So, almost overnight, I seem to have developed a profile on Twitter as a commentator on voter ID.
I was on a radio programme last night, talking about Brexit stuff, but the following debate was on the proposals to introduce free ID cards for voters, to combat personation.
Since I knew this was coming up, I’d done some prep, but didn’t get to talk about that on the programme, so I tweeted it out on the way home:
So far, so media tart-y.
But for me it’s been a good micro-illustration of how we teach.
We take material that we know something about, arrange it to make sense, share it and then discuss it with others.
Here, even more than other areas of work, I’m happy to be corrected and to be forced to explain my working/logic.
At one level, we’re all working like this: offering up ideas and conceptualisations of some thing, then testing that in dialogue with other people and (hopefully) producing a more robust outcome.
So far, in this case, that’s been really interesting for me to work through my argument and to think about how it fits with other areas of research.
And that’s why I love teaching: it really makes you think.