On the SCA A&S community and motivational barriers

A friend of mine posted a thread today asking people about motivation in the A&S community, and how students tend to feel unmotivated when they can't reach their goal. The question posed was whether there are things in SCA A&S that people find to be motivational barriers, and if so, what is it that stops people from believing that they can do the thing — and what can we do to help.

Never one to answer the question as posed, when instead I can answer the question I see as fundamentally underlying one's assumptions, I wrote a series of comments getting up on my soapbox about SCA A&S, and what the goals are, and where the barriers are, with the intention of getting other people to consider the overall framework they're working in. I saw the discussion up to that point as addressing symptoms, but not the root cause, and figured I might as well take a stab at getting to the root of it. Here's an edited version of where I went with that.

tl;dr: We're not doing a great job of finding cohesion between many different goals of the A&S community, and it's leading to elitism and gatekeeping, where thingmaking, particularly in projects that are impressive and push the envelope in one way or another, is prioritized over all other A&S pursuits.

To start, I think there's a difference here between "doing A&S" (participating in the SCA A&S community and activities, getting visibility for your art/science/craft/research, etc) and spending time working on projects that might fall into any number of A&S categories without engaging in any of the SCA outlets for that activity.

Taking myself as an example: I've been slowly working on a pile of onomastic research for use in the SCA, but I haven't published any of it anywhere or really made it known to anyone outside of a relatively small subset of heralds and friends. I started tablet weaving because I was fascinated by it, but I haven't documented or displayed my work anywhere, attempted to use period tools or methods, or given away the finished product as largesse. I love calligraphy and have done a couple of projects with it for people, but I'm not hooked into the scribal community and have not taken part in any calligraphy-related research or events (apart from the bardic war scribal relay).

Am I doing arts, crafts, research? Sure. Am I "doing A&S"? Not particularly. I certainly get the sense (that I've seen reflected in other people's comments as well) that if you're not either an exemplary artisan, or doing groundbreaking new work/research, or actively looking for someone to teach you one of those two things, there isn't anything to make it worth participating in the A&S community. There doesn't seem to be room for intentional mediocrity, or for people to just do the things that they love because they love doing them.

(And this highlights for me the difference in how I see the A&S track vs the service track: A&S often feels to me like the point is to strive to be better, to improve, to add to the body of knowledge available to everyone, and to do so by always pushing for more. Service tends to feel more like steady work at whatever pace is fine, and if you do it for long enough, that's enough - you don't need to do big impressive projects the way it feels like you do in A&S.)

Additionally, the idea that the goal of people doing A&S, or the broader A&S community, is to make things that are seen as "impressive," is part of the problem here, in my opinion. Why do things have to be impressive? Why is that the goal? (Yes, it's an assumption to say that "impressive" is the goal, but it's certainly seemed that way to me, and this conversation has reinforced that impression.)

So what is the goal, fundamentally? Is our goal for people to learn and improve and challenge themselves, regardless of their starting point? Is it for people to make historically accurate things? Is it for people to advance the broader body of SCA knowledge and raise the bar for those who come after them? Is it for people to get to explore the things they love without pressure? Is it to create a community of researchers and/or thingmakers of all different levels? (Is our goal something entirely different and more fundamental than this, that I'm failing to imagine?) Are any of these mutually exclusive, and if so, how do we reconcile that? And who gets to decide any of this?

All of these things seem to me like they are, or should be, goals of various parts of the A&S community, but it seems like there isn't a clear understanding of the distinctions between them, or the respective values placed on each of them. It also seems like there is an opportunity bias in favor of people who are (a) making (b) historically-accurate things (c) at a high level. The East has a research rubric, sure. But what opportunities are there for people to display their pure research without having to shoehorn their project into a display format that was designed around people who have made physical tangible objects? What opportunities are there for people who just want to make stuff and don't care about getting better at it beyond the natural improvements that come with practice? Or the people who prefer to make things that fit in with SCA culture but aren't particularly historically supported? Do we value those people's presence in the community? How do we show it? What about people who are researching and teaching things that fit on the martial track or the service track? Do we tell them that their work isn't really A&S because it's also something else? What about people who are doing work that doesn't categorize neatly into discrete projects, or who only teach instead of make? Where do they fit? 

Tangentially, part of why I'm reacting so strongly against the idea that A&S needs to be impressive to be valuable is that the definition of "impressive" has shifted upwards over the decades, and it feels like that corresponds to a prioritization of awards and competition wins as the main source of recognition for A&S (outside of guilds like Athena's Thimble), which can be a lot of pressure for people who are new to the community. Maybe this is just that my personal goals don't line up with that set of priorities, and therefore I tend to ignore the A&S community as being too much pressure for the work I want to do - but if other people are being similarly pushed away, that seems like it's the community's loss.

(I should add as a further disclaimer that I have never participated in an A&S display or competition besides the Laurels' Challenges this past spring, so I may be underinformed about how these things work. That said, this gives you the perspective of someone who's not immersed in the community, and it tells you things about the general success or failure of A&S messaging.)

I'd be real curious to hear other people's thoughts on all of this; I think many of the questions I've posed here are more-or-less rhetorical, but I'd like us as a community to take them seriously and consider the implications of them.