I’ve been enjoying daily updates from Inside Higher Ed this summer, learning a lot about the ins and outs of a university job. I’ve found the summer writing column especially helpful, and this post about the academic job market (including suggestions of books to read). Check it out if you plan to spend time in any area of higher education!
Like the sudden way I notice the contours of stone through the camera lens, I notice the way a conversation about coffee can become a discussion of national identity. And like the layers of mountains fading across the end of Spain and into France, I notice layers of questions and future projects in my daily fieldwork with schools and education policy in Barcelona.
What does it mean to belong as a new immigrant in a school? What does the work of governments and policies have to do with belonging to a place, our identity as “people from here”? When do we belong to a place, and when do we know someone doesn’t belong? How do people navigate the small interactions across cultural boundaries that happen in cities, schools, trains, marketplaces? Does government action have anything to do with how we interact with each other?
A page has turned with my work. I’ve been writing a lot, about what I see in schools, what I learn in interviews, and all kinds of other things. I am speaking better and better Catalan, and with this comes more insight into the way people think here, how they see these questions. A dissertation, a study, something that will become a real body of work still feels far away. But the project is beginning to feel like it has legs and might someday walk.
And another thing is happening, a surprising and exciting shift. Put simply, I’ve realized that a dissertation is not all that will come out of this work I’m doing. The Ph.D. is important training, and it’s helping me do a project with all kinds of good things like strong research methods. But I’m taking more than academic papers from this. The questions I’m uncovering, encountering–about identity, culture, language, and crossing boundaries of difference–they will be braided into my dissertation. But they can also become other writing projects (non-academic work? op-eds? future blog posts?) , or art, or advocacy work, or something else entirely. In other words, the thesis and the contribution I make to academia as a result of this year is not the sum total of what I can take from having spent this time in Barcelona. There are other stories, other meanings, other ways to work with what I’m uncovering here as I watch and listen and learn.
It’s wonderful to feel such creative possibility in this work. Welcome after months of plodding, wondering, trying, failing.
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Where are you with your creative projects? If you’re plodding, or trying, or failing, what keeps you going? How does the feeling of creative possibility spark to life for you?
The birds swoop over our heads as we walk by, diving towards bread tossed from the small boy’s hand. They fly down and linger a moment, trying to fill their bellies with bits of bread. The bread blankets the beach, and the birds must quickly find as many grains of sand as crumbs of bread because they sail back to the breaking edges of waves and settle down upon the water again. But their bellies call them again, and the instinct to seek food, and once again they burst toward the bread and peck away in the sand.
We walk with shoes off, toes curling around pink, gray and brown rocks that spot the grainy sand. My nose is filled with the smell of fried food, myseriously blanketing the beach though I see no fast food joint in sight. The smell, and the loud roar of traffic in the distance remind us that we are on an urban beach, on the edge of a teaming city.
I hold my breath, stare into the foam, feel the cold Mediterranean water on my toes, and hope to follow the birds this week, bursting forth again and again, pecking in the sand, flying on inertia and instinct. My bread is my research. I am here, in this city, knocking on doors, calling for interviews, looking for people who will talk with me and share their stories. Like the smell of fast food as we walked down the beach, the weight of the project is ever present, nagging at me, sometimes scraping and grinding, sometimes sparkling into inspiration. I wonder what I’ll find in the sand this week.
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How’s the week looking to you, dear readers? Thank you for your thoughts, reactions, comments. I love hearing what my writing and photos bring to mind for you.
I leave for the metro at 7:30am. The day is young, air still cold, the sky just growing light in the distance. I pass a mother carrying loaves of bread, and I see a line has already formed at the bakery. A man talks on his phone, sitting next to a bucket in front of a hotel, hand lightly resting on the window-cleaning brush. The grocery store, pharmacy, bank, and produce stand are all still dark, most not opening until 9 or 10. I stop at a crosswalk and the buzz of motorcycles taking off fills my ears, while I fumble in my pockets for gloves. I hear a train just leaving as I walk down the metro stairs, and the platform is empty of people. No one taking the train this time of day, I think. Then the next train roars up, the doors open, and I have to slide my bag down my arm to fit in the car, my gray wool coat crushing against the blacks and browns and whites of other winter coats.
My days are colored by these pieces of city life. The first thing I see out the window when I wake up are which windows in the loop of apartments outside have light. When we go to sleep late, I notice which windows still have light. There are too many to keep track of which ones have light from day to day, so I invent stories about anyone and everyone. On the weekends, I see people hanging their laundry on drying racks that take up half the balcony, covering them with plastic when the sky threatens rain. The traffic is a distant roar, punctuated by the honk of sirens during rush hour. The elevator takes my attention more when I’m home, and the distant rumble of a train 8 or 9 floors down under the ground, and the hum of the neighbor’s motorized shutter. Quiet, compared with our apartment in San Francisco.
And yet, all I crave today is open space, somewhere else. A different kind of noise. The sound of wind in pines, or rain soaked leaves whipping the windows at night. Birds singing, or the silence of fresh snow. Perhaps the slap of waves on a lake shore, or the roar of a river. After five years and two different cities, I’ve never yearned for trees and water the way I do now.
Yet here I am, in this city, at my desk in a windowless spare room, hearing the elevator gears and clink of a neighbor’s dishes. I sip peppermint tea and turn my thoughts to tomorrow’s school visit and interviews.
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What are the sounds of “here” for you right now? Is this where you want to be?
The most inspired moments of my undergraduate education happened in the last semester, when I took a class on “ethnography and human development” (I was a human development major), and did a study of an afterschool program for Hispanic children in an elementary school near my college. My teacher pushed all of us to observe, to question our participation in what we saw, to reflect on our position as researchers, to strive to understand what we saw from the perspective of those we studied. This professor was the first one to say “have you thought about graduate school?”, and to tell me my “mini-ethnography” of the afterschool program could become worthy of publication with some more work. There was a spark in that project that helped bring me to my current project today. It nourished my ambition, my belief that I had something to say, that my involvement with education and knowledge could go beyond teaching elementary school (my career plan at that time).
Today I know for sure that being a Ph.D. student is not quite what I imagined back when I wrote that term paper in my final semester of college. I know that part of what inspired me so much was the experience of connecting my own life, what I saw, and the things I read about in books. I was inspired to advocate for change in education, to push for better opportunities in schools like the one where I did my research. I was excited to write, to find (make) meaning through this writing. I wanted to find better ways of teaching literacy, teaching English to Spanish-speakers, making schools support their learning.
And here I am today, riding the waves of frustration, procrastination, hard work, and sometimes inspiration that come along with doing a Ph.D. dissertation study. An independent research study (there’s a lot of emphasis in Ph.D. programs on the fact that the dissertation is study is done independently). What does what I’m doing today have to do with those early sparks? What does it mean to dedicate my professional life to being a professor? How does my study, my writing, this career of research and teaching…how do or will they matter, and to whom?
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What questions do you have about what you do? How was it sparked by early learning? How does that spark relate to where you are now?
The goal was to write 700 words a day this November. The result: an average of 678 per day, with the most being 2120, and several days of 0 (yes I kept track, in a spreadsheet!). On the whole it felt like an attainable goal, and I almost met it. Some days I used the writing time as a way of pushing forward on things like interview guides that had felt tedious and difficult (and thus led to procrastination). Other days it was a way of taking notes and reflecting on experiences, like the trip to meet a group of researchers in Jaén. Many days I wrote about research methodology, a necessary thing to think about right now. This feels like an important step in my career, becoming a regular writer. The goal for December is the same, 700 words a day, with a new focus: work on context/background material for my dissertation.
What are you working on, writing-wise this month? How’s it going?
Looking ahead, the week is full. Work in the morning, snatches of time in the library, visits to Gaudi architecture with my parents, meals at home. Looking back, the weekend was fuller. Walks along harbors, roads, parks and waterfalls; a 90th birthday celebration.
My 700 words a day has been a challenge, made just 3 days of the goal so far. But I think of them as October practice. Now it’s really November, and a Monday, and I’m excited about keeping up the writing this month. I find there is rhythm and flow to writing with a goal of 700 words a day. So my next hour includes a warm cup of Chai tea and writing. And each morning this week will be the same.
Do you ever write with a goal in mind? What kind of goal works for you?
I’d seen a few yellow-splashed trees around campus and the city, but hadn’t yet seen a deep red fall leaf. And finally, a month into the autumn, I’m feeling fall here in Barcelona. Maybe it’s because along the Mediterranean it comes later. Or maybe because without classes, I didn’t have that feeling of settling into school. But now here I am, sitting at my desk at the university, looking out on pines and spots of yellow-dotted poplars. My project papers are spread around me, and the idea of research design is starting to feel less like something other people do and more like something I might get good at.
I’ve got a long list of things to do (people to contact, websites to read…) in this first week of real fall work on my research project. And I’m going to work on these. But I have one simple goal that is at the top of the list, part of a long-term goal of becoming a writer and researcher in my field: start writing 700 words every day. At first. And then once I settle into that, perhaps a bit more. The goal is to work on making daily writing a routine during the next month. I’ve tried this before, but it’s usually fizzled if I don’t have a deadline. So I’m trying anew, inspired by writer blogs I follow and their efforts to write furiously during the month of November.
What are you working on this Fall? How’s it going?
An important part of being in academia, starting with graduate school in most places, is seeking out funding for research. Whether you’re looking at social questions like I am, or searching for answers to climate change, all research depends on funding, and whether you get it depends on grant proposals. This involves learning to package your work in different ways, talk about its importance to different people, zoom in or out of the details. I’ve done this successfully once, with the Fulbright, but the Fulbright application process is much different (and arguably easier) than most other application processes, because you’re limited to 2 pages. I’m currently working on a dissertation fellowship application for the Spencer Foundation, which receives 600 applications a year and awards 20. Very steep odds! But worth a try, I think. Just going through the process has been a learning experience, and helped me refine my project.
Most professional fields require selling yourself, looking for funding or a position, figuring out how to move forward with your work. The most challenging aspects of this for me are:
What about you? Have you applied for grants or other positions to support your own creative or intellectual work? What has your experience been?
That my efforts this year will not be enough. That this churning attempt to do a project on my own will fail. That this academic track I’m on is not meaningful enough in the real world. That making a contribution to academia and making a contribution to the world are very different things. That the excitement for asking questions and seeking meaning eludes me. That I will not find a story, a study, worthy of a dissertation. That I won’t figure out how to own my work, care about it enough to carry it forward. That I will forever struggle to meet deadlines. That I’m not sure what the questions are I’m studying. That I’ll waste time trying to figure it out.
I feel passionately about making the world a better place for children, youth and families. About intercultural understanding and peace. About the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan and other places where they are similarly oppressed. About understanding peoples’ stories. About education and teaching as something that inspires growth, new ideas, community. And I worry that these things I care about are not central enough to the work I’m doing. That the academics won’t contribute to these things in meaningful ways.
Tomorrow I trust I’ll have insight. Probably feel more convinced about what I’m doing. Perhaps find new inspiration in my project. But today I worry, and wonder how to bring together these things I care about with this academic path I’m on.
