Our co-founders, Dr. Lindy Ledohowski & Dr. Rueban Balasubramaniam, have long believed that mastery over language is a profound equaliser. When Lindy was teaching Advanced Placement English as a high school teacher she placed a homemade sign above her door that read:
“Analyse the world around you and be empowered.”
This philosophy is a core principle underpinning their commitment to education and empowerment that has taken them as educators from high school to university and to this day, is a fundamental pillar of the EssayJack brand.
So……Why EssayJack?
In their collective years of teaching, they recognised a problem; students weren’t equipped to deal with the demands of academic, scholarly writing.
It wasn’t due to a lack of insights, or interesting questions to ask, and it wasn’t because they were incapable of critical thinking. Rather, they were continually faced with students who didn’t possess the basic skills required to construct a scholarly essay. Students were unprepared for scholarly writing for a variety of reasons – sometimes they had less than ideal high school training or needed more help than they could access at university or they came from another country with different expectations. To them, the issue was about more than enabling students to excel in academic writing: students are at a disadvantage in life if they can’t organise their thoughts into logical arguments, weigh facts and evidence, and build cogent perspectives.
How can we make important decisions if we can’t analyse evidence? How can we express ourselves if we can’t organise our thoughts coherently?
Lindy and Rueban began to think about solving this problem with technology. They sat down and began cutting out pieces of paper, playing with ideas of what a digital essay-writing tool that offered organisational guidance – without being too prescriptive – would look like. They played with a variety of different ideas, arguing back-and-forth about the relationship between form and content and the pedagogical principles over which they would allow no compromise.
Then they had their “AH HA” moment. Rueban had the opportunity to tour a massive scaffolding factory and seeing the connecting bits and pieces of scaffolding inspired him:
They were going to build scaffolding for writing!
From that moment on, they had clarity around how they would create a modular, cloud-hosted, web-based structure for essay writing for liberal arts and humanities students.
With keeping true to their philosophy that form influences content, and that user-driven development is key to giving students and educators what they want, EssayJack was born.
A picture of EssayJack as an idea on paper!
A picture of EssayJack – version #2! We’re getting closer!
A picture of the new and improved EssayJack interface!
