By Riyad A. Shahjahan
Why do we write what we write?
This question kept tugging at the back of my mind when I sat down to draft a piece about how I use popular culture in the classroom. At first, I thought I was simply documenting my teaching strategies—something practical, maybe even replicable. But as the words unfolded, I realized: I wasn’t just writing about pedagogy. I was writing through it—using reflexivity to ask deeper questions about who I am as an educator, what I value, and how those values manifest in my pedagogic practices.
There’s no shortage of advice on how to conduct and write up empirical scholarship. Elsewhere, I’ve written about my process for conceptual pieces, including writing conceptual pieces and/or co-authored scholarship. But rarely do we hear scholars write about the writing process itself for self-reflexive pieces—the story behind publishing self-reflexive journal articles. Indeed, Robert Nash’s Liberating Scholarly Writing and Me-Search and Re-Search (with LaSha Bradley), are some rare exceptions.
This blog post is about that writing process—not just the final product, but the journey. A journey of inquiry, doubt, rethinking, and discovery unfolding through the act of reflexive writing. In sharing this, I hope to offer not only a window into my process but also an invitation to others who are navigating the intersection of personal experience and scholarly work, through one’s writing.
Writing as a mirror: From practice to pedagogical purpose
As a scholar who teaches and researches teaching and learning in higher education, I have written empirically grounded, theorized accounts of teaching, as well as some reflexive pieces about my teaching practice (e.g. Shahjahan, 2004; 2009; 2010; 2015; Shahjahan & Wagner, 2015). However, these were written some time ago, and recently, I have felt that something is missing. For over a decade, I have incorporated elements of popular culture—films, social media, TV series, and news media—into my graduate and undergraduate courses, both online and in person. At the time, it felt intuitive. Cultural texts were what my students engaged with outside the classroom; why not use them as bridges into complex academic conversations? It seemed like a means to enhance accessibility and engagement.
But I hadn’t stopped to ask: Why am I incorporating popular culture? What else is happening when I bring pop culture into the classroom and assignments? What assumptions am I working with? What frameworks am I resisting—or unconsciously reinforcing?
The writing process helped me slow down and sit with these questions. As I drafted the piece, it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t just engaging students differently—I was engaging myself differently. Teaching with cultural texts was changing the way I viewed knowledge, power, and classroom dynamics. In writing, the page became a mirror. I saw more than methods—I observed a shift in my values, educator identity, and orientation towards knowledge itself.
The stalled draft and a reminder: Our stories matter
Interestingly, the piece began in collaboration. At that time, I was working with a doctoral student and we had ongoing conversations about the potential of cultural texts in academic spaces. Those early dialogues planted the seeds of the article. But when the collaboration had to pause, so did the writing. The draft sat in a folder—for months, then years.
What brought it back to life was a virtual conversation with Budd Hall, a scholar of community-based participatory research. During our exchange, he said something that shifted everything: our stories matter. Not just for their narrative power, but as legitimate forms of inquiry. He encouraged me to write not to prove, or critique, but to understand—not to perform certainty, but to create and share from experience.
That encouragement helped me return to the piece not as a product to perfect, but as a site of becoming. I wasn’t writing a neat conclusion about teaching—I was tracing how my teaching had shaped me.
Writing as decolonial practice
As the draft evolved, I came to a surprising realization: I had been unconsciously decolonizing my pedagogy and curriculum (DCP) (Shahjahan et al, 2022). I was already embodying some of its elements—without fully realizing it .
By integrating cultural texts that reflected diverse identities and experiences into my curriculum and assignments, I had begun to disrupt dominant narratives, challenge the supposed neutrality of canonical knowledge, and create space for other ways of knowing. These weren’t just pedagogical choices—they were political, relational, and deeply personal acts.
As a South Asian Muslim educator in a predominantly white academic institution, my pedagogy has always been shaped by the tension between visibility and marginalization. Through writing, I came to see how the inclusion of pop culture in my classroom wasn’t just a tool for engagement—it was an effort to resist erasure, to open space for stories often invisibilized.
Writing allowed me to name this work. It helped me see how I was unconsciously pushing against colonial legacies embedded in academia about what constituted valid knowledge—while also confronting the limits of what one individual can shift within institutional constraints.
The realities of publishing: Writing isn’t linear
Of course, the process wasn’t linear. Writing for academic journals brings its own set of challenges: word counts, theoretical framing, disciplinary language, and expectations of what “counts” as scholarship. You can’t just share a story. It has to be framed, situated in a scholarly debate, supported by theory, and make a “contribution” to the field.
For me, the stories came first. Then I had to identify what scholarly conversation they could speak into. Only after that could I choose the theoretical frameworks that held it all together. These weren’t clean steps; the content itself shaped the form, not the other way around.
I submitted an early draft to a journal, hopeful. It was rejected. The feedback was polite but clear: the piece was engaging, but too broad. Too reflective. It wasn’t clear enough about its academic contribution. I’ll admit—it stung, especially since I had written the entire article with that particular journal in mind.
But rejection has a strange way of nudging you toward clarity. That “no” pushed me to search for a venue that welcomed hybridity—the personal, analytical, and political. That’s when I found Dialogue, a journal that embraces reflexivity and alternative modes of inquiry. The reviewers were generous, the editors thoughtful. The feedback didn’t dilute my voice—it encouraged it.
Lessons from the writing process
Here’s what I’ve learned through this journey:
Writing reveals what we don’t always know we’re doing. It offers a space to name the quiet, intuitive, and often unspoken parts of our pedagogy.
Reflection requires vulnerability. Letting go of the “model teacher” narrative is hard—but vulnerability makes space for real transformation.
Collaboration and mentorship matter. The piece was seeded in dialogue and revived through encouragement. We don’t write alone.
Rejections are tough—but they can guide you. The right outlet for your work exists. Sometimes you need the wrong one first to find it. Don’t give up!
The process is the product. I didn’t just write about pedagogical change—I experienced it through writing. The writing itself was a form of inquiry, even healing.
An invitation to reflexive writing and publishing
If you’re an educator considering writing reflectively about your teaching, I hope this encourages you to begin. Not with a perfect thesis or a polished point—but with a question. What feels unresolved in your practice? What stories are asking to be told?
Reflexive writing isn’t simply a recounting of what we’ve done—it’s a way of understanding who we are in relation to what we do. It can illuminate our pedagogical values, expose hidden tensions, and connect our work to larger cultural, social, and political questions.
Most importantly, reflexive writing can reclaim voice in a system that often privileges theory over experience—and detachment over presence. For those of us teaching from the margins, writing reflexively can be an act of resistance. A form of survival. A way to create meaning and claim space.
If you’re curious about how your personal experiences and scholarly practices might meet on the page, I invite you to read the full article. It’s just one example of what happens when we write not just about our teaching, but through it.
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash