Valuing essays: essaying values

The essay regularly comes under attack. It is criticised for being rigidly linear rather than flexible and reflective. I first challenge this view by examining reasons why the essay should be valued as an important genre. Secondly, I propose that in using the essay form students and academics necessarily exemplify their own critical values. Essays should be valued because they allow us, flexibly and variously, to be analytic, autobiographical, connective, descriptive, dialogic, interpretative, meditative, reflective, and speculative according to our critical purposes. Essays become thick descriptions and ways of inquiry as we find out more about ourselves and our topics. But essayists cannot claim that their analyses, descriptions or interpretations are the right ones, since every essay has the subtitle ‘as I see it’. Nevertheless, our essayistic attempts at seeing and describing and interpreting the educational world may still be judged as valuable contributions to local and global conversations.

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