, and oversee administrative work.
We hope it is because we want our program to produce students who are people, and not merely scholars. We want our program to produce students who can create research-driven, theory-grounded, context-specific plans for the long term, and yet also know how to act with compassion in the heat of the moment when the long-term plans fall apart.
We hope they become the people who, in times of crisis, do not simply hand money over and sail away in their comfortable boats. We hope that our students will be the people who connect networks of government agencies and professionals so that everyone can help those in need, regardless of the region from which they hail.
We want discerning students who don’t just revert to thinking on impulse and spout poisonous diatribes online to worsen an already difficult situation. We want students who become great leaders not because they are handing out lessons or telling people what to do, but because they empathize with the poor and suffering, and become the light for those who have long lived in the darkness of injustice.
Social media has brought out the best in those seeking connection and the worst in those who refuse to make them. We’ve seen more and more students, however, who are getting tired of the manipulation, and who want authenticity, a conversation outside the electronic world of bigotry and lies.
We’ve seen more students getting better at balancing the worlds of adrenaline-laced midnights, as they work through the morass of their troubles to produce submissions by dawn, with the long hours, days, or weeks of planning, as they weave research and their imagination, as they discern the logic and integrity of their work before sending it for evaluation.
And from these students, we hear about their hopes, for leaders who do not simply bluster about, dance on TikTok, or parade their certificate of candidacy. The students’ ability to see the value of both proactive and responsive work also helps them see their ideal leaders clearly.
They want leaders who can plan governance programs and yet also go through the muck, mud, and floodwaters, never mind the naysayers and bashers. They want to be those kinds of leaders, whether they are voted into office or not.
Our students might not yet have the ability to completely write their stories, talk about their experiences from a discerning point of view, or even think through their creations. Maybe that comes with time, or a life outside their current privilege, or maybe even the workplace.
For now, we see their hopes for the country, and we want to make those hopes the norm.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu