Taking a Beat

Back in a couple of weeks

I’m stepping away from Substack for a couple of weeks, and I want to be upfront about why.

My day job is teaching fashion history, textile science, and sewing education at Texas State University. I genuinely love it, and not just because a steady paycheck protects my ability to make art without chasing commissions. My colleagues are thoughtful, my students keep me honest, and the work of teaching feeds my practice in ways I know I don’t want to give up. I’m one of the lucky ones.

Right now, though, that day job is asking a lot. Higher education in Texas is in the middle of a large-scale, state-mandated curriculum documentation and revision project with a very compressed timeline. As senior faculty, a significant portion of that work lands on me, on top of a full teaching load and active creative scholarship. It’s a lot.

Here’s what I keep thinking about: this kind of sweeping, rapid institutional change would have been logistically impossible to mandate even five years ago. The expectation that universities can document, revise, and report on entire curricula in a matter of weeks is itself a product of the AI moment. The tools exist now to generate frameworks, draft language, and process documentation at scale, so the assumption follows that the humans on the receiving end can absorb and execute at that same pace. We can’t, quite. The bottleneck, as always, is human judgment, human care, and the irreplaceable work of faculty who actually know what they’re teaching and why.

That gap between what AI makes possible to demand and what people can actually sustain is something I think about a lot, both in my own practice and in my classroom. It’s worth sitting with.

I’ll be back next week. In the meantime, I’m grateful for this community and looking forward to returning to it.

Thank you for reading what emerges from my process

Gwendolyn