Academic Speech Therapy: a provocation, using performative autoethnography

Two of my brothers had speech therapy. My eldest brother had a pronounced stammer throughout his childhood and now, even as an adult, when emotions get the better of him. My younger brother gets away with an occasional stutter. One of the problems with contemporary Universities is that educationalists, and by this, I mean the whole class of teaching and support staff, academics and managers, have forgotten how to speak. This also means we have forgotten how to speak about education.

I thought I had escaped this particular affliction because I used to speak very quickly, and fluently, using all the vocabulary at my ‘Institutional’ disposal, vocabulary that my undergraduate degree had grafted onto my speech, that allowed my family to comment on the change in who I had become. My academic accent grew broad and thick, the more I specialized, the more I reproduced my knowledge in writing. This became the fast-paced disciplinary classification task of research, pedagogy, of a particular managerial kind that allows insider references of increasing subtlety, that constitutes acculturated habitus and distinction. Hence cultural capital is embodied (Bourdieu, 1986, p.17) and constitutes invisible pedagogies (Bernstein, 2003, p.201) whose currency is a learnt language of long sentences, multi-syllabic words and complex grammar; supported by references and evidence. Plus, a certain attitude.