During various times in my career, I've stepped back from public-facing work. I attend but do not present at conferences. I organize fewer meetings. I avoid stirring up trouble.
This is one such time. On sabbatical, I work reasonably hard, taking coursework, reading widely on history and pedagogy, and doing my best to self-teach myself new tech. Currently I'm in a statistics 101 course and trying to decide if I want to host static pages on github using jekyll. I'm also reading about capabilities approach to development, feminism, and pedagogy and thinking about how it relates to signal theory, which is the purview of biologists and business folk. I came across both capabilities theory and signal theory in Zeynep Tuecki's Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest.
What started with a "hey, I should read more" has turned into a fuller literature review. Right now, as I'm learning about both ideas, my ideas are inchoate. That said, I started my project with the idea that I could make my courses just a bit better for students in poverty. It turns out that the capabilties approach deploys a parallel idea of justice, encouraging us to make things more just regardless of where we are rather than try to set up a perfectly just system and work to that. What's more, I've the beginning of a pedagogic framework that blends Freire's notions of empowerment with the capabilties approach to justice.
So, while I'm not teaching this year, I find myself working as much as during "regular" work time. . . working quietly.
Safe home.