Telling by hand: why academics need a different kind of reflection

“by Elizabet Kaitell On slowing down, noticing, and visual reflective journaling in the accelerated university There are mornings when I arrive at my workstation, and my mind is foggy, my shoulders tight, before I have even opened a single email. Sometimes this is the residue of a difficult week. Sometimes it is something from outside work entirely, something happening in my life, in my body, in the people I love, that has followed me here, because, of course, it has. We do not leave ourselves at the door. This is something we rarely say plainly in academic life: that we are not separate from our private selves, our families, our losses, our fears. We are embodied and embedded, porous, complex, open organisms, shaped by and shaping the environment we inhabit. What happens at home registers in the body that shows up to teach. What happens in a difficult seminar is carried home. The influence runs in every direction at once, and no amount of professional resolve, resilience training, or determined compartmentalisation changes this. The body does not take instructions. It registers, carries, and tells what our environment imprinted on us, often in ways we only notice when we finally slow down. This matters more than it might first appear: our sense of self is anchored in our capacity to feel and interpret these physical sensations — we do not fully know ourselves without access to them ( Van der Kolk, 2015) . And yet the conditions in which we increasingly work make exactly this kind of noticing harder. We work increasingly in what Vostal (2016) calls the ‘accelerated academia’, a culture that prizes productivity, accountability, and efficiency at the expense of human sustainability ( Mountz et al , 2015 ). These conditions require scholars to ‘excel at work rather than be well’ ( Nørgård et al , 2024, p 133 ), with university staff showing significantly lower well-being than the general population (Kinman & Wray, 2021 ). In this environment, something quietly gets lost: our capacity to notice what is actually happening in our bodies, our encounters with students and colleagues, and in the texture of our everyday working lives. I have been learning, slowly, imperfectly, to work with this rather than against it. Not to lock things away before I enter the classroom, but to notice what I am carrying, to let it surface with some gentleness, and then, with practice, to let it move through rather than accumulate. That is what this piece is about. A different kind of reflection Over the past few years, emerging from my doctoral research, I have been dwelling on a practice I refer to as Visual Reflective Journaling (VRJ). It began as a method of generating data about my own academic experience, but became something more: a way of staying with experience rather than rushing past it. Knowing is not confined to cognition but emerges through ongoing interactions between bodies, materials, and environments, and VRJ became a way of engaging these entanglements in practice. The practice is deliberately simple. A notebook. A pen. Words, images, marks, fragments, brought together not to produce something polished or insightful, but to let the hand move in response to what the body already knows. Drawing on Ingold’s (2013) notion of ‘telling by hand’, where drawing is understood as a way of telling that keeps us closer to sentient engagement with the world, mark-making becomes a way of remaining closer to experience as it unfolds rather than processing it from a distance. A stick figure cycling uphill can carry more truth about a difficult week than three paragraphs of structured reflection. VRJ starts not with a framework but with the body. Before writing or drawing anything: what is here right now? Is there tightness somewhere? Heaviness? A sense of bracing? These are not trivial questions. Our bodies carry the emotional labour of teaching, the tension before a difficult seminar, the weight of anonymous feedback that research suggests disproportionately targets women and marginalised colleagues ( Heffernan, 2023 ), the physical and emotional effects that accumulate from student incivility (Lampman et al , 2009 ). By translating these somatic cues into marks, images, and fragments, we begin to see patterns that no single incident review would reveal. In doing so, we hold together words, images, and bodily experience in ways that can generate forms of knowing that exceed what any one mode might evoke alone ( Ellingson, 2017) . Not a tool. Not a solution. I want to be clear about what VRJ is not. It is not a coping strategy, not a resilience intervention, and not an institutional remedy for structural problems. Proposing an individual practice within a sector under systemic pressure risks reproducing exactly the narratives of self-management that make academic life harder. VRJ does not fix workloads, or eroded professional trust, or the conditions that produce burnout. What it offers, more modestly, is a practice of attunement, a way of remaining present to one’s own experience within conditions that actively discourage it. Arts-based reflective practices have been shown to deepen reflection and heighten awareness of personal and contextual influences on practice ( McKay & Barton, 2018 ), while visual journaling specifically can support mood repair and emotional sense-making in ways that purely verbal reflection cannot (Drake et al , 2011 ). Viewed through the lens of slow scholarship as a counter-narrative to accelerated, productivity-driven academic cultures ( Nørgård et al , 2024) , VRJ is a small enactment of deliberate slowness: pausing, noticing, staying with what is there rather than managing it away. An invitation You do not need artistic skill. You do not need special materials. What I would invite is this: find a notebook you like the feel of, keep it somewhere close, and occasionally, after a teaching session, at the start or end of a working day, when something is sitting with you, open it and spend five or ten minutes with whatever is there. Draw. Write fragments. Make marks that don’t mean anything yet. A journal entry at the end of a working day, pausing before leaving, noticing what the day had left in my body before asking it to carry anything else. The dense, tangled marks at the head capture the weight of an overcrowded mind, and the beginnings of a migraine that comes when too much has accumulated, from work, from life, from everything at once. The orange lines tracing the neck and shoulders map tension and the persistent discomfort of an injury still healing. The circled warmth in the stomach is anxiety, not dramatic, just present, as it often is. This is not an analysis. It is simply noticing. [Figure 1]. Figure 1: End of Day Over time, the practice generates its own knowledge. The journal becomes less a static record and more a space where past encounters, present sensations, and imagined futures intermingle ( Phelps, 2005) The body’s quiet registrations, the things we have been moving too fast to notice, begin to become visible. And something in how we move through academic work starts, gently, to shift. The body that shows up This shift is not only personal. It touches something more fundamental about how we understand the academic body itself. Building on Dania and Ovens’ (2026) conceptualisation of academic bodies as lively material presences, continually producing and absorbing meaning through their encounters, I suggest that accelerated academic cultures privilege edited, high-functioning scholarly personas, rendering the lived body comparatively invisible. The body that walks into a seminar room is not a neutral delivery mechanism. It carries the morning’s difficult email, the tension from a conversation that didn’t go well, the particular exhaustion of a week that has asked too much. Students sense this, not consciously, perhaps, but in the quality of the encounter, just as we sense what they are carrying into the room with them. Within such conditions, VRJ creates a space in which the academic body can appear not as a polished performance but as a sensing and responsive presence. Telling by hand is a way of letting that body back into view. Not to resolve the structural pressures shaping higher education – those remain, and individual practices cannot undo them. But within those pressures, VRJ may open small moments of freedom: spaces where experience can be explored rather than managed, where embodied forms of knowing can quietly reassert their place, and where the academic body can appear not as a performance to be sustained but as a presence to be inhabited. Elizabet Kaitell is a Senior Lecturer in Learning and Teaching at Kingston University’s Learning and Teaching Enhancement Centre. She completed her doctorate at the University of Roehampton, where Visual Reflective Journaling emerged as part of her a/r/tographic methodology and sparked a curiosity that has continued to evolve since. She has a longstanding interest in embodied ways of knowing and ‘whole body selves’ in higher education.

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